So much to do so much to say

Wouldn't you know it. One of the few times I have many many (ok like 3 or 4) things to talk about I don't have the time to do it. I'd like to give each the time they deserve so I'll just list them here now so I can come back and do it right.

1. My disasterous upgrade from Ubuntu Dapper to Edgy - a great post on that from someone else is here
2. My (I mean OUR as in "Mine and Aimee's") new MP3 player, the Sansa e280 ( I think that's right) is here. I want to do a review but I've only had it a couple of days so it's probably best that I wait on that one.
3. Rifftrax!! They did the Matrix and Star Wars Episode One is next. Aimee and I did the Matrix last night and all I can say is that my Linux based sides are split (you have to hear/watch to understand that completely)
   

We also carved jack-o-lanterns over the weekend.  I'll post those to my Flickr account as soon as I can.

technorati tags:ubuntu, edgy, sansa, rifftrax, linux

Blogged with Flock

Random post

Just thought this was cool...
I stumbled across this blog today

Evilmadscientist.com

They linked to this group:
Stick Figures in Peril

good stuff

XGL+Beryl+KDE=OMFG

All I can say is wow. If anyone out there has Kubuntu on a half-way decent system then go to this link.

It's a very simple process to get running (it's specifically for an ATI card but if you have an Nvidia card installed with the nvidia driver it should still apply) and it looks AMAZING. This is way past what I saw just a few months ago with the Kororra live CD. I've only been running it since last night but I haven't had any major crashes...some minor glitches but overall not bad. After spending some time with Vista I have to say I find Aeroglass to be laughable compared to what they're doing with Beryl. It's simply amazing AND there's a menu GUI for controlling the different effects (there's LOTS of different effects). I've got it running on my 64bit system (dubbed BlackAdder) and I haven't seen any significant slow down. Try this out if you can!!!! I'll try and post some screenshots soon.

Photo-op

Aimee and I went and picked us some apples yesterday. I tooks me some photographs while we were there. I hope you likes 'em.







Click here to see the entire set.

The Big 2

Let me rail against Microsoft and Apple for one moment...they are unrelated topics but ones that have been bothering me nonetheless.

Vista can be a royal pain in the ass. Case in point: having to constantly allow Firefox permission to run. Now, I'm all for added security especially when it comes to Windows but, 1)Once I've authorized a program to run, why should I then have to reauthorize it everytime thereafter? 2)Even this "security feature" of Vista doesn't work consistently. I installed Synergy on my system and failed to do so "as administrator" (the new Vista equivalent of running a program "as root"). It ran fine for a few days then all of the sudden...plop. Nothing. I tell it to run, I have to authorize it to run, and it appears to run but still does nothing. Reinstalling as administrator fixes the problem, sort of. Bringing us to 3) Now whenever a program (such as Firefox) needs authorization to run, my keyboard and mouse via Synergy won't work. I'm still at a loss as to why this is. Vista isn't suspending TCP/IP activity. As I can see that downloads are still running in the background). Perhaps since Synergy is an added program it gets suspended while Vista checks to see if another, completely unrelated program should run (it makes sense in a twisted, Windows sort of way). If I use my non-Synergy-attached-to-the-system-for-real mouse to click the box, Synergy comes back. Pretty crazy and very annoying.

Now, onto Apple. I have an iPod. If I had it to do over again I'd never have bought the damn thing. In two years it's been replaced twice and it looks like #3 is right around the corner. In the meantime, I've bought a Sandisk Sansa solid state 8gb player that is roughly the same size as a Nano and has the same storage space but runs me about $100 less for more features including: an FM radio (I won't use it but it's a feature), a miniSD slot that will take upto a 2gb card, true plug and play drag-your-mp3s-to-the-hard-drive-and-they-fucking-play functionality, a picture and video viewer (extra software needed) and a voice recorder. Once I get my iPod fixed I'll be using it as a portable hard drive. I wonder if there's firmware that's good for that...

