So given that I have XCode installed anyway, I decided to build ffmpeg myself, just as I had done back in 2007. It should be as doable as back then!

I found a post by Martin Los, which was pretty much all I needed to get started. I just changed a few things; for example you don’t need to -enable-libfaad anymore with recent versions of ffmpeg as I think they have their own (experimental?) faad encoder, and don’t rely on an external library. I also didn’t install SDL as from what I remember it was only used for showing ffplay’s output (mostly for opening a window, showing the decoded video, etc). In any case, ffmpeg compiled fine without having SDL, so I’m assuming it just didn’t compile ffplay which frankly I don’t use.

After I checked that Martin’s method worked, I decided to convert his instructions into an script. Usually I would write this script with Python but I am trying to learn a bit more bash lately, so I made an effort (and several searches) and wrote it in bash –and a couple of other utilities such as sed which were already installed on Mac. I believe the only tool which isn’t installed by default is Subversion, but I am not entirely sure about this (and I’m not going to format the system just to check!).

It was also interesting to use cURL (which is installed on a bare Mac Os) instead of wget, which I expected to be installed already (it wasn’t). Apparently SourceForge (which is where the libraries’ sources are hosted) makes some sort of redirection even if you’re using a direct link. The -L option allows it to follow through 30x redirections until it finds a 200 code or similar.

And here is the script for your enjoyment and all that:

Using this shiny fresh build of ffmpeg I was able to convert several .MOV files which were rendered for iOS devices into MP4 files that Android devices could palate. This is the script I wrote (also with bash, to practise even more):

Hope it’s useful!

• Adwaita (GNOME 3)
• Adwaita (GNOME 3) scrollbars (this is optional. Makes the scrollbars look more Gnome-ish)

With compliments to mr.doob for revealing me the secret!

I finally succumbed to temptation and installed GNOME 3 on my machine.

I was slightly worried that it would end up breaking everything, but it did work quite nicely, and once I installed gnome-session, the option for starting a GNOME session appeared at the login window, along with the existing XFCE session.

So–first impression: confusing. Thankfully mr.doob had demonstrated GNOME 3 on his laptop several times (although he was testing Fedora and Ubuntu, not ArchLinux), so I roughly knew how to navigate the system. The key is to use precisely that–the keyboard. Forget ye good old Applications menu and start launching stuff in the Quiksilver/GNOME Do style, by invoking the “launcher” and then typing the name of the application you want to run. Using the mouse feels quite slow.

The next step has been launching my commonly used programs to make sure they kept working. They did! More things that worked well or even better than with XFCE or old Ubuntu:

• Fonts support. It’s way better and nicer now than I remember (whether with XFCE or with Ubuntu). I am referring to the way fonts are displayed on screen. Antialias is there without being excessive, etc.
• Nautilus integration. I didn’t manage to configure it properly with XFCE and for some reason it didn’t quite work as I expected it. Now I configured it to manage the desktop too, yay! (more on that later on).
• Keyring integration. Apparently it’s a silly thing, but it gets very annoying having to enter the same password for a remote system once and once again. Installing and configuring gnome-keyring in XFCE was an item in my TODO list… but it seems to have been resolved by installing GNOME shell & co, so great! One thing less to do!
• “Multimedia” keys also work without me doing anything (unlike in XFCE where I had to configure them manually). This includes the volume keys and also the brightness keys which now allow me to set the brightness in my Apple Cinema Display. This is something that didn’t work before, and since I dislike very bright screens, I had to reduce the brightness by tapping the side keys on the monitor itself. Super YAY!

The remaining step was, evidently, customising the rest of the system to my liking. I made a list of things I was missing, and in a matter of minutes they were sorted out (!!!), thanks to a bit of gconf-editor and the awesomeness of the Shell extensions website plus its one-click install method. Apart from it being incredibly rewarding, I guess that’s what happens when you wait and leave some time before hopping on the novelty bandwagon: somebody else will have written the extension you need already.

