Random Loci

eReaders and eBooks. eEk.

2011-01-19T00:30:00.005+11:00

This has been re-formatted slightly from an email I sent to a family member, as I'm probably going to be ordering two of whatever we decide on. I'm leaning strongly towards the Nook at the moment, but I'm prepared to have my mind changed. Keep in mind, this is written from, and mostly for, an Australian perspective.

Let me know if anything is unclear, or I've missed anything that's important to you.

Intro:

I originally narrowed my choices down to 3 models:

1. The Amazon Kindle 3: Probably the current market leader. ( Amazon link )

2. The Barnes and Noble "Nook". ( B&N link )

3. The Kobo reader ( Kobo link, A&R link )

They all have more or less identical reading areas, 6 inch / 15.2 cm diagonal , 600 x 800 pixel screen with 16 levels of gray. I've not considered any of the full-colour options, as I'd like to use this out-and about, or while away from time to time, so good battery life is important. There are other readers out there, but none of them looked compelling to me, feel free to suggest others if you think I've missed something great.

WiFi or WiFi+3G?

The first choice was whether to go WiFi only, or WiFi+3G. WiFi only means you need to have access to a WiFi network to buy/download new books from the online stores. 3G means the unit has a SIM card and phone module embedded, which allows you to purchase anywhere there is phone coverage. This sounds good, but I decided against it for a few reasons:

It makes the unit more expensive.
It is likely to reduce battery life.
You're usually limited to using the manufacturers eBook store over the 3G connection.
I doubt I'll ever be completely stuck for reading material and absolutely have to have a new book right now.
Many smart phones can be turned into a mobile WiFi hotspot anyway, so you connect to the internet via your phone, and your eReader connects to the phone's WiFi. (Update - this is trivial, but I find I don't do it all that often, I do most of my book management and purchasing at home)

Battery life:

These are manufacturers claims, I don't know how accurate they are, but if true, all are OK by me. I don't think I could be away from power for much more than a week, so they're all acceptable.

1 Kindle: Up to month.

2. Nook: 10 days.

3. Kobo: 2 weeks or 10,000 page turns.

Formats:

1 Kindle : azw (Amazon proprietary format), pdf, html, mp3 audio. Notably - no ePub

2. Nook: ePub, pdf, html, mp3 audio. Also does pdb.

3. Kobo: ePub, pdf. No html, no audio.

The Nook and Kobo are very similar. They both do ePub, and pdf as their main formats, and don't to azw, which is the Kindles default format. The kindle doesn't do ePub. There are tools around to to conversions and such, but this is based on out-of-te-box functionality.

Libraries here seem to be all using ePub, so if you plan to use walk-in services from libraries, the Kindle won't cut it.This is reasonably important in my opinion.

Storage:

Realistically, they all have enough internal storage to hold metric bucket-loads of books, it's mostly text, after all. However, I like the idea of removable storage, and if you do want to use it for music playback, it's some extra headroom.

1. Kindle: 4 GB internal, not expandable.

2. Nook: 2 GB Internal, microSD card slot, up to 16GB

3. Kobo: 1GB Internal, SDHC card slot, up to 32 GB

Phone Apps:

These are apps which, strangely enough, run on your phone, allowing you to read from your collection when you don't have your device. I kind of like this idea, and in I've already downloaded the Nook and Kobo Android versions and had a bit of a play with them, downloading and reading some free eBooks. Certainly handy, but not critical. They've all got good solutions here as far as I'm concerned. I've read entire books on my phone and even the old palm, so in a pinch, it's good to have.

1. Kindle:Android, Blackberry, iPad, iPhone, Mac, Windows, Windows Phone 7

2. Nook: Android, iPad, iPhone, PC

3. Kobo: Android, Blackberry, iPhone, Palm

Web Features:

The Kindle and Nook both have web browsers, the Kobo doesn't. You're never going to use one of these devices as a serious internet tablet device, but I like the idea of being able to get on the web in some fashion, plus I have some ideas for using it at home for interacting with my home automation setup and such.

Other features:

The Kindle is the only one of the three to do text-to-speech. Not a big deal for me personally, I'm a podcast junkie anyway, generally having at least one or two other audio capable devices nearby, but a nice feature I guess.

The Nook has the extra colour touchscreen for navigation. Cute, and good for recognising/browsing book covers, although I suspect it will have a small effect on battery life.

Cost:

1 Amazon Kindle. Amazon will ship here. Their web site say it should be US $155 shipped. There are also people based here re-selling. Approx $240 per unit in Sydney, I'm not sure why the big difference, the exchange rate it pretty good at the moment.

