Gadget Wisdom

We have been using IM for years, and migrated over to Pidgin some years ago when we were still on Windows as Trillian Pro was not being updated regularly.

So, yesterday, when we discovered a review of the Trillian Astra Beta, we thought we would explore the issue of clients for not just IM, but Twitter. The positives of the new Trillian, themes, notifications and replies, customizations, and email. Check it out.

Fedora has decided to make Empathy the new IM client in Fedora 11 over Pidgin, as it is more closely integrated with the desktop. Pidgin will still be available as an option though. We did a few tests of Empathy, but the version we had didn’t import from Pidgin, and we have years of log files we don’t want to lose, so we’ll hold off on migration decisions for now.  Empathy’s superiority is in design, not necessarily in use.

We used Pidgin for a while not only for IM, but for Twitter, when it first started, except the Twitter plugin was a bit buggy and kept crashing the whole program.

So, we sought to separate our Twitter from our IM. We tried several Twitter clients in Fedora. The only one that supported multiple accounts was Gwibber, and it had limits on how many messages could be displayed. So we went to Adobe Air and tried the immensely popular Tweetdeck. However, it does not have multiple account support, so we migrated to Twhirl.

Twhirl has everything we need. But Twhirl will likely soon be replaced by Seesmic Desktop, which is still in preview releases. We’ll be staying with Twhirl at least until its successor is out of preview. One blogger predicted that Seesmic will blow Tweetdeck out of the water. Everything on Seesmic is supposedly faster. Both Tweetdeck and Seesmic offer grouping functions, something Twitter itself should integrate, allowing those people you are following to be categorized by you. Seesmic is more a competitor for Tweetdeck than a straight successor to Twhirl.

Either way, there are a lot of IM and Twitter options out there. One has to find what works for them. So far, Pidgin and Twhirl work for us. Tell us what works for you.

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• Trillian Astra Handing Out Invites Willy Nilly [Downloads] (lifehacker.com)
• Trillian Astra’s still alive, beta available (news.cnet.com)
• Adium gets its Twitter on in version 1.4 (news.cnet.com)
• TweetDeck Fights Back: Plugs Memory Leak – Launches Facebook Integration (readwriteweb.com)
• Seesmic Desktop: A Threat to TweetDeck? (mashable.com)
• Twhirl’s successor unveiled: Seesmic Desktop (thaibrother.com)
• Twitter Client Arms Race Continues – Seesmic To Up The Ante (techcrunch.com)
• Twhirl Updates: Will You Dump TweetDeck? (mashable.com)
• Battle of the multicolumn Twitter clients (thaibrother.com)
• Twitter Client War: Twhirl vs. TweetDeck (scobleizer.com)
• Seesmic Unveils A Formidable New Twitter Client To Rival Tweetdeck: Seesmic Desktop (techcrunch.com)

Techcrunch reported that developer Paul Yanez, who developed Adobe Air application My Media Player, which we posted about in November, has released a second version of his application. It features 400 TV shows and 208 movies from Hulu, and there is a full-screen mode that apparently works with a remote, as well as Twitter integration. The unfortunate problem is the application becomes disabled every time Hulu makes a major change to its service. Yanez suggests we email them to complain.

Yanez has released his framework and thoughts on building a media player. He wants it integrate with all web video, be easy to use, have a television style feel and be fully integrated with mobile devices.

If you don’t want to try Adobe Air, you can try the application out in a Browser window, by clicking here. Of course, it wasn’t working for us. Maybe we should complain to Hulu. It kept saying Video Unavailable.

We think Hulu should be developing an app like this themselves…or encouraging/hiring Yanez to do so for them. We’ve long complained about a lack of TV-like functionality on Hulu and other sites. And now, under pressure from content providers, these sites are limiting third party development of such software.

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• Hulu Gets An Unofficial Desktop App In MyMediaPlayer2 (techcrunch.com)

For Windows only, NBC is offering an application that runs in the background and can download and watch shows offline. It works with Firefox or Internet Explorer, and contains both ads and restricted use, ensuring you can’t copy the files or transfer them to your mobile device.

