Check out my broother’s YouTube channel. Way cool.

The Backstory:

I am a huge fan of the Amazon MP3 store. In order to buy complete albums in one go, however, you need to have their Amazon MP3 Downloader application. When they launched the MP3 store they only had Mac and Windows versions of the client.

Shortly after they announced a linux version and I was overjoyed. Well, the linux version has launched and is only officially available for certain versions of certain distributions: Suse 10.3, Debian 4, Fedora 8, and Ubuntu 7.10. Obviously they don’t get the whole linux thing.

After downloading and digging into the different packages I found that really the only issue is that the application uses some Boost libraries. Since different distributions have different versions of the boost libraries as a standard package, and different naming conventions for the libraries on top of that, they need to distribute them specifically for the platforms.

Arch and Ubuntu are currently on the same rev of Boost (1.34.1) but they name the libraries differently. A few symlinks however and the Amazon mp3 application runs just fine. So I whipped up an Arch pacman package for it.

The file:

Right-click, save as:

amazonmp3-1.0-3-i686.pkg.tar.gz

then pacman -A amazonmp3-1.0-3-i686.pkg.tar.gz as root or sudo it.

It will automatically grab Boost and other dependencies as needed.

Updated 3-10-2008 to version 1.0.3

Author Neil Gaiman ran this online poll where he stated he was going to give one of his books away as a free download. I felt the obvious choice was American Gods and I am happy that it won. Now assuming that you have the patience to read a novel on your computer screen you can download it from this page.

American Gods is worth a read if you like shattering some conservative stereotypes while holding dear to your anti-media ones. (I liked it a lot)

When is Battlestar Galactica Season 4 finally going to start! I am so desperate for BSG action I’ve been watching Buck Rogers on nbc.com

(Normally this would be a twitter post but I lost my twitter password and don’t have time to go fix that right now)