Julian - keenblog

Mastering Quality DVD Video on Linux

nospam@example.com (Julian) — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 12:24:21 +0200

Or any *nix for that matter. Although DVD Video is past it's prime, I used it for years to archive and share my videos easily. As the elitist quality addict that I am, I've come up with a method that is far from being the easiest, but certainly results in satisfiable quality and compatibility.
Continue reading "Mastering Quality DVD Video on Linux"

Fedora 11 on Asus Eee PC 1005HA-M status report

nospam@example.com (Julian) — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 13:13:00 +0200

Read the full article. Note this is not step-by-step. If you're unsure how to do things like editing config files or installing/loading kernel modules, look that up elsewhere (hint: Google).
Continue reading "Fedora 11 on Asus Eee PC 1005HA-M status report"

Don't forget this sunday

nospam@example.com (Julian) — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:12:03 +0200

http://piratenpartei.net/

From Mandriva to Fedora

nospam@example.com (Julian) — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 12:14:50 +0100

Some package management equivalents:

urpmi foo (install package foo): yum install foo
urpme foo (uninstall package foo): yum erase foo
urpmq foo (finding package called foo): yum list foo (add wildcard to expand search)
urpmq -l foo (list files contained in package foo): repoquery -l foo (this took a while to find!)
urpmf foo (finding package containing file foo): yum provides foo
urpmf --description foo (finding package containing foo in its description): yum search foo

Other equivalents:

task-* meta-packages: Called "groups" in yum/Fedora.
List all groups: yum grouplist
Info about group: yum groupinfo foo
Install group: yum groupinstall foo
Remove group: yum groupremove foo

plf: rpmfusion
http://rpmfusion.org/
for libdvdcss you need http://rpm.livna.org/ as well

bash completion
Put this into your ~/.inputrc or /etc/inputrc to Mandriva-style your bash:

set show-all-if-ambiguous on

set page-completions off

New E-Mail

nospam@example.com (Julian) — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 19:37:28 +0100

I'll be using a new E-mail address from now: sloevenh1 _at googlemail.com

PGP key should hit a keyserver near you soon.

lolmod

nospam@example.com (Julian) — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 18:45:53 +0100

Headphone burn-in script

nospam@example.com (Julian) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 22:16:49 +0200

This is a little script I wrote to burn-in a new pair of earphones. It uses the speaker-test utility that gets shipped with alsa-utils, so you'll have to install those first (use your distro's package management to find the right package).
It outputs pink noise in stereo to the alsa default device for 100 hours, taking a 30 minute break every 120 minutes (edit the script to specify otherwise). Should you abort it using ctrl+c before completion it'll let you know for how it's been running so you know how far you've progressed in the burn-in process.

I thought about letting it keep track of how long it's been burning-in each pair of your headphones but unfortunately I kind of don't have any use for that until I need to do another burn-in. Hope it's useful to you as-is.

Download burn-in.sh

(save to /usr/bin/burn-in and sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/burn-in)

Gradually changing wallpaper over time

nospam@example.com (Julian) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 14:27:35 +0200

In Mandriva Linux 2008.1 Spring you can let your desktop wallpaper in KDE fade into another, controlled by some time based rules in an XML file. Look what you can do with a few GIMPed slides:

I don't remember where I got the original wallpaper from

The transition is too slow to notice, giving you a pretty good illusion of a wallpaper fitting the current daytime.

