This is the frontpage of the elwoodicious archives. Currently the archives are spanning posts and comments, contained within the meager confines of categories. Through here, you will be able to move down into the archives by way of time or category. If you are looking for something specific, perhaps you should try the search on the sidebar.
Accountant: What up, dawg!
Salesman: Pssht! Aw, you know.
Accountant: Sho’nuff.
[Followed by both pounding their fists together like they are about to start a little 2-on-2 hoops]
Salesman: Hey! Did you bring your sneakers because I really want to get down to the river and walk…
Democracy Player is what ushered me into the weird and interesting world of vlogs and if it were not for their channel guide I might not have discovered gems like Terra Video with their insightful nature shows or Telemusicvision which is a much better way to enjoy music videos than VH1 and all the MTVs combined. However, Democracy is designed with the notion that form should precede function so as a result it can be a stiff and awkward experience at best so after a few months of use I began to wish I could find a feed reader that was more like a media-centric version of Liferea*. PenguinTV appears to meet that need as it is designed with function first but offers enough polish to make media browsing and viewing an enjoyable experience.
Show here is Democracy Player’s channel guide which most users of cable or satellite TV would be quickly comfortable with searching and finding new shows to watch. Beyond that the interface is clean and easy to understand.
PenguinTV is more a feed reader than Democracy Player as it will parse feeds for all the content including information in the post about the content making it more of a comprehensive experience. Additionally, the upper right-hand corner always shows how much media has been downloaded helping the user better manage disk space.
Both Democracy Player and PenguinTV are very capable programs but it would be worthwhile to run down the pros and cons of each.
Democracy Pros
PenguinTV Pros
Democracy Cons
PenguinTV Cons
In the end, the flexibility and stability of PenguinTV wins out for me. The ability to back up the feed list as well as import is a huge win along with its ability to render the full contents of the feed rather than just the media aspects of it are huge pluses that cannot be ignored. Now, I will certainly keep Democracy Player around for its channel guide and to see where the team heads with the product.
* Note: Liferea does handle media-centric blogs well but it is designed with reading in mind rather than managing the consumption of media files, that and my enormous feed list is too unwieldy to add media content to it.
** Update: After using PenguinTV for the last two weeks it is hands down the app of choice and with self-discovery of feeds fixed in 1.92 things are even better. Also, my concern about shelling out to a video player is really a moot point as Penguin creates playlists so you can stack up all your unwatched content for easy viewing.
Just started watching the show with zefrank. If the future of vlogs keep this trajectory than this ADHD rattled soul might be able to cancel our satellite service.
Late to the part as usual. However, this has to be the coolest thing since sliced bread and it beats Samba in so many ways I can barely contain myself. The last couple of weeks have seen me become a bit of a SSH junkie, I’ve been running OpenSSH for well over a year but never really leveraged it to do more than shell into the server to check system mail and do general maintenance but after my successful PuTTY and TightVNC experiment I figure it was worth checking out what else I can do with it.
Michuk posted an article over at jakilinux.org that outlined some of the basics, like remote applications using X forwarding, but it was the chunk on SSHFS that really tickled my fancy. Samba shares are nice but brutally slow for copying files so most of the time I rely on SCP but that can be tedious, in my limited opinion, if you are looking for patterns or moving large amounts of scattered data. Enter SSHFS which allows you to mount remote folders via SSH and have all the security and speed.
My goal was to have my music available to Beep Media Player, which didn’t recognize Samba shares, and to potentially speed up Rhythmbox’s cataloging which is brutally slow over Samba. Needless to say it is stupid simple. Check it out:
Execute the following commands:
Add fuse to the list, save and close.
Add yourself to the fuse group under System–> Administration–> Users and Groups.
Logout and back in.
Create a mountpoint and take ownership of it:
Here’s the magic:
When you are all done don’t forget to clean up after yourself:
Super easy, super simple, fast, and secure. Here are a couple of more resources that I used as references when doing this: Ubuntu Forums HOWTO, and Ubuntu.wordpress.com.
I’m not really a skinny man, fleshy is a better term, more like a lumpy block of wood with stubby legs. All the same, Management and I have made a concerted effort over the past year to eat whole foods–fresh vegetables from local markets and meats and fish from local butchers and fish markets. Initially, it took plenty of time and energy on our part to do it but once we had a system down we found it to be better for our health and wallets, we even managed to carve our weekly food budget down to about $30 by eating local and fresh.
We eat out now and then but usually at local restaurants and we haven’t stepped into a fast food franchise in almost two years. Fast Food Nation and Super Size Me really impacted how we viewed what we ate. Though, this isn’t to say that we were radicalized into raw vegans because, honestly, who other than trust-fund babies has the money for that?
For giggles and prompted by the new Burger King Quad Stacker (four patties and eight slices of bacon) we surfed over to Burger King and built out what I might have eaten a couple of years ago. Eye opening doesn’t begin to cover it and checking out the costs of obesity at the CDC only hammers home the point that eating like this, even on a weekly basis is bad for you.
Check out the numbers in the detail and summary, far beyond the recommend 2,200 calories per day. Ouch. My heart.
My iRiver does have plenty of life left in it but it doesn’t hurt to look down the road a bit. Just added my lust list is the iAudio X5 60GB version, though likely to be 80-100GB when I buy.
Highlights include:
elwoodicious is proudly powered by
WordPress
Entries (RSS)
and Comments (RSS).
Comments
james, Sonny
james, james, Kirrus [...]
Chris Rosenzweig, Cyndy, Jenn Elwood [...]
Christian, Quyen
Quyen, Kirrus
james, Tyler