I am now trying to think of what I should remove or tweak next. I find it funny that with all the programs and files I have on the system now it’s only 20GB used and a large portion of that is the documents and files I have in my home folder Can we say Bloatware?

I am looking back on the things I have been doing through this experiment and it pleases me to see I am able to do a lot of things I was able to do under Windows just fine.

Netflix REALLY needs to get on the ball with the instant streaming stuff because this is a pain in the nuts having it be Silverlight 2.0 only. That is primarily one of the only things I miss so far.

Speaking of streaming I need to think about finding info about how to get my DirecTV DVR and this machine to talk so I can stream movies or pictures. I got it going under windows before. I also will have to hard-wire the laptop so I can get a decent connection for that as well.

It would be awesome to be able to stream videos off of the lappy because I have a ton of AVI’s I backed up onto DVD-R’s that I could easily copy onto the hard drive to play better. Maybe I will do this later today.. Or start that.

I didn’t really pick up the laptop except to check the weather and search for the phone number for a pizza joint that we got pizza from a while back. Also I updated my ipod as I do every day and did a little stumbling (StumbleUpon) using the firefox bar extension.

I also installed the Trillian smiley set for Pidgin. I forgot I had it on my external HD. There is still some things that are on there I have to decide on keeping on there.

Looks like MySQL stopped working for some reason. I don’t know why. Looks like I am going to have to research this crap now. *sigh*

I also found that Songbird has an iPod add-on but it looks like it’s geared more towards earlier generation iPod’s. It picks my iPod up but it’s not seeing my playlist on there. Also I tried subscribing to some podcasts and it didn’t pick up anything when I added a subscription (Distorted View was my test subject for this). Let’s hope the next day is better.

Ok, that was lame. But seriously I have tried a new AIR app called Mixero and it’s pretty nice. Not as extensive as Tweetdeck, but very compact. A nice feature is you can make “channels” out of search items or hash tags

And you can group your contacts a litttle easier than Tweetdeck in my opinion. But at any rate this has nothing to do really with Linux because AIR is crossplatform. I thought I’d just share this little finding.

Today I learned that with my installing and uninstalling of some applications I inadvertently disabled the MySQL server somehow. Nothing a re-install couldn’t fix. Now it’s back up and running and I can start figuring out how I am going to set up apache to get it out of the default directory for testing sites locally.

I connected remotely to my desktop again to update my podcasts after I listened to a bunch in the middle of the day. So basically another day of not much done. When I got home from work I had dinner and watched TV and passed out around 10PM on the loveseat.

I began installing the LAMP server stuff. LAMP is Linux Apache Mysql and PHP as one package. Once I got it all installed I tested out the web server. Worked. Installed PHPMyAdmin. Works. I will play more with that later. I need to read up on configuring Apache some more.

So while updating my podcasts from listening to a bunch of them at work, I installed some Applets for Avant Window Navigator as well as some themes for it and for Gnome. I  also added some more Screenlets and downloaded some desktops from Gnome-Look to make everything stand out. You can see the screenshot by clicking the thumbnail at the top of the page.

So I am still itching to get the mixer hooked up and work on getting the podcast recorded so I can really play with Audacity to re-learn it. It has been too long since I used it.

I ran across another Air application called AirTalkr. It is supposedly an IM client and Social media client combined (like Digsby) but it was REALLY buggy so I uninstalled it.

Uninstalling Air applications is kind of easy. You have to actually download the .air file onto your machine and double click it as if you were installing the application and the installer brings up the Uninstall option. See cake!

Ok That is all for today. I will have more on the 7th day.

So to fix this I subscribed to 1 feed inside of Rhythmbox (the default audio player in Ubuntu 9.04). I plugged in my iPod and after it noticed it was connected, I dragged and dropped the latest episode onto the iPod.

I loaded up gPodder and had it do it’s sync and  all the episodes that were not marked as played went right onto the iPod. However it kept the 1 episode from Rhythm box, which is no big deal.

I unplugged my iPod and head off to work with all my new podcasts ready to play. The ONLY downside to gPodder is that when the podcast uses cover art for their shows it doesn’t show on the iPod.  For example, VooDooRadio’s Last show had a special cover art that I made for the episode. When I was using iTunes under Windows the episodes would have that picture I made, but under gPodder. Nothing. Nada. BAH!

Maybe I missed something. I dunno.

So basically nothing new installed. Just conquered a small little issue that I found as important for my work day. Listening to shows as I work makes me feel more productive.

After  I installed it I loaded up a bunch of podcasts. It got 99% of them fine. For some odd reason it hates Talkshoe RSS feeds (so the Awful show’s feed was defunct).  After downloading all the current epidodes of the 45 feeds I added manually (suck it doesn’t have an OPML import function), I tried syncing, it didn’t add any new shows on there. I then removed the podcasts off the iPod manually from it’s list within the program.

I tried syncing again. Nothing. I went into gPodder and now it couldn’t even read the device. WTF? I headed over to the windows machine and restored the iPod thinking I messed up somewhere. Hooked it back up, still nothing.

So I finally just gave up.  Stay tuned for the outcome of this in Day 5.