February 2008 Archives

In preparation of building a vegetable garden in the Spring, we had started collecting kitchen scraps for composting but didn’t have a good place to put them. A couple of weeks ago, we built this out of some old chain-link fence left behind by the previous owners.

Now I feel like I have to save every little thing that might possibly be compostable. Did you know you can compost your dryer lint? When I eat a banana on the way to work, I feel bad for throwing away the peel. I guess I could walk around with a banana peel in my pocket all day but I’m not quite that crazy, yet.

I also recently heard that they are starting a community garden close to our house, which is cool, but I think our efforts will be tied up in our own garden this year.

What with all the controversy over performance enhancing drugs, mechanical legs, and such, I think it is about time we banned all humans from professional sports and replaced them with robots.

I received an email this afternoon from Amazon asking if I would like to test the Linux version of the Amazon MP3 Downloader which is required for purchasing digital albums from their site. They say that they will initially be supporting Ubuntu 7.10, OpenSUSE 10.3, Fedora 8, and Debian 4. I had them send me the Debian 4 package even though my desktop runs the testing/lenny version of Debian. I was able to install it by manually installing some libboost libraries from Debian 4/etch.

The program is written in C++ and uses GTK. It automatically configured my browser to use the downloader and has worked well for me so far. I downloaded an album of remastered and alternate Talking Heads tracks because it was cheap and the soundtrack from Across the Universe just because I like Beatles covers and it includes one by Eddie Izzard.

I still think Amazon should have just made their download format non-proprietary to save the trouble of trying to support multiple Linux distributions but this is better than nothing. Or, say, better than the iTunes Music Store.