This morning I felt like I wanted to try something new, so I installed Flock, the plugged-in, oh-so-social spin-off of the Firefox browser. Flock is basically the same as Firefox, but with integrated support for Flickr, Photobucket, del.icio.us, Shadows and most popular blogging software. Lotsa whiz-bang fancy shit going on.

After installing, I went through the setup and hooked Flock into my Flickr and del.icio.us accounts as well as this blog (typing that word makes me feel dirty… go figure). Currently, I’m typing this post using Flock’s built-in editor. I write the post, click publish and the post should go live, I guess, we’ll see.

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Liron-Freaking-Fishypants-WTF-OMFG-Tocker aka Cheeseball Deluxe in response to my post on moving to Kubuntu Dapper Beta asks:

Ever since I had been trying out all sorts of “community” versions of Mandrake/Mandriva, I’ve stopped being an early-adopter. I’ve never had any pleasant experieces with pre-release versions of operating systems, since I have a low level of tolerance and most of the stuff I use my computer for on a daily basis is “mission critical” (read: “work”). However, I’ve been looking for a reason to move away from Mandriva for a short time, as I personally don’t feel the evolution taking place. Being a simple end-user and not a programmer, if I don’t see or feel this evolution it’s a bad, bad sign. More people are moving away from Mandriva as we speak.

My question is this: Would you recommend Kubuntu over other linux os’? If so, why? Do you believe it’s more capable than other distros you have used? If so, in which ways?

I’d definitely recommend Kubuntu over other Linux-based OS—but I’d take it with a grain of salt. My experience in home use has always primarily been Debian-based OS. Since you use Mandriva, like me, you are used to having access to repositories and using apt-get and whatnot. I like it. I prefer it. I’m very inclined to stay in that sandbox.

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A few nights ago, I upgraded to the latest Dapper beta for Kubuntu. After a failed attempt last week at doing a dist-upgrade to Flight 6 that caused all kinds of catastrophic errors and having to wipe and reinstall Breezy 5.10 (thankfully I had the presence of mind to make a backup of my home folder), I decided to just do a clean install from CD. I already had pretty much everything backed up and there was really nothing to lose and hey, it’s Beta, right?

While I realize that I spoiled my geeky Xmas morning delight of being able to upgrade to Dapper final on June 1st, fuck it. I’ve always hated waiting for goodies and shee-it, the move was totally worth my while. Dapper is hot.

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I’m just on a role with the KDE worship. To think, a mere few days ago, I peevishly looked down on all things K. I keep finding more and more bad-ass apps and features that makes me wonder if this website is going to transform into a repository for drooling desktop worship. I’ve gotta reign the geek shit in, I know. But, since I’ve already started this post, allow me to indulge in a bit more of the antisocial software fetish.

My latest object of amorous sheep-humping enthusiasm is amaroK, a media player for KDE that comes pre-installed in Kubuntu. An all-in-one player and music library manager, amaroK is definitely the best I’ve ever used. Using MySQL to manage a database of my music collection, it fetches album covers, artist biographies from Wikipedia and discographies as well as lyrics. It does an excellent job of creating dynamic playlists by analyzing the music I listen to the most. You can’t help but be happy with the damn thing. Another plus is that amaroK works with the Last.fm service, letting me post my listening habits to my profile page as well as any other place I should choose. Case in point, notice the “Recent Music” section I’ve added to the sidebar of this page. As I listen to a song, amaroK updates Last.fm, which in turn updates this list on my website. Kinda cool.

Should I be in a statistical mood, amaroK gives me loads of summaries. What I listen to, like the best and might like. Songs are rated and scored depending not only on how often I play a song, but also how much of the track I listen to. A song I listen to in entirety gets a much higher scoring than a tune I skip after thirty seconds of play. I can also check Last.fm for even more charts and displays showing the history of self-inflicted my ear damage and the fact that I have a serious problem with Death Metal. I’m so deaf, but very happy.

What with my recent switch to KDE and Kubuntu, I’ve been playing around with the host of new programs available at my beck and apt-get. True I could easily have run many, if not all the KDE oriented programs I wanted under Gnome, but since I was all up in that Gnome-ness, I never really bothered even looking.

Out of all these new applications, one that has immediately become one of my all-time favorites is Akregator, the RSS feed aggregator for KDE.

Akregator is hands down the best damn RSS app I’ve ever used. For the past couple of years, I’ve been eschewing desktop programs for the Firefox extension Sage due in main part to the fact that none of the apps I ever tried out had usefulness that warranted running a separate program to browse feeds. Sage was simple, light and worked well at what it was supposed to do. It also worked from within Firefox. The downside was that Sage did not automatically fetch feeds. I had to manually check them, which I didn’t like. If I have to manually check, I almost might as well just visit the site.

Akregator sits in my task bar and I’ve set it up to check all my forty of fifty feeds every three minutes. Feeds can be prioritized, and customized with special notifications, archiving—all kinds of wacky, mind-bending shit. It’s just about everything I’ve ever wanted in an RSS aggregator.

If you can manage running it, get it. When you do, you can subscribe to this site’s RSS feed and die happy.