Rawr!

A challenger appears! HP dv9700t. Still looking up on Ubuntu compatibility, but this one seems decent and cheap.

I should compile a list of specs and prices to compare better.

(Other laptops are in my previous entry.)

mood: curious

So, I'm looking at laptops. I'm trying to find one that would let me play my games at a decent speed and would also last me a while. So here are three options:

• Dell XPS M1530
• ZaReason MidLap 1512
• Lenovo ThinkPad T61p

They seem pretty good, and they're in the same price range as my current one when I got it. Plus Ubuntu seems to run well on both the ThinkPad and the XPS (the other one has it pre-installed) so that's not a concern either.

One thing I didn't quite like about the ZaReason one is that there aren't any service shops nearby, in case something breaks. Maybe I won't need it after all if it uses somewhat common laptop parts; I'd need to look into that.

New icon mwahaha.

Also got rid of around 20 others from when I still had a paid account. Figured I really didn't need them.

mood: awake

music: The Final Battle

I associate Tostitos with Final Fantasy V, because I kept eating them while playing the first time through.

mood: curious

Been playing with Conky, and I came up with this:

The only problem I'm seeing is that the gradients seem to fade to black instead of the colour I set it to. Will look into that later.

mood: bored

music: Vermicide - The Mars Volta

Right now, I have the following installed:

• Amarok
• Audacious
• Banshee (1.0 RC)
• Exaile
• MPD (and MPC/pympd/Sonata)
• Rhythmbox
• Xfmedia

My pet peeves with each, as of this moment:

Amarok: Based on Qt, as expected from a KDE app, which is kind of an annoyance when running under GNOME/Xfce, but a minor one. And... that's about it really.

Audacious: Most similar to Winamp 5, except without the media library thingy, the obvious lack of plugins, and the fact that it seems to choke on .spc files for some odd reason while Audio Overload and other gstreamer stuff don't. Oh, and the GNOME shortcuts plugin doesn't seem to work (the Global Hotkeys one does, though).

Banshee: Runs on Mono. Not really an annoyance, but I'm afraid the ghost of RMS will haunt me, and the guy's starting to get creepy. Other than that, its Album panel seems to be more of an Album/Artist panel; e.g. if you have one album with some songs by X and other songs by Y, you get two entries. Compilations and sountracks are therefore most vulnerable.

Exaile: Supposedly this is to GTK+ as Amarok is to Qt, but really, not just yet. Cover art downloader chokes right after starting, dunno why yet. Also, when adding stuff to the playlist, it does so in alphabetical order—looking at the song title, and disregarding actual filename and track number tags. It gets confusing.

MPD: How the heck am I supposed to configure this thing, again? Dump everything into /var? Honestly I haven't looked into it too much.

Rhythmbox: No stop button agh. Cover art seems to have disappeared from the last version in Gutsy. And the Last.fm plugin is still borked as of 0.11.5. Or rather, it still randomly decides radio streams aren't valid audio files to play. GNOME shortcuts don't seem to work with it either. But hey, it gets the album thing right where Banshee gets nitpicky.

Xfmedia: More like Audacious than the rest, but without all the bells and whistles. It's actually quite nice, but based on xine and can't play .spc files as far as I know.

Not that they're all bad. I just can't decide yet on which to settle for everyday use. At least I have options, no?

Hmm. I wonder how well does foobar2000 run under Wine...

mood: annoyed

Damnit. My speakers aren't working, and I have no idea if I did something to them. Nothing seems out of the ordinary, except for a few cryptic lines from the ALSA stuff that seem to be more red herrings than anything else.

At least the headphone jack still works. Which makes it all the more confusing.

Hmm. I should try to document all the stuff I learn from this. And since I'm already abusing the tags in Firefox, might as well do it here too.

*tag tag tag*

How far away is too far away for you people, in terms of driving distance?

• 10 minutes
• 20 minutes
• 30 minutes
• 45 minutes
• 1 hour
• 2 hours

For the record, I'm in the 1-hour camp. Which is pretty much normal around here.

mood: excited

zomg open-sourced Blades of Exile

mood: happy

Yay!

mood: sleepy

I like how this one turned out.

That's me at home in SL.

Hmm. Maybe I can find more screenshots to upload and show around.

mood: amused

Garfield Minus Garfield.

Full of win.

mood: silly

Man.

I don't want a delete key anymore.

I want a deface key.

I just got a job offer.

The Good: It's in the evening, and requires English.

The Bad: It's in tech support.

The Ugly: Tech support for American telecom companies.

Still, it's something, so I'm gonna try it out.

*hops on the Last.fm bandwagon a few years too late*

<.<

Trust is the ultimate logical fallacy.

You know, I was looking at this photo and I noticed something.

What if someone wants to illegally cross over here? That is a painfully obvious bad design.

<.<

I don't care what you all say, 2006 is still last year ¬¬

mood: sleepy

Off to spend a week and then some with relatives. Happy holidays to everyone.

Yay girlfriend! Gonna miss her though. I left her a little present on SL, I hope she likes it.

Tangerines! *munch munch*

I really should sleep. We're supposed to be ready to leave in five hours.