Categories
Uncategorized

Has Jamendo Stopped Seeding Torrents?

Jamendo, everyone’s favourite source of excellent free music, has become slightly less excellent. With their update a while back, they introduced direct downloads, but only of MP3 formats – if you want OGG, you’ll have to use the old torrent files.

Not a problem, you’d think – Jamendo used to be seeding ALL of their own stuff all the time, so even if it wasn’t fast, you’d get your download eventually. At some point around the big update of the site, the torrent seeding stopped, though, and it’s never restarted… so unless another Jamendo user is peering the OGG-format of the album you want, you’re stuck with the MP3 version…

I’ve tried a couple of different torrent clients, I’ve re-downloaded the .torrent files in question, I’ve checked my router’s settings… the problem isn’t at my end. Jamendo torrents with peers work; Ubuntu ISOs work; other torrents work. If Jamendo went back to their old practice of seeding everything they offer a .torrent for, they’d work too. It’s hardly a bandwidth issue – a torrent not being requested uses miniscule amounts of bandwidth – especially compared to the bandwidth that must be sucked up by offering the new direct downloads of MP3-format music.

Anyone know who to poke at Jamendo to get proper OGG torrent service restored?

Categories
Uncategorized

Biking to Democracy

Although it’s much overshadowed by the clown show to the south of us, there is in fact a federal election going on here in the Great White North. Thanks to some oddness of the Election Canada database, I was no longer registered in the riding I’ve been living in for the last five or so years, so I had to go to my local riding office to re-register — best to do that now instead of election day, the chap at Election Canada’s call centre said.

It’s about 24km by road, round trip, a nice easy bikeride for my day off assuming the damn rain held off. Re-registering took all of two minutes after a nice ride; asking the clerk about voting lead to him mentioning that there was, in fact, an absentee/advance polling station open right there, if I was sure I knew who I was voting for…

Remembering my ABCs, I decided to vote then and there… so I’ve done my bit, now I get to watch the show (ours and the Yanks) and complain about whoever wins!

As a bonus, it didn’t start drizzling until I was nearly home, too…

Are You Registered?

Categories
Uncategorized

Mountain Flying

Categories
Uncategorized

Dear Lazyweb: gweather icons?

Like most pilots, I’m a weather junkie. I need a regular weather fix even if I’m stuck indoors and not flying. GNOME’s Weather Report panel applet (gweather-applet, technically) is a great fast fix if all I need to know is “Is it raining at the airport right now?”

GNOME Weather Report

Aside from fantastic customisability, gweather has really cool icons for seemingly every combination of weather conditions. I’d love to use some of these icons in my own work (as per whatever license they’re under, of course!) but I can’t seem to find them on my /system files. There must be some way to coax this information out of my system (Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron) but my commandline-fu is weak in this.

So, anyone know where gweather tucks it’s icons away?