* A nice idea for a bigger screen for camcorders is to use a Nokia N800 or preferably, a Nokia N810. With the well-understood USB-master hack you can connect a USB TV card to it, and then connect your camcorder’s composite-out cable to that TV-card. Then, you can utilize either the already ported MPlayer application, or you can port XawTV or equivalent such TV-oriented X11/GTK+ application. The only stinky point is to find which supported USB TV card model to buy and to then sit down and port its already existing x86 Linux driver to the ARM platform.

* I updated to AVG Free Edition 8.0 anti-virus the other day, and it made my Trillian super slow. When I click to a contact to open a chat window, it takes up to 10 seconds to open. I had to exclude Trillian from the AVG resident shield to get back the speed I had before. The previous version of AVG didn’t have this problem and it really bothers me when software becomes slower and buggier as time goes.

* Sharon Stone said that the Chinese earthquake was “karma” for the Chinese treating the Tibetans bad. I guess no one told her that many of the people in that area were Tibetans. For a woman with Mensa IQ over 140, I sure did expect more.

* This one is for the laughs. I remember the wars we had in the Gnome community about 4-5 years ago about the “spatial” Nautilus. The Red Hat masterminds behind the spatial crap were keeping their stronghold and they were not easy to back down. They didn’t want to listen to the community. And now, after Red Hat is nowhere to be found in serious Gnome development, not only the spatial stuff are turned off by default, but we have tab navigation and actual full MDI tabs. How times are changing, huh?

* I watched “The Andromeda Strain” on A&E last night. It was a very good sci-fi mini-series, originally written by book author Michael Crichton.

* I don’t know what the hell is wrong with youtube for 3-4 weeks now. 2/3s of the videos I watch don’t load fast enough, so I get start/stop on these videos all the time, making them unwatchable. No other video service has this problem. Might be a Comcast throttling problem again specifically for youtube, or youtube running out of bandwidth?

* Americans are among the peoples who would kiss in mouth for casual greeting kissing. E.g. a mother kissing her son coming back from school. It puts me off seriously. Cheek kissing is barely acceptable in my opinion, but mouth kissing among family members yucks me. I know that this is just a getting-used to thing, just a peculiarity of a different culture like the ones you find on any culture, but it still yucks me (sorry my American friends, I just can’t stand potential herpes-spread).

* My brother saw the video I shot for the HIJK the other day and he couldn’t believe it. He kept saying “how did you do that?”. I guess I am not the average Greek middle-aged wife with 3 kids and no interests. He could also not believe that the band doesn’t have a contract. He kept saying “but the song is good, like the ones we listen to the radio, how is it possible to not have a contract?”. You see, in Greece, if you are 1/10 as good as any random indie US band, you get a contract. Music is that bad there (sorry my Greek friends, I just can’t stand Greek music).

* One of my favorite rock tracks of all time, Ranting of Eva’s “Bright Side”, is now available for a free download. You will need a myspace account to get it. Trust me, that nostalgic tune is the shit.

* Got a new mp3 player for an upcoming review, a Sandisk e280R 8GB. Looks good so far.

* Birthday tomorrow. I will be 35. I feel old. Think that we go to the same sushi restaurant for lunch every Saturday. This is the epitome of being old: repetition and habits. Love it though. I think I need to start playing Bingo.

Stormrider challenges me with the following survey:

* How many years do you use a computer for?
About 16.

* Are you a newbie, casual user, power user, master, umber, jedi?
Power.

* What’s your main computer?
A Dell Hyperthreaded 3.06 Ghz P4.

* Do you put together your own PCs?
I used to, but I don’t bother anymore. I buy them ready.

* Have you ever broken a computer because of your anger?
Naah.

* What browser are you using?
Firefox on the PC, Safari on the Mac.

* What media player are you using?
WinAMP and iTunes.

* What mail client are you using?
The shit called Windows Live Mail.

* What IM client are you using?
Trillian and Adium.

* Do you run add-ons?
No.

* What anti-virus do you run?
AVG Free Edition.

* Favorite software
Outlook Express is not the most secure software, but it’s solid as a rock.

* Favorite software house:
Google

* Most hated software house:
Electronic Arts

* Favorite hardware company:
Apple

* Most hated hardware company:
Anything cheapo Asian, including HTC.

* Favorite geek PC usage:
None anymore.

* Dream-machine?
The fastest PC you can find to edit AVCHD in real time.

* Was your first video you saw on a PC porn?
Nope.

* Do you modify other people’s PCs when you use them?
Ah yeah, I need to “fix” things.

* Anything embarrassing in your Trash Bin?
Not much.

* Do you spend useless time opening/closing windows in your OS?
Naah…

Stormrider posted a very interesting and as always, right-in-the-mark blog post.

If you want to see what’s wrong with many Greek people today, you simply have to look at one person, who happens to be a good representative of the bunch: Mikis Theodorakis. He is an internationally known composer, and a politician. Even if you might never heard his name, you probably have heard his music somewhere.

And you don’t have to know him to judge him. You just need to read his — pretty objectively written — Wikipedia page (towards the bottom).

Let me vomit now.

* Edwards has just endorsed Obama. There’s a good chance that 19 of the super-delegates that endorsed Edwards in the past will also add momentum to Obama’s run. I think it’s a 99% certainty at this point that Obama will win the Democratic race by June 3rd, but I believe that it might be beneficial for his final election race to ask Clinton to be his vice-president. Hopefully her ego won’t get in the way and she would accept.

* The Vatican says that it’s OK to believe in aliens. Ok, I am a believer now.

* A fellow female who also fell for Mr Spock at very young age and her life changed from that point on. Read her account here.

* This article says that Fedora is better than Ubuntu and this one says that Ubuntu is better than Fedora. I find it curious though how both articles forgot to mention how both distros are worse than either a OSX or Windows desktop. Having said that, I find Ubuntu very usable as a normal desktop OS for internet usage. The problem starts when you need something more than that…

* How a career can be completely destroyed by drugs. Same for Lindsay Lohan. No one wants to do business with them anymore. Such a waste.

* [Minor spoiler] The writers of “Lost” said recently that there will be a “spectacular kiss” at the finale of the season in two weeks. TVGuide spills a few more beans and says that “it’s the kind of liplock that stops f—ing time and makes the entire world vanish in the moment.” This can only mean one thing, if you take into account my previous blog post about the episodic format of “Lost” for next year: that Desmond and Penny find and kiss each other exactly at the time when the Orchid station “moves” the whole island and the surrounding seas 2.5 years in the future. So in effect, that kiss, lasts 2.5 years! There is no other way to make a “spectacular” kiss on film, it has to be a twist like that.

* It seems that Obama has won the candidacy, at least theoretically at this point. Short of Alaska’s Mike Gravel that no one votes for (too liberal and no money, I guess), I personally like Obama, and I hope he wins the presidency as well.

* WSJ has an article about the food prices and that the bio-fuels are to blame. All I can say is this: if Bush had handed down that $300 billions to fusion research instead of the war, I can tell you that we would all be benefiting from cheaper energy by now — even if fusion would still be years away. But I guess, if he was to do that, his buddies oil owners would be out of jobs.

* “Microsoft May Build a Copyright Cop Into Every Zune”, says NYTimes. Well, short of having artificial intelligence, how the hell are they going to know if my XViD file comes from an illegal download or my own shooting/export from within my video editor? This is no different than the stupid law Greece had of banning all computer video games just because the lawmakers could not distinguish between PC games and gambling.

* JBQ sent me a URL with a very indicative picture to show the difference between “shallow DOF” and “background blur” — two notions that people are getting mixed up. Background blur, is well, all the background blur you see. Shallow DOF though is how much of the subject’s surroundings is sharp (meaning that, between the lens and the subject everything is blurry, and behind the subject is also blurry).

* Our lights are arriving today! We bought the Smith Victor KT900 for both mine and my husband’s photography needs.

I hate these modern bras that you now find everywhere in the market. They have this, I don’t know, piece of metal around them that HURTS. Sure, it makes your breasts look like floating devices, but that’s just too much. I am not willing to put up with the pain associated with it. So in the past few years, each time I would buy a bra, I would remove that metal from inside it.

