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Stuff posted in this site by me.

On bodily needs

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[18:15:02] Nullrend says:
you know what? screw it
[18:15:22] Nullrend says:
I’m staying out of girls’ beds and I’m keeping them out of mine
[18:15:24] Nullrend says:
=P
[18:15:45] [ Gabrielle Q ] says:
oh, so you are just using hotel beds? =P
[18:15:46] [ Gabrielle Q ] says:
jajajaja
[18:15:53] Nullrend says:
LOL
[18:16:10] Nullrend says:
I am SO posting that on my tumblr
[18:16:37] Nullrend says:
can’t stop chuckling at it
[18:16:59] [ Gabrielle Q ] says:
jajaja
[18:17:01] [ Gabrielle Q ] says:
it was good
[18:21:36] Nullrend says:
yes, it was
[18:22:12] [ Gabrielle Q ] says:
but, hey, maybe it is a good idea to keep out of beds
[18:22:37] Nullrend says:
oh, it just keeps getting better
[18:23:04] [ Gabrielle Q ] says:
why?
[18:23:10] Nullrend says:
you’d have to be careful of carpet burns
[18:23:20] [ Gabrielle Q ] says:
jajajaja

On bodily needs Read More »

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Don’t know if it’s a good day or a bad day but I sure know it’s a different day

Esra

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Of invitations to the good times

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Over the past months I’ve realized I need an active invitation in order to enjoy being at a bar, pub, disco or house. If I arrive at a place and find someone friendly there that counts as an invitation too; the other person will usually provide a pathway to enjoyment.

I got this theory since I first read the Artemis Fowl series. It’s a stretch, yes, but I’ve realized it applies well to my nights out.

Of invitations to the good times Read More »

Banshee

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Banshee screenshot

See that volume control button at the top right corner? Reason enough not to use it. All civilized music software should let you control volume without having to click anything at all. Hell, even iTunes does it and we know many people aren’t fond of it.

The fact it’s using Mono doesn’t really help its case either. The decision by the developers to also encompass video libraries makes me thing it’s trying to do everything but does nothing well.

Did not bother installing it.

Banshee Read More »

Songbird

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Used version 1.2.0, which is the one currently being offered as stable. The application itself takes some extra work to get it going since it’s a XUL application. There are pre-built Ubuntu packages which you don’t get from the developers themselves, but rather from third parties who offer them. This means you have to trust these packagers when performing the installation.

The program doesn’t integrate into the desktop environment at all either. Sure, you can install “feathers” (skins) on it, but if you like a unified look across all your applications you’re out of luck. It can’t be that hard to use system bindings, surely.

Any playlists imported into it need to be coded in ANSI (ISO-8859-15). If you try to import anything in UTF-8 you will get lots and lots of ghost songs in the database. In my case I ended up with 4K ghost songs in a library of 13.4K songs. All these songs would have to be rated again. Screw that.

Now, here’s the kicker. It likes to eat RAM like a legislator takes money out of the public treasury, often going into the hundreds of megabytes of RAM usage.

Gotta keep looking for a decent music player. There’s gotta be something comparable to Winamp at the very least.

Songbird Read More »

Exaile

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After my update to Karmic Koala I found myself in need of a new music player, specially after using the godsforsaken mess that is Amarok 2. In my search for a new music player for Linux I happened to find Exaile. It describes itself thusly:

Exaile is a music manager and player for GTK+ written in Python. It incorporates automatic fetching of album art, lyrics fetching, artist/album information via Wikipedia, Last.fm scrobbling, support for many portable media players including iPods, internet radio such as shoutcast, and tabbed playlists.

It takes a lot of inspiration from Amarok 1.4 in its layout and design choices and since it’s written in GTK you don’t have to install any KDE dependencies.

Even though it’s up to version 3.0.2 at the time of this writing, it should be considered alpha software. Beta at the most:

  • Playlist import/export doesn’t really work. You can import only from M3U playlists and export to XSPF playlists. The other choices don’t work.
  • Overuse of playlist tabs.
  • Most plugins don’t work the way they’re supposed to.

On the plus side, the developers offer a repository for it, so you don’t have to jump through hoops like you do when you want to use SongBird.

After attempting to use it for a couple of days, I’ve decided it’s not for me. Hopefully I’ll get SongBird working without too many problems.

Exaile Read More »

Karmic Koala

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All in all, a good update, with only a few issues here and here. Except for sound. Dear gods, the more I deal with the piece of screwmotherfucking shit that is PulseAudio, the more I hate it. Perhaps PulseAudio isn’t the one to blame, but Canonical’s implementation of it certainly sucks zebra donkey’s balls.

I am seriously contemplating migrating over to Debian just to avoid having to fight my way to a decent system configuration. This is something that happens every single release.

Seriously, they fucking nerfed volume controls this time around. There is only a single control for Master this time around. You say you want more controls? You’re SOL. You’ll have to use good ol’ alsamixer to set volumes for Master, PCM, headphones, etc, separately.

So much for ease of use.

Karmic Koala Read More »

Ennui, as of November 9th

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I don’t really have a passion for anything these times. Days pass in a blur, punctuated by brief periods of fleeting happiness occurring only on the weekends.

I write this on a calafia, feeling the cool wind move my hair across my closed eyes. When I open them everything has a bluish tint to it and hair strands untangle themselves from eyelashes. Yet I don’t feel depressed.

It probably has to do with a thoroughly unsatisfying end to a good weekend; or the fact I didn’t get my morning coffee.

Ennui, as of November 9th Read More »

Sleep

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No matter how many times I try, it is likely I will never be able to go to sleep before 00:00 if I’m running on eight hours of sleep.

On occasion I have been able to… usually after days (and nights) where I haven’t slept, if at all.

The proof is in this writing. Made it at 01:00.

Sleep Read More »