Tester

Testing out a new install of Flock on my lappy.  I want to load Songbird and the Democracy player as well since I'm a little incapacitated.  Let me tell you, tooth extraction isn't always as smooth as they say it will be.  I wanted to post something about Vista and getting a new MP3 player.  Maybe later...tomorrow...

Blogged with Flock

Tinker-ings

Not much new is going on. I've upgraded my Vista install from RC1 to RC2 and haven't had any major problems-- yet. I installed Synergy to share out my keyboard between my Vista install, Aimee's XP box, and my as of yet un-reformatted Ubuntu box and it's going great. Speaking of that system, I need to reformat that bitch into a non64 bit kernel.  No offense, but the state of Linux 64bit support may well be beyond XP (or Vista from what I hear) but it still isn't useable for a desktop.  Multimedia support on it makes me feel like I'm living about 5 years ago cursing at my computer for not displaying Flash or ANY media plug-in correctly.  Oh well, no biggie at least I have a choice  ;-)

technorati tags:synergy, vista

Blogged with Flock

Songbird=Mixed Bag

Well after talking with a friend about it and hearing about a new RC, I decided to try Songbird again.  They finally have Ipod support, something that had kept me from giving it more than a passing glance in the past,so I was excited.  That soon faded since I haven't had the opportunity to try that aspect yet.  Unfortunately, my experience hasn't been all that good.  It seemed to go fine testing it at work earlier yesterday, managing all of 2 albums on my computer there.  It played them, perhaps with some fuzz and other distortions here and there but overall, no major complaints.  I had heard that there were stability issues but I encountered none. I ran it all day without a hitch.

  But after coming home and turning it loose on my 180g remote-server-connected music collection the cracks really start to show.  I started it processing my collection before going to bed.  In the morning, it had finished and was thrashing my processor keeping it between 99-100%.  Being based on Firefox (as much as I love it) I'm not surprised to see that it was eating about half (512mb) of the available memory in the system and forcing other applications to a slow crawl.  Trying to actually play music was another exercise in futility, hangs and hick-ups every 30-50secs made it virtually unlistenable.

I really like the ideas and design/interface that fuels Songbird but damn, it needs an assload  of work before it's ready even for "beta" stage.  All bugs and glitches aside, I do take one issue.  I don't see where Songbird necessarily benefits from having a full web-browser built-in.  I can see where it's useful for, say navigating Odeo and then subscribing to podcasts (something that I assume is either a) in the works or b) already there and I'm just too dumb to find it) but I just don't think it's the best way to handle it.  I realize that at this point they need to just focus on having a useable player (there's still a lot of work to do in that regard) but when they go to add the spit and polish I would love to see a system that's more rss feed based with an interface that's more tailored for the Songbird experience than just another webbrowser that you have to worry about having plugins etc. for.  If you could type in an address and be presented with a list of feeds containing media off the site or...well....something else....I'm not sure exactly what.  I need to give this more thought but I'm kinda tired with the old idea of "Well we've got a new piece of software, let's cram a webbrowser in it".  To many bad memories of SonicStage....*shudder*....ugh....Not that Songbird is THAT bad, in fact being built on Firefox it would be surprising if it didn't have a browser...that being said, I really think that with RSS, and the seperation of content from presentation (a la CSS) that there should be new and exciting ways for users to interact with the same web content...it could be harvested and delivered in a way that is more customized to what a person is doing-- geared for music/media for example....

I need to give this more thought but I'm excited by the idea...

technorati tags:songbird, firefox, rss, css

Blogged with Flock

Nuttin New

Been working on the wedding website but not ready to show that off yet ;-)   Mostly wedding stuff has been occupying my time lately.  Torrentflux is running fine.  I wish I had more time to devote to my overdue server project (backup scripts, LCD etc.) but the wedding is definitly more important.  Gotta have priorities, ya know?

Blogged with Flock

w00t!! explained for the n00b

woot is a deal-a-day site.  Every day they have a different deal on something.  Sometimes cool, sometimes lame but usually a good price and in pretty limited quantities.  Every so often, they do 2 things.  One: a woot off.  It's a day long event where they do a marathon of different items.  They only bring out the new items when they've sold all of the old ones (they have a meter on the page that indicates the level of stock at the moment).  Right now it's a little unusual b/c they've been in woot-off mode for more than a day and a half and I don't know when it will end (no one really does).

