GIMP Portable 2.6.1 has been released

GIMP Portable 2.6.1 has been released.

Now I can make LOLcats pictures at work, without installing software on my desktop computer. Excellent! Windows Paint was really killing me.

[caption id="attachment_182" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Julie offers her sippie cup to Keifer"][/caption]

Facebook RSS Feeds

Okay, score one for the "open-platform" team. I just subscribed to some feeds from Facebook. So, if you're wondering why I never seem to care about your stuff, it is because I'm never *on* Facebook. I post from my blog, and I read my e-mail.

Now, I can see what everyone is doing, because i *do* read my RSS feeds.

Oh, and I hate ads, a lot.

Baked Potato

I had baked potatoes for dinner. I had a long, hard day of lawn maintenance, swing-set adjusting, grocery shopping, and corralling our son into bed. I loaded up with chicken, broccoli, onions, butter, sour cream and barbecue sauce.

Awesome. Just needed to post that. I forgot how cheap and fulfilling those are.

Windows Media Player as a CD Ripper

Windows Media Player 11 is a great CD ripper. I have a tower with 4 optical drives, and I'm just casually feeding it CDs, with the settings on "rip to mp3 and eject".

Why am I not doing it on Linux, with say, Banshee, and using ogg?

Sigh. My media center and phone are Windows-based. And the minimal configuration necessary is a big help. Banshee did a great job, except when it couldn't find album info. Which would be weird, because I'd end up just opening up Sound Juicer and it would find the album info. But I had a hard time getting them both into the same tagging and directory structure. And then there's the whole "downloading and installing patent-encumbered media formats" thing on Fedora. Some day, I'll just pick up that mp3 player that plays .ogg files and syncs with Banshee, and supports my bluetooth headset that I saw at the computer geeks disount outlet, but won't use because my phone is super-powerful.

Oh, and my CD collection is really dated, LOL. Secular music from the 90's. I spent all my paper-route money on CDs in middle-school / highschool. It has been fun going through it, but sheesh. I should just smash it all with a hammer or something.

What I miss about Mac...

Okay, so, I sold my PowerBook. It was a bit long in the tooth, and I have some other things I could use the money for. Incidentally, I decommissioned my Airport Extreme which is a fabulous router, minus the proprietary configuration interface. Then, I fried the router I replaced it with... an old wired-only Linksys.

It is a bit funny, because I grabbed it out of a drawer, and grabbed the power adapter to my spare DSL modem, rather than the power adapter to the router. A few minutes later, while fishing wires from under the table, I hear a hiss, then a pop, and see smoke. Oh well, that router was crap anyway. Unfortunately, the death was a bit untimely. I don't have anything to replace it with. I guess with my airport, it always seemed obvious which power adapter went with what. Apple saves you from being dumb.

Windows Vista's default Aero interface is relatively ugly. I'm sure you can hack it into a more pleasing aesthetic, and then there's that whole "eye of the beholder" thing with beauty, but, meh... I think I actually like my usual Gnome desktop better. Actually, all I miss is the compiz bling that got copied from Mac OS X, namely expose and the dock... The dock recently got patented, so maybe I'll have to actually use a Mac to get it now. LOL.

I sold my PowerBook

I sold my PowerBook G4. Get this. I met the guy in front of the Apple Store. Heh. So, the really funny part is... now that I am "mac-less" I don't want to use the Apple Airport Extreme. There's not much reason for me to feel this way, since I can still use it.

However, there is one fundamental flaw witht the device, which is otherwise great. I can't configure it with a web browser. I actually have to use a utility that comes with every Mac, and can be installed on Windows (thank goodness).

The device rocks, other than not having a gigabit hub built in. So, I'm torn. I love having a print server, and wireless access point, and router, and dhcp server in one device. But, I hate that I have to attach a hub to get more than one wired connection. This is fundamentally how I feel about apple devices, I love the simplicity, but I hate that I can't tinker. I guess I could just buy a gigabit hub and stop whining...

What if the revolution comes, and all my machines are running Linux? I can even use the print server in Linux, but I can't configure the router... and then there's that whole I-can't-turn-off-dhcp-without-some-hackish-trick thing. Yeah, it is silly...

I guess there's one thing keeping me on it for now. I have a Linksys wired router with a 10/100 switch built-in, but no wireless. I need wireless so that the Media Center box can access the Internet for scheduling info. I do have a wireless-B device that can be an access point or wireless adapter or bridge. It can even do DHCP as well. Hmm... I could just use that... Oh, and I have a couple of USB print servers that I could attatch too.

Clearly, the Aiport should stay, rather than hooking up three devices to replace it... or... I could just use ClarkConnect, get the print server and wireless working on it, and not be so anal. Or, I could just buy a wireless router, and then run Amahi on a spare box. Again... this is a silly choice. It works now, I shouldn't even be thinking about this.

All because I sold my PowerBook. Nice.

T-Mobile Shadow Update

Today, at work, I'm going to work on making my T-Mobile Shadow experience better. In between tasks, and generally filling time as I can, while doing work, of course. So, it is going slow. (I'm starting this post at about 10:00 AM. I've been at it off and on for an hour, inbetween reading training material, reviewing trouble tickets, dodging funny pictures sent to me by my colleagues and such.

For those of you, like my Aunt Staci, who says that I make "boring" posts. This one will probably be boring. Fair warning and all that...

So, music... I've purchased a set of Motorola S9 stereo bluetooth headphones. They're great, and I was going to use them with my Apple PowerBook, but I need Leopard for stereo sound, rather than the simple headset/microphone profile. I'm selling my PowerBook anyway... not specifically for that reason, Mostly because I don't want to pay for the battery upgrade, memory upgrade, and Leopard upgrade, but I digress... The bluetooth headphones work great with the phone, and I'd like to use them when I work out in the mornings before work.

I loaded a few songs from my PowerBook onto the phone, using a memory card that we've bought. They were encoded in AAC (.m4a, like on iTunes/iPod/iPhone) and they worked fine in the Windows Media Player. I haven't ripped all of my CDs, but I wanted to make sure that if for some reason, I go nuts and use Apple as my primary system, that I could use my ripped tracks on the phone. Seems to be fine.

Incidentally, I'm probably going to stick with Windows Media Center and just deal with the OTA subchannel nonsense or maybe go with Media Portal or some other free replacement on our DVR box. It's working very well, and syncing playlists and such seems like it will be great with our phones. Sigh... I've given up freedom for convenience, so I guess I deserve neither. I'll learn my lesson and come crawling later, I'm sure.

I'm also going to try to get my phone updated, and I guess I need to call in to customer service and grab those spare extra capacity batteries that are supposed to be free, but couldn't be sent to customers subscribed for less than thirty days... Sigh.

I'm also going to try to install moBlog, and see if I can try to use my camera phone and post directly to my blog, making some of those life moments more publically available. Maybe then I can justify having this fancy toy, rather than simply saying my wife needs to keep a schedule with her, and I just got one too.

We'll see how it all goes. Good luck to me.

Okay... went to lunch, came back... lunch was just awful, food-wise. My PC is getting re-imaged at 1:30, and I've got training to finish up. moBlog just didn't work right for me. I couldn't get it to work, and I gave up. I do wonder why Wordpress.com has a mobile client for iPhone, and not for Windows Mobile, but there's no real guesswork. Announcing a client on iPhone is bigger news...

I did manage to get the T-Mobile update installed. Avril Lavigne and Dave Matthews Band now emenate from my phone... very nice indeed. There's some better text input stuff too.

I think it is just time to sit down this evening and rip discs on the big box... WMA or MP3?