Looks like I’m in sort of weird group of portable audio players customers as there is no product from any vendor to satisfy my needs. And this situation has been lasted at least for couple of years. And there is no hope to change soon :(

I thought these requirements are not something really exotic, are they ?

• User friendly & easy to use
• Great design / aesthetic look
• Ability to use it with Linux
• Support for OggVorbis
• Adequate battery life

I tried Neuros, but it looks awful and battery life turned somewhat to 2 hours which is not acceptable. But at least it has cool feature of transmitting the output on selected FM frequency, so I still use it in the car.

Nothing else meets that criteria … Creative, Emgeton, iAudio … nobody. For a long time the closest is Apple with iPod. No Ogg support makes me beg after sending mails & signing petitions:
APPLE, IF YOU CAN READ THIS, INCLUDE OGG VORBIS IN NEXT FIRMWARE VERSION,
PLEASE!

Noticed interesting news on upcoming Microsoft products while reading Slashdot. Vista delayed, Vista 60% of code set to be rewritten, Vista not ready, Office delayed ?! …

Looks like they’re doing serious progress :)

Received wierd spam message today …

From: "Moreland Mervin" 
Date: March 17, 2006 5:33:45  GMT+01:00
To: "Moreno Micah" 
Subject: Re[8]:

muttered in a sleepy voice but without malice : 'All right, then . . . 
but you'll pay for it ... I warned you, but if you want to ... 
What interests me most now is Pontius Pilate . . .  Pilate . . .' 
And with that he closed his eyes.

'Vanna, put him in No. 117 by himself and with someone to watch 
him.' The doctor gave his instructions and replaced his spectacles. 
Then Ryukhin shuddered again: a pair of white doors opened without 
a sound and beyond them stretched a corridor lit by a row of blue 
night-bulbs. Out of the corridor rolled a couch on rubber wheels. 
The sleeping Ivan was lifted on to it, he was pushed off down the 
corridor and the doors closed after him.

'Doctor,' asked the shaken Ryukhin in a whisper, 'is he really 
ill?' 'Oh yes,' replied the doctor. 'Then what's the matter with him?' 
enquired Rvukhin timidly. The exhausted doctor looked at Ryukhin and 
answered wearily: 'Overstimulation of the motor nerves and speech 
centres..

No Viagra, no drugs, no penis enlargement, no stocks, no software … no
images, no links … but what ?!

Just read Techreport’s nVidia GF 7900 review with some information about quad-SLI systems. Quite interesting and also funny reading as they really have jokeful editors. Here are some quotes:

“And we have the juicy details on the King Kong of PC graphics, quad SLI, where not one, not two, but four GeForce 7900 GPUs can pull together to squash all competition and raid your Swiss bank account.”
“There’s nothing like playing some F.E.A.R. on a pair of GeForce 7900 GTXs after a long weekend of yachting, but most of us will probably be more personally interested in the G71’s other assignment, the GeForce 7900 GT.”
“Probably a whole truckload of cash, because quad SLI will initially be available only through PC system builders like Voodoo and Alienware, who like to charge about the price of a Mazda for a well-equipped PC.”

Long time of waiting for more battery power is coming to the end … Ultracell demonstrated methanol based fuel cells with these specs:

• two working days per single cartridge
• hot-swappable
• will work in sub-zero and desert environments as well
• half weight in comparison to Li-ion batteries

Is there anything else what it could do ? And they look cool … I guess their designers have been inspired by energy cells (or were these the ammo boxes, don’t remember well) from old, very old, but nonetheless the best computer game ever made System shock 2.

Wired had published it as every year: 2005 vaporware list! Try to guess what is number one. You got three attempts.

Check out videos of upcoming Novell Linux Desktop 10 showing XGL effects on window movement, workspace switching, application switching etc. Damn cool! The guys at Novell made big step forward.

Have to mention one of my favorite sites …maslo.cz.

Just went to see the progress on “GNOME 2.12 Official Release – unstable to stable” in Gentoo bugzilla … and saw “now stable on 3 archs”. At last! It took four and a half months from official release to be stable on Gentoo :( Hope more people will get involved in Gentoo’s Gnome team…

I hate sites which require free registration to access anything. Like NY Times and like last time Dell. They require to register to be able to save shopping cart. WTF! So I did it as usual I entered fake information and logged in as saw this:

Of course I’m not Emil. Who is it ? :) Always wondered why are these registrations required, when everybody do enter fictional data, or everybody doesn’t?

BTW … BugMeNot Firefox extension to bypass all those annoying logins for your pleasure.