Android to lose MP3 capabilities?

Posted on February 15, 2011 by Ben Lavery

Google has chopped the H.264 codec out of it’s Chrome browser and replaced it with it’s own, open source, WebM codec – All in the name of openness… Continue reading →

Posted in Google, Musings, Open Source | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Partial Facebook Fix

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Ben Lavery

A while ago I blogged about Facebook having some problems.  Well it appears they may have done something rather odd. Continue reading →

Posted in Internet | 6 Comments

Oh Dear Facebook…

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Ben Lavery

It seems that everyone is having some problems with Facebook at the moment.  They are getting notifications saying someone has written on their wall, but find that their wall hasn’t been updated for a week or two.

I have been bitten by this oddity and decided to vent by filing a bug report.  After navigating to the Facebook Help Centre I had a quick glance at the “Common searches” box.  Here is what I found: Continue reading →

Posted in Internet | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Away from civilisation for five years

Posted on February 6, 2011 by Ben Lavery

The other evening Faye and I watched the film, Cast Away.  I didn’t watch the whole film, but the overall plot was man gets stuck on island, everyone thinks he’s dead, he comes back after five years.

I started to think about what it would be like if I had found myself left on a deserted island five years ago (2005), what sort of technology would I have missed? Continue reading →

Posted in Musings | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

OpenIndiana

Posted on February 2, 2011 by Ben Lavery

Back last year Oracle canned the OpenSolaris project.  A group of developers forked the source and created the Illumos project which aimed to maintain the base of OpenSolaris as well as develop open code to replace the closed binaries that OpenSolaris included.

The community was generally very happy with the release of Illumos, however, it soon realised that the project wasn’t there to replace the desktop and server OS that users knew and loved.  Enter OpenIndiana! Continue reading →

Posted in OpenSolaris | 3 Comments

Film Sorter Script

Posted on February 2, 2011 by Ben Lavery

On my server I have a store of films located at /share/media/movies.  Using NFS I share this directory to various other computers on my home network.  For a long while Faye has been asking me to categorise them into genres and cast, but with over 300 files I’ve been loath to do it by hand, so I thought I’d automate things using Perl. Continue reading →

Posted in Perl | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

iOS VLC fails after all :(

Posted on January 31, 2011 by Ben Lavery

Back in November a mobile version of VLC was released for the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch.  Many people cheered as the open source media player graced their iOS device.  Though some people didn’t… Continue reading →

Posted in iOS, Open Source, Rants | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Happy 2011

Posted on December 31, 2010 by Ben Lavery

Happy 2011 everyone, I hope everyone has a good night and a great 2011.

Posted in General | Leave a comment

Adium Gains IRC Support – Colloquy to die?

Posted on November 2, 2010 by Ben Lavery

Adiam is an awesome app for OS X which is based on the same code as Pidgin.  Adium has the advantage of being the same as many other open source instant messenger clients out there as well as being coded specifically for OS X and all the Aqua goodness one could ask for.

The latest release of Adium (v1.4) was let loose on 31st October this year and touts the following changes: Continue reading →

Posted in Internet, Mac OS | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

VLC for the iPhone could fall thanks to the GPL

Posted on November 2, 2010 by Ben Lavery

VLC, the popular open source media plater, has been ported to the iPhone by Applidium.  The media player is available via the App Store for free.

VLC is licensed under the open source license called the GNU General Public License, this license has very extreme views on how the code can be used in an open way.  For example it can’t be used with closed code unless code under another specific license is used between the GPL and closed code, you can’t relicense code that is under the GPL, you can’t restrict people using it for anything.
Which this all sounds good, it’s not always great for the consumer. Continue reading →

Posted in iOS, Open Source, Rants | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment