Back Pain
Ouch, ouch, and if I may say it again, ouch. For some reason I still don't know, my back went to spasm last weekend. Because of this I've been at home, spending my time taking pain killers (aspirin, ibuprofen, paracetamol and codeine) and trying to relax my back. This is not fun. On the plus side, I've caught up with my DVD backlog: I've finished Babylon 5 series 2, started Bottom series 1, and watched Minority Report, The Usual Suspects and Terminator 2.
There are other good points to sitting around at home in pain all day: last night there was a power cut in central London. I'm not sure exactly when it was but I think it would have caught me just as I was going through London, which would have been a right pain. There were still queues of people outside train stations last night at 22:00...
Last week Bastien stayed over Saturday night as his flight from France didn't land at Stansted until gone 23:00. It was good to see him again, and we got free wine and some French hip-hop. What more could I ask for. :)
In other news, our Notice of Marriage has been announced and the authority is ready. Yay, it's legal for us to get married!
Rhythmbox Writing
I managed to tick off an item in my long-term To Do list yesterday, by finishing the first draft of a patch for Rhythmbox to burn playlists to CD.
The patch isn't great at the moment -- changes to nautilus-cd-burner need to be rewritten, and the Rhythmbox patch is more proof-of-concept than release quality. However, it works and I've been playing two CDs I wrote using it today. Hopefully I can clear up the patches over the next week or so and get the changes into CVS.
PS: Anyone want a Coolermaster Heat Pipe fan for an Athlon up to 2000+XP? Mail me.
Sound Juicer 0.5.2
Sound Juicer "Who needs FLAC?" 0.5.2 is out -- download the tarball here. Debian packages building as I type.
What's New:
- Fix the FLAC and Wave encoders
- Fix crash on pressing Reread
- Faster startup with mounted CDs (Bastien)
Plans for GammaarRRr
After discovering my first GammaarRRr user, Maria Blackmore, we had a long chat about what GammaarRRr should be able to do. After much thinking I've developed a plan.
Main Features:
- Black point calibration
- per-Display gamma calibration for arbitrary target gamma values.
- A graphical editor for calibrating the gamma
- A GNOME applet to select gamma corrections quickly
This is the current gamma calibration dialog:
The applet when it starts will set the gamma correction to the default setting the user has set for that display. This means that adding the applet to your panel will make the gamma correction Just Work once it has been calibrated for the machines you use.
GammaarrRRRrr!!
It's a perfect mix of a useful tool (calibrate the gamma for your monitor) and the strange pirate fascination in #gnome-hackers. It's GammaarRRr!.
This is version 0.1. It sucks, though it does work. It's full of bugs, but it has potential. Download a tarball here.
Kefalonia Photos
I finally scanned some of the photos from Kefalonia!
Super 7
Super 7 is my sister's boyfriend's band (vocals and guitarist) -- and they rock. They recorded a gig recently which was shown on Sky last night -- a movie of it is available here (its a WMV but Xine plays it fine). They buggered up the aspect ratio, so manually select anamorphic.
If anyone out there thinks they are good, then feel free to email info@trinityforceltd.com and tell them how great you think they are! :)
Devil's Pie "Floating Skulls" 0.3
Devil's Pie (everyone favourite window manipulation tool) 0.3 is out. Finally. Changes are:
- Vastly improved documentation (Gaetan de Menten)
- Add a "fullscreen" property (requires libwnck 2.3.something)
- Many bug fixes (Patrick Aussems)
Downloads are in the usual place, a tarball is here. A Debian package has been uploaded into Sid, hopefully it will be accepted soon. The tarball has a spec file, so rpmbuild -tb should work.
Wedding Progress
Last night we filled in the notice of marriage, the first official step towards getting married. We have to answer questions like address and fathers occupation for each other first, which is a little odd. The registrar said this was a way of protecting against people who don't really know each other getting married (i.e. marriages for passports), but it wouldn't be too hard to memorise the answers.
We also discovered that "spinster" (a non-married woman, the female equivalent of bachelor) has its roots in the Crusades, when the wives of the knights would spin cotton until they returned. Or so the registrar said, anyway.
Sound Juicer 0.5.1
Sound Juicer "Who needs prefs?" 0.5.1 is out -- download the tarball here. Debian packages Coming Real Soon as usual.
What's New:
- Fix out of range warnings in the extracting progress dialog (Bastien Nocera)
- Use new tag names for Gstreamer (BN)
- Add defaults for file and path patterns
- Use defaults if we get "" for the file and path patterns (these fix the crash when going to Preferences)
- Fix more memory leaks
- Don't exit if a CD-ROM drive can't be found
Gaming
ScummVM 0.5, the excellent SCUMM interpreter (Monkey's Island, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max, etc) has been released. This is good news. Even better news is that the Beneath a Steel Sky developers assisted in this release, and even re-released BASS as freeware!
However, it appears I am out of practise in this form of point-and-click adventure game. After 10 minutes of not being able to do anything in the first room but die, I had to resort to a walk-through. Now I'm stuck again, Joey has the new welder shell but I can't get the key out of the store room. I'm determined not to use the walk-through again! I foolishly had a walk-through when I played Monkey Island for the first time, and instead of giving me weeks of fun I completed the game in a day, as I had a quick look whenever I was slightly stuck. I have learnt my lesson, and never again shall I repeat it.
Things That Annoy Me
Several thing in the world annoy me.
- People who stand at the top of the Moorgate tube station exit, trying to hand "Work from Home!" flyers, whilst standing totally in the way so that everyone coming out and me going in have to squeeze past.
- Overground trains which don't have air conditioning, or even air circulation.
- People which walk down busy pavements/corridors/walkways and just stop and turn around abruptly. Often the same people will wave an arm through the air, saying "Gee Dwayne, will ya look at that!" whilst concussing anyone within arms reach.
- Pink tops which have been washed several times and haven't run in the wash before, but suddenly decide to run after all and dye two of my linen shirts and a top of Vicky's a lovely pale pink colour.
- People who write Things That Annoy Me lists.
Update for Mikael
This is an update for Mikael. Hi Mikael!
I've been feeling rather ill for the last few days -- I blame the eye infection/medicine personally. The infection is nearly gone but its still sore in the morning until I take the ointment, which makes the soreness go... but brings with it a headache as it makes it hard to see out of my left eye!
Damn its getting warm too. Yesterday it hit 31 degrees celcius, and today its likely to reach 34. The weather men are speculating that Wednesday could break the English record and go for 100 degrees Farenheit. I know in the scheme of things that's not really hot, but in England it is. Our high-speed train tracks are buckling in the heat...
In other news, I was busy fixing Sound Juicer bugs on the way to work this morning, so should be able to do a new release this lunch time. Hopefully this one won't totally suck...
Oh, and it turns out that my fiance's mum's old friend's daughter was Anne Boleyn in Kevin and Perry Go Large. Well there you go.