2. Nook: Not available locally. B&N don't ship to Australia. Purchasing on-line elsewhere, I can get two of them here for just approx $206 each.

3. Kobo: Nice in that you can buy them retail in Australia. Angus and Robertson have them for $179

eBook Stores:

I picked about 20-30 authors and titles, and checked Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the Kobo bookstore and Borders. Prices and availability vary a lot. Prices in the US stores are typically a lot cheaper than the Australian equivalents. Amazon and B&N had the best ranges and prices by my estimation, although there may be a bit of technical messing about to purchase directly from the US stores, but I've got that more-or-less sorted out. Both the Nook and Kobo do ePub (with DRM), but you could transfer titles from any store to either.

Other links:

Wikipedia's comparison of eReaders.

--
John

More than the sum of it's singles

2010-07-17T22:39:00.001+10:00

Listened to a couple of whole albums on the 2 hour trip back from my parents' place tonight. Was listening to Live's "The distance to here" and thought to myself "There's scarcely even a sniff of filler on this disc". It an actual album that works end-to-end, in fact probably more so than as a bunch of individual tracks.

So do (m)any young-uns buys or listen to albums these days, or has the 99c track on iTunes destroyed this experience for future generations?

Here endeth the old-guy-back-in-my-day rant. Feel free to go all internet-music-critic if you must, but the particular album isn't really the point. Get off my lawn.

Little LEDs and Spaceships

2010-04-12T15:50:00.010+10:00

I was recently asked by a friend about helping to dress up some models for table top gaming. Putting small electronic bits'n'bobs'n'batteries inside various objects is something I'm not unfamiliar with, but I hadn't attempted this particular operation before.

The models aren't truly tiny, so I could use 3mm diameter LEDs for the undercarriage lights, and 5 diameter mm ones for the engine lights.

Overall, it think it turned out not too badly, although I haven't yet had any feedback as to how he went in the painting/decorating section yet. If nothing else, he should definitely be in the running for the "most liberal use of hot melt glue" category.

I've put a few more detailed pics below for those that care to get up close and personal. The top two are a little blurry as I turned off the flash to better show the LED's, but was too lazy to set up the tripod. The detail shots are all sharper.

Not shown are the battery packs. I used a 6V battery a little thinner than a AAA and about a third the length (9.5 mm diameter by 15 mm). I used heat shrink hold on the leads to make it into a flying-lead version so as to connect to the mini terminal blocks, for a solder-less battery swap for the end user.

Image Processing with Python

2010-03-07T21:43:00.008+11:00

I needed to turn this:

into this:

Why? Well, my wife wanted to paste smiley faces onto some triangles, rectangles and other shapes. The set with the outline is great, but she wanted to put faces onto triangles, rectangle's and some other shapes too. (She's a teacher, the shapes were warring, harmnony day is approachng and, and ..... it's complicated, trust me). Anyway, the borders looked a little odd.

As there were 60 of them to do (15 expressions in 4 different colours), I started thinking I'd figure out how to do some python scripting from inside GIMP, but after half an hour of futzing about, I decided that was too messy, and just decided to process the images directly. This is pretty easy actually. One of python's included batteries is the "Image" library.

I decided to tackle it thusly; modify any pixels within a specified annulus to transparent. I originally intended to check that the pixel was black before modifying it, but I forgot, and in this case, it worked just fine anyway.

Here's the code I used:

# RemoveAnnulus_01.py
# Removes a dark circle from smiley faces
# Replaces black pixels in a specified annulus with transparency
# Doesn't do anti-aliasing

import os
import sys
import Image
import math

# Parameters to modify pixels in an annulus
xMid=53 # Centre position
yMid=53 # (origin)
rInner=45.0 # Inner radius
rOuter=54.0 # Outer radius
xMax=106 # (Image size)-1
yMax=106

inputFile=sys.argv[1] # Input image file
outputFile=sys.argv[2] # Output file, will be overwritten if it exists

thisImage = Image.open(inputFile)
pixelArray=thisImage.load() # Use load method for pixel addresing mode

try:
reportMessage="OK"
for thisX in range(0,xMax):
for thisY in range(0,yMax):
dX=float(xMid-thisX)
dY=float(yMid-thisY)
thisRad = math.sqrt((dX*dX + dY*dY))
if ( (thisRad>rInner ) and (thisRad
pixelArray[thisX,thisY]=(0,0,0,0)

except IOError:
reportMessage="Failed"

thisImage.save(outputFile, "PNG")

print "%s:Processing [%s] to [%s]" % ( reportMessage,inputFile,outputFile )

I've not shown the script for iterating through the 60 different files, but that's not really the point of this post. This code works with two command line arguments, the input file, and the destination file.