Now, DRM annoys us, but ultimately, we understand it on any service offered free. We hate it on services we pay for. The software also has some downsides. By installing it, you agree to be added to the NBC P2P(Peer-to-Peer) network. So other NBC Direct users will be downloading files from your computer as you download from theirs…essentially the same system BitTorrent uses.

We object to this, as from what we’ve read, it gives NBC too much control over your connection speed. We like the idea of being able to download a file and play it, eliminating the buffer issues that plague so many of these sites. But in an ideal universe, we’d prefer digital rights management implemented in the following manner.

You download a video file. If it is to be done by P2P, a P2P client can be used. Or direct download can be offered. The DRM is in the player. The file is impossible to decode without a locked player that requires an internet connection to work to get a decryption key. And the key can be cached along with the ads to work for a certain number of hours without an internet connection. We haven’t thought out the details of how this might work, but this is similar to some schemes used before. It would also allow copying to any computer that had the player installed. We’ll leave it up to the content providers to consider this. Furthermore, if they build this player on a platform offered on Flash or Silverlight, both of which have or will soon have Linux support and already have Mac support, they can ensure the same piece of software will work on any system.

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• NBC Direct relaunches: Free video downloads of NBC TV shows (downloadsquad.com)
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Image by rigeneriamoci via Flickr

Organization is a hard thing. A few months ago, it took a week-long effort to index our entire movie collection. Now, when something is added to the collection, it takes a few seconds, which is minimal, but the benefits are major. We store our movies in two storage boxes, and alphabetization is not worth the time. On the screen however, we can open the file on a movie and get the location and locate it.

We champion open-source software, and looked for a piece of free software to use.

We tried a few different programs, but settled on the simple Griffith, which is available for Windows and Linux. It searches a variety of databases for data on movies, and, assuming it finds it, adds information on the cast, the director, length of the movie, and an image, if one is available. It makes browsing the collection on the screen appearing the same as browsing through it on a shelf.

An alternative is MeD Movie Manager, which, by virtue of running on Java, runs on all hardware. It supports two features that Griffith does not… Support for television series via the TV.com database and the ability to scan directories to retrieve movie file names, which saves you a lot of data entry hassle if you store movies in digital format.

There are better and more complete programs, but they cost money.

We maintain a music collection, but we don’t keep it indexed, instead we ripped it, keeping the original CDs as backup media. Now, there are a variety of ripping programs, as well as CD Databases such as freedb.org, but as they are contributed by multiple volunteers, the notation style is inconsistent. A future project we have on the books is editing the metadata to correct mistakes and adjust some inconsistencies. One of the big problems are our collection of commercial purchased mix CDs, ie the Best of (insert genre here). Since each track has a different artist, they are being sorted incorrectly by missing programs, and have to be manually retagged. A lesson we’ve learned is to review the data and edit it as the CD is ripped, something we will do in the future.

Finally, we come to books. Another project on our list, as space considerations require us to keep books in places where a reading of the spines is not as easy. We intend to index the collection, and already have chosen social cataloguing website LibraryThing, which offers a lifetime membership for $25, or free for under 200 books.

It pulls data from the Library of Congress or from Amazon.com, and permits a list or cover view of books in the collection, as well as searches. You can add reviews and ratings which can be read by other members. It can even recommend new books based on your collection, as well as a variety of other interactive tools to get you involved in the greater world of books.

Online Competitor, Shelfari, which is owned by Amazon, does offer an alternative social networking option for book-lovers, but not the level of cataloguing offered by LibraryThing. LibraryThing also indexes some small professional collections, as evidenced by a recent Massachusetts volunteer event where a group of LibraryThing volunteers indexed 2000 books in a day.

We’ll have more on our index, when we finally devote the time to starting it…Remember, one shelf at a time…But we’d love to hear your methods of organization. Post a comment if you have anything to add.

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• Griffith Manages Your Movie Collection [Featured Download]

Image via Wikipedia

Lifehacker alerted us this week to the release of Rockbox 3.0. Rockbox is a product we already use on our MP3 player. It is an alternative open-source firmware which includes not only expanded music support, but album art, games, video playback, and more.

For those of you wishing to try it, but not willing to give up the manufacturer’s firmware, it installs a dual-boot firmware loader, allowing you to press a hotkey to boot into the old firmware.

