Archive for General

New printer

07 January 2007 General Comments Off on New printer

I’ve just bought a new printer: a HP Deskjet F380. It’s a cheap (76€) multi-functional printer: color-print, scan and copy.

HP Deskjet F380 HP Deskjet F380

I guess that the cheap price is justified by the low ink cartridges capacity: only 5ml. However, I’m no great ink consumer. I only print some simple stuff (mappy itineraries, text e-mails, … ) and most of the time in draft mode, and surely no high quality color photographs. I prefer to count on foto.com to print my pictures.

From the little tests I’ve performed, I’m quite happy with it: it prints fast enough in draft quality, scanning an A4 picture in 300dpi resolution only takes about 30 sec, and the copy function works very good and very fast as well. A really good product regarding its price!

Collection tagged

31 December 2006 General Comments Off on Collection tagged

Okay, I’ve just finished to rename and tag my mp3/ogg collection. And indeed, TagTool has been my best friend for the last days. It’s really easy to tag a bulk of mp3’s and ogg’s files in a click, based on the filename or manual input.

Now I can make extensive use of the playlist functionality of Amarok: I can sort my collection by genre, artist, album, year, track number (though I don’t know who would do that…:angry:), … Great 😀 !!!

My next objective is to copy all the songs I’ve backed up on CD (about 15 CD’s… :oooh:)to my Lacie hard drive. That way, my music collection would follow me anywhere :B).

Music Player

29 December 2006 General, Linux, Music Comments Off on Music Player

Since the Gentoo team declared xmms being out of support, I tried some music players for replacing it, which I used for many years now.

I first took a look at audacious, which is a xmms look-alike player written in Gtk, but I had some problems with sticky title bars and I soon abandoned it.

Then I gave Amarok a try, and after some tweaking, it rapidly became my new music player of choice. It of course plays mp3, ogg, wav, pls and m3u (stream radios), and CD’s, and features a great playlist editor, which xmms lacks. Aside of that, it has some nice features like On Screen Display (OSD), covers management, lyrics search tool, etc.

Amarok

I was reluctant to use any other player than xmms because I heavily used the xmms-shell program to command the player: a small applet on top of my screen allowed me to rapidly pause, switch songs and change the volume. This has now been replaced by the amarok global shortcut capability: you can configure any key combination to trigger the most common actions: play, pause, fast forward, next track, volume, … and that not only within amarok (hence the word global 😉 ).

Now I just have to arrange all my mp3 tags in order to use the playlist functionality the most efficiently :|…Tagtool will be my best friend!

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