And The Silence Was Gone!

Today i’ve bought myself a new toy!  Namely this little fellow:

A Sansa Fuse!  I already had a Creative Zen MicroPhoto mp3 player for quite some time now and it was my trusted companion through thick and thin.  We have been through a lot together and this is not a goodbye blogpost my good friend!  But although you are brilliant with my precious music files, you have one big flaw in your design.  You don’t play Ogg and/or Flac files and your idiotic maker in all his stupidity refuses to teach you that (in the form of a firmware update or something).  Don’t take it personally, i still love you, but he can go f*ck himself!  That’s why i started to look for an alternative that 1. had Ogg and Flac support and 2. was Linux-friendly.  After reading a lot of reviews and visiting many sites of mediaplayer manufacturers, the obvious choices were one of the iRiver or Sansa players.  I chose the Sansa Fuse because you can increase its storage capacity with Micro SD Card’s and also because it had a rather nice price tag.   I bought the 4 gig model that included a free 4 gig Micro SD Card, so that made it 8 gig for the price of 4!  Plugged my new buddy in and my PC immediately recognized and mounted it with a nice icon on my desktop.  Now that’s what i call Plug and Play!   I dragged some songs into it’s music folder, detached the Sansa and was greeted by welcome screen and a rather nice looking interface.  And half a minute later i also figured out that round button isn’t for pressing but more like a wheel!  I quite like the interface, but when i was exploring my song collection i noticed that not all the songs i copied on to its drive where showing.  To make it worse, the songs that weren’t showing were the Ogg and Flac ones!  Another minute went by when i found out that you needed to update the Sansa’s firmware in order to get the Ogg and Flac support.  And the download section didn’t contain any Linux version of their firmware updater.  Again a couple of minutes later i discovered why!  You didn’t need that updater!  I just had to download a small file, drag it into the Fuse folder on my desktop, detach it from my pc and start the player.  A pretty looking dialog with the words “updating firmware” showed up and half a minute later it was finished.  This time all my files were showing and playable!  The sound quality is comparable with my Zen and that means it’s superb!  Another big plus for the Fuse compared to the Zen is battery life.  The Zen can do about 8-9 hours max on a full battery, but the Fuse literally can go on 3 times as long!  Yes i like my new toy and i hope it’s as robust as the Zen. (that after almost 3 years still works brilliantly)  But only time can tell…

Podcasts, Rubies and The Answer!

This week KDE4.2, codename “The Answer”, was released!  I was surprised to already see it in the Arch Linux repos that same day.  Great work from the Arch devs!  My gf’s uses KDE on “her” desktop, cause she likes all the shiny and pretty plasma stuff, so i upgraded that pc.  But that did mean the upgrade had to be problem-free or i would definitely have slept on the floor for a couple of nights.  Luckely the upgrade worked without any flaws and the 4.2 edition does looks very very good.  I love what they did to the taskbar!  And more good news from the KDE front: someone is working on a Remember the Milk plasmoid! (source: http://blog.chatonka.com/2009/01/more-on-rtm-plasmoid/)  That meant i was happy, my gf was happy cause everything still worked (and looked extra pretty) AND i didn’t have to sleep on the floor!

On to part 2 of this blog!  I always liked watching Aaron Seigo’s  “aseigo on KDE” videocast, but he seems to have suddenly stopped doing that.  So i was in need of a replacement!  People on twitter, identi.ca and plurk were talking about tech (and other) podcasts for quite some time now and that woke up a little voice in my head, telling me to broaden my horizon. (eat that people who think microblogging is useless!)  After some googling i found a cool little program called gpodder (http://gpodder.berlios.de/).  Seconds later it was installed and a cute little green alien icon popped up.  I added 2 podcasts, namely Linux Outlaws and Linux Basement and The Linux Outlaws one really grew on me after hearing a couple of episodes.  It’s just 2 guys, one with a cool English accent and the other one with a goofy German one, talking about Linux and other tech stuff.  And the best thing about the show is that they don’t take themselves too seriously!  If anyone knows other good podcasts, preferably about tech and/or Linux, please tell me!

Now on to the last part of this blog! *loud cheering in the background*  In a previous blogpost i wrote about ripping all my cd’s to ogg and flac files and the program i used for that job was RubyRipper.  It really is a brilliant application!  Where most programs just read the cd and rip the songs, RubyRipper rips each song a couple of times and than checks if both files are the same.  The result is an error-free ripping experience!  RubyRipper is, like you can tell from it’s name, written in the Ruby programming language.  Something i looked into a couple of times before.  But me being a C/C++ and Python guy, Ruby never really seemed like my cup of tea.  Until a cool Mexican dude gave me a link to a great guide. (http://poignantguide.net/ruby/index.html)  “Why’s (poignant) Guide to Ruby” is a fun way of learning the language and just a nice blend of humor and great examples.  I’m starting to “get” Ruby thanks to it!  And even if i don’t know if i’m going to swap in my beloved Python for that “red gemstone” language, at least now i can (try to) fix bugs if i encounter any.  Thanks Israel, you rock!

Music, Monsters and a Beautiful Princess

Few things in live give greater pleasure than music.  So the music-addict in me was overjoyed when i got Sennheiser HD 595 headphones for my birthday!  I wanted those for years! ^^  Though i have to admit that i was a bit disappointing when opened the box.  They didn’t look very robust and the plastic felt a bit cheap.  But i use my headphones when i’m sitting in a chair or in bed, not in a war zone or on a jungle expedition.  So it’s not that big a deal, which brings me to the important part… the sound quality!  I plugged them in for a testdrive, started Bent – As You Fall (Micah’s Swollen Booty Mix) and boy was i in for a shock!  Not only is it a brilliant song to test your soundsystem, but the sound was so warm and you could hear so many details.  The last time i was this impressed with a soundsystem was in Sven Vath’s Cocoon club in Germany.  The “hard” work of ripping all my cd’s to flac and high bitrate ogg’s really pays of with the sennheisers! ^^  I “tested” it with other songs, to see how it handled other music genres, and my precious new headphones passed with flying colors.  From Beethoven to Sasha and Digweed, Radiohead or Ricardo Villalobos, it all sounds so beautiful.  Highly recommended!

That brings us to the monsters part of this blog.  I started designing a microblogging app for Twitter, Identi.ca and Jaiku.  At the moment it still only is a terminal app.  To my own defense, it is a working terminal app!   You can post to twitter and see your timeline, but i’m working “hard” on the graphical interface.  Trying and figuring things out like “to webkit or not to webkit, …”. Definitely To Be Continued!