Daniel "Camera Whore" Stone stole my camera and wouldn't give it back. Two things to note: 1) I predict Daniel will have an EOS 350D within the month, and 2) when at GUADEC, bring a battery charger and twice as much CF as you think you'd need, just in case. Daniel was only stopped due to the battery dying.

I should blog more about GUADEC but in my usual style I'll leave it until I can't recall anything. Instead I'll just mention my favourite quote of the week: GUADEC has been homo-erotic and informative. But mostly homo-erotic. Thanks, if I recall correctly, to Fiona. Personally, I have no idea what she is talking about.

Who needs more than 640x480 when you have 12560Hz!

The presentation being scaled down so much meant a little last minute hacking to reduce the font sizes, and some images didn't fit at all so they had to be viewed in Inkscape. Ah well.

For the curious/bored the slides are available online: Taming The Beast: Porting Evolution Data Server To DBus. They are are sequence of PNGs Update: The presentation is a PDF, bested viewed in Evince in Presentation mode (press F5), produced by the most excellent Opt, so sadly you don't get to see the gorgeous fades. The source is also available online for the cool people running Opt.

I think there are many people out there who would like this to happen, so I want to arrange a group bounty. Bounty County looked promising but I have to specify how much the bounty is up front, I can't just let the fund grow as people donate what they can. The Bounties section on Launchpad has the same limitation. Does anyone know a reputable site for managing donations like this, or should I just get register a new email address on PayPal and get people to donate there?

Also to gauge how much interest there is in this, can anyone who would consider donating leave a comment?

NP: Vertigo, Groove Armada

Go Clutter!

NP: Foolish Games, Jewel

Next week I'm giving a presentation at GUADEC and would like to avoid embarrassing last-minute configuring of X by setting up VGA out on my laptop before I leave. This is harder than it sounds as I don't actually own any monitors any more.

If anyone out there has the VGA port working on a Thinkpad T40p (or similar) in clone mode, with GL acceleration, hopefully with automatic down-scaling to 1024x768, then can you please mail me your xorg.conf. I have S-video out sort-of working but it's not downscaling the image and I've lost GL acceleration, which is a great pain.

Note: any comments about how I'm evil for using a non-free driver will be ignored.

NP: Ágætis Byrjun, Sigur Rós

My first worry was that the faac element doesn't implement the tagging interface, so I may have AAC data but there is no track information. I then noticed that file wasn't identifying the files as AAC, but as just data. Starting to panic, I dived into #gstreamer and discovered some bad news. By setting an option on the encoder (outputformat=1) I get AAC data that is recognised, and Xine will play it, but it's not wrapped in a Quicktime container so can't be tagged and probably won't play on an iPod.

This is my challenge. If someone can write enough of a Qt muxer that supports tagging so that straight from Sound Juicer I can create .m4a files that play on my iPod without any hassle, I'll give you a free Sound Juicer t-shirt and my eternal gratitude. Anyone interested?

NP: Remembranza, Murcof. Yes, again, it's great.

NP: Remembranza, Murcof

• Update for new nautilus-cd-burner API (William Jon McCann)

NP: Black Diamond, Angie Stone

Of course summer means sitting outside with glasses of cold drinks and lazying around. We did a bit of that over the weekend but it was a little too sticky then, as today is much fresher I dug around the pit of doom that is our garden and built some of the (to be replaced very soon) garden furniture.

Lovely. However as the sun makes its way up the shadows to work in get smaller and smaller, we really need to get a sunshade.

NP: Lounge stream, Digitally Imported Radio

Did I say no PIM apps? The 2006 release includes Contacts, and OpenedHand has plans. Full PIM capabilities on the 770 coming soon!

Update: seems I was wrong, the SDK may be missing the VOIP software, but the Internet Tablet image is fully featured.

NP: Worldwide Underground, Erykah Badu

Thus, I'm considering writing a small Nautilus extension in Python, so that in the context menu of every image there is a Upload to Flickr option. I'd prefer not to re-invent the wheel so does anyone else has written a simple GNOMEy uploading tool for Flickr? Thanks!

NP: Motion, The Cinematic Orchestra