Looking Forward: 2009

With a new year right around the corner and way too many Christmas cookies under my belt, I’ve been thinking ahead a bit. Looking forward to what I predict will happen in 2009, I see it as being the year of “continued growth” in several areas.

Wireless Broadband – With many companies already well involved with wireless broadband internet, 2009 will no doubt see continued new subscribers. Mobile phones and devices that can do just about anything a computer can do for everyday users are getting into everyone’s hands. Wireless connections are ideal for providers who want to cover huge areas without having to wrangle wires and deal with individual customers unique location hassles. For companies like Verizon, ATT and Sprint, you will see the prices they charge slowly start to come down and package offerings and coverage increase.

I see this as the year a new kind of wireless broadband. I’ve mentioned this before, but unless you have been hiding under a rock you know that in February all current television broadcasting signals will cease and switch over to the mandated digital signals. This leaves a huge chunk of capability for data signals to be utilized. With hundreds of multimillion dollar companies investing in this technology, by the end of 2009 I look for some wireless broadband connection to come out of it.

Netbooks – When I first heard of and saw a netbook, I thought it was a joke. I didn’t see the need for another machine to do what I already could on my laptop or desktop. Then I started to think about it. Laptops have gotten bigger very much more powerful and are in many cases replacing desktops. With their increased size, it’s become more difficult to travel with a laptop. While travelling, what’s the main function of a laptop? Mainly to communicate with others via email, instant messaging and VOIP services like Skype and to surf the internet. So why carry a cumbersome laptop around?

Enter the netbook. With it’s medium size and ability to so much more than todays mobile divices, it’s starting to catch on. In 2009 I look for Desktops sales to drop somewhat, laptop sales to increase and netbooks start filling the gaps. This is particularly true for the current teenage and early twenty something group. Netbooks are great for those with space issues either in their living arrangement or travel patterns. The ability to stick one of these in a bag or pack in a carryon is where it will shine. I see netbooks being to the early 2000′s what the Palm Pilot’s were to the late 80′s and 90′s.

Linux – 2008 has seen a huge number of people migrating to Linux. With Microsoft dropping below 90% maket share in the computer industry and thier continued battle with the Vista blunders, I see many people making the switch to Linux. It’s already been happening, but look for this to increase in 2009.

Oh yeah, happy new year!

Nothing cheers up the Christmas season like office humor!

Top Linux Music Players Roundup

Ever since the very first Linux distributions started being developed some of the most popular applications were music players. Over time, hundreds of applications have been developed suiting a variety of needs. Some focused on one single task such as playing CDs and others tried to support as many features as possible. While the number of applications available today have grown even more, I’d like to take a look at a few that I conciser the top.

Amarok

This heavyweight in the media arena comes from the KDE developers. Considered by many to be the best and sets many standards, it comes highly recommended. With features too numerous to list and more being added constantly, you’re sure to find some very hand uses. Here’s what some of the features include:

• Playing media files in various formats including FLAC, Ogg, MP3, AAC, WAV, Windows Media Audio, Apple Lossless, WavPack, TTA and Musepack. Amarok does not play digital music files embedded with DRM.
• Tagging digital music files (currently FLAC, Ogg, WMA, AAC, MP3, and RealMedia).
• Associating cover art with a particular album, and retrieving the cover art from Amazon
• Creating and editing playlists, including smart and dynamic playlists. The dynamic playlists can use such information as the “score” given to a song by an Amarok script, and the playcount which is stored with the song.
• Synchronizing, retrieving, playing, or uploading music to the following digital music players: iPod, iriver iFP, Creative NOMAD, Creative ZEN, MTP, Rio Karma and USB devices with VFAT (generic MP3 players) support.
• Displaying artist information from Wikipedia and retrieving song lyrics.
• Last.fm support, including submitting played tracks (including those played on some digital music players) to Last.fm, retrieving similar artists, and playing Last.fm streams.
• Podcast
• From version 1.4.4, Amarok introduced the integration of Magnatune, a non-DRM digital music store, enabling users to purchase music in Ogg, FLAC, WAV and MP3 formats.
• I use Amarok mainly for it’s great handling of my iPod files. It transfers files to and from very quickly and handles playlists very admirably. Even though it’s developed specifically for the KDE environment, it still works well within Gnome.