The other thing unique to the site: Bag of Crap.  Now it doesn't sound all that appealing but let me explain- since they are a deal-a-day site, in fact, THE deal a day site, they get lots of merchandise filtering through their office.  Sometimes they get stuff left over from a sale or only get one or two of a particular thing.  In any event, the bag of crap is just that: a bag of promo and miscellaneous left-overs that have been hanging around in their offices.  They only charge you a buck per bag and you can get upto 3.  Most of the time, they're just ok stuff.  Headphones or computer speakers maybe an optical mouse or something.  But sometimes, oh sometimes they give you awesome stuff.  People have posted in their forums getting a Robosapien, a very expensive pocket PC and even an Xbox 360.  Because of this, the bags of crap (or any other B O C words, it started with "Blinged Out Cabbage" and "Bandolier of Carrots") are highly coveted.  If you check the Digg front page right now you'll see that there's a story about the woot memebers being livid b/c woot's servers crashed and crashed hard when the "boards of canada" came on early this afternoon.

I was very fortunate to get my 3 bags o' craptitude.  Now I just have to wait to see what they are....

technorati tags:woot

Blogged with Flock

Vista::Reloaded

I loaded Vista on my older system! It was still choking while loading on my newer, 64-bit system (blue-screened on the install, go figure) so I loaded it on the computer I built while I was at home (good ol' blue). It's an Athlon 2800, 1 gig RAM and a 256 mb video card. Right now I haven't run into any problems except a couple of drivers not being automatically installed but I added them manually and it seems to be running fine. I'm really surprised at how well it's running on an older system with only half the recommened memory. It's a very pretty operating system with some neat visual effects and a cool "gadget" dock on the desktop that you can add small applets to (like an analog clock, a post-it pad for notes etc.) So far, so good! In the appearance department tho, it still doesn't really hold a candle to XGL and Compiz. Oh wait, has anyone seen Beryl? It's a fork off of the Compiz project. Pretty cool stuff...

http://youtube.com/watch?v=i0ZtcxHUSDQ

Someday I will get around to loading that on my system. Someday....

Right now I've finally found RC2 and need to get that loaded.

Also: I've got Torrentflux fully functional. Generally, it tends to help if you've got a bittorrent client installed if you want to download torrents :-P

Advetures in Burning

Wow, copying DVDs has sure come a long way since I last attempted it.  I used to have to intstall software then play the DVD in a seperate player and then run the copying software and then burn a disc.  Now all I have to do in Ubuntu is right click the DVD icon and click "Copy this DVD".  The times have-a-changed quite rapidly.

Blogged with Flock

Unnecessi-squiddy

Well, once again I have been proven wrong. A proxy server isn't necessary for Torrentflux at all. Courtesy of the fine men and wimmin of the torrentflux community board is a shell script that will pass .torrent files onto the server. All it requires is setting it up in the browser and a click. No proxy needed. It works really well. Now if I could just figure out why Torrentflux won't work I'll be in business.

technorati tags:torrentflux, bittorrent

Blogged with Flock

Squid-ward Ho!

Starting to work with Torrentflux made me realize how necessary it is to run it in conjunction with a proxy server. Even with the additional search engine add-ons, courtesy of the kindly community hacking-around in the formus, it's still a necessity to setup a proxy so the cookies get handled correctly. A friend of mine had the idea of setting up the proxy so that any torrent file that gets downloaded would be forwarded to Torrentflux on the server. We're looking at Squirm. That's about as far as it's gotten. What with the wedding and all, personal projects have to take a backseat (Aimee has been VERY understanding to this point what with the Xbox and all and I love her for it). I've got Squid installed but I can't even get that working properly at the moment. Torrentflux is installed but not running anything since I've got no way to access it. C'est la vie.