We have switched from MP3 to playing files encoded using open-source format OGG and this software allows us to do so. It runs on a variety of players produced by Apple, Archos, Cowon, iriver, Olympus, SanDisk, and Toshiba. More will come, as people work to port it.

So, check Rockbox out. If you don’t like it, you can uninstall it.

Related Articles

• Rockbox Web Site(Rockbox.Org)
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• Rockbox open-source MP3 player firmware hits 3.0
• Rockbox 3.0 Released. Quietly.
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• Rockbox 3.0 firmware breathes the life back into your MP3 player
• The case for FLAC, the case for Rockbox

We recently started testing a freeware application and web service called Dropbox. Dropbox instantly backs up files you place in a designated folder to the Dropbox server. Whenever you modify a file, it will update the copy on the server. Dropbox also does revision history, so you can recover older versions should you lose something.

You can check out Dropbox at their site, and download a Windows, Mac, or Linux client.

We were recently reading Lifehacker and found an article on Why its Readers Switched to Linux. We thought we might put our two cents in.

• Dislike of Microsoft and Windows – We certainly got fed up with them. We admit to being primarily a Linux using now(this blog was built on open-source). Every few years you have to get the new Microsoft whatsis or you’ll be left behind. And, using Vista as an example, the new whatsis isn’t always an improvement.
• Speed – A lot of the built-ins to Windows slow down the computer. It is why Linux runs faster on older hardware as well as newer hardware. It has background processes and programs just like any other system, but the overhead is usually much less.
• Customization – This may be a pro or a con. Nothing is so configurable as Linux, with dozens of different packages to expand, change, or customize your experience for most standard functions. Of course, such choice can be be overwhelming to some. In which case you can stick to the defaults. No harm, no foul.
• Price – 99% of things for Linux are 100% free. There are some commercial license Linux programs, as well as ones that ask for your donation in assisting them. You can forego them, or you can contribute to the community.
• It’s Just Better – Not a great argument, we know. But our frustration level is way down. We can’t adopt the philosophy that change is impossible because Microsoft won’t let us. If enough people want a change to a piece of software, it happens. And if it doesn’t, if you are a programmer, you can hack it in yourself.

So try out your friendly neighborhood Linux distribution today. We recommend you consider Fedora or Ubuntu. Both have a reputation for being new user friendly and easy for those who have no Linux knowledge to use even if they don’t want to delve into the guts behind the graphical interface. You can even download bootable CD versions to try out before deciding if you want to switch.

For information on Linux distributions and their estimated popularity, visit Distrowatch.

We recently started experimenting with QEMU. QEMU is a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer.

As an emulator, it can run operating systems and programs made for one machine on another. It currently can emulate the ARM processor(used in routers and other embedded network hardware), SPARC, PowerPC, MIPS, and more are coming.

As a virtualizer, it can create a virtual computer than can run a complete operating system on it. There is an optional drive available to enhance speed.

QEMU runs on the command-line under Windows and Linux-based computers, but pops up a window or a full-screen display for the operating system it is virtualizing. We have used QEMU to experiment and test bootable CDs. These CDs boot a complete operating system and are often used for diagnostic testing on computers.

You can find the latest version of QEMU for Windows here.

To try QEMU out, get a CD image of a bootable CD in iso format, and run the following command:

qemu -cdrom [iso filename] -boot d

That will boot whatever iso you want in a virtualized window.

We’ll have more on QEMU in the future, but it is a great way to experiment with Linux and other operating systems, if you want to try them without major alterations to your system. For more information, try the QEMU on Windows wiki.

This question was put to us recently by an educator who wants to show certain Youtube videos in her classes but cannot rely on a working internet connection. These simple instructions are courtesy of Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Try vixy.net – it will allow you to download Youtube videos directly as a standard video file or even audio-only. It is somewhat limited in the formats though. We’d prefer an Xvid option. Xvid is an open-source alternative to DivX. 

For a free program you can install on a computer and run…try Super…

Finally, if you want to put them on a DVD, Amit offers a bit more advice(Although we generally go the Linux route) and instruction.

For those of you looking for free fonts, check out the EquippedCreative’s Ultimate Free Font Roundup. It has links to various free font websites. Since fonts are a subjective thing…we can’t tell you which one you’ll like.