Spotify Ads... Oh My...

I moved to Spotify a couple of days ago.
It is rather good, and I've been able to find a lot of the music that I used to have, not only on Rdio.com, but on Grooveshark as well.
At the moment, I'm using the free version, and I find that they are using a more aggressive approach towards ads than Rdio.com.
Spotify's ads are, first of all, LOUD and on top of that, somehow dynamic -specially compared to the ones that Rdio.com used to have, which were basically all the same- this time of the year they are all of them New Years Electronic Fest related, with an horrible mix of reggeaton and dance music...
Anyways...

And Then...

... The scorcher got us.
Got to us with everything it has.
Damn fucking summer.

Movies During The Weekend

The GF was away this weekend so I watched a couple of movies that I wanted to see for a while.

• Bridge of Spies

The GF hates Spielberg's movies, I don't.
I liked this one, as usual, period re-construction is amazing.

• Dawn Of The Planet of Apes

Wanted to see this one for quite a while.
I liked it a lot more than the first movie of the reboot, which I saw a couple of years ago.

Loli-Papelk Icons: HUGE Calendar

 Well, I would say that the issues with theming Evolution seems to goes on ;) ...
This is the preference on Evolution, with (obviously) the Loli-Papelk icon set.

Thursday 24-12-2015

Making a New Musical Home..

So, I moved to Spotify a couple of days ago, now that Rdio.com is dead.
I've been re-creating my play-lists, taking the time to delete some crud on the way.
More or less the music I used to listen to on Rdio.com (and Grooveshark before that) is there, so no biggies on that regard...
Two things raised a few concerns, tho, first, the Last.fm scrobbling (on the Spotify's web player, if that matters) is far from perfect... I've missed quite a bunch of plays while listening.
The other one is that somehow (and only on the T430's Firefox, maybe is related to the resolution?) the play-list look like shit; the same thing doesn't happen on the W530, go figure...

A Fucking Scorcher...

.. Is coming our way...
May Jeebus have mercy on our souls..
Fucking summer...

81K and counting!

And then they were 81 thousand!!!!
The last one in which Rdio.com did its part...
No way in Hell I can make it to 100K before the year is out, tho...

It's Over

So long, Rdio!
You'll be missed.
BTW, that error page is gone for now, replaced with the farewell one, but I'm pretty sure that one won't last long.

Sunday 20-12-2015

Movies During The Weekend

• Star Wars (Episode VII)

I've managed to drag the GF to see that one, that alone can be a little victory, I guess...
The movie? Yeah, it's better than the awful ones that Lucas made in the late 90's early 2000's, but that is not a big deal, since those movies were dismal.

• Crimson Peak

Yeah, a nice one, you know... One of those terror movies that features your regular ghost made mostly of flesh and decaying bones, with an amazing art direction.

• True Detective

We gulfed down all the remaining episodes from season two, 6 of them one after another.
If you ask me, that's the only way to watch a serie nowadays.
Personally, I enjoy a lot more season one.

Wednesday 16-12-2015

Please Don't Forget To Blink!

Or... Installing Blink on Linux Mint 17.2 (32 bits)
This week because of a work project, I had to install one of those.
Can't even remember when was the last time I used one, we mostly moved to an all Skype ensemble, both at work as well as for personal use.
Way back when I was using soft-phones in Linux, the soft-phone that you had to use was Ekiga.
But that was years ago, so, after a bit of research, I've settled for Blink, which seemed rather nice and full featured.

Installation was pretty straight forward:

Created the repo:
sudo emacs /etc/apt/sources.list.d/blink.list

With this:
deb http://ag-projects.com/ubuntu trusty main

D'loaded and installed the repo GPG key:
wget http://download.ag-projects.com/agp-debian-gpg.key
sudo apt-key add agp-debian-gpg.key

Updated and installed Blink:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install blink

stilgar > sudo apt-get install blink
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
g++ g++-4.8 libcurl3 libstdc++-4.8-dev
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following extra packages will be installed:
libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 python-application python-cjson python-dateutil
python-eventlib python-gnutls python-greenlet python-msrplib
python-sipsimple python-xcaplib x11vnc x11vnc-data
Suggested packages:
python-greenlet-doc python-greenlet-dev python-greenlet-dbg
The following NEW packages will be installed:
blink libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 python-application python-cjson
python-dateutil python-eventlib python-gnutls python-greenlet python-msrplib
python-sipsimple python-xcaplib x11vnc x11vnc-data
0 upgraded, 13 newly installed, 0 to remove and 26 not upgraded.
Need to get 4.766 kB of archives.
After this operation, 14,5 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y

It's Official

Rdio.com is going down on the 22nd.
So long, and, once again, thanks for all the streams.

Movies During The Weekend

Not many, but mighty, mighty good!

