With the recent acquisition of a digital tv tuner, I had to decide what program to use to view TV. Dale introduced me to Me TV. Rather than being a full blown media center, Me TV is a desktop application for viewing digital TV. Although I had a few little problems with setting it up, helped by Dale, I quickly had it running. And it's great!

It does exactly what it's supposed to do, without a lot of clutter and other things that you dont need to just watch TV. And with the addition of scheduled recordings in the latest version, its all I need .

PS - the problems I had are now a non-issue with the newest releases (0.5.x release series)

Some discussion (and competitions) in the Zazz forumz lately lead me to look back at some AA (Ascii Art) bits and pieces I've looked at in the past. AA is, essentially, producing pictures using no more than the 256 ASCII characters (hence the name). Below is my Zazz avatar, rendered in AA.

            ttttjj::  ;;..

          ;;tt    LLtt;;iitt

          ii;;    ..ii    ..ff

          ii;;      ..      tt,,

        ,,LLtt  ..        ....LL

    ..ffii  tt  tt        ttLLttii

  ..LL..    tt  ii..      ttttLL;;

  ff..      tt                  ff

;;tt        tt    ::ii    ;;..  ;;ii

ff          tt..;;GGtt;;..iiGGii  jj..

ffff          ttii    ffttii  ..ff;;tt

KKii..                tt          ffiiff

tt;;ii                tt            iiLL

    tt    ii  ;;..    tt

    ff    ffttfftt    tt

    ff....ff    jj....tt

    GGDDDDii    ffGGGGii

To get the desired effect in HTML, the AA must be enclosed in <pre> tags to tell the browser that the text is preformatted, and so spaces etc. will be preserved.

One of my personal favourite demonstrations is the well put together BB (AA -> BB, get it? ). BB showcases what AA art can do, and although now 10 years old, it is no less exciting. Below are some highlights:

As you can see, the possibilities are (almost) endless! If you so desire, you can watch all your movies in AA too, using aaxine:

Recognise dear Smeagol?

So, if you really want to amaze your friends, render them in AA! (not Alcoholics Anonymous, ASCII ART!)

One program I'm using more often now is Elisa Media Center. There are a few media centers for Linux - most notably MythTV and Freevo, but Elisa is the easiest to install by a long shot. It is also entirely built on Python and OpenGL, so this brings some beautiful effects.

Currently, development effort is being channeled towards this new version (the screenshot above is from the development code (svn)). In my opinion, Elisa is fast shaping up to be something exciting .

I do a lot of looking at my desktop. Whenever I don't have a window open, in fact, or just feel like navigating to one of my 8 desktops . It seems to me that the desktop is largely a waste of space. We need to have something behind our windows, and a picture looks nice, but it doesn't really do something. Desktops that look like the family computer's (around 50 icons randomly scattered) are pointless, as those 50 items are impossible to navigate. Desktops like mine, with only a few icons, usually aren't too useful either, as the few icons are generally hidden behind windows. This is probably why a default Ubuntu install has no icons - a good idea imho.

So what should the desktop be like? Should it be filled with a raft of gadgets, much as can be done with Vista's sidebar, Mac's Dashboard, and the plethora of desktop widget programs available for Linux (notably Screenlets, which I used previously) ?

Then we have the Windows 'Start' menu, KDE's big K button, the Computer menu, Gnome's Menu Bar, etc. The Computer menu I have (gnome-main-menu) is pretty good, and it handles most of the stuff I need, although I use the Gnome Menu Bar for most stuff - the Applications, Places and System menus work well for me. The Computer menu provides frequently used applications, search, some links, and some info on my system. But if it needs to block out an application anyway, why not make it much bigger? That way it could also become much more useful...

So, overall, I think we have a nice looking but rather dysfunctional desktop, and a main menu that isn't useful enough What should we do?

Well, why not merge the two into one? We can have a desktop that looks nice and at the same time does useful stuff. I do quite like seeing my nice organic wallpaper in the background while typing this. We don't want loads of ugly text polluting our 'background' all the time. So... if we merge the 'Start' button, or 'Computer' button or whatever you call it into the 'Show Desktop' or 'Hide All Windows' button, our nice big menu with plenty of useful information, links, eye candy and everything else can be displayed with one click. Clicking the button again will hide it and bring it back to where we are. The default display on the desktop could be this menu, which will just disappear after a minute of inactivity on it, to be replaced with a nice wallpaper, or slideshow, or whatever normally occupies your desktop. This'd be far more useful than existing solutions.

On a side note, SymphonyOS is doing something along these lines with their Mezzo desktop. At the moment, however, it doesn't feel too useful (just my opinion) and it appears to totally abandon the traditional wallpaper.

What do you think?

For once, I had little homework to do on the weekend, so I decided to download and install the newly released Ubuntu Studio. Unfortunately, the torrent I was using was rather slow, so it took me almost 24 hours to download the 867 Mb ISO. Anyway, I burned it to DVD, and installed .

The result is a very nice looking system. The first thing I noticed were the beautiful themes and lovely startup sounds... it took me only a few minutes to get everything running how I wanted it. It runs much faster than my usual setup, however I suspect this is only because my usual setup is running a lot more (two web servers, indexing services, etc). In any case, it´s a very nice system to play with. Not doing much audio / graphics / video editing I can´t say much about that, but there´s a plethora of tools available.

On a side note, I did get a story thrown together for English. I won't be posting it online though . I basically wrote an alternative ending for one of the stories that we had been studying for English.

Cheers,

Matt