Skype is a quite popular at work – used for most of our online conversations with the Seattle office.

This means I tend to have bothкомпютри Pidgin and Skype active at any one time. As well as having a single consolidated view of all my I.M. accounts… I personally prefer the Pidgin interface;

Just came across Skype API Plugin for Pidgin – created be Eion Robb.

UPDATE: after using this for a few days… I turned it off again. Pidgin was unstable, Skype didn’t always start automagically in the background.

Last night I spent a bit of time attempting DVD playback on the latest Ubuntu – Hardy Heron Beta.

Whether I tried vlc / totem / ogle / mplayer – I was getting the following hard crash

X Error of failed request:  BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation)

I was running my Sony SZ Laptop in ’stamina’ mode – which uses an Intel i810 graphics card. I had to sift through quite a few pages before I came upon a solution that worked:

Add the following line to the Device section of your xorg.conf file:

Option "LinearAlloc" "16000"

Also checked out bluetooth-alsa again – came across this site to ease the installation of a2dp (stereo bluetooth headset) on Linux. Worked incredibly well – comes with a nice script to toggle between speaker/headset. VLC & Amarok play nice as soon as you select the ASLA device as ‘bluetooth’.

(Watched a fair bit of TV over the weekend; West Wing, Lost, Southland Tales, Meet the Spartans, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford)