I just installed Wine on my Gentoo system (just “emerge wine”, oh how I like portage!). Thinking that winex was required to run anything involving DirectX, I tried out StarCraft with a feeling that it wouldn’t work.

Installation works fine, intro loads, game loads! Further than I thought I’d get. But then, alas, no keyboard! So I couldn’t even type my name in to start a game. However, a quick Google revealed the solution. Adding a couple of lines to the wine config file (’[AppDefaults\starcraft.exe\x11drv] “DXGrab” = “Y”’, if you’re wondering) sorted that out. So now I have StarCraft working. Which is nice.

We went to a gig last night. We saw the Black Keys at the Fleece and Firkin. Only one word needed: amazing. They really were. It was one of the best gigs I’ve been to in a long time, at least as good, if not better, than the Muse gig.

You’ll need some background to understand quite why we were so blown over. I first heard the Black Keys on 6music a few months ago, playing a live set on John Peel’s show. I was listening to it in the background, not properly, only taking away the fact that I quite liked the music and that it was the Black Keys playing.

Ah, now I see why we in the UK have to wait until April to get an iPod Mini : that’s when Apple plan to open the iTunes Music Store over here. Good move, Apple, from a business point of view. I suppose good for me aswell, because it means that I have three more months to convince myself that it’s a bad idea to get one!

But… 4GB of music… to listen to… in a small package… so good… damn; it’s good I have those three months!

I think I may have found a media player that I actually like on Windows: Musik.

It’s a cross-platform program, but I think I’ll be sticking to Rhythmbox on Linux just because it’s more polished and follows the HIG very closely. That makes it more consistent with the other apps I use, which is good =)

However, I’ve been using Windows for developing SharpMenu and I have been at a loss for a media player to use. Apple’s iTunes is a very nice program, but it just seems clunky and out-of-place on my desktop. It doesn’t help that re-sizing is so slow either. Winamp just doesn’t stand up to the might that is Rhythmbox/iTunes, though I used to like it, it just doesn’t cut it now. I’ve also tried foobar 2000, which is what I settled on for a while before I found Musik. Foobar is fast and uncluttered, things I like. However, I found myself missing the searching power and speed of iTunes, so it was never quite there.

Keith writes a post over at asterisk* about how web standards are now second nature, that, to him, other methods just don’t come to mind when designing a web page. Whilst I don’t want to sound egotistic about the whole thing, I’d say his sentiments are pretty much what I was getting at when I said that using standards is just easier for me; they’re now second nature to me aswell.