BTW, none of this is meant as a slight on the GIMP's scripting capabilities, I just have little experience with them, and decided to go with something more familiar.

A Cyberspace Independence Declaration

2010-03-01T10:29:00.003+11:00

The "This Week in Google" podcast I just listened to mentioned the "Cyberspace Independence Declaration", written by John Perry Barlow. Leo read some excerpts and I thought a link to an audio version I enjoyed would be in order.

Link to MP3 audio, ~5 MB.

The reading is by Jan Ruback, and included as a bonus chapter at the end of his reading of Cory Doctorow's collectedion, Content. (Highly recommended, BTW) It's available a variety of audio formats on this internet archive page, the second bonus item after the numbered chapters. You can also play it directly from the embedded player on the page if you're so inclined (It's chapter 32 in the player).

The full text version is available, with a little background on the eff site. Here's the obligatory wikipedia article.

NFS Shares

2009-06-26T22:30:00.004+10:00

Modifying both mine and my wife's ubuntu Desktop machines (both running 9.04 at the time of this writing) to mount our music folder (on the MythTV box on the lounge room) locally.

The music is on the media box (called mythty) in the lounge room, at /media/ourmusic

Using NFS, to mount manually it's:

sudo mount mythty:/media/ourmusic /media/ourmusic

(That's servername:serverpath localpath)

Edited /etc/fstab to add:

mythty:/media/ourmusic /media/ourmusic nfs rw rsize=8192,wsize=8192

Using True Type Fonts with Ubuntu

2009-04-19T20:14:00.004+10:00

My wife does a fair bit of crafty stuff, and often finds weird and wonderful fonts to use with her creations. Often they're Windows TTF font files, which aren't linux native.

I simply get her to copy the fonts into a particular directory, and then run the following script.

sudo cp *.ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/username/
sudo cp *.TTF /usr/share/fonts/truetype/username/
mv *.ttf /home/username/Fonts/installed/
mv *.TTF /home/username/Fonts/installed/
sudo fc-cache -f -v

You can get all the bacground and other information you'll need in this article on the Ubuntu Wiki, which is where I got a lot of the info for this post.

It simply copies the files into a folder I created to hold installed TTF fonts, (/usr/share/fonts/truetype/username/) which will work for everyone, and then move the filed from the "todo" folder into a backup folder for reference. ( /home/username/Fonts/installed/ )

You'll have to restart any apps (Such as open office) to see the new fonts, but there's no need to log out or reboot.

Note, I commented on this issue a while back, here's the previous post.

Ubiquity

2009-02-18T23:17:00.005+11:00

I've been playing around with Mozilla labs ubiquity plug in in recent weeks. It's still in beta, and far from fully featured, but even so it's quite impressive.

Tonight I was reading comments on a boing boing post where a few of the commenters had used ROT13 to obscure spoilers. There are plenty of good sites to do the conversion for you (I'm too old/lazy to do that sort of thing in my head these days) but I thought to myself that this would be a perfect for for a ubiquity command.

I know the world isn't really crying out for a ROT13 utility, but I thought it would be a good way for me to test the waters in writing some browser code. My javascript-fu is far from strong, but it was surprisingly easy. I spent far more time futzing about with publishing it than I did writing the code itself.

You can check out my notes here. Even if you've no interest in my almost embarrassingly trivial utility, check out ubiquity for it's own sake. If you're a power web-user, you won't regret it.

Broken Windows Updates

2008-11-10T13:50:00.004+11:00

This post was inspired by a folder cleanup in which I found a note to myself from earlier in the year (May 27, 2008). I'm putting it here as a quick reference, as it's the sort of thing that happens once in a while, and filtering through all the google hits can be time consuming when you just need to fix something now. *

Symptom: Neither Windows Update or Microsoft Update would complete. The machine in question in this instance was a vanilla P4 somethingorother, running XP pro. Before finding this solution I tried a bunch of things, including an install of Service Pack 3.

You can read the full thread on the techarena forums. I found it via a google search, I'm not familiar with this forum in general. The bit that I needed is from post 3 in the thread:

Start regedit.exe and delete the following key (contains the WU
service configuration):

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\wuauserv

Do a reboot now!