Rhythmbox

Even though Rhythmbox does not offer as many “bells and whistles” as Amarok, it’s very capable of handling all your music needs. This has become my recent default player for several reasons. First, I use Gnome as my desktop manager of choice. Being included with most Gnome based distributions these days, like Ubuntu, it blends in seamlessly with whatever theme I am currently using for window decoration. If you are using Amarok, you have to just deal with the default blue and white or track down a theme and apply it on your own.

My second reason for liking Rhythmbox so much is the way it automatically scans my collection and updates contents like album covers. I know you can do this in other players like Amarok, but it just seems smoother in Rhythmbox to me. Instead of cramming features into it, the developers seem to have put much time into thinking through what people actually use and when and where to place buttons. Here’s some if Rhythmbox’s features:

• Playback from a variety of digital music sources is supported. The most common playback is music stored locally as files on the computer (the ‘Library’). Rhythmbox supports playing streamed Internet radio and podcasts as well.
• Searching and sorting of music in the library is supported. Playlists may be created to group and order music. Users may also create ‘smart playlists,’ ones that are automatically updated (like a database query) based on a customized rule of selection criteria rather than an arbitrary list of tracks. Music may be played back in shuffle (random) mode or repeat mode.
• Track ratings are supported and used by the shuffle mode algorithm to play higher-rated tracks more often.
• Music importing from Audio CD ripping.
• iPod support (experimental)
• Audio CD burning from playlists.
• Album Cover display can display cover art of the currently playing album. However, rather than reading the embedded ID3 tags for album artwork, the plugin searches the internet to find corresponding artwork.
• Song Lyrics display can provide song lyrics of the currently playing song (as long as they are stored in a lyrics database like leoslyrics).
• Last.fm Support. You can submit played songs info to your Last.fm account (known as “scrobbling”). Since release 0.9.7 it can also play Last.fm’s radio streams.
• Jamendo Support. You can browse and play all the Jamendo free (as in freedom) music library.
• Integration as mentioned. Rhythmbox can be easily integrated into the GNOME Panel.
• Rhythmbox has been extensively integrated with a number of external programs, services and devices including:
• Nautilus file manager context-menu integration (off by default in version 0.8.8), “hover mode” playback in Nautilus
• XChat, via an XChat plugin. Rhythmbox XChat Announcer (Perl)
• Pidgin-Rhythmbox automatically updates the Pidgin user profile with details of the currently playing track
• Gajim and Pidgin include options for automatically updating the user status with details of currently playing track[1]
• Music Applet (previously known as the Rhythmbox Applet), a GNOME panel applet that provides Rhythmbox playback controls from within the panel
• Shuffle, a gDesklet providing an interface for Rhythmbox resembling an iPod Shuffle[citation needed]
• Rhythmlet, another gDesklet that retrieves album art locally or from Amazon.com, has configurable display strings, playback controls, editable ratings and a seek bar
• SideCandyRhythmbox, a gDesklet-based Rhythmbox control and SideCandy display
• Rhythmbox XSLT allows the music library to be viewed as a web page
• Drivel inserts the name of the track Rhythmbox is currently playing into a LiveJournal blog entry
• Rhythmbox Tune Publisher publishes the currently playing Rhythmbox track to Jabber via the User Tune protocol (used by the Jabber World Map)
• Blue Remote allows Rhythmbox to be operated from a Bluetooth-enabled phone
• FoxyTunes, a Mozilla Firefox extension that provides Rhythmbox playback controls from within the web browser
• Plugins for browsing and listening to Creative Commons licensed albums from Jamendo and Magnatune.

Audacious

Last but certainly not least! Audacious got its roots from the extremely popular XMMS application. XMMS was known for being very lightweight and using very little system resources. Other features that made, and still make, this player stand out is it’s ability to change it’s appearance to almast anything by the use of skins. Customization of this player is almost unlimited due to this and the massive amounts of plug-ins and extras you can add both from XMMS, XMMS2 and WinAmp.

This little player has become my preferred player for splaying internet radio streams and podcasts. Because of its low system resource demand, playing internet audio streams seems to work so much better for me and the buffering happens seamlessly. This is great for those of us on slower internet connections. (Note: as of this post, their website seems to be undergoing reconstruction.)

