This will be a few days old by the time this blog post appears on the site, but Gnome 3.0 is set to come out by 2010!  This is huge news!  Ever since Gnome started getting into the 2.2x series, people have constantly been asking about when Gnome 3.0 would be coming out.  Since the Gnome project has decided that Gnoem 3.0 would be an appropriate time to break API and ABI compatibility, they have been saving that until it was needed.  However, ever since KDE 4 was announced a few years ago, people have increased their calls for a Gnome 3.0.  After all, they don’t want to seem so ridiculously behind when compared to KDE.  Computer geeks like you and I know that doesn’t matter, but the lay person might think Gnome was outdated.  Now that KDE 4.0 is finally out and with KDE 4.1 due at the end of this month, it seems that the momentum has finally built up for Gnome 3.0.

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 the Birdhouse because that seemed to be the way to type in an address to go to.

Last.fm is getting close to relaunching their site and I was invited to participate in the beta program.  I think the new design has some great new features and I wanted to share it with you so you could get excited about it too.

Here’s the main page as it appears now:

The most important thing to notice is how cluttered it is.  Look at the proposed layout under beta:

Someone with a bit of artistic creativity has decided to create an illustrated view of all the big news of the year.  I like it so much, I can’t wait to see his work no Fall 2008 and so on.

Check it out, here.

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 problems with podcasts. Eventually, I just got frustrated and stopped using it. I updated to version 0.4 a while back, but it still seemed a bit unstable. With Rhythmbox and Amarok meeting my needs on Linux, and with me hating Windows Media Player so much, I’ve pretty much stopped listening to music on my Windows computer.

Moving up in Views Groups and thought I’d share them.

My wife’s aunt’s computer was always getting full of viruses.  I’d spend a few hours every time I came to visit removing the viruses and get the computer back to a working state.  Sounds like the perfect job for….. Linux!  All she does on her computer is email and watch videos - that’s it.  Plus, I can set everything to Vietnamese for her thanks to Linux’s great internationalization efforts.  Since I wanted a nice, worry-free desktop for her, I installed Ubuntu 8.04.

Second best xkcd this month!

The first word that comes to my head when I see this photo is heaviness. A huge heaviness that can’t be overcome. Even though it’s only 10 lbs, from the angle that I shot this, it seems to convey a strong sense of weight.