Then run this command line (from a command prompt of from Start/Run, it
installs the AutoUpdate service (line will wrap in the newsreader!):

%SystemRoot%\System32\rundll32.exe setupapi,InstallHinfSection DefaultInstall
132 %SystemRoot%\inf\au.inf

(it must be a space between DefaultInstall and 132)

If it asks for your OS CD-ROM to get some files, just point it to the
folder %windir%\System32 (%windir% is typically C:\Windows).

Then run the following commands:

regsvr32.exe wuaueng.dll
regsvr32.exe wuapi.dll
regsvr32.exe wups.dll
regsvr32.exe wucltui.dll

Do a reboot again.

Then check if you can start and stop the Automatic Updates service
successfully from services.msc

These steps repaired the problem.

* Caveat: This sort of stuff does change from time to time, but it should still serve as an indication of the sorts of problems you should look for if you have similar symptoms. At the very least, you might include some of the relevant terms in your search to speed things up.

Resizing the swap partition size after install

2008-10-12T14:36:00.004+11:00

I just increased the amount of RAM in an Ubuntu web server from 256 MB to 1 GB. I wanted to increase the size of the swap file accordingly. There are various schools of thought as to how big the swap file should be, I went with 2 GB which is almost certainly overkill, but there you go.

My procedure was as follows:

Boot to using the Ubuntu8.04 live CD.
Use the partition editor to shrink the primary partition, and grow the the swap file partition and volume.
Write the changes to the disk.
Reboot to the server command line.
Determine the swap volume's new UUID using:

ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid

Edit /etc/fstab and change the UUID for the swap partition to the correct value
reboot
Check that the partition is correctly mounted with the "free" command. Don't mind that you may not be using any of the swap at present, but you can at least tell that it's there for when you do need it.

Text editing with multiple files on the command line

To make my life easier, and considering that my web server doesn't have a GUI I first saved the output of the ls command to a text file, and edited that so that it contained just a single line containing the UUID
I then opened fstab

sudo vim /etc/fstab

and then, at the end of fstab, I inserted the file I'd created with the command:

:r /home/john/uuid.txt

I copied the UUID to the appropriate spot, deleted the line at the end and saved the file.

There are plenty of good tutorials and command summaries for vi / vim around on the web if you need them. (here's one, and another). I admit I'm somewhat conditioned to using graphical editors, but one doesn't always have a choice.

VMWare server on Ubuntu

2008-08-06T16:56:00.003+10:00

I recently allowed my Ubuntu 8.04 desktop machine to do some upgrades, including some kernel updates. Everything went fine, except that my VMWare server would no longer run, it would start, I'd see the "Starting VMWare Server" block on the panel, but then it'd disappear.

It turns out that VMWare server installations are coupled quite closely with a particular kernel. This sounds sensible, after the fact, but all it really does is point out how shallow my *nix knowledge is in some areas.

Anyway, this fixed things just right, accepting all of the default options along the way:

sudo vmware-config.pl

Edited to fix spelling, and add that I had to repeat this exercise again after another Kernel upgrade 15/08/2008. Trivial after the last time, although still somewhat annoying.

Amarok setup

2008-05-31T14:01:00.002+10:00

On Susanne's PC:

Installed MySQL client from repos

Edit /etc/mysql/my.cnf, adding this line to stanzas [client] and [mysqld]:
default-character-set = utf8

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql restart

installed mysql server
had to enter password

susanne@arwen:~$ mysql -p -u root
Enter password:
Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 4
Server version: 5.0.45-Debian_1ubuntu3.3-log Debian etch distribution

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

set password for root@localhost = password('xxxxxxx');

mysql> CREATE DATABASE amarok;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.02 sec)

mysql> USE amarok;
Database changed
mysql> GRANT ALL ON amarok.* TO amarok@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'PASSWORD'
-> ;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> Aborted
susanne@arwen:~$

Long file names and removable media

2008-05-16T17:54:00.002+10:00

I was recently trying to copy a bunch of files onto an SD card, and kept getting an "out of space" error message, which was kind of odd, considering the 300 or so image files added up to a grand total of just over 20 MB, and the card was en empty 1 GB card.

Much poking, prodding, trying stuff from the command line and googling resulted in me learning more about VFAT than I'd originally intended. Anyway, it turns out that the implementation for long file names in VFAT is a workaround which means that if you have too many(1) long file names in the root directory you may chew up all your allocation units and get "out of space" errors long before the media itself is full.

