Archos plugins fee

I wanted to watch a movie on my Archos tablet just to find out that actually I can’t !
Archos charges me with additional fees to watch movies with Dolby AC-3 or MPEG-2 codec. But I’m glad we have free alternatives, I mean Flac, Vorbis and Google’s VP8. And now I’ve a reason to reencode all of these using free codecs. Yeah !

So I made a little script to ease encoding with ffmpeg and another program to manage concurrent queues to leverage the dual core cpu. I use a combination of the above codecs which I put in a Matroska container. Actually VP8 is doing quite well with high quality VOB (far better than Theora which came from VP3 anyway) but it still shows some encoding artifacts here and there. Though it may take up to 2 days to encode and I’m still struggling to integrate multiples soundtrack in the resulting Matroska with ffmpeg.

New compose on GMail

GMail has a new compose and he sees fit to remind me constantly whenever I write a new message. But I’d like to have my say on this since we’ll be forced to use this thing in several month anyway. So let’s get things straight, I really hate this, it is just stupid and I guarantee that if Google eventually puts this in place and forces us to use it, I’ll just quit ! That web interface was everything but there it just feels like a hyped gadget.

At least -please- put an option to get back to the original compose permanently so we can write real mails that we focus on. I mean I know most of them are just quick informal replies, just like we would use mobile messaging and I know for sure that services need to evolve from time to time but they just make everything easier and it just gets more useless and annoying at every step.

Steam on Debian x86_64

The Steam Linux beta is out ! Good news !
However it seems like it didn’t work well on Debian and even less on Debian x86_64. But I finally managed to get it running with some little hacks.
Here a screenshot of what is going on a 64bits sid with an integrated intel graphic card.
I’m not enrolled for the closed beta though… Valve do you here me ?