Ship Some Code

About a year ago I wrote a Linux alternative in Python to the Gmail Notifier released by Google using the libgmail library. It took off rather well for a while but Google kept changing things about the way Gmail worked meaning I had to constantly update the libgmail library. Since then many others have got involved with the project and recently Juan Grande re-wrote most of the code to use the Gmail Atom library meaning the project has become fairly stable and reliable as a day to day tool. The greatest part now though is that someone has built a Gmail Notifier package for Ubuntu Breezy that can be apt-get installed if you have the universe source package line in your sources.list uncommented. So if you run Ubutu Breezy, try:

sudo apt-get install gmail-notify

The Gmail notifier project site can be found here
and the Ubuntu package page for the app can be found here

So I’ve been playing with MythTV recently. I brought a nice looking mini-itx case left over from a stalled robotics project, a 120GB HDD and borrowed a Winfast 2000 tuner card and stuck them together. Lesson learnt: MythTV is a waste of time on anything under 2GHz (my mini-itx was an early EPIA-V 1GHz). You really can’t have fast enough hardware when it comes to stuff like this. I ended up setting up an XP2400+ box as a mythbackend server in the garage and using the mini-itx as just a frontend that connected to the TV in the lounge, but thats a story for another post. I can tell you that it cost a small fortune to get it working reliably and unless you’re serious about it, stick with with your VCR - it might suck, but believe me, it’s cheaper.