techy stuff

I upgraded the site to PHP 5 this morning. This should be visible in precisely no way at all, I just thought I'd mention it :).

Have been playing with f-spot today; it's a fantastic photo management application in early development. I really like the way it works. It's a little sluggish and memory happy at the moment, like many mono apps, but it works really well, and makes organising pictures pretty much effortless. Which is good for me, as I'm terrible at sorting my pictures out. GNOME has had gthumb for a while, and that is obviously more mature and stable, but it's not half as nicely designed as f-spot. Thumbs up.

I'm once more trying to set up MythTV as a front-end for my HTPC. It always ends up going wrong somehow. This time, it compiles and installs fine, the front end works perfectly when I run it over ssh from my desktop, but when I attempt to launch it actually sitting at the HTPC itself, it goes to a grey screen and freezes, in a really strange way. The system is still alive and happy but doesn't respond to input. If I ssh in from another machine I can kill mythfrontend and kill X - and the grey screen doesn't go away. If I use sysrq sequences from the HTPC itself I can kill everything and get back to a console login screen - into which I can't type anything any more. All together now: huh?! Oh well. I'll stick to launching everything from GNOME with big icons, for now.

Called Sony Ericsson to see about getting my dead T610 fixed this morning. I bought it second-hand on eBay a few months ago and have been happy with it ever since, until the Ash concert last month. I took the phone to the show; when I got home, I took it out of my pocket, and it was dead. It hasn't come back to life since. Sammy's works OK, and I can swap the batteries and his still works OK and mine's still dead, so I know it's not just a stuffed battery. It doesn't start when plugged in to the mains, and I can't even get anything out of it with my terminator cable. It's utterly dead. So the very nice guy at SE told me I can send it in for them to fix, but it'll cost $150. I took a pass on that...I'll see what the local dodgy Chinese mall can do, and if there's no dice there, I'll sell it for parts on eBay. I already ordered its replacement off eBay, a Treo 600 - they're going nice and cheap now as the new version has come out and all the rich executives are dumping their old models.