Having grown somewhat discontent with the venerable XMMS, I cast about last week during quieter moments for a replacement media player to use on my Linux workstation. What I found was a media library system called “amaroK,” and so far I’m very happy with it.

And yes, that’s the inaugural image for a new section of the gallery. I realized today that I lacked a place for screenshots and other digitally-generated imagery. Hooray for progress, eh?

Anyway, if you run KDE and want a damned nifty media player that automatically updates its media library, gives you one-click lookups of album covers, and throws a pretty nifty playlist manager into the bargain, you could do worse than to give amaroK a try.

As I write this, the firmware and OS on my Treo 600 cellphone is in the process of updating. Yes, that’s right, I’m upgrading my phone.

It’s not necessarily that I have to do it. It’s that the new version is there, and I want it.

In case you didn’t know, I’m one helluva geek. Sad, isn’t it?

I noticed this morning that the CPU in my main Linux workstation wasn’t being used. This may seem like an odd statement if you don’t know that I’ve been in the habit of running the SETI@Home client on whatever Linux machines I can since May of ‘99. Running the command-line client with the “niceness” turned up from a cron job is part-and-parcel of my setting up a new workstation.

So I looked at the SETI@Home website to see if anything had changed. Boy, has it ever.

A few minutes ago I activated my transferred account and converted over to the new BOINC client code, and I’m once again happily churning out SETI results packets. Of course, now I have to make this update to all of the other machines I have that run the old client code…