Have you heard of Blue Monday? Not the song by New Order, but rather the “scientific” theory that the Monday of the last full week of January, which was yesterday, is the most depressing of the year. Hopefully this theory was proven wrong for you, but just in case it rang true, the Moovida Team has come up with a list of recommendations to start infusing post-Blue Monday with positive vibes.

5) Get comfy

There’s nothing worse than feeling uncomfortable. Whether it’s wearing clothes that don’t fit you, or being forced to watch Spanish tv broadcasting (expats are behind me on this), it bites to be in a situation that doesn’t feel quite right. The Moovida team recommends you get organized to avoid mediocre entertainment. How? First, get Media Center harware that includes Moovida, and browse our plugins for quality content. Moovida makes it easy for you by offering a 5% discount.

4) Never stop being entertained

Wifi has become our best friend, allowing us to stay connected 24/7. Instead of moping on your way to work this week, make sure to stream funny videos and good tunes on your mobile for the trip. The Moovida Team recommends a Nokia N900 Unlocked Phone/Mobile Computer. It’s ain’t cheap, but it’s currently the only mobile powerful enough for Moovida… we’d love to have Moovida packaged for it one day . It’s got the usual goods, Wifi, 5 px camera, GPS, Blue Tooth stereo music, so you can stay entertained while on the road.

3) Diversify your stimuli

Let’s face it, your local cable only allows you to watch a limited number of channels, 90% of which is mediocre at best. Watch what you want, when you want, on your own time thanks to Moovida’s plugins. Here’s a sample of some of the great content you can find:

• Funny vids

• Explore new music

• If you’re thinking of other kind of stimuli, I’ll let you use your sense of initiative to find the appropriate links…

2) Read more

How about reading 52 books in a year? Or if you haven’t gotten started yet, 49… Kindle can help you make it happen by allowing you to download a book under 60 seconds. Reading just got a whole lot easier with this gadget, so no more excuses (or maybe one more excuse not to exercise).

1) Produce something

Let’s face it, most of us prefer sitting back, relaxing, and letting ourselves be entertained. To conquer this sense of passivity ruling our lives in winter, be creative and produce something! Consult Vimeo’s plugin on Moovida for some cool suggestions… or produce your own video to share with friends or the whole world via YouTube and Vimeo.

Moovida’s beta tester program is kicking into full swing by making the Justin.tv plugin available for testing. You heard right, one of the most important live video sites on the web with over 500,000 channels broadcasting live content will be going through rigorous testing before it’s available to all Moovida users. Beta testers, this is your time to shine! If you’re a first timer to this blog and wondering what the heck a beta tester is, find out here.

Justin.tv’s got a large variety of content in 20 languages, in plenty of categories ranging from Entertainment to Animals. There’s even a channel entitled Chicken Coop Living where you can follow the exciting life of chickens in an enclosure… If you already followed the link, I apologize for taking part in wasting 5 seconds of your life you’ll never get back. If you follow the link after this warning, well you asked for it.

Besides useless chicken streaming, there actually is cool content. For a humorous stroll down memory lane by outspoken and slightly nutty commentator ThatGuyWithTheGlasses, check out the Nostalgic Critic. He’s worth it!

Arte, the award winning plugin (as in Moovida’s developer contest award), has been recently upgraded to support videos from the site in German. The plugin reserved for French and Germans will automatically detect in which region users are located to play the corresponding language. If you’re in bizarro world and wish to view videos in the other language, for example a French person living in Germany (crazy!), you can simply change the option in the plugin’s configuration file.

Big thanks to community developer Guillaume Desmottes for this latest plugin release.

Some of you may have noticed that the Grooveshark plugin “went missing” from Moovida’s library in the past few weeks. We’ve had a few mishaps with it and decided to temporarily remove it until it was fixed. Well now that the special day has finally come, I’m announcing its healthy recovery.

Feel free to express your gratitude for its comeback to Moovida, or just give us holla.

Facelifts come under many forms, and we’re not talking about the kind with the painful swelling. In our case, the Moovida web facelift was long overdue, and hopefully with this site, newbies to Moovida will have a good first impression from the moment they visit our homepage. Moovida’s UI has been a strong point for us and now we have a website design to make it proud!

So please, go ahead and enjoy Moovida’s new web, and don’t forget to tell your friends about us… (hint: the “Share This” link below makes it easy for you).

My name is Michał Sawicz, you can find me on Moovida’s IRC, Forums, etc., where I come by the nickname of Saviq. I live in Wroclaw, Poland and I’ve been a Linux admin / user for about ten years now (almost half of my life ). I have since become an eager FOSS enthusiast and evangelist. I’ve done my share in translations at first and then started to properly contribute as much I can to many different open projects I’m fond of. Moovida is the first big project I get my hands on. Coming from translation, my initial focus was to get Moovida properly internationalized. The project is also my training background in Python, as most of my knowledge of it came from working with Elisa and Moovida. I really like the project and will try and keep ‘em  [plugins] coming

Michal is Moovida’s most active and prolific Forum member and moderator, and is responsible for the Vimeo, CNN and We Are Hunted plugins on Moovida.

Every now and again we can get complaints from Moovida users about hardware related problems. No, we’re not perfect, but often enough, neither is the user’s hardware, which is why we recommend Verybox.

Verybox is a Spanish based company delivering custom hardware solutions. You can select the type of hardware you want (media center, professional, xGamers or home), choose from a wide selection of models, then configure to your needs. Not only does Verybox have very competitive pricing, lucky for you Moovida & Verybox are in the giving mood and offer 5% off any Verybox hardware order, all you have to do is enter this promotional code when making your order: Moovida09.

So why not give a Moovida Media Center gift for the holidays this year? Moovida already comes pre-installed in all Verybox machines, just thrown in any infrared remote control, and there you have it! It seems the Christmas lighting and cheesy music is getting to us…

Note: Check out our minimal hardware requirements to put together the ideal Verybox machine for Moovida.

As you may have already noticed in an earlier post, Moovida’s dev contest brought some goodies to its user community, namely with the Vimeo plugin.

You’re most likely already familiar with Vimeo, YouTube’s younger, more attractive and less trashy sibling.  Why less trashy? Maybe because Vimeo has strict upload guidelines, and was created by a community of artists.

So yesterday while I was perusing through the Vimeo plugin on Moovida, I came across some good recommended content, like NIN in concert. Cool beans. Image quality is great, and when searching for videos, both Vimeo and YouTube results appear, just in case you wouldn’t find anything in Vimeo (which would be my first choice for the reasons mentioned above). If you’re feeling uninspired, I’d suggested checking out the videos from the always entertaining Montreal based electrofunk duo Chromeo:

Chromeo “Night By Night” Video

Chromeo “Fancy Footwork” Video

Congratulations are in order for Michał Sawicz, Moovida’s tireless community member responsible  for the Vimeo, CNN and We Are Hunted plugins. To show your appreciation for his work and for bettering the lives of Moovidamankind, vote for Michal’s Vimeo plugin.