Here’s some of the features:

• Decoder plugins, which contain the actual codecs used for decoding content.
• Transport plugins, which are lowlevel and implemented by the VFS layer.
• General plugins, which provide user-added services to the player (such as sending tracks with AudioScrobbler)
• Output plugins, which provide the audio system backend of the player.
• Visualization plugins, which provide visualizations based on fast Fourier transforms of the wave data.
• Effect plugins, which provide various sound processing on the decoded audio stream
• Container plugins, which provide support for playlists and other similar structures.
• Lowlevel plugins, which provide miscellaneous services to the player core and are not categorized into any of the other plugins.

Just because I chose these three, doesn’t mean the list stops there. Below are some more popular ones you can try out on your own. Now go to it and happy listening!

Exaile
Banshee
BMPx
Sonata
Juk
Esperanza
Aqualung
Decibel

Moved

Due to certain issues with Blogger… I’ve moved to WordPress.

Just moved in.

So I dumped blogger. I ran into a few issues with adding my own content. Did you know they change any links they don’t approve of? I thought I was imagining things, but nope. I was trying to link to my Twitter, Yahoo!, Facebook and other sites, but everytime I reinput the code, it changed the links to my blogger website! Talk about censorship. Two words for you Blogger…

SEE YA!

Yes, that’s a bug!

Who says you can’t turn a serious subject into a funny one?

Ubuntu Launchpad Bug Report Site:
#1 Microsoft has a majority market share.
Importance: Critical
Status: In Progress

Gotta love that!

Sending our money into space.

With our country in a financially strapped time, we are all looking at cutting from our budgets. What about our government? What are they doing to cut unnecessary expenses?

Q. How much does it cost to launch a Space Shuttle?
A. The average cost to launch a Space Shuttle is about $450 million per mission.
-www.nasa.com

So how many launches are there? Already for 2009 NASA has planned 4 launches. That’s so far, more can be scheduled at any time. Their running total so far is $1.8 billion. Looking at the scheduled missions below, which ones do you see that can’t wait at least one year??

1-The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) is a new Earth orbiting mission sponsored by NASA’s Earth System Science Pathfinder (ESSP) Program. The ESSP Program funds competitively selected, low to moderate cost Earth Science missions. These highly focused missions acquire exploratory measurements of the atmosphere, the oceans, the land surface and the solid Earth. These missions share a common goal of improving the capability of Earth scientists to predict changes in weather, climate and natural hazards.

2-The Solar Dynamics Obdervatory (SDO) is designed to help us understand the Sun’s influence on Earth and Near-Earth space by studying the solar atmosphere on small scales of space and time and in many wavelengths simultaneously.

3-NOAA-N is the latest polar-orbiting satellite developed by NASA for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA-N will collect information about Earth’s atmosphere and environment to improve weather prediction and climate research across the globe.

4-The flight of space shuttle Endeavour includes several significant steps to install new crew equipment inside the International Space Station and service the solar array joints of the laboratory. During STS-126, the crew of space shuttle Endeavour and the space station will:

– Exchange crew members. Sandra Magnus will swap places with current station resident Greg Chamitoff.

– Conduct four spacewalks. Working in teams of two, astronauts will emerge from the space station’s Quest airlock and work on the two large joints that turn the station’s massive solar array “wings.” They are to service the starboard side joint and perform preventative maintenance on the port side joint.

– Install new crew quarters, a galley, waste water recycling system and oxygen generator inside the space station. The equipment has been packed inside refrigerator-sized racks that require forklifts to lift them on Earth. But in space, a single astronaut can move a rack around with little problem.

Endeavour and its crew are to land at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center after 15 days in space.

Book meme

No, that’s not a typo. This is something going around the Ubuntu RSS feeds. It’s kind of a game with very simple rules:

-Grab the nearest book.
-Open it to page 56.
-Find the fifth sentence.
-Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
-Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

OK, here’s mine:

Now both of those have been torn down, and some new brick buildings – not brilliant architecturally, but certainly an improvement on the gas station – have been erected in their place.

Even though you don’t have to tell what book it comes from, I got mine from neither here nor there by Bill Bryson.

My Ubuntu

What geek doesn’t love screen captures?

My Ubuntu Desktop

See more shots here!

Ubuntu Wireless Broadband Support

The latest version (8.10) of Ubuntu and Kubuntu both have upgraded their network manager to support the 3G service I subscribe to from Verizon. I have one word for you:

THANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOU!

Now I don’t have to mess around with command line hassles anymore just to get gppp or kppp installed and configured. It even speeds up my connection by about 10%.