TLLTS TV Coming Soon?

When The Linux Link website was started back in 2001 (at least, according to the Wayback machine) they were planning on doing a magazine or newsletter, but that never really picked up. In 2003, they started doing TLLTS, and just recently finished their 100th episode. Now, what’s next? According to Pat…

Another cool export script is converting your video to theora. This will come in handy as I plan to record some videos of upcoming TLLTS episodes. Why video tape TLLTS episodes? Stay tuned for an announcement in the near future!

I hope you only release them in theora 🙂

NewsForge: “KDE 4 promises radical changes to the free desktop”

I just came across this article on NewsForge about KDE 4, the next generation of KDE.

As the dust settles from aKademy 2005, the annual KDE conference, it’s a good time to take a look at what the KDE developers are working on. Though KDE 3.5 isn’t even out yet, developers are already working on KDE 4. Plenty of work has already gone into porting existing code to Qt4, the GUI toolkit upon which KDE is based, and KDE developers are working on projects that could radically change how the world’s most popular free desktop looks and works.

KDE 3.5 is due out in late October. The 3.5 release will give KDE users and developers a mature, stable, and integrated desktop platform with a wide range of applications.

Its developers see KDE 4 as a chance to experiment and introduce new concepts and applications that do more than build on the strength of KDE’s existing architecture. Just as KDE 3 brought major transformations in that architecture, developers are looking to KDE 4 to transform the desktop experience and enable a surge in third-party application development. With a KDE 4 release not likely to happen for at least another year, the developers have plenty of time to experiment.

I now firmly believe that KDE 4 (Plasma) will be the “vista killer”. If they can match OS X’s speed and simplicity with Linux’s ‘Linuxness’, then people would probably start using it. Why? They don’t have to shell out money for overpriced Macs, don’t have to pay for an operating system, and will probably be able to use it on a computer they already own, or a low-end new one.

I can imagine computer manufacturers giving you the option of Linux preinstalled with a reduced price in the not too distant future (HP is going to start doing that soon with Ubuntu). If you can give them the same computer for $100 less (or however much Windows costs for new PCs), they’d be stupid not to do it. And once computer manufacturers start doing that and Linux has a respectable market share, more and more apps will be ported and it will be Bill’s downfall.

Check out the article, it’s a good read.

Oh, and here’s a comic.

What’s TiVo Good For?

Well, I now have DirecTV. I know that I said a while ago that I was getting Dish Network, well they tried to install it but had line-of-sight issues. DirecTV is different, in the sense that it uses two satellite dishes instead of one “Super Dish” that Dish Network uses. They were able to place the two satellites in different places, and eliminate the problem.

But with it, I got the DVR. I had heard about the DirecTV DVR using TiVo, but it was never really advertised like that, so I didn’t think they used it. Well, I was wrong. I now have a TiVo unit with a special receiver for DirecTV.

And after using TiVo for a little while, I’ve realized it’s only good for one thing: recording TV. Period. So far, I haven’t found any useful feature that hasn’t been in MythTV. In fact, MythTV can do so much more that TiVo can, it’s not even funny. When you take into account all the features in MythTV like DVD playing/ripping/burning capabilities, intergrated weather, an intergrated web browser, RSS feed support, MAME, MythTV’s ability to remotely schedule recordings, podcast support (if you set it up right), and countless other features that you can do with other plugins, why would anyone not want MythTV?

Oh, but I guess I mispoke. There is a great feature that TiVo has called “Suggestions”. When it is enabled (which it was by default), it will record shows it thinks you will like if there’s free space on the HD (without bothering to ask). The added advantage to this is when you try to record a program you actually want to see, you’re informed that it’s already recording something. And after a few days of leaving this feature on, the HD is cluttered with useless recordings you’ll never watch anyways…
Someone needs to step up and be able to manufacture a cheap MythTV box, because TiVo is still cheap. An 80 hour TiVo is $300, while the cheapest MythTV box I saw would be the $500 one that guy is documenting. I know, if you get a lifetime license it does amount to $500, but you can pay a monthly fee, that’s probably what most people do.

(Oh, and did you hear that TiVo is not selling anything directly? They’re redirecting users to BestBuy)

A Cool Start Page

For a while there’s been My Yahoo, there’s been Google, and more recently Microsoft’s start.com, but I found one that’s really cool.

It’s called NetVibes. It’s a home page that can show you the wether, many website feeds, and can even show you new GMail messages. It also has a similar layout to Google and start.com, meaning that you can drag and arrange the different boxes.

What I like about the feed feature of it is that you can read feeds within a new ‘window’ on the same homepage, meaning you don’t need to go to the actual site to read it’s content.

But what’s really cool about this is that it’s completely done with Ajax. You don’t need an account to customize the page, but you can get one to see it from other computers.

Oh, and did I mention, you can even change the title 🙂

I’m giving it a try, it’s pretty cool.

Signs Can Be Misleading

I was in the Library today. I passed the computer lab and saw a sign that said, “Do NOT Open Windows“. The computer lab is air conditioned, and the windows aren’t supposed to be open.

That just struck me as funny 🙂

Firefox

I’m sure some of you read Jon’s blog. He recently posted an article on Firefox (that got 15 comments at time of posting this – wow!) and I would like to state my opinion on it.

First off, I respect Jon’s opinion, and he does have a good point. With that said…

According to Symantec:

The Mozilla family of browsers had the highest number of vulnerabilities during the first six months of 2005 with 25; 18 of these — 72% — were rated as high-severity. Microsoft Internet Explorer had 13 vendor confirmed vulnerabilities of which eight — 62% — were considered high-severity.

But I have a problem with this statement. While Firefox has more discovered bugs, notice that IE only has “vendor confirmed” bugs. Firefox is open source, so anyone can see the source code and tell wether there really is a bug or not. How do we know that Microsoft is hiding how many bugs there really are? There are probably tons and tons of bugs in IE, but since it is closed source, we’ll never know.

But, let’s face it – Firefox still has bugs. However, I really have no problem using it under Linux. Chances are that several of those bugs use an exploit to make Firefox download and run a virus. What kind of virus? A Windows virus, duh. What’s gonna happen when it tries executing a Windows virus on Linux? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. (before you jump on me about Wine, I have heard that almost no Windows virus has ran successfully using Wine)

I’ll admit, I didn’t look at any of the bugs to see what they were, but I imagine there are a few that do affect Linux machines. Time to use Konqueror again? Maybe, maybe.

Back, and the TagCloud is Going Down!

Hi everyone.

I’m back from my little trip, and I decided to remove the TagCloud. Jon agrees with me, it basically is a piece of crap and I think that almost no one uses it.

Expect more posts in the not too distant future 🙂

Going Away for a Few Days

I’ll be going away for a few days. I should be back on Monday.

May the Penguin be with you 🙂

Added Technorati Back

Well, I can’t yet tell which search is better, so for the moment, they’re both on. My instinct tells me that Google will probably be more standard and unlikely to change as time goes on (heck, they have the same design they had seven years ago), but Technorati is a little more modern, is completely focused on blogs, and has had a blog search for a while now.

I think the winner will be whichever one updates faster. This will probably give Google the upper hand, since Blogger is a Google service, but who knows, really?

(also, remember to vote in the next entry)

Does Anyone Use TagCloud?

I’m sure everyone’s noticed the TagCloud on the sidebar, as it’s been there almost since I started this blog a few months ago.

Anyway, I’m now starting to see the uselessness in it. It does provide a tagging interface, but I cannot specify what tags I want posts to be, and it doesn’t update that frequently.

So, I’m thinking of removing it. But you have a say in it. Should I remove the TagCloud?

(poll removed)