mray's blog

It does not happen very often that a close friend of yours releases an astonishing new album. But when he does you would be a fool not to blog about it.

Circuitboard is the new Album of Georgeblunt from Tonstube.de!

It feels pretty electronic, but far from boring and is hard to categorize. Triphop? Hiphop? Dance? Pop? - One thing is for sure: it's sound is amazing, and hearing it is always adventurous, getting better each time you hear it.

Even if it is hard to decide on a favourite i'll recommend hearing these three:

• Late (smooth beat)
• Lala (funky!)
• Operator (hard and cold)

...oh one more thing: did I mention it is CC licenced?

Who doesn't love to have stupid servants as friends? In this case it is a guy called "TOBO" sitting in your buddy-list, happily awaiting orders from you and taking notes about what you don't want to forget.

Just go and add his jabber id: tobo.bot@jabber.org!

He'll be happy to tell you how to use him, if in doubt try this video.

GPL3 & XMPP based gadgets with an incredible smile on their face - you have to love them!

Phour Trakk has a new really smooth release. It mixes chilling vibes with happy beats and feels a bit like The Thievery Corporation but without vocals. You could argue that vocals are missing, but a positive of it is: you can work and listen without distraction and benefit from the inviting atmosphere.

This album is really high quality CC music.

Go grab the zipped *.ogg archive already and hear for yourself!

Yes it finally happened! The Scribus team decided to release their work in version 1.3.5.1.

I'm not going to say anything about the changes since the last version: it would be too much, even the official "list" is boldly understated.

Take my advice and grab this sweet GNU'ish DTP tool as fast as you can. It will rock your world and hopefully replace Adobe InDesign soon.

Thanks to the great Scribus team!

Just choose Ogg as your video-codec (ogg-theora) and audio-codec (ogg-vorbis) of choice, especially on webpages.

Why again this blatant advertising? - Because nobody here uses JPEG2000 either, and java or flash for video playback just sucks!

OK - you could put any codecs in the new < video > tag, since the web we know is OPEN and FREE, remember?

But tell me: which codec is so darn cool and

• plays out of the box in Firefox and Opera soon!
• is so tempting that even dailymotion can't hesitate to play around with it already!
• is natively supported in VLC!
• gets better all the time!
• is absolutely free!
• has a stoned fish on a crystal as a logo!

Nobody can compete with that - so why do you even THINK about limiting $$-crap that takes away your freedom to show people your useless stuff!? Take action and choose Ogg whenever YOU can. That's how mp3 became a standard; without any decision from the "big players".

[EDIT:] Check out this comparison, Ogg absolutely can compete with h.264!