I’m a big fan of music, and everybody knows that I hate ipods or restricted devices. But I have a bad luck with portable media players. My first device on my linux era was a sansa fuze of 2 gb but I screwed it with coffe and the scroll wheel simply stop working . Later I got another sansa fuze but with 4 gb and the fn3k robbers think that was a good player and take it with guns and a smile (please don’t visit Guatemala with good media players jaja).

Most of the time I use mpd+gmpc to listen music, but the “troubles” start when I want to sync music with portable devices. Of course is easy drag and drop the music, but is easiest copy it from the media player. MPD is not designed for this and gmpc doesn’t have a plugin to sync portable devices, well isn’t his bussiness.

When I had the 4gb sansa fuze, I started a search for an alternative media player with portable devices sync support, the restrictions where:

• Fit well in gnome
• Don’t use mono or java
• Easy sync

So I tested four media players and my conclusions where:

• Exaile: In that time has only  read capabilities with portable devices
• Rhythmbox: The sync process is complicated and to many clicks
• Banshee: Same as rhythmbox
• Amarok: Was a little complicated, but is heavy for this simple task.

I choosed rhythmbox. Was ok for the task, but actually I got a new sansa fuze+ and a friend talk me about clementine.

Clementine is a media player that feels amarok 1.x but built on QT4. The most shiny feature is the simplicity of the sync feature. Is all I was looking for :’)

• Copy music to the device with two clicks
• Personalize the destination path with regular expressions
• Show the remaining space on the device
• Remove non ASCII characters
• All of the above in the same screen
• Support for gstreamer backend
• Is perfect for the people that loved amarok 1.x but hate 2.x era.
• A plus: If I love a song into clementine, the player also send this info to last.fm and “loves” the song

The only issue is the eternal debate with QT and GTK. I really prefer gnome simplicity over the KDE fancy style, fortunately nokia people developed a GTK wrapper for qt, in the actual versions of QT is included, just type “qtconfig” and choose GTK+ from the “Select GUI Style” box.

And I know this post is useless without screenshot so enjoy it:

The best feature of sansa fuze vrs. ipod?: Works out of the box with Linux :’).

posted by tuxtor
Filed under: Gadgets

1) Def Leppard – Hysteria

2) Guns n’ Roses – Knocking on heavens door

3) Toto – Hold the Line

4) The Doors – Love Me Two Times

5) Deep Purple – Black Night

6) Ozzy Osbourne – I just want you

Six songs for a special date

posted by tuxtor
Filed under: Shouts from my head

Well I came to work early and finished my day assignations yesterday. So is time for a little post.

As many of my friends know. I was very involved in Free Software Community Activities. But the last months I simply didn’t have the enough free time to help the Free Software community in Guatemala. I was helping in a middle-active way. But all the things have a beginning and end. And my end is right here .

Clear and without preludes actually I have a personal conflict with some members of the community (don’t ask for details I won’t give you that) and no one is more important than other in the community.

Everybody is replaceable and fortunately there are many new members . Far from it, I’m sure of one thing: “the community work has to remain intact”. So I took a difficult decision: keep my personal problems as “personal” and let the community continues strong and working .

One thing that I learned in the communities is “work with people is hard, very hard”. Sure you are in a community because you share one thing with the people. “Free Software Advocacy”. Maybe for freedom, maybe because they don’t have friends, maybe for money. But participate in a Free Software Comunity was one of the greatest experiences in my life. And I really like the “boom” of the Free Software in Guatemala.

As an Spanish quote says “the best support is not be in the way”. So I’ll continue suporting Free Software in another ways. In my job, with code, with tech support on IRC (in selected channels of course). But with the same objective: “For the Software and Knowledge Freedom”. Maybe in this new era I’ll help more with code. I have various rusty  project asking for “love and attention” xD. Good luck to all my community friends and keep the hard work.

BTW this post is because everybody ask me the same question: “why?”. And I really hate talk about the same topic two or three times. So this is my response

PD I finished this post two days later

posted by tuxtor
Filed under: Freedom tutorials

Well I’ll continue my english lessons. Once at Harmon Hall I talked about a US Army experiment to learn another language. They started “language villages” where his environment was absolutely in the X language of the village and everybody learned the new language in three or four months.

So If i’m blogging (or trying to blog) in english, and I listen music in english language all the time. I’ll start also to microblog in english.

But as I have more than 200 followers in twitter and identi.ca I’ll create new accounts because many people and friends find disturbing follow and read twitt/dents in another languges different from spanish.

So my old accounts in twitter and identi.ca will remain open. But I’ll post only in this new accounts (twitter, identi.ca). I’m trying to unplug facebook from identi.ca but I don’t know how. Maybe latter I found the solution.

Thanks to all my followers but it’s time for the next step. If you wish you can follow me in the new accounts (in pseudo english). Thanks

posted by tuxtor
Tags: tuxtor
Filed under: Shouts from my head

Not at home anymore.

Actually I’m working on three projects. One as a main job and two complementary projects (I need a new laptop BTW). Many years ago a buddy wrote in my blog a sentence like this “You will die writing small programs with Free Software”.  Years later I’m here working with, Java, PostgreSQL, Glassfish, Tomcat, Richfaces, Icefaces, Netbeans, Eclipse, Subversion. All Free software .

Looks like I have the Job that I ever wanted: “Internet without a firewall or proxy, no dressing rules, a good and powerfull (very powerfull) Linux desktop, JEE+SOA+domain driven architecture”. And thanks to God this job knocks to my door. I never looked for it. By the moment I’m happy with this.

But . . .

The Job reallity is very very different. A year ago in the classrooms explaining SOA (as auxiliary teacher at University) I never Imagined how hard is write enterprise software. Work with this tools is good. The environment is fine. But is a work like another one and is very stressfull and fullfilled of responsability. Cut off times, merge the code with another buddy code, zero day bugs, PermGenSpace, etc.

Maybe let the freelance world was a good step. Let see it in the next months.

And the life just continues . . .

posted by tuxtor
Tags: java, tuxtor
Filed under: Freedom tutorials, Shouts from my head