Files in sub folders are not implemented in the same way, and therefore don't exhibit the same behavior. Put all of the files in a subdirectory and all is well.

References:

Wikipedia's entry on various implementations of Mr Gates' File Allocation Table.

A MEPIS forum post that really pointed me in the right direction.

Notes:

(1) How many depends on how long your file names actually are, you use one extra directory entry for every 13 characters. I think it's 512 directory entries, so assuming I had 302 x some number greater than 1, I was bound to run into problems.

Torrents and such

2008-05-14T22:14:00.002+10:00

I should probably do a general guide on torrent clients and sensible practices.

For reference:
I found a good description of abbreviations for TV episode torrent descriptions here, on Mininova.

Windows XP Service Pack 3

2008-05-14T11:28:00.005+10:00

I've just completed my first trial run with XP service pack 3. I installed it on top of a fresh copy of windows XP Professional, installed i a VMWare virtual machine. It installed without a hitch, seemed faster than the SP2 installation.

I've since run a Windows update check, and there were only 3 "high priority" updates. Not perfect, but much better than the several hundred MB of downloads and several reboots required after an SP2 installation.

My plan is to install a few basics and keep a copy of this VM for use as a base for various tasks. The first one will be a Visual Studio 2008 VM. 8 GB will probably be just enough* for this, but if I can keep it to 8 GB I can burn copies to DVD. My intention is to have task specific VM's, rather than one do-everything machine.

It will require a little more discipline, but I think it will serve me better in the long run, especially as I do more and more on Linux. Launching a Windows VM on demand should be more convenient than dual booting, except perhaps for gaming. However, my computer gaming time is pretty much non-existent these days, so it's not really much of a sacrifice.

* As it turns out, 8 GB really insn't enough for Visual Studio 8. Actually, the install was OK, but I removed C#, leaving me with less than 1GB. This, unfortunately, is unsufficient to install any of the docoumentation and reference material. I'll see how this goes, I can almost certainly have the doco on a second monitor / machine in most instances. Otherwise it'll be a 10-12 GB build.

Music for Norm

2008-05-13T23:34:00.002+10:00

For future reference:

The music from Norm's Tai Chi DVD is made by "The Silk Orchestra".

Here's a CC-Now link. The particular tracks on the DVD are are called "Remembrance" and "Mr Wu".

Ripping Audio from a DVD

2008-05-12T22:32:00.003+10:00

I was recently asked to get the audio from a DVD and place it on a portable media player. Here's how I did it, using Ubuntu 7.04.

1. Installed mplayer from the repositories

2. played the various chapter until I found the one I was looking for. This can be a bit of a hit and miss process, as DVD's often have rather strange title/chapter builds. The command is:

mplayer dvd://4

Where the "4" refers to the title number. This particular DVD has 6 titles. Apart from playing the chapter, you'll see a bunch of stuff in the console window. click "x" to stop playing. The output includes the following:

Playing dvd://4.
There are 6 titles on this DVD.
There are 2 chapters in this DVD title.
There are 1 angles in this DVD title.
audio stream: 0 format: ac3 (stereo) language: en aid: 128.
audio stream: 1 format: ac3 (stereo) language: zh aid: 129.
number of audio channels on disk: 2.
number of subtitles on disk: 0
MPEG-PS file format detected.
VIDEO: MPEG2 720x480 (aspect 2) 29.970 fps 7500.0 kbps (937.5 kbyte/s)
xscreensaver_disable: Could not find XScreenSaver window.
GNOME screensaver disabled

3. The red text above shows the information I needed. There were two audio tracks for this title, I was after the english (en) version. The command to extract the audio is: (This is meant to be all on one line)

mplayer -vc null -vo null -aid 128 -ao pcm:fast:waveheader:file=output.wav dvd://4 -chapter 1-2

The "128" refers to the audio track found in step 2.
"Output.wav" is the output file name.
chapter 1-2 means I want the audio from both chapters. "2-2" would have taken only the second.

4. Import the wav file into audacity, a superb audio editor.

5. I then used audacity to crop and normalize the audio I wanted, including adding nice fade ins and outs.

6. I Again in audacity, export the audio to mp3.

All Done.

References:

Most of this is derived from this post on the Ubuntu forums.

John's time sink, Issue #1

2008-04-16T14:51:00.006+10:00

This post is essentially a copy of an email I sent to a number of deserving victims.

Rather than forward every amusing thing I come across, I saved a few for later recommendation, distilled them, lost or threw away most of them, and decided to inflict what remained on a few of you. I also cleaned out a bunch of old temporary bookmark folders, so there's all sorts of randomness up for grabs.