The annoyances “I” fixed:

• Lack of a dock or currently running applications panel. I fixed this with the Window list extension.
• Lack of min/max buttons, and them being on the right side. I wanted them all, and I wanted them on the left side, as I was used to having them on the left side since Ubuntu 10.x and I use Mac OS in the office too. I fixed this with a combination of gnome-tweak-tool and gconf-editor:
  1. In gnome-tweak-tool, select “Shell -> Arrangement of buttons in the title bar -> All”
  2. In gconf-editor, modify the desktop/gnome/shell/windows/button_layout entry to read close,minimize,maximize:. This reorders and relocates the icons to the left side of the title bar.
• No desktop icons. GNOME 3 tries to fix the overpopulated desktop syndrome by forbidding all icons in the Desktop, but that’s against my workflow: while I’m not a fan of overpopulated desktops, I do like placing the stuff I’m currently working on in the Desktop. The way to overcome this limitation is to use gnome-tweak-tool and enable “Desktop -> Have file manager handle the desktop”. Voila, Nautilus is managing your desktop and thus you can have icons in it. Business as usual!
• The clock in the middle of the top bar (why!?). Moved it to the right with the amazingly simple Frippery move clock extension.
• That accessibility icon on the top bar. While I recognise it’s great to be accessible from the start, I like managing my own screen state. So as before–removed it with a couple of clicks thanks to the noa11y extension.
• System monitor. When I’m doing anything that eats too much CPU I like to measure why, and how much. I couldn’t find any nice widget for XFCE, and I was missing the old GNOME 2 system monitor panel. Fortunately the new SystemMonitor extension is sort of similar, but it isn’t visible all the time, as it’s in the notifications area (on the bottom area of the screen, visible only when something gets notified to you or when manually focused). Still, I think I prefer this version, as I don’t need to be looking at the widget all the time, and this is more efficient space-wise. It also opens the full blown System monitor application when clicked, as the old widget did.

I also dabbled with the Dock extension before installing the Window list extension, but it annoyed me that it wasn’t visible all the time and I couldn’t configure it in an intuitive obvious way, so I disabled it.

Overall, I like GNOME 3 once I changed all those details to suit my tastes, but I’d like to be able to right click over things and access their configuration instead of going through arcane settings trees à la Windows Registry. That’s quite awful, and there is no official documentation on this, or at least it’s not visible in the obvious places. As an example, there’s no obvious explanation on how to install and enable an extension in the GNOME extensions wiki page. While the process is somewhat easy if installing extensions with the website, it took me a few minutes until I found that method, and even then I wasn’t sure it would work. This issue is present in pretty much all open source projects anyway: bragging about a project, but not explaining how to install/start it.

That aside, GNOME 3 feels great and fluid, even if I’m using the nouveau driver. I feared it would require me to install the proprietary nvidia driver, but it works quite well with the free driver, which is excellent news. The only graphical oddity I’ve found is with the sushi previewer; it does some sort of jerky window relocation on start which I don’t know if it’s because of the graphics driver or because of sushi itself.

Conclusion: I’m going to stay with GNOME 3, as XFCE is not as mature as I’d wish it to be, and GNOME 3 seems to perform quite well (plus I’ve always liked the GNOME Do style of launching stuff, and being able to write extensions in Javascript is one of the best ideas for desktop environments).

I’m also looking forward to installing ArchLinux + GNOME 3 on my laptop (which is currently still running Ubuntu 10.10 :-D). Hopefully the brightness keys will work there too!

Amazing.

Then stop moaning worrying about Google datamining your interests or profiling your attention span, or feature X being changed arbitrarily because of business reasons, or Gorgeous Google Reader Alternative Yet To Be Developed to have even an alpha release that you can have a look at if you’re lucky and get an early invitation.

Also, if you don’t like something about the software, just fork it and change it. Then maybe send a pull request? All hail the powers of Git!

Jokes aside, I’ve been sporadically using this nifty little web application for a couple of months now. It might not be as “polished” as Google Reader, but it certainly is the best of all the alternatives I tried. I’m not a heavy user of feed readers–I use them as the equivalent of a customised magazine which caters to my tastes, and not as a news source. I read feeds when I have time and feel like reading, not as a mandatory duty that I have to fulfill every day, lest the reader explode with unread items.

Tiny Tiny RSS also has support for autopurging feeds (the way Google Reader deletes stuff you haven’t read in X days); an API so things such as a mobile TTRSS app can be possible, and there also are some sort of functionalities such as sharing public items and interconnecting TTRSS installations that I haven’t tried but sound cool in any case.

So there you go. Enjoy it!