After reading about Magnatune integration into Rhythmbox, I checked it out even though I’ve been using Banshee lately due to great integration with my DAPs (ipod nano, SE phone and iaudio m3). After about 2 hours of listening to full tracks in their ambient section I bumped into a german artist’s project called Saros, which completely blew me away after the first listen and had to buy the Soundscapes album. If you like H.U.V.A. Network, Asura or Carbon Based Lifeforms, check this guy out.

I was quite skeptical about the content quality (This sort of rubbish I thought) considering the liberal distribution terms. I mean not only do they not make your life harder with incorporating DRM and offer the downloads in Ogg Vorbis and FLAC formats (apart from mp3 and WAV). They also let you pass the download details to three of your friends. And you can choose to pay from $5 if you’re going to be cheap to a more generous $18 for an album. Check out Magnatune, they are not evil .

As for the Rhythmbox integration, I wasn’t able to complete the purchase/download operation, but browsing through the library actually made me find what I like. Some sort of recommendation/social system like audioscrobbler/last.fm would be slick. Which is what an alternative to the rubbish promoted on TV and radio really needs. Friends don’t let their friends deal with DRM.

VMWare on Tango

I was extremely pleased to see a Tango facelift of the upcoming VMWare Workstation 6 application.
Hopefully more ISVs will follow the example.

After watching me helplessly struggle with python-fu on #gimp, Saul Goode
wrote a nice script
to export a GIMP image (XCF) with the background layer set to invisible. I’ve
bound it to the powermate
button so every time I need to export an icon I’m working on, I just hammet the
nice glowing button in front of me. You probably need a bleeding edge
Tiny-Fu/GIMP for it.

Ideally I’d like to trigger this on every file>save, but it’s probably not
possible.

Update: So it’s actually possible by
adding a gimp-xcf-save before saving the PNG copy and replacing
file-save with this for Ctrl+S. Thanks for the tip dobey, and thanks
for the script again, Saul. I’m saving hours of my time now. Oh and Saul tells
me the script should work fine with the older script-fu interpreter.

• Fun little project.