One thing I’ve been trying to do some cleanup of my stuff lately, as I have a lot of things I don’t use anymore and I thus have to get rid of. This especially consists of older hardware, stuff I haven’t used in years, if I ever use it at all (some stuff is just stuff I got, used computers that were on their road to the trash, from which I usually took a few things).
To try getting rid of this stuff I’ve been trying eBay for the first time in my life. I was able to sell away an old nVidia video card and the infamous Pokémon Sapphire game in Italian; the money I got will start the “new box found” which I have to prepare as I need to replace Enterprise (I’m considering the idea of an 8-core Xeon box, so that it can continue serving me for the years to come, even if I need to spend more for it right now). Rebuilding FFmpeg, xine-lib and xine-ui many times a day to improve the situation is a very time-consuming job.
Most of what I’ve been trying to sell now is very stupid stuff, like old soundcards and network cards that only do 10Mbps, so I have no refrain from trying to sell it. One thing I’m not sure on what to do. It’s an old Matrox video card, I think a Mystique PCI. Not really a good videocard, not like I need it at all. But there’s one thing that it can be useful for: testing DirectFB/SyncFB in xine.
I didn’t even know of having it, I recovered it from a very old piece of junk, but I tested it once and I know it does work. I could be testing those outputs too, which at the moment I’m sure are mostly unmaintained in xine, especially the 1.2 branch.
But to do that, I need a computer where to put it (I don’t know if it ever works on AMD64), and I need time to pour on that. So here is the question: does anybody want me to take a look after SyncFB/DirectFB in xine? If there is somebody, then I’ll consider it and as soon as I’m done with my current jobs (mid-February, early March) I’ll see to put the card to use.
If I don’t hear from anyone in, say, a few months, I’ll likely just try to sell the card away. Please say so if you want DirectFB/SyncFB support. An appreciation token is also well appreciated and might actually move this up in my priority list, but not really needed 😉
Talking about audiobooks, I found myself having trouble to sleep again, lately, so I’m using podcasts to sleep. It’s actually nice, especially since BBC seems to have quite a few interesting podcasts (yeah I listen to them in English, it actually makes me feel better to listen to stuff in English rather than Italian before sleeping). Unfortunately the podcasts are never much long, and that is a bit of a problem as often one podcast is not enough to make me sleep.
I’ve been re-listening to “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”, which I bought from the iTunes Store while I was in the hospital, and which I never was able to complete actually (I wasn’t able to listen to the third part), and that also is nice. I don’t have the force to read in bed lately, as I tend to get to sleep very very late, when I should be sleeping already for a while, and audiobooks are useful for that. Of course, now I don’t have the urgency I had in the hospital, so I can avoid buying them from the DRM-encumbered iTunes Store, and I was looking at the CD versions on Amazon, the whole Hitchhiker’s series looks nice.
Has anybody been listening to audiobooks? I would very much like some suggestion on what to look for and what to look out for. I seen that BBC is full of audiobooks (they seem to have a different company for those), but I’d like some opinions about their quality, especially I’d like them not to be abridged versions.
On the wishlist I put, beside the Hitchhiker’s boxset, The Pelican Brief (by John Grisham, I like his books, and I didn’t see the movie) and The Hobbit (I loved the book, but I read it only in Italian, an audiobook might be a good way to begin an English Tolkien experience). Other suggestions will be appreciated, maybe I’ll do an order for those before next month, as I really need something to help me sleeping.
The Hitchhiker box set you have linked is the *Radio-Series*. Just for information :-)The set you might be looking for might be this one. (I bought mine some time ago at the bbc shop but they seem to not have that one in the catalog :-/)
Well, Radio Series or Audiobook the final effect to me is the same 😀
Well, I doubt you will have any luck with SyncFB. When I took over the syncfb video out plugin sometime around xine-lib 0.9.4, Matthias Oelmann (if I remember his name correctly), the original author of the plugin as well as the necessary kernel module, also handed me over his kernel module project at sf.net. Joachim Koenig and I spent some time on the plugin but we never really got to work on the kernel module. So the teletux project is still present over at sf.net but is way out-of-date and nobody is taking care of it anymore- AFAIK. I bet it won’t even compile on any current system.So… like I already suggested one or two years or so ago, one should remove the syncfb plugin once and for all because I guess nobody is using it anymore… or nobody can really use it anymore, that’s more like it. :-)If you need more infos or something, just let me know.On a totally different subject: after I read the The Client by Grisham (great one!), I decided to get my hands on the Pelican Brief. Over the years, I tried several times to get through it but I always lost interest. :-)So long and thanks for all the fish,matthew.
The last one I listened to was Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and it was excellent. Freakonomics was a good one too.