Feel free to read/watch whatever takes your fancy. I'd be worried if any of you found that all the stuff that amuses me did the same for you. I'm pretty sure there's nothing outright offensive here, though.

Some sciency goodness:

A super shrimp that can detect circularly polarized light and punch through crab-shells or aquarium walls. (A new edition for the monster manual, perhaps)

Colour tile illusion. I didn't believe A and B were the same colour either. I used both a web colour picker, and slid some blocks around in a drawing program to make sure. Sometimes scepticism hurts.
.
General humour:

Now that April 01 is long gone ,and it's as safe to surf the internet again (well, as safe as it ever is). My pick was Unusual penguins Needs sound, documentary style, work safe.

Web advertising as it should be. Music and sound, but quite work safe.

Vaguely techy / general web stuff:

I admit I'm nerdy enough to think that Tresling would be cool. Probably a great drinking game, until the day after. (Has music, oh does it it have music)
The nerd handbook. This article has quite a few cliches, but some nuggets of truth too.
A comic predicting the future of the OLPC program.
Try this real-quick online quiz. I got 9 out of 12. I'm not sure if that's good or bad. (Actually, there's about a 7% chance you could get that score with a coin toss) Porn star or my little pony?

Weird, but amusing. (But weird)

I've no idea how I came across this story/blog. It's about the tracking down of a drawing some guys dad used to do all the time. It sounds riveting, I know, but I thought it was cool. Here's the first part.

Kids / Parenting related

From the foul mouths of babes. A cool discussion of young kids and bad language. You only have to see what's on mainstream TV now to realise that we need some newer, more offensive swear words, the old ones are getting somewhat passe.

"Why I let my 9 year old kid ride the subway alone". This one is controversial, and I'm not 100% sure on where I stand on this, but I'm certainly leaning towards agreeing with the article writer. I will , of course deny that if any of you call DOCS.

In a similar vein, here's a good video titled "5 Dangerous things you should let your kids do." (TED do great talks on all sorts of things)

What your kids know about science. Real answers from 5-6th graders. " I am not sure how clouds get formed. But the clouds know how to do it, and that is the important thing. ". Sounds about right.

Done, you can go outside and play now.

Recovering photos from a dodgy XD card

2008-04-16T00:00:00.004+10:00

I've done data recovery from portable/removable media before, but this is the first time I've done so under Linux.

I used "photorec", which is bundled with "TestDisk", the latter being the main part of the package, however I didn't actually get any images back until I used photorec itself.

It's a simple text based tool which is quite intuitive to use, and available from the repositories, so installing it was a snap. (Search for "TestDisk"). My discovery started with the results of a good old google (surprise surprise), here at debian-administration.org.

Anyway, I recovered the images from the card, and have re-formatted it, so hopefully it'll be some time before it causes any more problems. Mind you, at 128 MB, that particular card is a bit of a dinosaur, and on the small side.

I'm not sure what actually caused the data corruption. A couple of times I've had the camera lock up when shooting video when the card has been almost full. It's an Olympus C760 using XD, and been a pretty good all round camera.

Stuff to get for the kids

2008-04-04T21:17:00.003+11:00

Note to self, inspired by Neil Gaiman's blog:

Look for:
"Odd and the Frost Giants"

Another book:
The Starry Rift (Amazon) via boing boing

One campaign ends ...

2008-03-05T14:19:00.012+11:00

Gary Cygax has died.

I heard it via email from a friend and fellow gamer. As it turns out, this was about 5 minutes before reading it on a variety of news sources and forums I frequent. Not surprisingly, this news has travelled quickly, far and wide. The article originally sent to me was from slashdot:

Ask Slashdot: How has D&D (and tabletop roleplaying) touched/improved your life?

I think this is a good idea, and some of the responses make a good read. I, however,am not a slashdot poster, and figured I might as well use one of the platforms I do have. Thus the post you're reading right now.

In short, I think I'd say that D&D introduced me to genre of gaming that's got more to offer than most others, in my humble (but correct) opinion. It's fun, challenging, engaging, often unpredictable, forces me to think in areas outside of my expertise, and assume roles outside of my normal experience and/or comfort zone. That, and a chance to hang around with friends and just talk crap.

I won't make any of the obvious jokes. There are enough "failed saves" and resurrection jokes floating around now to easily fill 3d20 bags of holding. Besides, many of them are much better crafted than any I could come up with.

