I’m a movie fan. I go to the cinema as often as I can, but I also watch a lot of movies in the comfort of my own home. I’ve got a neat little setup that is not at all high-end and hasn’t cost me an excessive amount of money. I did hand-pick every component. But because I bought all the components one by one and didn’t quite go through all the specs beforehand, some things didn’t work out as well as they could have. Here are some things to be aware of when buying AV equipment.
More Five home cinema tips I learned the hard way

This week, Gmail introduced a set of skins (“themes”) for their web email application. Luckily, there are a few that are quite functional, but there’s also a large number with obtrusive graphics and terrible color schemes. I was quite relieved to find there was a ‘classic’ theme that looks almost exactly like the old familiar gmail interface. Am I the only one not ‘getting’ this skinning thing?
More Application skins -- Do you really want all your apps to look different?

Stephane Grenier sent me a copy of his newly published book Blog Blazers, 40 top bloggers share their secrets this week. Having a new book mailed to me reminded of my adventures into book publishing when I contributed to a book about Flash optimization back in 2002. Since then I’ve become an avid blogger, and although I read very little paper nowadays I was curious about this project. Stephane interviewed 40 successful bloggers about how they became just that, and the results are hard to put down.
More Blog Blazers: 40 top bloggers share their secrets

I came across this article on Ars Technica a while ago while looking for ways to improve Flash performance on my two Ubuntu machines. I wanted to see if there was a way to get YouTube clips to play properly. Both my 1 GHz Pentium III and the 1.6 GHz Atom have trouble with Flash videos and especially it seems with Flash’s full screen mode.

Ars tested how much CPU load YouTube caused on some pretty interesting machines.
More What’s up with Linux and Mac Flash performance?

I have to say that I was slightly disappointed by the 8.04.1 version of Ubuntu-eee. I know I blogged about how the Netbook Remix version of Ubuntu would probably be ideal for netbooks, but now that I’ve actually played around with it I feel differently. The 901’s 9″ screen is big enough to use the regular UI, and having even the smallest little popup window be maximized bugged the hell out of me.

That’s why I decided to go ‘back’ to my old setup with regular Ubuntu made ‘eee-friendly’ using the array.org kernel. I put the word ‘back’ between quotes in that last sentence because this also allowed me to go with the newer 8.10 version of Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex). It may not be as easy as installing Ubuntu eee, but I found it to be well worth the extra effort.
More Installing Ubuntu 8.10 on the Eee-pc 901

Several users have contacted me about the same issue with WP-Cumulus this week. On non-English (and mostly European) language blogs some of the tags would display either very small or humongously big. This turned out to be caused by internationalization of numbers in the inline style sheets in WordPress’ tag cloud. I have no idea why this only popped up now, but the Flash movie wasn’t built to handle 9,55pt tags (instead of 9.55pt).

Version 1.17 fixes this issue, and adds a highlight color setting.

Oh, and Ryan Tomlinson has ported WP-Cumulus to BlogEngine.NET. More about his project here.

I’ve been using the Google Talk application for years. It’s a lightweight Instant Messaging client that was built upon open standards and doubles as a pretty good Gmail notifier. My reason for not using another Yabber client like Miranda was that that wouldn’t allow voice chat, which I often use professionally.

Things turned a little ugly when Google decided to add a web-based gtalk ‘gadget’ to Gmail. All of a sudden I found myself being logged into the same account twice, with messages popping up in either the web or the desktop client without any sort of logic. I was quick to disable the Gmail gadget, but yesterday’s announcement of ‘Google Talk voice and video chat‘ had a big surprise in store for me. It’s a web-client-only feature.
More Has the Google Talk desktop client been abandoned?

I’ve been getting questions about a possible Chinese version of WP-Cumulus almost on a daily basis ever since I posted the first version on wordpress.org. I’ve tried to reply to all of them with basically the same answer. That I’d tried to create one but failed. And secondly that although perhaps possible, a Chinese version might not be usable due to file size issues. I looked into this again today to see if I could confirm that second claim, and here’s what I found.
More About WP-Cumulus in Chinese

When visiting family last week, the conversation turned to Sudoku puzzles and how to solve them through software (I know, it’s sad ). My initial impression was that it shouldn’t be too hard to write a program that fills in the missing numbers but, as so often, I now stand corrected.
More Sudoku solver

Pratul Kalia emailed me this week that he and Björn Jacob have ported WP-Cumulus to Drupal. Instead of going for a clever name like “Blogumus” or “Joomulus” he opted to simply go with “Cumulus”. How about “Drupumus”, Pratul?

Anyway, if you’re using Drupal and would like an animated tag cloud, be sure to check out http://drupal.org/project/cumulus.