Happy new year to everyone.

I had my Cowon iAudio7 in my pocket most of the day and when I took it out to use during lunch it suddenly froze and wouldn't power back on for a little bit.

After looking it over, I noticed that the iAudio 7 had a nice crack on the right side of the Swing Touch control which left an indentation (The one place that wasn't covered by the plastic case it is encased in).

I have absolutely no idea what I did or what I hit in order to ruin it, but I could have lived with the crack provided things still functioned properly.
Unfortunately, the unit is malfunctioning badly so I am forced to set it aside and purchase a new Ogg Vorbis player.

Does anyone know if there is a better Ogg Vorbis capable player than the iAudio 7 out these days? If not, I'll just get another iAudio as I really liked it.

It has been quite some time since my last post on this site.
Honestly, I haven't been able to think of anything that I really wanted to talk about.

If you have ever read some of my previous posts, you know that I am a complete sucker for old hardware. Thus, It should not be hard to conclude that during my absence I have been happily collecting various incarnations of out-dated technology.

My most recent acquisition is an Sun Microsystems Ultra 5 (UltraSPARC-IIi 360MHz). I had to put some money into it in order to get it running, but bringing things back from the 'dead' is part of the game so it was completely worth it.

I'll be replacing the GNU/Linux distribution I had initially installed for testing purposes with Splack, a port of Slackware to the SPARC architecture, fairly soon and from there we shall see how things go.

Just a quick PSA:
Matt Lee has a new project called Libre.fm which is an open alternative to Last.fm.
The project is in its infancy and is in need of people to both use it and help work on it.

It implements the Audioscrobbler API so you can continue to use the same Last.fm plug-ins that you have been using.

1. Just register at libre.fm via http://alpha.libre.fm/register.php
2. Change the login information stored for your last.fm plugin to that of libre.fm
3. Add 89.16.177.55 post.audioscrobbler.com to your /etc/hosts file.
4. Begin playing your music like always

Some links of interest:

• Libre.fm Ideas Wiki
• Client Support List
• Importing your Last.fm data
• A quick interview about Libre.fm

If you are interested, you can see my profile here:
http://alpha.libre.fm/user/moparx

I just noticed that version 2.0 of SliTaz, a light-weight GNU/Linux distribution weighing in at under 30 megabytes, was released a few days ago.

If you are looking for something small to run on an older computer, SliTaz is definitely a worthy contender to look into. Do not let the small size of the ISO fool you. It contains more than enough software to get you going. If you need something that isn't installed by default, you have access to their software repositories via the tazpkg package manager.

I have been running it on an old 500MHz Compaq Presario 1200-XL111 for over a year now (using their cooking versions) and I couldn't be happier.

My congratulations go to the SliTaz team for yet another fine release.

Anyway, Lets get on to the screen shot tour: