Rihards Unplugged

I know that I haven’t update in a while, and there probably is a good reason for it as well. I’m working on a new version of Rihards Online, but seeing that it’s not a top priority project at the moment, it’s taking quite a bit of time.

So until it’s done and launched, I’ll be posting odd bits and pieces that come to mind. So let’s start then. A new version of foobar 2000 is out. What is foobar? Only the best music player that there is. Forget winamp and iTunes, both are rubbish (unless for some reason you are locked into using one of those, then I pity you).

The new version is actually pretty cool, lots of new changes, including my favourite, a new user interface. And it’s not just any new user interface, it’s a fully editable user interface. What does that mean? Well it means that you can delete everything from the player user interface when you open it, and then add bits back where you want them.

Want to have the toolbar at the bottom? No problem. Want to have a huge album art section? No problem. You can basically do anything that you want. Having said that there are two things that I do miss. First is a proper lyrics component that supports the new user interface. And the second thing is a table of album covers just like WMP11 has it.

This is what my current theme looks like:

Sure it’s nothing spectacular, and it doesn’t have super eye-candy, but it currently only takes up 18mb of ram, and that’s with who knows how many GBs of music loaded, and the visualisation component running.

You can download the new foobar version from the official webpage where you can also check out some more screenshots of it in action.

Some of you, especially those that browse a lot will have by now probably noticed that more and more webpages have started switching from flv based videos over to divx based videos. It’s quite easy to notice it as well, for one, you need to install a special plugin to view these videos, and also you get to see a big divx logo first.

At first I didn’t like this at all (I don’t like most things that require a plugin to be usable), but after getting the plugin and watching some videos, especially those on Stage6 site, I must say that I’m very pleased with this new web video format. Now divx itself is quite old of course, but it is new to the web, and beats flash video and sound quality any time of the day.

Here’s an example, and don’t be alarmed if it asks you to install the divx plugin, it should be perfectly safe to do so. It’s the Theatrical Starcraft 2 trailer.

After discussing whether I should or should not upgrade my PC a day or so ago, my 3D card on my gaming rig decides to just kick the bucket. So I’ll be getting a new 3D card sometime next week (suggestions are welcome), but in the meantime I didn’t want to lose the ability to play games, or just in general, to have access to a Windows OS. The perfect solution for me? Apple’s Boot Camp.

For those of you who don’t know, Boot Camp is a set of tools that lets you use Windows XP and Windows Vista on your Apple hardware (be it the macbooks, the iMacs, the iWhatever). Aside from the annoying Windows XP setup, the whole process is quite painless and quick.

In the end you basically have a partition that has your Windows OS on it, with all the drivers for every single piece of mac hardware installed. Even the remote, and the built-in camera. And best of all, it all works flawlessly from what I have seen so far. Really great for gaming, so there’s no real reason why people who have decided against macs purely because they lack the gaming factor.

You can now, with the help of Boot Camp, quickly boot into your Windows XP partition, play your games, and once you are bored you can boot back into your Mac OS X partition for some serious working.

I remember saying on SGN that I won’t try Vista out until Microsoft, nvidia, or the makers of STALKER and Gothic 3 release fixes that make those games compatible with Vista. But then I realised that I haven’t played either of them in quite a while, especially Gothic 3.

So I thought to myself, hey why not try out Windows Vista, you have an hour or two to spare today to install it, and have been looking for an excuse to re-install your main OS for quite a while on your gaming rig anyway. So I did, and my first impressions of Vista can be summed up by the following two words, flashy and annoying.

Flashy is quite straightforward, Vista’s Aero interface is very flashy, and shiny. It reminds me a lot of Mac OS X, basically a very cute/pretty pastel(in Mac OS X’s case it’s white) coloured interface with lots of round corners and transparency. At first it seems quite the overkill but one gets used to it quite quickly and then it seems nice. I just wonder how much longer it will be till I start finding it to be annoying and useless.

Now to the annoying bit. I’m a power user, emphasis on the power bit, I like to turn things upside down in my main gaming OS. I use shell commands, clean up services, edit the registry by hand, and a lot other things, and this is where Vista really gets in the way. “Do you want to continue” pops up just about every step that I make, luckily that can be turned off somewhat, but even after turning it off I run into it.

Overall, I think that Microsoft is actually going into the right direction with Vista, making it even more accessible and usable for the average Joe user. Not to say that there aren’t enough improvements for the power users.