Pretty Things
One of my coworkers (Thorsten -- also does some work on KArm) saw my background today and suggested that I should put some of those that I use (which are generally from my own photos) up online. I've since obliged him. The thumbnails from a couple of my favorites are below:
The 21 that I picked out as my favorite background-ish photos are here (notably not my favorite photos, but these mostly work as backgrounds).
Ugly Things
JuK actually sort of compiles against Qt 4 now, but it ain't exactly pretty. I did kind of a marathon of commits last weekend to synch up the changes from the 3.5 branch to trunk and then worked towards getting it to build. David came and finished things off the next day. It still doesn't actually do anything interesting, but it's encouraging seeing it run. There will likely be a visual overhaul to the interface and various redesign of the internals to work with Qt 4's Interview, but well, lot's-o-warm-fuzzies seeing it build and start.
Also in the 3.5 branch I recently checked in support for GStreamer 0.10, which I've been using at home for the last couple of weeks and seems quite stable.
In the last bit of kde-multimedia news, Matthias and I have been cleaning up the kdemultimedia module in Trunk and have removed many of the deprecated aRts plugins and moved the maintained stuff out of kdemultimedia and into an artskde module. It's nice to get things tidied up a bit.
Invisible Things
TagLib has also seen quite a few bug fixes of late, a few new features, along with a lot of new folks working on bindings. Even though I haven't updated the application on the page in a while, I'm aware of over 20 applications using it these days and have heard rumors of it being used in some mp3 players. It's also now the top listed ID3v2 implementation on id3.org. A 1.5 release will probably show up in the next month or two.
Intangible Things
For the last few months I'd been doing what I call "dancing in my room". I call it "dancing in my room" because, you know how sometimes when there's some really music you just catch yourself dancing in your apartment? Not as a social or alcohol or flirting induced phenomenon, but just because, well, it seems like the thing to do? That's kind of been how I've been coding for the last few months. I've been coding on stuff not so much to release stuff or have things to show, but just because I wanted to understand a problem or well, just because coding is an interesting means of exploring certain classes of things. I've hacked up a couple of small applications for my own use which will likely never see the light of day, but it kind of reminded me why I got into OSS in the first place -- because I like writing code. I was disconnected from November to January which gave me an opportunity to really step away from some of the more bureaucratic bits of the whole scene and get back to the fun parts.
My hacker mojo is returning. I've been writing more code at work in the last few weeks than I've had a chance to in a long time; my commit rate in KDE isn't breaking any personal records, but it's starting to reenter the range where I feel active again, which is nice.
The last few months had been pretty stressful for me, and the last month has involved some pretty difficult personal decisions (nothing like I'm selling my kidneys or moving to Zimbabwe), but as some clarity has started to surface I'm kind of getting back to my roots -- coding, reading (I've read Tom Robbin's Villa Incognito, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and am about half-way through Chomsky's On Nature and Language as well as picking up the MIT Press Computer Music Tutorial -- 1200 pages -- in the last month.) and music. Hopefully this trend will continue. 
Syndicate Blogs
hey, i've seen that before...
Nice pics. I had just closed the one of Budapest when I thought -- that looks oddly familiar (interestingly, *after* I had closed it) -- so then I reopened it to confirm
.
Snow Crash is also one of my favorite books.
Backgrounds
Hmm... Three things here, about your backgrounds:
1. Pretty!
2. These would work really well with SmoothSlideSaver - opengl sliding picture slidescreen screensaver (works over dual-head too)... Really nice for a serene effect - http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=33197
3. i use SmoothSlideSaver with some pictures i took of mum and dad's garden - http://www.leinir.dk/temp/gardenpics/
Glad to see Juk go getting over the hump
Kudos for making Juk possible. I am bit concerned about its "functional" future though. It seems Juk's (apparent?) inability to handle internet radio may hold it back. I have my playlists in it, but switch to amaroK for internet radio.
It's a bit embarrasing to admit, but amaroK just plain overwhelms me with bling. I hoped I could just use Juk for my music needs.
Is implementing this just a matter of teaching Juk read .pls files, or the whole internet streaming thing is just too big?
Anyway, thx again for cool app.
Internet Radio
The real reason that it hasn't supported it was that it makes the playing backends much more complicated. If JuK was bound to a single backend, as it may again be in KDE 4, it's relatively simple.
That said, I don't view the amaroK uptake as a bad thing. I've never been fond of its interface -- it's just too much for me, but I get along well with the developers and there are quite a few things we cooperate on.
Things like internet radio and CD ripping and whatnot do fit with The JuK Concept (tm); it's just a matter of getting around to them and they'll probably be functional rather than entertaining.
(My line for a long time has been that JuK is primarily for people that see a music player as a utility for playing music. amaroK is for folks that want to be entertained by their music player. Neither is bad, but they preclude some different interface concepts.)
Really the difference isn't
Really the difference isn't entertainment, but being playlist-centric vs. collection-centric. amaroK presents a playlist with the ability to add stuff from your collection, JuK presents the collection with the ability to make a playlist.
When I'm at a iTunes-using friends house I get really annoyed by its interface and it mostly comes down to it being collection-centric. (That and how your collection list randomly turns into a web page sometimes, obviously JuK doesn't suffer from that
We're just in two separate camps.
Not so much anymore.
While that was true in the early days of amaroK, it really isn't now. I mean, these days when you start up amaroK it scans your music files and stores then in a collection and then there's a "All Collection" playlist about four clicks away. At one point I'd argue that there was a real functional difference there (back when amaroK was much closer to being the KDE XMMS); these days it's just a different starting point. (There are some subtleties in there that come from the historic orientations, but I don't think that you can still say these days that such is the major difference between amaroK and JuK.)
amaroK vs. JuK
Ha! Got your attention
The concept of the two players opposed to eachother doesn't really exist, as you say the two players target different types of people. Basically we have had a lot of people suggest decidedly iTunes-like features that just wouldn't work in amaroK, and it is a god-sent to be able to tell them that JuK already exists and works just fine 
Reading back here a bit, i snipped out the text " - while i'm not entirely sure i agree with your suggestion for that difference, there is a difference :)" from above... The reason for snipping is that i rereread your message there and noticed that yes, i do actually agree. Technically amaroK is playlist-centric (you have a playlist, into which you can stuff all sorts of music entries) and JuK is collection-centric (you have a central collection, from which you can create a number of playlists using different methods). But, as you say, JuK is brilliant at staying in the background and just sitting there serving you music from that collection. amaroK can sit there, but where it sits best is in the foreground where you get all sorts of information on your tracks and such. Very different purposes
Note to self (and anyone else, obviously): Try to get somewhere with that amaroK Guide for JuK users/JuK Guide for amaroK Users thing...