Well.. It’s Friday night and it looks like I’m staying at home again.

Emalee is fast asleep, as she usually is at midnight, but hey, she gets up (almost) before dawn for work. We did talk about going out tonight but um.. yeah.. it is, to quote Dr. Evil, “frickin’ freezing” outside right now. I’m not joking, the weather people say we’re looking at the low 30’s tonight. Yeah.. So totally not ready for that, btw. Frost & freeze warnings are in effect, but at least I don’t have any “tender vegetation” I need to cover up. WTF is tender vegetation anyway? I’m assuming that it’s plants who’d take Michael Bolton, Celine Dion and candle light dinners over Marilyn Manson, Kittie and a mosh pit.

I’d like to say hi to the Songbird developers. I got a nice email from one of them in regards to my post on Linux media players. I’ll have to head over to their bugzilla on “the weekend” (aka my weekend aka Monday & Tuesday) to see if my stuff is in there and if not add it. By the way, the fact that I got an e-mail from a developer and was thanked for the feedback is one of the top reasons I love open-source software. You’d never have seen anything more than a form mail at most from Apple or Microsoft. I wish there was something I could do to help the project, but, um, my programming skills are limited to a small amount of PHP and a few different “flavors” of BASIC as I’ve forgotten practically all of the C++ and Java I learned in high school and college. Of course, if they ever need promotional material, that I can help with. Especially that of the video variety.

And from the random bits of useless info department… I learned this week that Lea Culver is the wife-of-the-son-of-the-guy who started the Culver’s restaurant chain. She should not be confused with the probably-tad-more-famous-in-places-outside-of-Prairie-du-Sac, Leah Culver, who is responsible for things such as Pownce. Honestly, I heard Lea’s name while I wasn’t paying attention to the TV and did a double-take thinking that Leah had entered into the custard biz. (I just confused you there, didn’t I?)

Oh and to my Jewish friends & family, I’m a tad late, but Happy New Year. I believe that this is year 5768 on the Hebrew calendar.

-A

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We’re barely cracking 50 degrees at noon! Yes, I’m aware that I’ll be asking for these temps in like 2 months, but right now, it’s cold!

-A

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Posted in Weather

 

^{Songbird playing “Prozac Girl” by Sunspot}

Ok.. As you’ve seen now, I’ve ditched Windows in favor of Linux. One of the big problems I’ve been having is finding a media player that is as good as iTunes. I mean, I really would like 1 good, solid program that can manage my iPod, podcasts and music. The closest I’ve found is AmaroK, but even then, it’s not the best solution. Translation, I’m not a huge fan of it. So what’s a geek to do?

Right now, I’m having to use 3 programs to accomplish what 1 program does under Windows and OS X. First of all, I’m using a wonderful program called Songbird. Songbird is hoping to be the Firefox of music players (it even says so on their website!) Right now, like I’ve found with most things Linux, it’s not a finished program. It’s still in beta (as it seems most things for Linux are). Heck, it’s at version 0.25, so it’s still a mere hatchling. Basically, the biggest thing that it has going for it right now, is the interface looks pretty much like iTunes:

But, unfortunately, it like most Linux apps, has a bunch of shortcomings.

• Songbird has bad podcast management.
  1. When I add an RSS feed, it proceeds to download everything that’s in the feed. I have no options of being able to just download the newest thing.
  2. Songbird does not manage the files well. I am not able to have my podcasts automatically cleaned up after say a week, or after I’ve listened to them
  3. There is not a folder, or dedicated playlist, or something so that podcasts are seperated from the main library. The most annoying thing about that is having music playing on shuffle and a podcast coming up in the mix
• Songbird does not have the ability to “uncheck” songs. I use this feature a lot in iTunes, especially when dealing with a Smart playlist. For instance, in relation to podcasts, I have a smart playlist that finds everything with the tag “Podcast”. In iTunes, I can say “match only checked items” and then uncheck things as I play them. This way they don’t stay in the smart playlists.
• Songbird does not have the ability to reorder smart playlists. In a smart playlist, I’m stuck with the order that Songbird gives me.
• Songbird’s playlist is highly unresponsive. When I was building a playlist, I added my entire collection to a playlist and then removed what I didn’t want. Songbird took at least 5 minutes to remove items from the list once I hit remove and then it left large “gaps” in the list.

^{VLC playing DL.TV Divx formatted video}

So if they’d just fix those issues, I think that Songbird may eventually be that one iTunes-esq app for Linux that I’ve been looking for.

Now… Since it has those problems, I’ve been using gPodder as my podcast management tool. So it’s not the slickest program in the world, but hey, it’s not iPodder Lemon.

It’s pretty minimalistic, but it gets the job done. Now, what it doesn’t do, though, is play my media files. I could go back to using Songbird to do that, but that would just mix podcasts into the library, so I have a third tool for that purpose, VLC. If there’s one application that rocks, it’s VLC. It’s basically the Swiss Army Knife of media players. Even if you don’t have Linux, you really ought to have VLC on your system. I mean, this player will practically play anything that is thrown at it and it does just as well at playing video podcasts as it does playing audio ones.

So there you have it, my Linux media toolkit. I’d love to hear any suggestions you might have, if you might know of a program that could do better than my 3!

-A

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