Still thought I’d post a few quick links…
Firstly, a little post from TechSoup with some helpful guides and stages on how to design or redesign a NGO’s website : www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/webbuilding/page11822.cfm
Secondly, I came across this post about how the British government is hiring young hackers to help the combat cyber crime, most amusing…
Tags: british government, creation, cyber crime, design, holiday, ngo, techsoup, website
Sounds painful! Well, actually, it’s quite a pleasant and positive thing…
I love Ubuntu, in fact I’m growing to like it more and more, and whilst it’s cost (i.e. nothing) makes me relatively tolerant of issues, bugs and interface flaws, there are a few little things that annoy me greatly. For example, with the Mac OS, if i’m trying to perform a file operation in a folder where I don’t have the necessary privileges, I am prompted to enter a password for the super user account in order to carry out those operations anyway. Whilst it is possible to this in Ubuntu through the command line or sort of half do it with a Nautilus plugin, it’s not as graceful as the Mac implementation.
I’m sure others have their own gripes to, so Canonical has started a program to start patching 100 of these imperfections and welcome your help in taking part in a user survey, read more here.
Firefox 3.5 promises some interesting new features on the cards but the most talked about floating around the Interweb is it’s capacity to resize live video on the fly, but the most interesting part of the whole story is that all the demos have been showing videos in ‘Ogg’ format, an open source video format that is generally considered better than flash and of course authoring applications are free…
Have a delve further here.
With a clear and helpful guide on how to install them :
http://www.unixmen.com/linux-distributions/ubuntu/265-great-themes-for-ubuntu-904-jaunty-jackalope
A nice little round up of Pros and Cons for those of you who may or may not be thinking of adopting Linux…
http://linux.gauravlive.com/general/gnu-linux-pros-cons-dissected/
As well as an Open Source / Linux fan, I’m also a massive Apple Mac fan, so thought I’d give a quick round up of new developments from Apple’s recent developers conference…
Not really any surprises, but as always I’m as excited as a school boy about new operating systems… Until I install them and am hit by a slew of problems….
Tags: apple, iphone, macbook pro, new products, snow leopard, wwdc
I was very happy to find this article mentioning that developers around the world have made a massive move away from using windows as a development environment into Mac and especially Linux. Personally I find developing on Linux is a cinch, Mac pretty easy and windows is generally horrible, so good to see that I’m not the only one who thinks that!
Tags: developing, Linux, mac, programming, windows
Wow! You know people are paying attention to ‘minority’ groups when they get their own magazine…
I wonder how long it will last though, what with most Linux user’s used to getting things for free…
Tags: Linux, magazine, ubuntu, ubuntu user
For some time I’ve been trying to create a media centre computer… Ever since leaving the UK and travelling around the world I’ve been a big fan of digitising content and reducing entire piles of CD’s and DVD’s to an easily portable Hard Drive. Now I’ve settled again, I wanted to find a way of being able to watch and listen to all this content again, but to also reduce the amount of gadgets and electrical devices in the home, preferably combining them all into one…
Enter media centre computers…
These increasingly popular computers are designed to play back music, videos, DVD’s, downloads, radio and tv, generally all in one machines, with simple hardware and interfaces. I wont go into the options available here, suffice it to say there are a variety of options and personally I’ve tried four models before settling on what we have now, what I want to discuss is the actual software you then use to manage your media.
By default windows computers tend to come with Windows Media Center and Mac’s come with Front Row, I have no experience of the Windows option, but suffice it to say, both integrate well with the rest of the computer’s operating system and are fairly simple to use, however they’re generally not particularly customisable or expandable and to uber-nerds out there, just too simple. So here are a few alternatives to try out for size.
XBMC is the best know of Media centre software, it’s free, open source and available for Mac, Windows, Linux and Xbox. It has a large developer network, plenty of plugins, skins and documentation.
Plex is fairly similar in function and style to XBMC but is closed source and Mac only, it can also be expanded through plug-ins and by default supports playback of online content such as Hulu.
Another Mac only option it includes plugin support and (strangely) the option to use Wii remotes, though I am struggling to find out from their website if the project is still current.
Probably the best open source alternative for Windows, mediaportal is widely expandable and has a large fan/developer base.
A windows application that is primarily for recording live TV, Gbpvr is also capable of playing back a variety of media formats.
Another open source project that is also mainly for recording live TV, be aware, there are no platform downloads for MythTV, you have to compile it from source yourself!
Tversity is a Windows application with a wide variety of features, options and able to play files from any mobile devices you may have around the house, it comes in free and a pro edition.
Finally Freevo is an open source option for all platforms (their site mentions that Windows users will face a challenge) that despite it’s plain appearance packs a lot under the hood.
Phew! I’m sure this list is still only the half of it, so any other ideas and suggestions?
Tags: front row, Linux, mac, media, media center, media centre, Open Source, plex, tv playback, video playback, windows, xbmc
Want to know where to find the latest Linux news, thoughts and opinions…?
I came across a great list here!
