Ubuntu Google Gadgets - Who Gives a F...

Google Gadgets are now available on Ubuntu. I read about this here.

I read the post, and was all ready to start using all these fantastic gadgets. So I loaded a few up. Pretty boring stuff. The same sorts of stuff that I don't ever use in Vista on my work machine. Then I loaded the NASA picture of the day. That sounded sort of cool. It crashed my session.

What?

That is right. It killed my session. It dropped me to black screen and then I had to log in again. I was actually writing this blog entry on how to set this stuff up, and I lost all but the first sentence (the one that you see starting this post).

The funny thing is, I'm actually glad it happened. I've always said widgets, gadgets, desklets, whatever you want to call them... They suck. They waste resources in your system, and you really don't gain much benefit from them. The NASA gadget crashing my session was just a reminder of that.

The analog clock in vista is a great example. Does it provide any real benefit over the clock in the system tray? Well it is a lot bigger, and don't get me started on how it is realistically lit and shaded! Really, how much value does that provide? And now you have less desktop to use. And I would bet real money that it more than uses more than twice the amount of memory and CPU cycles needed for the system tray clock. And while I have no hard data, I'd also bet it has an impact on laptop battery life as well.

These things are typical of the bloat that folks always bitch about when it comes to operating systems. Why is it that I need to have an 80GB hard disk when I could run windows 95 on 100mb? Well, you didn't have a shiny over sized-analog clock taking up desktop real estate in windows 95. YOU'RE WELCOME.

When active desktop came out with Internet Explorer 4, everyone thought it was the greatest thing ever - for about 15 minutes. Then they realized it was no real benefit, and it was a big pain in the ass. Apps and content running on the desktop rightfully went into hiding for a few years, until Apple made it popular invented it in OS X Tiger. Of course their implementation is very different, with Apple using a dashboard to house the widgets. And of course they would never rip-off Microsoft - they ripped of Konfabulator. But that is a different story.

The bottom line is this - of course any modern computer can probably take any small performance hit caused by running these little apps all the time - BUT WHY? there is just not enough benefit that I can see. Want your RRS feeds visible? load them on your home page. Want to know what time it is? Look at the clock the computer already gives you. To me these are mostly just useless eye candy, with very few real productivity gains.

Update - I found a Vista gadget I'm actually interested in. When I first got Vista, I could not believe that the included calendar gadget did not integrate with Outlook or Exchange. Well, they now have some gadgets here that show upcoming tasks and appointments. I will run this for a while and see if it really is worth it...

Update to the Update - They suck. you have to have outlook running for them to work. Which means they look like this when you boot:

so, if I need to outlook open, what is the point? Oh well I keep outlook open all day anyway.

How To Convert DVD to iPod with VLC (works in Ubuntu Linux)

I've been playing around for a while trying to get the best solution for ripping DVDs right to iPod format. Since most of the '1 click solutions' I've found for Linux are either A, a nightmare to setup, or B, not very reliable or all that easy, VLC appears to be a great solution. And a bonus is that since VLC is cross platform, this should work on Linux, Mac, Windows, pretty much everything.

OK - what to do. first, get VLC - for Ubuntu, it is in the repositories.

Next pop your DVD in your drive, open VLC. Go to the file menu, and choose Open Disc, and you will be presented this screen.
I've had to change some of the default settings.

First, I've set the disc type to DVD - not DVD (menus).

Second, I've selected the title number. It would have been nice if VLC had some way to figure out what title corresponds to what video on the DVD, but hey, nothing is perfect, right? You can use dvd::rip, if you have it to view the table of contents and figure out which title is which. You can also just run the transcode for a few seconds, and see if the resulting file is correct...

Lastly you need to click the check mark by the Stream/Save option, and click the settings button.

This brings up this window
You need to adjust the following on this screen:

First, Click the checkbox next to File, and then select the file name and location that you are going to create.

Second, change the encapsulation method to MP4.

Third, make sure the video codec is set to MP4V and the Audio to MP4A. you can change the bitrates if you want to, but I know the defaults work for me.

At this point I would like to make a note - the iPod supports the h264 codec, which is an option from this point. but I could not get it to create a file that would show video in my iPod (although it worked fine on my desktop)

now tell it OK to close this window. and OK again to the first window.

the vlc player will then run. At this point it does not show video, but the slider moves along as though it was. Don't be alarmed - this is how it works. You can stop the player, if you want to have an incomplete file that will work for testing, but you will need to start it over again to make the complete video. Once it is completed, upload to your iPod with Itunes, floola, or whatever you normally use.