David Johnson's Blog

Just got myself a new portable OGG player, and it’s bloody brilliant. It’s called the IOPS and is, not suprisingly, Korean made. It is available in the UK if you’re made of money, but I saved a packet and ordered direct from the main Korean distributor. It’s about the size of a pendrive, weighs absolutely nothing, plays MP3’s and OGGs, works as usb-storage under Linux, includes an FM radio, has an OLED display and it’s just great. I went with the 512MB version (I could have lived with 256MB, but thought I’d leave plenty of room for the future). It’s great for transfering data between machines as well. It’s only failing is that it doesn’t like mono OGGs, so I have to re-encode LUGRadio as stereo to listen to it… (and I thought I could manage a whole entry without mentioning LUGRadio….).

On a completely unrelated note, I’ve recently discovered the Amazon Marketplace. Basically if you go to look for a CD or something, you are given to option to “Buy it new or used”. Click on “Buy it new” and you’ll get a list of both individuals and companies who are selling the item (usually) cheaper than the retail price. Today I bought a full album for just £2.99 when it usually retails for between £9 – £12. Yes, Amazon are evil, but technically I’m not buying from them, but from a third party. I do rarely buy CD nowadays, since I found a great legal-as-far-as-I’m-concerned download site, but if I can always get them for that price I’d buy more.
And speaking of buying things, I’ve noticed that Kelkoo has gone down the toilet recently. The search is just crap and so it’s very difficult to find what you’re looking for even if you enter the exact search terms. And when you do find what you’re looking for, I’m sure it doesn’t compare as many stores as it used to. Anyone else remember ShopSmart? Now that was a good shopping comparison site, until BarclayCard bought it and killed it off.

On yet another unrelated note, I’ve bought myself a nice new laptop. For the first time, I’ve actually decided to go for Debian on the desktop. Previously I always thought Debian was best left to servers (just because I can configure stuff on the command line, doesn’t mean I enjoy doing it) but I’ve now changed my mind. I bunged in a Debian-Installer CD as I wanted to run testing anyway and as the saying goes, “it just worked”. I compiled up the latest 2.6.7 kernel to make use of the Hyperthreading and now I’ve got a super-fast machine with a great OS on it. I always thought apt was great on server installs, but it’s bloody brilliant now that I use it on a daily basis. And every piece of hardware works, albeit some with nasty closed drivers.

And following on from the great Linux arseholes debate it seems that an arsehole has taken up residence on the Debian-SPARC mailing list. This particular arsehole thinks they’re qualified to slag off decisions made by the “gods” of SPARC kernel development, without whom there almost certainly wouldn’t be a SPARC port of Linux. This person also feels the need to make stupid and unhelpful posts to people asking sensible questions and is clearly making a deliberate attempt to annoy people. It will be interesting to see if my theory about dealing with such people actually works. Only time will tell.

I really should post more often so my posts aren’t so long and unrelated… Oh well. I’m off to Spain on Saturday and am looking forward to a week without so much as touching a computer.