And then they pull this crap. Splitting up the services so they don’t integrate anymore, loses their “try it on streaming and if you can’t find it fall back to physical media” value proposition. Further, it opens up the new streaming-only Netflix to increased competition from streaming-only services. The value the unified Netflix brought was the one-stop shopping. With this split, I could see myself quite easily keeping Qwikster and dropping Netflix in favor of Amazon video or similar – or possibly dropping both.

Of course, I would have commented on their blog, except you can’t, because it’s not a real blog – it’s Facebook, and you can’t comment without a Facebook account, which I don’t have, because Facebook sucks.

Q: Why do we have email quotas?

A: We set them on the server because after some amount of space, Outlook/Exchange corrupts your mailbox, and we’d much rather have that corruption happen on your desktop than on the server.

Q: Well, it’s nice to know that Microsoft’s products are so “enterprise ready”, considering that I’ve had multi-gigabyte mailboxes stored on Unix machines over the past fifteen years or so and not had an issue.

Enter djvu. It is a new(er) document format designed primarily to allow for space-efficient representation of scanned documents. It has more uses beyond that, however:

• It decompresses very quickly, making it excellent for mobile devices.
• It generally takes up the same amount or less space than a comparable PDF. Again, good for mobile devices and the internet.

So, uhm, use .djvu more. The more folks who use it, the more vendors will support it.

Just like .ogg.

Now, one thing I happened upon is PlayOnLinux, which is a pretty clever idea. Basically, it sets up a separate wine environment and configuration for each app – so they don’t end up stepping on each other, and you can even run different versions of wine to run the best one for a given app.

That was how I found out that Fallout 2 doesn’t work, even under the old version under which it used to work.

So, I’m not going to play this game with wine anymore, at least, not for awhile. I’m on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, and I’ll upgrade to the next LTS when it comes out, but until then, I’m not going to be buying any Windows games and trying to run them under wine. This is kind of a shame, because Gog.com is running a sale, but I’m going to pass on it this year.

I wish wine was as reliable as dosbox.

Anyway, I started looking for native ports and found the Wikipedia article, so I’m going to go poke about there and see what I can find. A pile of them are in the Ubuntu repositories.

I also find OilRush, which is promising simultaneous release for Linux, Mac and Windows.

Another interesting experiment/phenomenon/etc. is the Humble Indie Bundle. Again, games for Windows, Mac and Linux, and this bundle is a promo with some of the proceeds going to charity.

I’ll let folks know if I find anything to be tremendously interesting.

Oh, and World of Goo is quite a lot of fun. If you like puzzle games, it’s totally worth it. (I got it as part of the first Humble Bundle)

AB’s brined turkey recipe is quite good. The turkey was wonderfully seasoned and juicy.

His cranberry sauce, not so much. It’s okay, but the Ocean Spray canned stuff is better.

To go with it, we had stuffing doctored up with mushrooms and apples, garlic mashed potatoes, gravy, and baguettes.

This was the first major meal cooked in the new stove which, is finally in. Originally, we were supposed to get the gas lines run last Wednesday and do the hook up on Saturday (which, requires the gas company to pressure test the whole thing before they’ll unlock the tank). So, I was going to be home to take delivery of the stove, meet them for hookup, etc. I canceled gaming, and Liz went hunting. Of course, a plan is just a list of things which don’t happen, so they couldn’t do the hookup on Saturday for lack of staff. Thus, we pushed the whole affair back to the next Tuesday. I still leave gaming canceled, so Lizzy can go hunting, while wait for the stove. Once it arrives, I convert it over to LP, and the next few days we end up trying to use our other appliances to cook supper (lots of soup and things made with a contact grill).

Tuesday roll around and the gas man shows up after lunch. Of course, sales guys can never seem to fill out work orders correctly, so:

• He doesn’t have enough gas line.
• And, of course, what he doesn’t have enough of is too small

So, very little happens while he waits for someone to come out from the home office and bring a couple of rolls of the proper line. I mean, we get the tank set up, some holes drilled, and the beginning of the line run (he had maybe 20 feet of the right size line, which got us in the house). A bit of work later (went pretty quickly with two people), and we’re in business. No leaks, gas on, stove works.

