Wednesday 21 October 2009

Body Confidence

OK, so it's probably not cool to admit that I watch "How To Look Good Naked" (or that I actually enjoy it), but we'll ignore that point for a couple of minutes.

I want to promote the Body Confidence petition that they're currently running. They want the government to agree to putting Body Confidence on the national curriculum for girls AND BOYS!

Boys are equally affected by low body confidence as girls. For boys, they're "supposed" to be slim and toned, even muscular. For girls, they're "supposed" to be slim and curvaceous. The media puts these false images of perfection in front of us and makes us believe that we're not good enough! It's not on! Let's teach our children that they ARE beautiful!

All that's fine, but here's my main reason for posting this. A woman's body confidence affects us men too! When you watch this program you hear about men who have not seen their wives naked for years, some have NEVER seen their wives naked!! If we could make it so our wives had more body confidence now thanks to something in school before we even met them, wouldn't we?

This nations children need your help! They are surrounded by voices telling them they are not good enough and what's more they pass that message onto their friends without realising. Man, woman or child, please add your name to the petition: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/bodyconfidence/

Thursday 1 October 2009

Aggregating Vodcasts on KDE4

OK, so this is a really geeky post, so if you're not in the slightest interested stop reading now...

So I'm quite into the concept of vodcasting (Video-Podcast). Getting new episodes of a "programme" as and when they are released and automatically downloading them. For a while a year or more back I was using a program called Miro which was fantastic, but sucked the life out of my computer...

More recently I was using a combination of hpodder and reencode to download and encode the vodcasts for my GP2X and then watching them on the train to work. When I stopped taking the train, I stopped keeping up-to-date with the "channels" I was following.

I finally have my dream set-up in my office: 1 computer, 1 laptop, 1 keyboard, 1 mouse and 2 screens - all thanks to a KVM... woop!

Anyway, my computer has Kubuntu 9.04 (64bit) and KDE4 on it. Love it! Had a few teething problems with the network managers, but eventually found WICD (pronounced "wicked") which works perfectly! Also had some dodgy graphics and some issues with the dual screen, but that is all sorted now.

Anyway, thought I'd get a vodcast aggregator now that I have my own computer again (Lucy also has a computer in the back room, so at the moment there are 3 computers on... ooops). The question is, what should I go for?

I thought about Miro, but when I went to install it, saw a whole load of gnome packages, which I wasn't really into. So I had a look around and found a KDE compatible equivalent... Kitty. To be honest, Kitty looks like it hasn't been developed for a couple of years. With just a few tweaks it could be really nice, but it was just too naff for me. It doesn't automatically download new episiodes and it doesn't tell you what you've watched.

I did think about just using my hpodder/reencode combination, but this would have the same drawback (although I could cron it to run regularly, there would be no way of seeing what I had watched).

So it's Miro after all. I like the way it has a great guide full of other shows. I like the fact that it automatically downloads new episodes. I love the fact that once you've watched it it gives you 7 days and then deletes the old videos unless you select to keep them. It's brilliantly thought out and I love it! Such a shame it's Gnome, but nevermind.

So, in summary, Miro is much better than Kitty.