At this rate, I’ll never be able to kick the Flock habit.  Ever since, as I blogged before, they fixed their problem with stuttering YouTube videos, I’ve been able to use Flock for my main Windows browser day-in and day-out.  Now they’ve added even more features!  First of all, I think it’s neat that they’ve published an online video (via YouTube) that appears on the “you’ve updated” page.  This is much more exciting than simply reading a list of what’s new and even shows you how to activate it.

Almost a year ago, I mentioned that I had discovered the site www.mytoons.com. In that blog post I mentioned that I felt my animation wasn’t really getting the amount of views I hoped they would get. So I put my animation on mytoons and when the results weren’t immediately different, I completely forgot about my experiment. I check back on MyToons.com from time to time because of their great newsletter, Animation Snack. But I hardly ever check on my own videos. Well, I did a check today and the results are astonishing!

Foresight Linux was supplied on the most recent Linux Format Magazine disc. Unfortunately, the distro doesn’t run in LiveCD mode (or at least such an ISO was not provided) so I decided to try it out in Virtualbox, which I have heard so much about. It appears to be equivalent to VMWare while also being mostly open source, so that was a bit of a draw.

A few quickies.

1) I fixed up a bunch of my links.  Some of them led to websites that no longer existed, one domain had been bought by a pr0n website.  So all my links should go to where they’re supposed to now.

2. I haven’t updated to Feodra 9 yet because I keep hearing that Fedora really jumped the gun on this release and there’s still a ton of stuff broken.  Since I use Fedora as my main daily computer, I can’t really sit there wasting time debugging it - especially since I’ve got a few animations that I’m working on.  I’ll move it it when it gets a bit more stable.  I’m thinking of maybe moving to another distro in the future.  Perhaps Mandriva….we’ll see.

Big Buck Bunny from Blender Foundation on Vimeo.

Here’s the Blender Institute’s latest movie.  It’s much, much better than Elephants Dream.  Check it out!

I’ve been reading a lot of reviews recently about the upcoming Banshee 1.0.  ( Arstechnica and Linux Magazine, for example)  It looks like it’s going to be an awesome release, but I wanted to see where it is now and compare that to Rhythmbox.  As I mentioned here, I switched to Rhythmbox in May 2007 (a year ago!) from Banshee which I had been using approximately from May 2006 (when Mono programs were first introduced into Fedora).  Back then Banshee (and other Mono-based programs) were around version 0.1, but it was the new cool thing and everyone was talking about how awesome Mono would be for Linux.  (This is before everyone turned against it and Miguel de Icaza)  Eventually I left Banshee because it was slow and bloated (as are most Mono programs), couldn’t handle podcasts (which I had recently discovered), crashed when updating my large music library and when I changed Metadata it wouldn’t stay changed.  Since then Rhythmbox has been meeting all of my needs.  For Banshee to be worth switching to, it would have to provide all the features of Rhythmbox along with adding some new features.

This song is awesome and, best of all, it’s been released under a Creative Commons license, so I can share it with you all without fear of the RIAA breathing down my neck!

I first heard Code Monkey on a recent episode of Linux Outlaws. It’s a song about a code monkey who is having a hard time with his boss and with unrequited office love. It’s a tale any code monkeys will find familiar. You can either download it at this post or, if that takes too long, off of Jonathan Coulton’s blog. His l ast.fm page says he came out with a new song a year for a whole year, so check that out. There may be some other really awesome ones.

On graduation from Cornell!

Although, since you’ve done a summer job every summer, like me, you probably won’t notice that you’ve graduated until winter comes around and you don’t get a winter break.

I just can’t wrap my head around the fact that 5000 people have seen this one picture of mine.  It’s nuts!

Blender 2.46 was released yesterday and it has a whole bunch of new features- mostly created to facilitate production of Big Buck Bunny.  What I’m looking forward to the most is hair/fur rendering, any tools that make armatures easier to skin (the bane of my animation hobby!), a cloth simulator, and the improved sequencer which should allow most of the video editing to take place inside of Blender.

I’d love to play with it, but right now I’m working on some animation projects so I need to wait until at least Fedora comes out with the 2.46 rpm.  Ideally also my FreeBSD render farm would also get updated.  A lot of the new goodies like hair/fur rendering are not backwards compatible.  Good job from the coding team and I hope to test it out soon enough.