Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

Quick public service announcement (which probably comes a bit too late, sorry):

There's a coreboot developer room at this year's FOSDEM (Free and Open-Source Software Developer's European Meeting), which starts roughly... um... today. In 20 minutes, actually. Unfortunately I cannot be there, hopefully there will be video archives of the talks. If you're at FOSDEM already, here's the list of talks:

Sat 13:00-14:00 coreboot introduction (Peter Stuge)
Sat 14:00-15:00 coreboot and PC technical details (Peter Stuge)
Sat 15:00-16:00 ACPI and Suspend/Resume under coreboot (Rudolf Marek)
Sat 16:00-17:00 coreboot board porting (Rudolf Marek)
Sat 17:00-18:00 Flashrom, the universal flash tool (Carl-Daniel Hailfinger)
Sat 18:00-19:00 Flash enable BIOS reverse engineering (Luc Verhaegen)

Highly recommended stuff if you're interested in an open-source BIOS and/or open-source, cross-platform flash EEPROM programmer software.

If you ever wanted to support an open-source project but you are not a programmer, here's one (of many possible) ways to help:

The Miro project (Internet TV / Video and Audio Podcast application for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X) is seeking for pledges/donations that will be used to add subtitles support in Miro.

To quote from the announcement:

We’re hoping to build real subtitle support into Miro in the next couple months, but we need your help! So we’ve started a Kickstarter project to raise $1,000 to develop this feature for Miro on all three platforms: Windows, Mac, and Linux. Can you pledge to help make it happen? One of the great things about the Kickstarter model is that unless we can reach $1,000, your pledge won’t be charged.
[...]
(if you live in the United States, donations are tax deductible — we are a 501c3 non-profit)

There are 11 days left to make a pledge.

It's been announced at quite a few places, so you probably already heard about it: Miro 2.0, the new major release of the cross-platform Internet RSS audio/video aggregator and player has been released.

Miro is available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, the new release on Linux now features a "native" GTK+ widgets UI (instead of the Mozilla-based HTML widgets of earlier versions) and supports both a xine, as well as gstreamer renderer (for audio and video).

I won't even attempt to list all the improvements and new features, please check the release notes and the feature list for details. Overall more than 670 issues have been fixed since the last 1.2.x series release.

You can also watch this video (Ogg Theora, 10 MB) for a short introduction in Miro 2.0.

Together with the software release, the getmiro.com website, as well as the online Miro Guide have been competely rewritten and are a lot more usable and better-looking than before.

Finally, I have uploaded a new Miro 2.0 Debian package to unstable yesterday, by now it should be available from most mirrors. For Debian we're defaulting to xine at the moment, but please consult README.Debian if you want to switch to the gstreamer backend.

Please test the new release extensively so the few remaining issues (if any) can be ironed out soon...

Yay, finally! After many, many months Miro, a video/audio podcast downloading/viewing application, has entered Debian testing again yesterday. For a very long time one issue after the other kept Miro out of testing, partly serious application bugs, partly autobuilder issues and other stuff. I had almost given up hope, but luckily my 1.2.3-2 upload has now finally entered testing, just in time for the freeze...

Just in case you haven't yet watched it: Big Buck Bunny.

Great animated video created mainly using Blender, released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

The soundtrack/score is now also available under a CC license (as is lots of other "raw" material for the movie).