It’s pretty awesome. Two ovens, five burners, and it throws a lot more heat than the electric one did. This is the one.

In addition, we’ve gotten the house into something approaching clean, gotten our Warmachine figures varnished, and played a couple of games. I even won a game for once… and it’s only Friday. Most of the Christmas shopping is done as well. Tomorrow is “put the snowblower on the tractor” day, and we’ll likely go grocery shopping on Sunday.

Oh, and I’ve gotten an Amahi server set up and mostly configured. It’s pretty slick.

I think that’s it for now. I enned to post pictures of the miniatures at some point, but I’m kozy and don’t feel like getting the camera.

Specifically:

1. (And I realize that this is actually an Ubuntu bug) – I plug in my iPod3G running Rockbox via Firewire, which kicks it into disk mode and causes it to charge, and it automounts. However, the hal doesn’t see it as an audio player, so the various apps which use the hal (Rockbox, banshee, etc.) don’t see it. Of course, I can plug it in via USB and it works, but won’t charge, and I have to manually kick it into disk mode.
2. Most of the apps allow you to drag and drop the playlists on to the player, and it will copy all the files there, but in most cases it will not do what it should and copy the playlist too. This would be ideal – drag and drop a pile of playlists, all the songs get populated and the playlists get stuck in the right spot on the device, and re-homed to work correctly with the relative pathnames of said device.
3. Some apps (most notably banshee) actually support some semblance of sync. However, it only seems to handle syncing the whole library (which is too large) or a single playlist (which is too limited).

That said, this falls into the “put up or shut up” file, so I’ve written a perl script which takes a list of .m3u files and does the right thing. I plan to put it up on my website – however. after I wrote it, I realized I could extend it to have more functionality. Specifically:

• sync – well, it does this already
• rm – remove files in the playlist from the target (note, you’ll want to do an rm, then a sync to ensure that any files deleted by the rm get put back by the sync)
• du – disk usage of each playlist and aggregate usage of all of them (with appropriate accounting for the same file in multiple playlists, of course).. Might need to extend this to also account for the ones already on disk.

Edit: Posted the initial version of this to github.

A couple months back, I tried it again and was very impressed. Most things just worked out of the box.

This luck has apparently run out. I’ve tried several versions, and they all have the same problems:

• You can still see the taskbar if you tell it to let the window manager manage windows.
• If you have the window manager not manage windows, it still is there accepting keyboard input, so if you hit a hotkey used by the program, the WM gets it instead, and if you do anything (like, say, switch desktops) accidentally, you can never get back to the program you’re running.

I note that neither DosBox nor VirtualBox have those issues.

I really just want Wine to be as good as DosBox, but it’s not.

So, I guess I’ll be running various Windows things in VirtualBox.

Is me, or has the level of people with stupidly annoying business models increased in recent years?

Later, Gnome adopted Sawfish, but you had a choice. I still used Enlightenment.

Then I don’t exactly recall what happened. I think Enlightenment went away from Gnome, I tried several (IceWM, Fluxbox, etc.) finally settled on FVWM, which I used for several years.

Then Liz made fun of me sufficiently for having an ugly WM that I switched to XFCE4.

XFCE broke their window stacking model, so I switched to Gnome + Metacity (the default).

This morning at work, Metacity decided to go insane, pegging my CPU and generally being unreasonable. Now, I had been annoyed by its sluggishness for quite awhile, so this was the final straw.

I installed lubuntu-desktop, and used LXDE + Openbox for today at work. It was a little.. interesting. Fast, for sure, but very minimalist, and not quite.. right in all cases.

On the drive home, it hit me… Gnome + Enlightenment.. again.

We’ll see how this goes. There is one little annoyance – with some themes, the gnome panel menu doesn’t seem to like non-minimized application windows managed by enlightenment… It makes you not able to click on menu selections.. However, with ShinyMetal (the theme I was originally using those many years ago), it works fine.

Oh, and I discovered Conky today, which may replace the gnome-panel flyout I have which does system monitoring. (I used to use GKrellM, but now I want trending for memory usage…