I didn't know Gary Gygax, so my thoughts are really about the game and it's impact, not the man himself. It turns out that he'd been of poor health for quite some time, and I honestly had no idea. He was, however, a guy largely responsible for creating a gaming genre that is a legacy few could hope to surpass. Game specific material aside, I've only read book of his, which from memory was a generic strategy / mapping guide of some sort, and a good read from memory. Google has failed me this time, I'll have to see if I can find the actual book at home.

People who enjoy the genre that is role playing, turn up almost everywhere I choose to spend my time. I find that people whom I've enjoyed discussions with in environments where we don't usually know much about each others backgrounds, or have a lot in common (thinking largely of on-line communities and the like), often turn out to be gamers.

That's not to say that I automatically like all the keen gamers that are out there, or that gamers are universally friendlier, smarter, less smelly or more amicable than any other group. They're not. There may even be empirical evidence that the converse is true for one or more of those attributes. My point is though, that of those people that I find myself getting along with, and wanting to spend time with, gamers, or at least people who are "game/gamer friendly", make up a larger proportion than would be expected statistically.

It's a matter of getting that causality/correlation deal properly sorted out. I think that bright, open minded people looking for a bit of fun are likely to end up being attracted to all that RPG's have to offer.

This is as good a reason as I'll probably ever have to resurrect an old page from a now defunct personal web-site, under the auspicious title of "games":

If you came here hoping you'd get to zap aliens or spank a monkey or some such nonsense, too bad. There are no flash/animation games here.

I'm a semi-keen gamer, mostly of the RPG (in a room with (mostly)real people) or real-time strategy (PC based) persuasion. While my busy schedule doesn't allow for much actual gaming these days (please, no flowers), I can still dream. right? If you think that my mention of RPG's makes me the spawn of Satan, you could well be right. Or not. I tell you what, roll 2d6 and consult the table below.
1: You're absolutely correct, gamers have no place in this universe.
2-10: Actually, you're just a narrow minded tool who likes nothing more than a good stereotype. You prefer games with a high probability of head injury.
11-12: You've probably run out of fingers. Please refer to the entry for results 2-10.
Have a nice day.

I thinks it's also a good time to point out a link to a great article by Garry Pellino, called "The Shame of the Game". I don't think it's as bad now as it used to be, although this could simply be the result of me being older, wiser, and less bothered by others opinions. It may still be a big deal for, say, a high school RPGer. I've got a decade or so before I have to worry about this on behalf of my kids.

Of course, wikipedia has a good article on Garry Gygax. Apparrently, he said:

"I would like the world to remember me as the guy who really enjoyed playing games and sharing his knowledge and his fun pastimes with everybody else."

Sounds like a pretty good sentiment to me.

A couple of links to related items at other places I frequent:

Pharyngula The Dungeon Master fails his saving throw. Some amusing and well composed comments below the post.

Skeptic Friends Network: RIP Gary Gygax

Boing Boing: Dungeons & Dragons Creator Gary Gygax Passes Away

The Register: Dungeons and Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax dies.

Audio format conversion

2008-02-28T22:18:00.005+11:00

I recorded some audio (my daughter singing), and wanted to send the audio to someone in a generic and friendly format, namely mp3. The Nokia handset records as an amr (Adaptive Multi Rate) file. A good player, like VLC will play this quite happily as-is, but a lot of people wouldn't know what to do with an amr file.

Ubuntu talks happily to my phone, so getting files off is easy. I have a USB data cable (CA-53) for the phone (Nokia 6234). Ubuntu mounts the micro SD card automatically, if you choose "Data mode" from the phone menu once plugged in. "Default mode" doesn't work. Depending on how your handset is setup, you may have to use the handset interface to copy stuff from the phone's built-in memory to the memory card.

I found a program called Mobile Media Converter, which does a great job. I simply downloaded the archive, extracted it somewhere and ran the executable from there. The interface is straightforward, and even supports drag'n'drop if you're into that sort of thing. No settings to tweak, it just works. It's based on ffmpeg, which you may or may not already have installed, but comes with it's own version, so should work regardless.

Fixing Microsoft Fonts

2008-02-26T23:05:00.005+11:00

I needed to use fonts from documents from Microsoft office, as well as make available some other specialist fonts.

Essentially it's matter of copying the font files to an appropriate directory. I put them in:

/usr/share/fonts/truetype/subfolder

After getting them there it's just a matter of reloading the font cache:

sudo fc-cache -fv

This link on another (far superior to this one) Ubuntu blog had all the info I needed.