In work related news: Cheers to Firefox for making their search engine bar so easy to code for. Jeers to Macromedia Contribute for screwing over my javascript to install the search engine.

technorati tags:squid, torrentflux, squirm, proxy

Blogged with Flock

A Flux of Torrents

I installed Torrentflux on my server last night/ this morning.  Torrentflux is a php based "torrent hub" program.  It's supposed to be a centralized place to download your torrents.  I'm interested b/c I've got a server that's up and running 24/7 so if I can move my torrent seeding/leeching to the server then that's one less box I have to have running.

I haven't had much of a chance to play with it but at first blush there appears to be a good number of options and it apparently will support multiple users on a single server, which is cool.  The biggest problem I see at the moment is the fact that I use closed tracker sites that require authentication in order to access.  The interface provides a search box for the open tracker sites (torrentspy, mininova, piratebay, etc) and an option to upload a torrent file that's been downloaded.  I suppose that would be an option but it would be a pain in the ass to have to go to a site, find the torrent, download it, then upload it to the server and run it from there.  There are worse things, I know, but it's not an ideal situation.  Now an ideal situation would be support for authenticated sites as well as a scripted auto-download feature that could be set to periodically search for certain keywords so I could get new TV show whenever they get uploaded.  They have something like that for non-pirated material ,the democracy player, but that's no fun.  I'm just going to have to spend some time and see if there are any other workarounds.

technorati tags:bittorrent, torrentflux

Blogged with Flock

The Mystery of the White Button

I stand corrected.  XBMC DOES have bookmarking and even a media "Library" feature (I would assume to facilitate navigation through IDV3 tags and to collect files from dispirate locations into one place).  The problem I found was that in order to make use of this feature you had to navigate to the directory then hit the "white button" to pull up a new menu.  Well, looking at the remote control of the Xbox, I saw many many white buttons.  Which was "the" white button?  After much internet searching and groping about blindly I found that the white button in question is on the Xbox controller, not the DVD remote.  Go figure.

Blogged with Flock

XBMC - First Impressions

I have to say I haven't been this impressed with a piece of media playing software since amarok and this has amarok beat simply on the fact that it plays video as well.  The navigation is intuitive and easy.  There are tons of features and I've played back DVD's, avi's, divix, xvid, etc. with no problems AND the ability to fastforward and rewind files with the Xbox remote (a feature missing from most video software players).  On the main page it features- Music, Videos, Pictures and Weather and it handles all of these features well. 

Now the bad- it could use more integration with network shares.  I think there should be some sort of "BookMark" feature to remember where your network devices are.  As it is everytime you turn the machine off and on you have to navigate back to the location of the share again and that's annoying.  They're easy enough to get to but there's also no ratings system for them or number played etc. as they're not integrated into the library (although there is last.fm support built in...awesomeness).  They have a weather feature built in that works...kinda well.  It started out in centigrade and I wanted to change but there wasn't a way to.  Well it changed on it's own after a couple of reboots.  I don't know why.  And it's not the most stable piece of software I've run.  It's crashed a few times but always when I was trying to do more than one thing at a time like watch a picture slideshow, listen to music and navigate the system options.  It could be a problem with my Xbox version.  It's a 1.0 and I think they added more ram to later models.

It could use a "News" feature to let you run customized RSS feeds but that's a hollow gripe since it handles everything else so well.  As I'm sure I mentioned before I got the after-market face-plate that has usb ports and an LCD built in.  Both work well (XBMC works with my wireless USB keyboard; the LCD is not quite as nice- it has a pretty slow refresh rate and it shows) and are integrated in XBMC well.  All I need now is a seperate receiver to replace my bookshelf stereo system so we can listen to music without the tv on. 

Overall, I've seen software that you have to pay for have half the functionality, features and spit and polish XBMC has.  It's pretty damn amazing.

I may work up a small quide on getting an Xbox specifically for the task of running XBMC.  It certainly beats having a computer in your living room (believe me, I tried) and it's not that expensive to do especially considering what you get.

technorati tags:xbox, hack, XBMC

Blogged with Flock