Re: My Top Picks: Long Rant

+++ Zed Shaw [12/09/03 01:46 -0700]:
> I looked through the archives to see if any of these were there and I 
> didn't see them.  Let me know if they are not clear enough.

very clear, thank you. :o)


> 2.  While we're on the subject of sound, can we please set the mixer to 
> a sane default rather than making me go insane messing with some weird 
> curses interfaces to my particular sound card just to find out that the 
> mixer thinks my "headphones" are actually my "aux" output line? And can 

this may not be what you like, but along with mp3blaster i got a real neat
ncurses based mixer called nmixer.


> 
> 4.  Could KDE take any longer to start up?  It seems to me that the 
> advantage of a multi-tasking, threaded, forking capable operating 
> system is that I can have stuff happen in the background.  You know, no 
> point in starting artsd just so KDE can blast my eardrums right away.  
> Do that in the background and get me to my application.  This also has 
> usability implications since the user's perception of speed is based on 
> what they see happening.  Seeing an annoying "I'm doing this 
> nondescript icon now" dialog makes it look slow.

i have this same annoyance with KDE or KDE'ish application. i use
enlightenment on my desktop which btw sorts out those start menu issues that
you have very very nicely. anyway if i run a KDE app, i always do a 
"killall -9 kdeinit" in the nearest open xterm afterwards. that said i know
little about the underlying requirements that a desktop like KDE has.

> 6.  I watch lots of...uh..."movies" online...uh...from the BBC...yeah. 
> :-)  Anyway, it would be really nice if I didn't have to download all 
> this media to disk and manually run mplayer (or others) from the 
> command line.  I usually end up going through the painful process of 
> trying to get all the MIME types and file endings (remembering that 
> .rpm is actually a RealAudio format) and setting up all of them in 
> Mozilla so that it will launch my favorite player.  Couldn't some smart 
> guy or gal who packages Mozilla for me do this?  This also applies to 
> mp3 files, and others.

i don't stream much and mostly listen to music or watch the occaisional
movie. (g)mplayer, xine, xmms, mp3blaster, mpg123 work quite nicely for me.
but one annoyance that i *do* have is that i cannot play quicktime movies
with sound. these are the files that are on internet sites. i have tried and
have not succeeded *yet*

Thank You,
Regards,
mario
-- 
Mario Michael da Costa <[email protected]>
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The opinions expressed in this mail are mine
and may not reflect those of my employer.