Grauw’s blog

My mother bought a beautiful table cloth for our dinner table, you can see it on the picture on the right. It shines! So pretty... So, I asked her to buy one for me too ^_^. I don’t have anything to put it on, but once I move out and get my own place to live, I’ll be sure to use it!

Another thing, I bought an MP3 player at the Albert Heijn supermarket... It’s an USB key as well, has 256 MB of memory (about 4½ hours of MP3), supports both MP3 and WMA and even lyrics, and has an FM-Radio and memorecorder, although I only discovered that after I bought it and don’t think I’ll use those very often :). It hasn’t got the best user interface I can imagine, I’d for instance like to have easier access to the repeat/shuffle selection (currently I have to use the menu), but it works, has a nice amount of memory, functions as an USB key at the same time, can be connected to other computers easily, and was very cheap. Only €80,-.

I think I’ll experiment with 64kbit WMA’s too, that’s supposed to be not far behind on 128kbit MP3’s in quality and should give me something like 9 hours of music. I just found the Sveta Portable Audio software, a sister project of dBpowerAmp Music Converter (a great tool for conversion between music formats). I haven’t actually tried it yet but I will, because it’ll be nice to be able to automate the reencoding of files to lower bitrates...

Now some interesting links...

Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 is out! Thunderbird is Mozilla.org’s email client, and just like Firefox it is a very nice product, feature-richt and comfortable to use. A particular interesting feature is that it can do adaptive (learning) spam filtering, and this works very well. A good replacement for Outlook Express.

Eric meyer writes: Once with heads held high. A followup on a post about homosexual marriage and the ban on it in the US he made last month, responding to some of the comments made. He is 100% right in every respect. Gawd do I hate those stupid religious zealots in the US who think they can proscribe how people should live their lives. Or in the Netherlands, for that matter.

Link sang has put up a nice review of the Playstation Portable (PSP). It’s pretty, but it doesn’t seem without issues. I will probably buy one eventually, when there’s RPG’s released for it, but unlike the Nintendo DS I don’t think I will get it immediately when it’s out. Now the Nintendo DS – that’s one cool device, its innovative technologies will make for some very interesting games, and it still uses cartridges which means good battery life and instant booting.