I’ve been playing around with Amarok the last couple of days as well. When I saw a friend with an ipod who had the lyrics also downloaded with the songs, I started salivating and of course went off to check what would work with an ipod off an ubuntu installation.

Dapper Drake seems to have the 1.3.9 version of Amarok installed, so after a little poking around, I added the following

deb http://kubuntu.org/packages/amarok-142 dapper main

to my /etc/apt/sources.list file. Going back to the Synaptic Package Manager, it now lists Amarok 1.4.2 for an update. So I updated that, and went back to my playlists.

But nothing plays! All it says is “No Audio Channel” …!

After a little more digging around, I find out that for some reason libxine 1.1.1 broke support of playing FLAC files. This was, of course, the format I’d chosen to copy my CD’s over into my computer. It’s been fixed in 1.1.2, but 1.1.1 is the version in Dapper Drake (I do not know what plans are for fixing this in the 6.0.6 release: this one certainly seems to mandate a backport for functionality). In any case, following instructions on this page and snagging this patch as given by the user “Ivo Man” resolved this little problem.

And now I’m happily listening to my playlists. I even hooked up a pair of speakers to my laptop!

I just discovered a very quick and easy way to have a live list of delicous bookmarks on a Wordpress blog; although this will work anywhere that javascript can be dropped in.

First, I went to Delicious’ javascript generator page. I checked off the options I wanted, including showing the notes that I attach with each entry I make. This resulted in the following javascript (spacing and line breaks added for visibility):

< script type="text/javascript" src="http://del.icio.us/feeds/js/digitalramble?
extended;
title=my%20del.icio.us;
icon=s;
name">< /script>
<noscript><a href="http://del.icio.us/digitalramble">my del.icio.us</a></noscript>


I then opened up my WP’s admin pages, and started a Write->Write Page session (not Write Post). Then I copied the javascript generated by delicious into this page, with the title that I wanted, and saved the page. This now creates a static page (similar to the about page) but which will show my last 15 entries to delicious at any given time.

I tweaked the styles by finding the css styles used by delicious listed on style page, and adding that to my style.css file, with appropriate modifications. For the curious, this is what I wound up using:

 
.delicious-posts {
        margin: 1em;
        padding: 0.5em;
        font-family: sans-serif;
        font-size: 120%;
}
.delicious-posts ul, .delicious-posts li, .delicious-banner {
        margin: 0;
        padding: 0.25em;
}
.delicious-post {
        border-top: 1px solid #eee;
        padding: 0.25em;
}
.delicious-odd {
        background-color: #f8f8f8;
}
.delicious-posts a:hover {
        text-decoration: underline;
}
.delicious-posts a {
        text-decoration: none;
}


No further need for the plugin I used to use… If I wanted a quick list for the sidebar, I’d go back to the javascript page, and choose something like 5 entries, no notes, no titles or afterwards to make it as short and quick as possible, and then drop that into my sidebar.php file. Easy.