How much for a Power User Windows desktop

nospam@example.com (Julian) — Tue, 20 May 2008 11:28:35 +0200

Ever wondered for about how much all that software costs Windows users have to "buy" to get their system up to roughly the same desktop functionality as a default Mandriva Linux One install? I did the maths:

- Windows Vista Ultimate, 180.34 € (Amazon.com, 308,85 € on Amazon.de?)
- Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended, 628.66 € (Amazon.com)
- Alcohol 120%, 59.00 € (from official website)
- Nero 8 Ultra Edition, 69.99 € (from official website)
- Office Ultimate 2007, 759,95 € (Amazon.de)
- WinRAR, 35.64 € (from official website, incl. tax)
- mIRC, 12.88 € (from official website)
- EyeBeam, 30,63 € (from official website)
- PowerDVD 8 Ultra, 64.38 € (from official website)
- Trillian Pro, 16.10 € (from official website)

Total: 1857.57 €

In no particular order, without S&H, and no liability assumed. All in their full versions, after all, that's what crackers *cough* I mean "price and quality aware customers" use. From my experience, you can find most of these, all of them or a similar competitor on many "power user" desktops. I used Google to convert USD to EUR.

Let's see... from my total maximum bandwidth I pay for monthly, the 700 MB for the Mandriva ISO would account for roughly 0.03 €. The CD-R costs me 0.15 €, power to burn it about 0.03 €. Makes a total of 0.21 € of total cost. 0.21 € vs. 1857.57 €.

That's all the calculation I need for now. It's only for the default install, without installing a single additional program.

Read on for a list of the Mandriva equivalents to the apps above, and a list of free alternatives on Windows.
Continue reading "How much for a Power User Windows desktop"

New toy

nospam@example.com (Julian) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:06:13 +0200

The other day I wanted find out for how much Ogg Vorbis-capable portable audio players go on ebay. I noticed an auction for an iPod nano clone player (Chipod) that the Hong Kong-based seller claimed to play Ogg Vorbis among some other formats (like MP4/MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video) and to store up to 4 GB of audio and video files. When I stumbled upon the auction it was at 7 € or so with 3 minutes left. I thought what the hell and bidded and won with 12.03 €.

I don't like the color that much

It took 2 1/2 weeks to get here, a bit longer than the seller claimed (5-10 days). It was packaged in a little-bigger-than-palm sized box and the tax form thingy stated the value was 8 Hong Kong Dollars, which are about 0.65 €. It came with a Mini USB adapter cable, a 220V DC to USB adapter, a CD-R with Windows 98 drivers and AMV encoding software. It also came with a generic manual in broken English that clearly wasn't written for any specific model. Luckily, these things aren't that difficult to handle.

The box also held ear phones that look pretty identical to generic iPod ones. I didn't put them in my ears but gave them to my little brother and used my Creative EP-630.

It was preconfigured to use German menus, which I set to English - the German translation was OK but not the best. It actually plays Ogg Vorbis perfectly, at least the ones in my collection which are encoded with the AoTuV-patched vorbis libraries (mostly beta 5 and 5.5) at quality 6 (~192 Kbit/s). It also plays unprotected WMA, MP1, MP2 and MP3 files.
It doesn't come as a surprise that it doesn't actually play any other video format other than AMV. There's a ffmpeg fork out there to encode AMV but the quality isn't the best, even with the software scaler compiled in. Quality-wise, what seems to work best for me is to do the rescaling and framerate/sample rate/sound channel conversion using mencoder to a lossless format, then transcode to AMV with the shipped software.
It can also display JPEG, GIF and BMP image files and the ebook reader lets you open TXT files.

The Z80-based processor is a bit on the weak side, the menus don't feel as snappy as I'd like them to be. Sound quality wise it would be OK if there wasn't a faint but audible interference when there's screen activity. Apropos screen, it's a bright 1.8" big 160x128 screen that looks pretty good.
There's a little bit of a nostalgic feeling involved, since the original Z80 also powered the first home gaming console I ever used, the SEGA Master System.

However, it didn't take long for me to notice that this isn't a true 4 GB player. While it was partitioned to show a 4 GB FAT partition and there was also a sticker reading "4 GB" on the back, it's really a "hacked" 2 GB player. Putting more than 2 GB of files on the hacked partition caused the files after the 2 GB mark to be unplayable. Following a guide from mympxplayer.org fixed this and the player now operates correctly showing its true size.

