Internal Dialogue

It’s been a while since I lasted post here. It’s not that I didn’t want too, but I’ve been busy with so many different things that at the end of each day, I’d lost the will to write about it. A lot has happened though, and I haven’t forgotten about this place. Before taking a break I actually wrote more than the months before. I guess I needed a little breather. I’m back now, though. I plan on writing more steadily from now on. I’ve been thinking about switching to Dutch from now on, but since I haven’t decided I’ll keep on writing in English for now.

Too much has happened to sum up in just one post, and I don’t think I even want to get to all of it. Here’s one of the highlights, though:

I bought a new (desktop) computer last week. Even though my old one still worked it was getting a little dated, especially for playing today’s games. I’ve now got a Core 2 Duo 3.00 ghz (E8400), combined with a ATI Radeon HD 4850. Pretty happy with it so far. For the past few weeks I’ve been playing a few games, most notably Age of Empires III with friends. One of us bought a new computer some months ago, and the rest has now followed suit. Hopefully no more lag soon!

I also took the opportunity to install the latest testing version of Ubuntu (Jaunty Jackalope). I’m having mixed feelings about it. I wanted to go to testing because of KDE 4.2. Turns out I love it! It looks even better than 4.1, and it has so many features that I’ve been missing from the previous release. I also wanted to try out Amarok 2, but that’s been a huge dissapointment. I really don’t understand how they can justifiy creating an entire new release and leaving out so many important features that made their software to great. I read through their forums, and they’ve got the typical ‘we’re still working on it” attitude, along with ‘you don’t have to use it’. I could understand that if it was still a beta, but a release numbered 2.0? Nah. I immediately aptitude removed it and tried out Banshee, and so far I’m really impressed!

It’s much faster than Amarok has ever been, last.fm scrobbling works as it should, and synching my iPod is unbelievably handy and quick. I can’t believe I’ve been using such an inferior media player for so long! The only downside is that Banshee doesn’t seem to synch my iPod plays to last.fm, but I’ll look into that later.

But back to Jaunty: I said I had mixed feelings; this is because my desktop use is very limited at the moment. My video card series (Radeon R700) only has basic 2D support through the open source radeon driver, and the proprietary driver from ATI doesn’t support the latest X.org yet. This means that right now I don’t have any 3D support (meaning no desktop effects and no Stepmania), but there’s also no video acceleration. I’m unable to play any videos because their playback is very choppy/pixalized in certain players. I didn’t realize you needed hardware acceleration to play video files. My best bet is to wait for an update to the binary driver, but it’s probably gonna take a while. I don’t regret buying ATI, though. In the past I’ve been told that NVidia is much better, but from what I’ve read that’s not really true. NVidia does have an open source driver that provides 2D support, but they’ve never released any specifications for their hardware. But since AMD took over ATI they’ve released specs for most of their chipsets. Unfortunatly the process is slow, and it’ll be a while before the radeon/radeonhd OSS driver has better support for my card. I’ll just have to be patient. This unfortunatly means that right now I’m doing more things in Windows XP than I’d like to…