I’m almost to the point where I’m ready to do a push out of the new 0.4 release of PennAve. This release sees lots of new features and bug fixes that make the software even better. Most of all, it’s got a UI that’s 83.6% sexier than the previous version, all at the same great free cost. It seems like most everything is working now, there are a few large known bugs that I’m not sure if they’ll get fixed before the release.
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Today I finally hit my breaking point with Evolution. It’s always been with it’s quirks, but in general it’s worked quite well for the last four years or so. It’s address book had suitable functionality, and the filtering was okay. But in reality, it sucked, just like all other mail clients. For some boneheaded reason it would always start each message at the bottom of the message instead of at the top.
One of the blogs I frequently read is the Make: Magazine blog. Today I noticed when reading it that one of the topics was How to make a combination composite/component cable for the Wii. “Wow,” I thought, “someone else had the same idea as me!”. Looking at the first picture, I was like, “This looks really familiar.” Well, if it looked familiar, that’s because it was my writeup. Yay. I made it into Make’s blog.
My component cable for my Wii showed up this week, and Zelda in 480p is much nicer than 480i. However, I’ve got a slight problem. Because I use a YPbPr to VGA transcoder that only handles 480p, when the Wii switches to 480i output for things like GameCube games, I can’t see it. The simple solution is just to always switch cables, but, that doesn’t satisfy my hacker instinct and may be hard on the Wii.
The line at Walmart. Are you here for the poinsettias too?
On Saturday, November 18th, 2006, I found myself inside the lawn and garden section of a local Walmart. I had come prepared. Papers to read, books, movies for the laptop. I was ready for a camp out. So were some fifty other people. The object of our desire, the 12:01am release of the Nintendo Wii. I arrived a little after 2pm, the list was organized and jovial.
Here’s a tasty little treat for you. The Linux client for Second Life allows synthetic events to be sent to it. What’s this mean? Basically, it means that you can script X input with other programs throught the wonders of XSendEvent. Where I find this comes in useful is in the places where you have to camp. Specifically, if you’re playing the horribly named casino game “Death Camp” you can make a killing just by occasionally sending keys to keep you from going idle and getting kicked of Second Life.
Hey you! Yes you! What does your computer do most of the time? If it’s like most computers, it just sits idle. Sure, some of us may have reasons to leave our computers on all day, such as a web server, or a mythtv box, but even then they sit idle. Fortunately, CPU manufacturers have noticed this fact, and developed technologies that allow processors to slow down when not being fully utilized.
I released PennAve 0.3 today. This new release brings a slew of nifty new features that you can find on my gallery. Among them are:
Slide show Nifty new graphics RSS feeds Customizable landing page Improved performance thanks to caching Anyway, if you’re running GNOME, go grab F-Spot and start sorting your photos. Then put them online with PennAve!
Somehow I’m becoming a bit of a treehugger. Either that or I’m just getting annoyed with how hot rooms in the house get as a when I have computers on all the time. So, I set out to figure out how much power each of my computers takes to run and how much this power costs. The easiest way way to measure these devices was with my handy Kill A Watt.
When it comes to freedom, there are several levels of software out there. At the most difficult level is subscriptionware. This covers packages like SAS, a very powerful statistical analysis package. These tools typically cost thousands of dollars and require a new license to be obtained every year. Once the clock on your system ticks past the final date on the license, the software ceases to work. While it’s not ideal, it’s in the license agreement, they never promised that you could look at, manipulate, or even use it, outside of that agreement.