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Review: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins My rating: 4 of 5 stars I listened to the audiobook narrated by Greg from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend as I drove the 900-something miles from Maryland to Florida and it was better than I thought it would be. Ms Collins has avoided most of the annoying tropes…
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Play the web? Testing out additional functionality in Songbird
One of the killer features of Songbird is that when you view web pages with MP3s, it presents a very easy way for you to download the songs. I noticed on my last.fm home page that there were a few free MP3s available for download, so I decided to test this out. I went to…
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Taking another look at Songbird
It’s been a really long time since I last looked at Songbird. In fact, according to my blog, the last time I checked it out was version 0.2 back in October of 2006. The UI certainly has a bit more polish. I submitted some bug reports on their Bugzilla about Metadata problems with WMAs and…
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Songbird takes flight…and other lame puns
As I read my Linuxtoday.com RSS feed today, I discovered a new piece of software. Songbird aims to be, in their words, “the Firefox of media players.” They seem to be on the right track. First of all, it works on all majors operating systems: Windows, Mac, and Linux (and by extention BSD). Second, it…
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2021 in Books
In Calibre, I now have 2529 ebooks and e-magazines, 2026 unread. To be fair, I get a free book from Tor.com and Amazon.com every month. This also counts any ebooks I’ve bought for the kids, many of which I will not end up reading. (I also have some number of physical books and audiobooks I…
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Review: The Collapsing Empire
The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi My rating: 4 of 5 stars I can’t believe I waited so long to read this book, it’s so great. The quick summary: Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series meets the family competition dynamics of Frank Herbert’s Dune. Interesting to read at the same time as The Ballad of Songbirds and…
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Tomahawk – unify all your cloud and local audio
It’s been a long time since I last took a look at an innovative music player. Back in 2006 I explored Songbird ) and in 2008 I looked at some of the unique features over two posts: Taking Another Look at Songbird and Play the Web. The ability to grab MP3s off of sites, in particular…
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KDE 4 Look Part 2: Amarok 2.3.2 in KDE 4.5 and Fedora 14
There was a time when I thought Amarok was the best music player on Linux. I even used to run it in Gnome as you can see from this 2005 screenshot. In that first link you can read me gushing over Amarok 1.4. I loved all the integrated technologies, especially the metadata juggling Amarok did.…
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Another Look at KDE and Amarok Part 1
As I’ve mentioned before, I used to be really excited about KDE. It’s been a while since I last looked at KDE. Well, technically, I couldn’t really do much there. But there’s this time I was able to look at it. Let me just say that I no longer agree that it’s uglier than Gnome.…
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Why there are over 2 dozen music players
People often groan when they hear of someone making another game of Tetris, Window Manager, or audio program. After all, people ask, “Do we really need another? Why can’t you just contribute to fixing annoying bug X in gTetris/KDE/xmms?” I’ve always been on the side of the argument that said – “So what! They’re doing…
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Rhythmbox Revisited
A while back (6 mo to a year ago), I tried Rhythmbox and found it too buggy for me. I absolutely hated it. I loved Amarok so I used that within KDE, but it took forever to load within Gnome. So what was I to do? Ever since Fedora started packaging Mono, I’ve been using…