Ola Lindberg

A petition has been created to release MainActor as open source. Please look into the petition!

Some days ago I booted up Ubuntu Gutsy (the next Ubuntu release that’s due October 2007) and it was kind enough to tell me that the battery in my Thinkpad T40 was being recalled. That’s so nice of Gutsy to tell me that; I don’t want a battery blow up in my head!

Beside from being nice it’s also innovative that my computer tells me about this without me having to search it up myself.

Today I’ll do a quick round up on a number of different programs that I have found the last days. First a game, then a computer recovery tool, an audio player and I round up with a new web browser for your phone!

Frets On Fire
This is a game where you play “the guitar” and are supposed to hit different “notes” in tact with music as they appears on the screen. It works surprisingly well with your keyboard but I guess you’ll get the most out of the game if you hook up a fake guitar to your computer (for example the RedOctane Guitar Hero SG Controller with an USB to Playstation convertor). Update: I have now bought a guitar for the PS2 version of Guitar Hero and plugged it into a USB to PS2 convertor. It works really well!

I ran this game on my laptop (a fairly old 1.5ghz laptop) and it worked quite well but I had some random runtime errors that kept crashing the game. After some research I found out about a setting in the game called “Light Graphics” and after setting that to “On” my problems disappeared.

Two songs are included in the game and you can import songs from the Playstation game Guitar Hero (if you are going to buy a RedOctane guitar the game can be bought bundled with the guitar) or you can check out community made songs. You can even make your own songs and import. See the Frequently Asked Questions for more information.

Frets On Fire is available for Linux and Windows and an experimental Mac OS X version is also available.

Check out the Frets On Fire web site for more information.

Carbon Copy Cloner
Some months ago I got an old PowerMac MDD that I’m using for video editing. The computer had an old 80GB hard drive that I didn’t trust but I wasn’t very keen on doing a reinstall. Instead I searched around for a tool to clone a hard drive to another; Carbon Copy Cloner is just that tool and it works really well!

I just inserted the new hard drive in my computer, booted up (from my old disk with the new one as a slave disk), formated the new disk (in the standard Mac OS X disk utility) and selected to clone the old disk to the new. Half an our later it was done. I shut down the computer, removed the old disk and booted up on the new one. Viola!

Cog - A great audio player for Mac OS X
Ok, I think that iTunes is a good audio player if you need a complete set with all those whistles and bells but since this is not my primary computer that’s not what I want. Instead I tried out Cog which is a seems to be a great light weight audio player. It’s in early development (I got the 0.06 release) but after running it for some hours I haven’t had any problems yet.

Opera Mini 4 beta
Opera has been my favorite web browser for the phone since I started to surf the web on my phone. It’s now available in a new version (version 4 beta) and it’s so great I wish my desktop computer was a phone!

Thats all for now. Hopefully will these tools do you as much good for you as they have for me! Comments, questions and feedback is as always welcome!