Wednesday, August 29, 2007

New Machine ideas?

I have an Aopen MiniPC 915G that is starting to make some odd noises. I think it is just the fan, but I've also thought about replacing the machine with a dual core machine. So I'm starting to look around for a new machine. I'm looking for something that has a dual core, minimum of 2GB of RAM and preferably a small form factor case. I really like the size of the Aopen box, but the lack of slots is frustrating since I can't upgrade the video. I would like to have at least 1 PCIe 16x slot (low profile is ok). So far the compact machines from HP are looking interesting. Probably reliability and quiet are the most desired features. Does anyone have any suggestions.

GNOME MPlayer 0.5.0 and Gecko MediaPlayer 0.5.0

GNOME MPlayer 0.5.0 and Gecko MediaPlayer 0.5.0 have been released. You can get them at my website.

The biggest feature is the addition of playlist and a graphical playlist manager to GNOME MPlayer. Full drag and drop support to the playlist is included, so creating a playlist should be a snap.

I've found out recently that Zonbu and Zenwalk Linux are including GNOME MPlayer in their software as the default interface to MPlayer. So that is pretty cool. Zonbu is supposed to be sending me one of their machines, so I am looking forward to trying out one of those.

Monday, August 06, 2007

Exchange Student

My wife and I hosted a second exchange student from Germany last month. We had a great time with her and as always we learned a little more about the world and about ourselves. We still keep in touch with the student we hosted a year ago and we hope the same will happen with this recent one. It is fantastic to have friends all over the world.

If you have ever thought about hosting a student, try it, you might like it. I definitely had reservations with the first one but after having him, it was fun, so we decided to host another one this summer. So far we have only hosted students for a month during the summer. Maybe we'll host one for a year if we get up the nerve.

Sunflower Applet 0.7

I've been sitting on this code way to long. I actually thought I had released the updates in this, but now realize I hadn't. So here it is. It's main feature is the new location selection by map feature.

mplayerplug-in version 3.45 is out

mplayerplug-in v3.45 has been released. It should fix a problem with crashing on certain distributions of Linux. CVS did not crash on my Fedora installation, but it did crash on Myah OS running in VMWare. After a couple of patches I was able to correct the crashes and the fix was confirmed by the developer of Myah OS. This should fix problems with other distros as well. In addition there are a few other fixes in there as well.