This player doesn't maintain any kind of collection database, and it doesn't read Ogg tags. Luckily, Amarok can arrange files and folders in such a way that I can practically mimic said functions somewhat.

The battery life is around 6 hours for playing Vorbis with EQ enabled and some occasional file browsing.

Well, for 12 € it's practically a steal anyways so I'm still considering it a pretty good deal despite the smaller storage size. Let's see for how long it'll live to serve me as my portable Vorbis player.

Edit: I gave the seller a neutral feedback, mentioning the hacked memory and including the URL to a website examining the so-called scam. Shortly afterwards, I received a request per mail to remove the feedback. I responded that I might remove it when I learn of his opinion. He then offered me a 5 Euro refund. I accepted, got my refund and removed the feedback. So in the end, the player did cost me only 7.03 Euros.

Launch kbluetooth when dongle is connected

nospam@example.com (Julian) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 20:18:21 +0100

Looks like we haven't posted anything here for a while. It's nothing special, but I just put together a little hack to launch KDE's bluetooth tray utility once a dongle is connected to the box and KDE is running, and so I thought why not share it. It's a little silly and dirty, but it works as expected as long as long as the only KDE session is on display localhost:0.0. If there're there's more than one KDE session running or at a display other than the mentioned one, it'll try to launch kbluetooth on display :0 as the user of the oldest KDE session.

install hci_usb /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install hci_usb; if [ `pidof kded` ] && [ ! `pidof kbluetooth` ]; then DISPLAY=:0 su `ps o euser -C kded h` -c kbluetooth &> /dev/null & fi; /bin/true

Put that line into your /etc/modprobe.conf or, if your box doesn't have that file, create /etc/modprobe.conf.d/kbluetooth and put it in there.

Why the effort? I don't like having kbluetooth launch on login as it's a waste of resources as long as there's no dongle connected. I suppose it could also be done by creating a few dozen hal rules, but this is just a simple, independent one-liner. And I just thought of this now because I'm usually using the Bluetooth key on my laptop to launch kbluetooth, but there's no such key on my desktop.
Now all that's left to wonder about is a way to kill kbluetooth once the dongle is disconnected. Since the module hci_usb doesn't get unloaded automatically, using remove in modprobe.conf is no good.

Oh, and I hope you're all busy testing the latest and last before final Mandriva Linux 2008.1 Spring RC 2.

Back online soon, eventually

nospam@example.com (Julian) — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 12:50:55 +0100

Hey folks, I'll eventually be connected again tomorrow or the day after. Only with half the bandwidth than in my old apartment, but still plenty better than nothing.

Edit: I'm back officially.

My Goban

nospam@example.com (Julian) — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 23:46:40 +0100

Just noticed I never bragged about my first Goban here.
Continue reading "My Goban"

Offline Time

nospam@example.com (Julian) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 21:26:23 +0100

As some of you might already know, I'll be moving into our new apartment next Sunday (the 2nd of December). Unfortunately, my ISP informed me yesterday that they probably won't be able to provide me with DSL at my new location. So as long as this situation remains unchanged, I won't be seen online quite as much as usual, probably not at all. Whether it's going to take weeks or months for the DSL availability to change, I don't know. The Deutsche Telekom is known to be rather stubborn when it comes to DSL availability, as can be seen with towns that still aren't connected, almost a decade after the technology became available.
So I won't be working on anything online related for a while and might not be able to answer all E-Mails . Once things look better, you'll read about it here.

Cave Story for Linux!

nospam@example.com (Julian) — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 19:42:06 +0200

Doukutsu Monogatari, commonly referred to as "Cave Story", has been ported to Linux by Simon Parzer. To celebrate this native version of one of the best freeware titles of all time, I made an RPM package for Mandriva 2007.1 Spring (and probably other versions and derivatives such as PCLinuxOS). I also wrote a launcher script for it so it stores your saves and configuration in your home directory in ~/.doukutsu and not in the game directory.
You can get the RPM from my RPM repository.