Colin Charles Agenda

I’ve been playing with Performancing for Firefox, and am loving every moment of it. Its got a sensible blog editor, built right into Firefox. Supports multiple blogs from what I can tell, all your categories are downloaded, so it does multiple categories (unlike Drivel, BloGTK, and the whole other slew of blog apps on Linux), allows you to gracefully edit old blog entries via the History tab (something even ecto sometimes finds hard to muster), and you save all posts as Notes, so its offline editing just like ecto (and not like BloGTK where you open up file, by file). It also supports Technorati tags within the interface, so thats always nifty.

On to the useless. It has some Metric system, but it requires signing up at their site and further editing my blog. If only they integrated it with the Google tool offerings or FeedBurner. Then there’s the del.icio.us poster, which seems rather odd - why would you want to del.ici.us bookmark a blog post you made? Then I remember, that the Performancing motto is “Helping Bloggers Succeed”.

Did I mention, its free? Give it a twirl, its good stuff. I should be appropriately removing all the other tools I’ve tried to use… Now to find a feed reader that’s as good as NetNewsWire (and no, Liferea doesn’t cut it).

And in life, I’ve not watched a lot of movies recently… Managed to merely catch Mistress of Spice (its got Miss India in it?), and felt that the storyline didn’t make much sense… Also caught Casino Royale on the plane, and I still think Pierce Brosnan was a better James Bond. Anyways, Christmas 2006 brought on some nice gifts - 37″ LCD in PJ, and a 42″ LCD in Klang. Life’s never really the same again when you watch flat screen television. Plus it has PC input, and when I drove the display, it was amazing. Boy am I going to miss those TVs… Probably the next time I’m in KL, I’ll be looking into MythTV a lot more.

Technorati Tags: performancing, firefox, plugin, blog posting, blog editor

Its the end of another month, maybe I’m entitled to be a little peeved?

Thunderbird. In Linux, its Edit -> Account Settings. On Windows and OS X, its Tools -> Account Settings. On OS X, its Thunderbird -> Preferences, on Linux is Edit -> Preferences. Yes, I see the importance of making local users a lot happier about where to find things, but I’d very much like it if it was made easier to support (so no matter what OS I use, I know if said application is to be used, I can guide someone over the air, on what to do).

Ekiga of late, thinks I have a non-full-duplex sound card. Yes, I know, laughable, in the 21st century. Look at this in amazement:

Could not open audio channel for audio reception

An error occured while trying to play audio to the soundcard for the audio reception. Please check that your soundcard is not busy and that your driver supports full-duplex.
The audio reception has been disabled.

Yes, that’s right. I can’t have Rhythmbox playing, and Ekiga working, at the same time. I can however have Rhythmbox playing, and make/receive a Skype call just fine. How ironic.

However, I’m still a big fan of Ekiga. Its not proprietary like Skype. In fact, if more had Ekiga accounts, it would rock (I’m colincharles at ekiga, just like skype). Skype on Linux looks like arse when you’ve used Skype on OS X (or Windows). Not only does it look bad, it actually has so much less features, than the other Skype platforms. Is Skype 1.3 ever going to die, so we can see at least Skype 2 on Linux?

One of the reasons I registered a Gizmoproject account was so I could make SIP calls and GizmoOut calls via my N770. Seemed viable then, but the service quality is pretty bad (sadly, Skype’s actually better in that respect). Skype mentioned that video calling was coming for Linux on the Nokia N800 - is it? On that tangent, I’m glad I still don’t own one, as people seem to be having failures - reboots and window problems.

Technorati Tags: skype, ekiga, sound cards, drivers, sound drivers, full duplex, thunderbird, software