What's in a name?

2008-02-17T21:56:00.005+11:00

Renaming a batch of files.

I needed to rename a bunch of images before uploading to flickr. The following worked well enough:

To preview: (Specified by the -n)

rename -n 's/Image/Saturday_/' Image*.jpg
Image000.jpg renamed as Saturday_000.jpg
Image001.jpg renamed as Saturday_001.jpg
Image003.jpg renamed as Saturday_003.jpg

To perform the task, delte the -n. or swap the -n for -v, verbose, which tells you what it's done.

rename 's/Image/Saturday_/' Image*.jpg

Essentially it's:

rename 's/old/new/' SearchFilter

Reference here.

Roaming Multi-OS Thunderbird

2008-02-07T21:41:00.001+11:00

Happy days.

I just managed to setup a relatively painless way to use Thunderbird as my mail client on both my Ubuntu machine, and a Windows XP laptop.

Background:

Late in 2007 my laptop had a coronary. It's had a long and fruitful life, but was suffering from a cracked mainboard, which caused the occasional instant shutdown if it was flexed at all. The LCD screen backlight was also dead, and I'd been using it with an external monitor (or KVM switch in most cases) for 6 months or more. Oh yeah, it also had a missing₁ "Y" keycap. Since this time I've been using my Gmail account to check my main email address, and a handful of others.

To be honest, I didn't miss application based email all that much, the Gmail interface is pretty good. However, the ability to work off-line is nice, and I'd like to be able to randomly access archived business stuff, and a few other niceties, so I'd always intended to go back to Thunderbird at some point.

Back to the setup...

So firstly I installed Thunderbird onto a functional XP laptop I've been using, and setup Thunderbird to synch with Gmail in IMAP configuration. Gmail checks my other accounts, so I only need one account in Thunderbird. This also means if I'm at some other PC, I can still get to everything using the Gmail web interface. Good instructions for setting up Thunderbird/gmail IMAP can be found at bother lifehacker and google.

Once I was happy with the IMAP synchronisation I took the laptop home. It's worth making sure that you get all the settings just right, so that if you delete something in Thunderbird, it's available in the Gmail web trash bin, and that sort of thing. All the instructions are in the previous 2 links.

On my Ubuntu machine, I installed Thunderbird using Synaptic, and setup a default mail profile with the bare minimum to get it running. I didn't download any mail. Then I:
1. Copied everything from the Windows Thunderbird profile directory into the Ubuntu profile directory under a sensible name. (Here is where to find these directories)
2. Modified the profile.ini file to point to this directory.
3. Started Thunderbird and started using it on Ubuntu.

Actually, I did the transfer via a portable hard disk, and intend to keep doing tis, so that at any given time, there are at least 3 versions of my profile. You can never have too many backups. And, because I'm using Unison to automate all the synchronisation at the Ubuntu end, I've only got to manually copy stuff on the XP machine. I'll probably automate that using SyncBack, now that I come to think of it.

Still todo:

Settle on a contact management tool. I'm considering using my Gmail address book, I believe there are plugins to access it from Thunderbird. I'm not sure about this, I'm more inclined to do something more flexible to solve this problem. Maybe a home Zimbra server is in order.

Footnotes:
1: Not truly missing, it's in a glassine bag in my laptop bag, somewhere.

Unplanned power disruption testing

2008-02-04T22:50:00.001+11:00

I guess that's what you get for having a UPS on the floor under your desk, with the "test" button right about toe height. Unfortunately, the UPS in question has a battery more than a decade old, and my little test amounted to little more than pulling the mains plug straight out of the box.

Ubuntu 7.10 booted right back up, and I logged in again with no unusual messages or warnings. I pulled up firefox and restored it's crashed session, and here I am. Apart from an article I hadn't saved in Joomla, I didnt lose anything.

Note to self, I need a new UPS for the office. I should probably get one for the media centre box in the lounge room too.

Joomla is great, but . . .

2008-02-04T22:26:00.001+11:00

Blogger is just damn too easy.

I'm messing around with a Joomla site at the moment (randomloci.com), and was posting thoughts as articles, thinking I'd present them in some sort of bloggish layout, but a self inflicted power outage caused me to lose the post (no fault of Joomla's) and decide to go for something quick and easy.

I may integrate this into the Joomla site, or may just keep them separate, who knows, for now, I'll use this for random posts. As I said, blogger is just too damn easy. Picking a colour scheme is not. I'm an engineer, OK. Bite me.