The Xiph.org list, pointed me in the direction of a Mpman MP3 player. This is a cheap (~£15-20), simple 1 Gb MP3/WMA player, that acts as a USB removable storage drive. What it doesn't tell you anywhere in the official documentation is that its a secret Ogg player! For those that are cautious about different versions of hardware that have different chipsets, the model/serial number is MP-FUB34. I find it strange when companies forget to mention, or purposely leave out features. A quick google search for "fub34" brings up quite a few results, and currently some are being sold on Amazon.
I have been using it for a while now, with the music I have encoded from CD to Ogg, and podcasts that I have downloaded. The music I encoded myself using SoundJuicer, with the default settings, works fine on the player. Sometimes the ID3 tags don't display correctly but the music works fine, skipping, fast forward, all the usual functions you would expect. Problems arise when I put Ogg podcasts on the Mpman, it seems however many podcasts encode their audio just chokes the Mpman, so I have to default back to MP3 feeds.
The player is great for simple day to day usage, but the buttons feel tacky and cheap. And it does consume a lot of batteries, buying some recharable AAAs and a charger would be a good investment. But remember to have the batteries charged! There's nothing worse than when you are in a rush, and your music dies because you forgot to charge a battery.
Being strapped for cash means that alternatives are limited but I have my eye on the Cowan iAudio 7, which seems to be a popular choice for freedom lovers.
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In a nice game of "me too" with Peter Lewis, I decided to post the progress of my plants that me and my housemates planted about a month ago. The good new is that most of them have now sprouted, adding a nice touch of green to our house.
The garlic is growing very well, though previous experience says that garlic doesn't always turn out for the best.
The sunflowers are doing really well.
I'm most proud of my onions, they've been doing very excellently, and are going to run out of space soon.
[Poor-Man/Student Tip: Note use of take-away boxes as seed trays]
The jalepeno's and bell peppers have only just recently sprouted, I suspect its not warm enough over here for them to develop properly.
Unfortunately the avacardo, bird's eye chillis, and blue berries are not doing as well....
The next stage, which will be sometime this week, is to plant them into the garden. I haven't decided how yet, either they will get planted into large garden pots, or I'll try and make some space in the ground.
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In an amazing display of green-fingered-ness me and my housemates have started a little greenhouse/garden.
We have planted them inside, near a very large window, that gets a lot of sun gets very warm. Hopefully this will mean nice little seedlings in a few weeks, depending on the weather.
We have planeted the mundane, Onion, Parsley, Mint, the adventurous, Garlic, Jalepeno, Sweet Peppers, and the strange, Blueberry, Birds Eye Chillis and Aubergine(?!).
There is also a random bonsai tree, and a bean plant that I planted last year.
We have plans to grow carrots and potatoes too, but they'll be started in a few more weeks.
We now have our fingers crossed for lots of free fruit and veg!
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I know its been a while, but all the recordings that were made on the first day of PyCon UK 2007 are available on the PyCon UK Wiki.
Get them while their hot.
The Sunday recordings are knocking around somewhere. When I find them I shall get them done as soon as possible.
Until then enjoy!
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There's a bit of an Ubuntu meme, meme 1,meme 2, spreading around the net, making sure that we have all done our "5-A-Day".
Try to triage 5 bugs, help with 5 new users forum posts, shoot down 5 current bugs with your mad programming skills, every day.
I took this as an opportunity to try my hand at triaging bugs. My 5 for today are, 123647, 148832, 149048, 151929 and 155352
I suspect that I won't triage 5 bugs a day, but I'll try!
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