Mon, 07 Oct 2002
kioslaves (tutorial) in KDE are modules that implement new protocols for Konqueror to play with. kioslaves for HTTP and FTP were written fairly early on, and handle all things to do with those protocols.
kioslaves that I've played with in the past include man (eg. man:vim), info (eg. info:emacs), devices, floppy and webdav. Today I've been using the audiocd ioslave, and it roxxor :)
Typing "audiocd:/" in the konqi URL bar, I get a listing of the contents of the audio CD in the drive - by track number, or by track name (having looked the CD up on freedb) or... and this is the neat part ... by track name with .ogg extension. It gives an estimate of the resultant file in Ogg Vorbis format, and if I drag-n-drop copy any of those files to disk, it automatically rips the file. Neat :)
No more wrestling with the crappy grip interface for me! :)
.. to get a full listing of the kioslaves installed, go to the Konqi Help menu, select Konqueror Introduction, then Specifciations, and down next to Transfer protocols click "many more".
The crop circles are still coming out, and these ones are fairly amazing.
ta tobe
I recommend NaNoWriMo to anyone who's ever though it'd be neat (or a life's dream, or anywhere in-between) to write a novel. 50,000 words in one month. Just over 1,600 words a day. Eminently achievable, if you don't pay much attention to the detail.
I participated last year, and made it in time with just over 50,000 words. Only one person has actually read my novel end-to-end, and it wasn't me :)
This year, the word counters are back, this time with verification. They're also including a "novel-in-progress excerpt area", which worries me - it might scare people off. It was pretty hard keeping on going last year reading some of the quite decent prose that other writers were coming out with. In the end though, it's a personal challenge, and a very worthwhile one at that.
"National" hasn't been an applicable name since about the second year of the event. It's definitely global, with a strong Aussie following.
I played the demo of TS2 that came with the latest aussie PS2 mag. It really is quite an amazing game :)
The gameplay is very smooth, and the controls are the best of any first-person game I've played on a console. The fine aiming will still take some getting used to - I'm finding that almost every game has different response curves to the analog sticks. Practise would improve that quickly though.
The environment ranges from very well done (the overall structure) to kinda bland in the detail. The character animation is superb though, and quite fun to watch.
The sneakiness of the demo was a lot like MGS2, only without the horrid "cut" scenes (which felt like they took more than half of the game time)
I don't like my chances, but I reckon I'd like this game and GTA:Vice City in my xmas stocking (barring any other amazing releases between now and then :)