• Ant Man

One hell of a funny movie, we both loved it.
I never ever expected that it might be so good and funny.
One of the best movies that I've watched lately.

• True Detective

Now that we finished watching House Of Cards, we started right away with True Detective (the second season), we watched 2 episodes, so far, it looks really good.
Bonus point for the Nick Cave closing theme.

Life Without LED

I've noticed something since I've started using the Moto G.
The lack of a notification LED actually makes me hardly even check the email on the phone.
I get a ton of work emails a day, so the first thing I do on every single device I get emails is disabling any kind of audible notification, to prevent throwing the given device thru the window.
On my late BB, the dreaded LED kept me looking all the time at whatever crap I had on my INBOX, now, the lack of it actually makes life a bit easier.
That, and the fact that the default email client is awful, on that regard, Blackberry's email client was amazingly better, at least for what I use it for...

Sunday 13-12-2015

Summer: Fuck You!

It's here already.
Those long, eternal, Buenos Aires summer days...
Did I mention, that these are humid too?
Once again: fuck you!

80K and counting!

Another thousand up!
Trying to squeeze my Rdio songs as much as I can, before it goes down...

Chronicle Like It's 1984

The last couple of weeks I've been watching a lot of old (doh!) episodes of The Computer Chronicles.
I freakin' love that show!
It is really interesting Googling & Linkeding the interviewees as well as the different companies and produts, specially those of the really old episodes, circa 1984.

Movies During The Weekend

We had (sort of) a four day weekend around here, so with the GF we had to watch a shit load of movies no matter what...

• Salem's Lot

We finally finished it.

• Paranormal Activity

Watched this one on Popcorn Flix, a free movies Roku channel.
Boring, except for a very few instances.

• The Counselor

A re-watch on my case, but not for the GF, so we dived onto it...
Still a damn boring movie.

• American Ultra

Nice one, we were expecting this one for quite sometime.
It is sort of a mix of Clerks and The Bourne Identity.

• The Master

Even tho I do like Paul Thomas Anderson films, this one was boring, long and I should have skipped it.

• French Connection

A re-watch for me, but the GF hasn't seen it.

• House Of Cards

We finally did!
We finished the 3rd Season!
In the end, it sort of takes off and it gets a bit better.

Themed Evolution: Coarse Results...

I found another one of those pesky Evolution problems with the theme that I mentioned before.
This time not while using some strange theme, but using Ubuntu's own "Ambiance" theme...

Sunday 29-11-2015

Reasons to get (or not) a PowerBook Nowadays

I've been lusting for a PowerBook, maybe even a 17" one, so I've written a little list of the pros and cons:

Pro:

• An ultra sexy and amazing aluminum body

Cons:

• PPC (so, not a lot of software)
• No Virtualization (!!!!)
• Small amount of RAM
• IDE hard disk drives
• Lousy battery life

In Praise of Defaults

That is, regarding themes...
Simply put, the more I test and test different Unity themes (mostly flat ones), the more I like the default "Radiance".
Right now, along with that theme, the other two I'm using are:

• Yosembiance

• Yosembiance-Atomic

Like I said "Radiance" is great, an amazing theme, except for two small things, that I find annoying...

Not completely flat:
Something that I find strange, to say the least, since the unfocused windows are totally flat and look great.

Launcher "Pills":
The launcher has a thin, small rectangle around the icons, a so called "pill".
Even tho the default icon theme (ubuntu-mono-dark) looks rather nice, those god damned pills make then look ugly.

Despite those two things, I think that the default (once again) look of the Terminal on "Radiance" is pure gold.

Monit & Ruby: What a (Environment) Hell!!

These last couple of days I've been dealing with Monit and a Linux box running a bunch of Ruby stuff...
What a freakin' fucking nightmare is to setup Monit to start those damn processes, by Jeebus!
It took me a lot of fumblin' and testing to get those fuckers up & running thru Monit.
The whole thing remind me of those halcyon days of setting up Oracle on a Red Hat 6.2 box, the only difference was that getting Oracle installed and running on those boxes was a pain, and getting this hipster crap is a piece of cake, the hard part was getting it to start using a different user.

Movies During The Weekend

Ok, we actually were able to watch a couple of movies during the weekend, also, we kinda of dragged ourselves thru an episode of House Of Cards too! (Third season is damn hard to get by...)

Mission Impossible - Rogue Nation
Yeah... Well... it packs way too much, IMHO, a twist of a twist of a twist... On top of that, you get the usual impossible (get it?) to access compound

The Vatican Tapes
Well.. I fell sleep on this one...

Salem's Lot
A re-watch for me, a first for the GF...
We both fell sleep, even tho I love it, and it gave me the shits when I was a kid.
We'll try to watch it next weekend.