The Casimir Effect: v. 2.0

Hey! Remember about two months ago when I did that review of Serpentine?

Well, Tiago Cogumbreiro, the developer behind Serpentine came across it and left a comment calling me on a few features. Regardless of my rating of Serpentine. Tiago gets 5 stars in my book. Keep up the good work, man!

To any of you who downloaded that package yesterday, I sincerely apologize for any headaches I may have caused. Apparently it had an exclusive arrangement with me, as far as running properly was concerned.

Anyway, I’ve fixed it, I think. It depends on libmp4v2-0, but I think that’s installed by default in Ubuntu. Whee dependencies. If you like video and m4a music on your iPod with one Linux program, download the Ubuntu package here.

Okay, I’m being a bit facetious here. I was thrilled to get a spiffy new video iPod for Christmas this year which meant I finally get to play with video podcasts.

“This is great,” I thought to myself, “now I can watch Democracy Now while I’m on my way to school, yay!”

However, after examining the state of video podcasts, I discovered that a good percentage of them were NSFW.

That aside, I got the interesting experience of building and packaging a gtkpod that works for Apple format AAC/M4A as well as H.264 videos. Most of this code is out in CVS already, but getting it to work with Ubuntu can be a hassle even for someone with a good deal of Linux experience.

For this reason, I’ve taken my build and packaged it as an unofficial deb for Ubuntu Breezy. It might work with Debian Sid as well, but you’re taking your chances installing it. I offer no guarantees that this package won’t replace all your music with David Bowie, but it’s worked for me. If you’re still interested in living close to the metal and don’t mind hurting yourself on sharp objects, download and install the package here.

More on Blingo, the cool site with the weird name that gives away free stuff for searching. It appears they have their own social networking framework set up. So not only do you win things if you search, you win when your friends search. Wow, a free way to share your free fortunes with your searching buddies.

So, how about being my friend?

It takes a lot to pull me away from my favored search engines, but this is just really neat.

It’s called Blingo and their business model is to give things away for searching. On top of this, their results are powered by Google, so you don’t lose any of the speed and accuracy which you’ve come to love.

They don’t have all the really advanced features that Google does, like searching for “wifi hotspots near tampa fl” but they do give things away, free.

Of course, I thought, what’s the catch? There’s not one. At least that’s what readers of the Tampa Bay Times think. Like Google, Blingo makes its money on sponsored advertising, and uses these randomly awarded prizes to bring in more traffic. Go take a look, who knows, your next search might bring you an unexpected gift!

As primary time rolls closer, you might start to notice that political blogs have something to do again. Candidates are fund-raising like it’s going out of style, and campaigners are busy gathering votes in anticipation of upcoming ballots.

District 11 is no exception. With Representative Jim Davis running for Governor, the district 11 seat is up for grabs with no incumbent for the first time in nearly ten years.

The race for the Democratic nomination has already attracted a number of candidates. County Commissioner Kathy Castor has some name recognition via her mom, and has done great things on the County Commission. State Senator Les Miller is also a well-qualified candidate and a Tampa native. However, if you’re looking for an up-and-comer with some great ideas and nothing but enthusiasm for putting them into action, check out Scott Farrell. He’s a UF grad that is pro-education, pro-business, and actually doing something to get out a message about alternative energy.

When there are this many good candidates, nothing but good things can come of the primary, but I think you’ve all guessed my endorsement.

Exams are over, but as one thing gives way to another, I’m departing Florida for a week beginning tomorrow.

Don’t panic. I’m taking the laptop with me (though it’s limping along without a hard drive thanks to the incompetency of FedEx drivers; the pizza guy can find my house, FedEx ought to be able to! This parenthetical aside has grown too long for it’s own good, though.)

Flippancy aside, (pun intended) I intend on blogging at least once from the road. Look for things to come when I get back. Thanks for reading, everyone, and stay tuned for further updates.

A few people from my Electronic Music class are putting on a concert at the New World Brewery. Sadly, I won’t be there as I’m heading out of town on Friday, but if you can make it you really should. They’ll be playing a pair of Moog synths. How very vintage!

And now for the linkage. They’re called History and you can listen to them here.

Inspired by Dave Pinero’s description of the New Tampa Hartline user input tour, I dropped in at the Temple Terrace meeting before one of my exams last night.

A few interesting ideas were tossed around. First, the Hartline people seem really excited about BRT, a solution that BloGax has mentioned before. Also, I asked about computer tracking and smart signs of this ilk and Hartline has apparently just started a major project to install routes with this enabled. Cool. There are a number of solutions in place for catering people from North Tampa to Downtown and for making the bus faster than a car.

I mentioned Google Transit and a possible route planning framework, maybe in partnership with Google, or in-house through their own website. This mainly got them talking about all the cool things they’d like to do with their website and its current woeful inadequacy. I had to agree, most of the information is static and unhelpful to a potential commuter. Some dynamic or real-time content would be nice, I must say. So I asked, how many responses have you gotten to that online survey of yours? The answer? About 72 a day. Gasp! I could double that if all of my blog’s unique visitors were to take such a survey. Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more. (Some of you don’t live in Hillsborough County, so local residents only on this one)

Then I popped the (insert-government-budget-number-here) dollar question. Light Rail? Any chance in the near future. The answer, the federal dollars were there, but no local commitment meant we got passed over. All the plans are still there, and the idea’s ready to fly if the political climate changed just slightly. Remember that at the polls. Or mention rail in that survey of theirs.

HARTLine buses servicing New Tampa will have free wi-fi, says a one sentence paragraph at the bottom of an article in the St. Pete Times. Now that’s a fringe benefit.

Mass transit always has the benefit of giving its passengers some extra time in the mornings. Since one doesn’t have to worry about evading traffic, one can catch up on reading, study, or do some much needed work. With wireless access on the bus, one can also whip out one’s laptop pull up one’s email or favorite blog and kill some extra time. Sounds like a great idea to me, now they need to install that on all the lines (equip the 6 first, though.)