It's Just this Little Chromium Switch HereWeblogging and commentary by Chip Rosenthal.Community Forum on the Transition to Digital Television- March 27, 2008 Earlier this year I wrote about the transition to digital television. This weekend, the Austin Community Technology and Telecommunications Commission is co-sponsoring an educational event to let people know about DTV and how it affects them. The Austin Community Technology and Telecommunications Commission and the City of Austins Office of Telecommunications and Regulatory Affairs will present a free community forum on "The Transition to Digital Television" from 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday, March 30,...http://www.unicom.com/blog/entry/515 last.fm Submission Flakiness- March 15, 2008 I have amarok configured to submit tracks played to last.fm. If you go there you can see what I've recently listened to. I get frequent errors in the amarok status bar such as Failed to submit 'Mining for Gold' and 8 other tracksand Failed to submit several tracks to last.fm I Googled the messages and found many reports of the problem, such as this thread. Most people pointed their fingers at a server problem. I was skeptical. When, however, I tried to log into last.fm through the web...http://www.unicom.com/blog/entry/514 Get Social- March 14, 2008 A note, primarily to my readers (both of them) who follow this blog by RSS. I've added a bunch of social network badges to the sidebar of my site. If you know me, feel free to friend me or stalk me or whatever it is you kids do these days.http://www.unicom.com/blog/entry/513 FAIL: Album Cover Guesser- March 11, 2008 I was using the Amarok "Album Cover Manager" tool to fill in the missing cover artwork in my music collection. It has a "Fetch Missing Covers" button, which goes to Amazon and retrieves the artwork it needs. The lookup often makes mistakes, particularly because I tagged artists in a discouraged "Lastname, Firstname" form. Still, it's easier to fetch them all, then go back and manually fixup the ones it got wrong. I ran it over several hundred albums. It made a lot of mistakes, but none quite so.http://www.unicom.com/blog/entry/512 Media Center Network Control- March 11, 2008 My media center PC is an ASUS bookshelf computer running Ubuntu Linux and KDE desktop. I use it primarily for music, running the Amarok music player. Our house is pretty small and open. I can see the entire living room from my desk. I often play music on the media system while I'm working. The annoying bit is that I have to get up from my desk and walk over to the living room anytime I want to fiddle the controls. I wish I had a good way to control the music from my desk. I've been puzzling...http://www.unicom.com/blog/entry/510 Best Breakfast...All Made in Austin- March 10, 2008 I had the most phenomenal breakfast this morning. It occurred to me afterwards that it was completely made of foods from local Austin sellers. First, there was the migas quiche by The Soup Peddler. I've had a few things from them, and everything has been extremely flavorful and delicious. Past favorites include chicken corn chowder and chicken pot pie. I'll add the migas quiche to the list. The crust was very tasty and flaky, a little worse for the microwave reheating but still quite good. The..http://www.unicom.com/blog/entry/509 Bar Camp Austin III- March 9, 2008 Just got home from Bar Camp Austin III. I had a phenomenally good time. You usually hear at gatherings like this that the interesting stuff happens in the hallways, and the sessions just fill the time between. Well, not here. The sessions were excellent. I didn't have to suffer a single product demo. Every session was well facilitated, the participants engaged, and nobody boorishly hogged the discussion. One of my favorite sessions was titled something "Weblog Vanity Sites and Thought Leaders"..http://www.unicom.com/blog/entry/508 Community Media Weekend- March 3, 2008 This has been my weekend of community media. Saturday, I attended the Texas Community Media Summit. There were several highlights of the event for me. For instance, it was nice to see Debbie Austin from The Texas Observer give a shout-out to Austin Bloggers, a site I manage. I also enjoyed finally meeting U.T. R.T.F. Professor Laura Stein who seems to have a good earthy handle on community media issues. She lead a session on media convergence. It got me thinking about funding for projects...http://www.unicom.com/blog/entry/507 |