RockBox - Sweet sweet freedom

I tried RockBox a little while back, probably a year or 2 ago. It showed great potential, but was less impressive that the stock firmware on my nano.
Whilst hunting around for my perfect portable working environment, I stumble across RockBox again. Curious as always, I thought I'd check out the compatibility and feature list for the nano in particular. To my suprise, all rockbox features seemed to be working. So what the hell, I hooked up my nano and ran their installer called RockboxUtility.

Simple as 123. I popped some music and some audio books and podcast on, and decided to give this bugger a good run in.
After running through the installed themes, I decided to grab some extras. In the installer is an option to browse and install extra themes. Found and installed a couple, and ended up settling for a theme that is pretty much a crib of the ipod display, in all fairness though the theme is called nanoclone. I chose this theme mainly for legibility reasons (I always have my nano clipped to my belt via the belkin pouches' , carrabiner ).
After 2 days of solid use, I vote with my actions and will not be returning to my iTunes tolerance ever again. ........Until I get my iPod Touch , that is. Hopefully there will be some cool stuff to come out of the RockBox for the iPod Touch, although the interfaces are sufficiently different enough that a port to the Touch seems unlikely without completely butchering the Touch interface.

More Firefox Addons

First off, I love to have a slightly darker working environment, as staring at a screen with tons of white can be quite straining on the eyes after hours of work. In light of this, I am pretty fond of darker themes for my apps in general.
Example I am using the Zune theme under WinXp.

More importantly I am using the NASA Night Launch Theme in firefox.


Finally, i am not sure how many of you out there use the advanced search operators in google. It's really useful for getting google to respond more accurately. For firefox there is a addon called Advanced Dork. With just a right click in google you can get it to automatically add the requred operator. If you haven't used it yet and you do use them cache: maps: ext: etc..., then you should give this little addon a go.

Linux, Portables etc...

In my continual search for a real portable working enviroment, I am giving slitaz a go under Portable VirtualBox .
(WARNING: Google has this site marked as a possible Malware Site, personally I have not had a hassle, but i have only accessed the Portable Virtual Box build, which also seems to be malware free)
I am also trying a portable QEMU setup on a usb key, using Qemu Manager as the config GUI.
The biggest problems i have come across in trying to find such an environment is that not all pcs are equal. The biggest of all is the memory in most of the pcs i get to work on, when sooo many pcs have 256Mb of ram or less, and any virtual environment tends to pretty much get murdered under those hardware specs.
I am also trying a wiki on a stick(woas) as a sort of portable environment.
Other news of interest, the new PCLinuxOS magazine has been released, always a fun read, if you enjoy Linux news and articles.
Then on the shiny and fun side of things compiz/compiz fusion 0.7.4 has been released.
And for anyone following the google 700Mhz spectrum ordeal, google has released info on their strategy on dealing with the auction.
I will be back shortly with the other few firefox extensions and more on the portability project :)

Firefox Extensions Part 1 of ?????????

First off, I just started listening to the Full Circle Magazine podcast. Not a bad podcast, it's a pretty good round table discussion, and covers Ubuntu reasonably well.
In Podcast episode 1 they cover download managers , of which the one of them is a firefox extension called DownThemAll . It's a very nice and obviously integrated download manager.

Rebooted

Kay, lets get this bugger off the ground again.
I'll try to keep it on the tech line of things, but I don't even know where I am going.
Real first post to follow. Keep em peel'ed :p