Squaresphere

..scary stuff.., http://www.inteldaily.com/?c=117&a=1431

This are probably old news to most, but sometimes the old news is the best news! I was looking for a way to quickly get to my desktop but not clear anything that was on it. I’m giving, what was Konfabulator, Yahoo! Widgets another go, with the release of v4 of the Widget Engine I figured I’d dive back in, as having notes on the desktop is quite handy. To see these my first thought was to use Win+D to show the desktop, but this also cleared the Widgets away defeating the whole object. I was pointed to Win+M to minimise all open windows, which works great. This led me to looking for more, just in case there were a few gems I’d missed. Have a look yourself, freshen up your knowledge!

Keyboard shortcuts for Windows - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/126449

A great article on how Microsoft is actually helping to promote Linux to its own user base. Microsoft aren’t really the most popular company in the world, and their latest OS has been causing waves for quite some time. Having just recently taken the plunge into Linux myself, it looks like I picked the perfect time to make the change, if Microsoft are starting to look at ways of actively killing off Windows XP.

Find the article here, http://aaxnet.com/editor/edit043.html

I managed to find a day to backup my spare pc and take the dive into Linux in the form of Ubuntu. I have to say it’s the easiest install I’ve ever had, yes, better than Windows. The Synaptic package manager is an amazing innovation in software installation, that coupled with Automatix made installing all the software a breeze. The biggest thing I found when running though the LifeHacker Linux Roundup articles I mentioned previously, is XGL and Beryl. This amazing application converts your entire desktop environment into a fluid and more usable work space. It’s all well and good watching the screen casts and the YouTube movies, but having it on your own pc makes a huge difference. Be sure to check out thier website, at beryl-project.org.

Songbird wins the battle of the media managers. Although there is a late arrival in the shape of http://www.mlipod.com/ which is an iPod plugin for WinAmp’s media manager. Which I am yet to try. The main reason was that iTunes doesn’t allow me to copy my music off my iPod to my computer. This caused it to lose more points than the RSS podcast downloading feature (probably the best thing in itunes) gained.

The next stage is to clean-up my library and perhaps actually swap my iPod over to a SongBird library instead of an itunes one. The application can only get better with time, as development thunders ahead and more extensions are released. So go and give it a try for a while, you’ll not go back to itunes! Try it, http://www.songbirdnest.com/

In a late review of the media libraries, I actually got some time to read the Lifehacker articles mentioned in this post. Which led me to the excellent, if rather ugly looking, Media Monkey. This ace application can tag all your mp3’s using folder names or amazon as a base. After about 4 hours, I finally had all 5,000 odd tracks tagged and named properly along with artwork. The only real drawback is that the information is stored locally in an mdb file so when I arrived at work and plugged the iPod into my work pc, it didn’t quite all work out.

I guess I will have to store the mdb on the iPod and install Media Monkey at work, in order to transfer the database over. I guess Apple didn’t think that people might want to have more than one application and more than one “library” pc, shame on you Steve.

Finally got my scrapper Midnight Dragon to level 50 in City of Heroes! Awesome achievement, big thanks to all the people who helped out.

Check out the movie, apologies for the crappy quality, kind of rushed and I don’t have a good encoder.

Time for change is the spring they say. So I recently got myself a 60gb video iPod to replace my tired old 20gb Creative Zen. So now the battle is on to find a good media application for managing my music collection and the ipod. The obvious choice is iTunes, but I have heard more nightmare stories than good stories. A quick google led me to SongBird, which looks quite interesting. So the race is on to test quite a few applications and see which one makes the least amount of mistakes.

Swiftly followed by a trip through the Lifehacker school of mp3 organising,

• Part I Level the volume
• Part II Album art
• Part III Metadata

Then the tides will change as I install Ubuntu on my spare machine, so the quest will continue into Linux based music managing software. Which places Songbird as the front runner, being multi platform.

Again, a foray into Linux under the watchful eye of Lifehacker.

• Ubuntu/Linux Roundup