I feel the same way about stiletto high heels. I don’t mind to have some heels on my shoes, but I don’t see the point of the stilettos. I find them laughable, along with the women who try to look ultra sexy for no apparent reason — especially when they are already married.

And what’s the point of wearing $10k earrings either? You can buy a car with that money. Or help your less fortunate distant family members.

There’s a point where someone could look good and sexy and comfortable, and I like that and I am sure more husbands would like that too. But look-modification via painful bras/stilettos/piercing/mud-baths and expensive jewelry is not something I support because I don’t see the point of it.

Yup, as a teenager, my girlfriends stopped asking me to go shopping with them because I was their worst nightmare. I have had these opinions since I remember myself, not because I am older now or try to excuse myself. I am a pragmatist to the bone. I always was.

Or party-pooper. Depends how you see it.

* Some Lesbos residents are suing a gay group for using the word “lesbian”. How pathetic and stupid. Someone needs to teach these people about how language evolves.

* Pidgin is getting forked for not listening to the users. I thought that this was long overdue. I never liked that project and the way it ran. Its main developer had the audacity once to tell me that no one cares about video IM and video iChat support. A few years later, and Adium (which sprang out of Pidgin) is actively work on it.

* Are you into a new PC for your video editing needs? Here’s a good deal (ends soon). Just make sure you spend the extra $20 to get the faster 800 Mhz RAM, and add $30 for the firewire port if you own an HDV firewire camera.

* Five nice, free, and legal, mp3 songs:
- “Fire” by AlibiTom (amazing song)
- “Beyond the Door” by 13ghosts
- “To Be Gone” by Anna Ternheim
- “C’mon Baby Say Bang Bang” by Jane Vain and the Dark Matter
- “Oh Yeah” by Morning State
- More legal downloads here (”Cat Swallow” by Royal Bangs found there is great).

* A sneak peek from the new “Lost” episode tomorrow.

…at least email me on the right email account. Don’t email me on my Gmail account. Hotmail is my main email account, and it has been since 1997 (long before Microsoft bought the service). It’s a curious thing when I clearly show on my contact page that Hotmail is my preferred email address why everyone keeps emailing me on my Gmail one, which is only mentioned on the IM section. Now, send me some email love.

Michele Weiner-Davis wrote an article/study saying that women in America are sex-starved. She says that men should just wake up and serve their women.

What a whole lot of bull. She only looks at the symptom rather than the cause.

If Michele actually had taken into account the fact that the people who have less sex are Japanese, she would have figured out that the reason why people don’t have more sex is because of WORK TIRING AND STRESS, not because somehow “people shut off their libidos”, as she writes. Of course and people can’t have sex when the only thing they think is how to do stuff at work and take care of the family.

Look at Greeks. They are the people who have the most sex worldwide. Why? Because they live very care-free lives compared to how North Europeans or Americans or Japanese live. Young men usually sit around all day in the cafeterias and discuss each woman who passes by. And in the summer… ah… in the summer… The British are coming! There’s a contest as to who’s gonna fuck more British cunts. It’s a popular sport in places like Corfu.

And speaking of my personal love life, the ONLY reason why there’s gonna be a week that we will have more or less (or no) sex with JBQ is strictly work-related. There are nights that JBQ talks to his sleep about his work! That’s what he thinks all day, that’s what he even dreams about! There’s not much time for anything else in his life. He doesn’t even do any of his hobbies anymore. And that’s going on for years now. The money and the glory of working on important products comes with a price.

But when we happen to be on vacations, I can’t even take him off me! Why? Because he’s not stressed anymore, and so his “libido wakes up”.

So that psychologist who wrote that article, should have a reality checkup. If she wants to fix the problem it’s not about telling men to “wake up their libido and have sex”, because that would mean to add MORE PRESSURE to hard working men. Instead, she should write to her Congressman and explain the situation and ask for a change in the way Americans live their lives in general. It has nothing to do with the will of the dick.