keenblog

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. Read More

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.

Just noticed I never bragged about my first Goban here. Read More

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.

I was about to give up after googling for how to get something like virtual surround on Linux when I "discovered" a plugin for ALSA called vdownmix. It downmixes 4.0 or 5.1 audio to create a virtual surround effect on stereo headphones.
A good kept secret? Probably not, it's in the official ALSA plugins package after all. But why does it seem like nobody is using it (google)? Read More

If you know ALSA well it's probably very simple but still here it is because I couldn't find it anywhere: my ~/.asoundrc (or /etc/asound.conf) to use two ALSA devices simultaneously from a single playing application. Read More

Updated July 2nd 2009: Now using Sebastian Pipping's bs2b LADSPA plug-in instead of tap-bs2b

After picking up some new headphones yesterday, I wondered whether there was any way to convert stereo audio to binaural audio. It took an hour of time but now I've got it working wonderfully, by feeding ALSA the LADSPA plug-in for Bauer stereophonic-to-binaural.

Read on for my how-to. Read More

Low power consumption and high hardware compatibility is exactly the right alternative to WiFi when all what you want to do is sitting in the green and chit-chat with other hackers and browse the web a bit.
But it needs you to do some tinkering before it works nicely, so reading what steps I took to make it work for me might make things easier for you. Read More

Yes you read right - today I'm going to reveal my darkest secret to all of you. Or at least to those who are prepared to see me in a completely new light and face a feel of betrayal. You ready for the truth? Read More

Dear Santa,

I knew you would have to do some research and read our blog before deciding how to reward me being such an awesome guy all year, helping everyone out whenever they couldn't stop me. Read More

If you need SCIM support in Mandriva 2007 for both GTK and Qt apps, add this to your ~/.i18n or /etc/sysconfig/i18n file:



EDIT: Looks like SKIM, the KDE frontend for SCIM, sometimes gets a bit confused with this. Omit the XIM_PROGRAM and XIM_ARGS lines mentioned above and enable autostart in skim (use the settings dialog or set Autostart=true in ~/.kde/share/config/skimrc) if you use KDE.

After lots of waiting, the stable release of Mandriva Linux 2007.0 had finally been released to the public 10 days ago. In case you haven't done so yet, you can read the release announcement here. Despite some initial confusion regarding downtimes of the BitTorrent download pages, everything appears to have went smoothly afterwards.
So the explanation why I was so silent the past days is simply that I was upgrading my "home lab". Read More

This is the first of what will eventually be a series of entries revealing some of my favourite Mangas... or at least Mangas that I had fun reading. And one of the cheesier ones will have to make the start.

Ah, I''s. How long has it been. Back when I started reading it I found it totally hilarious and just couldn't stop.
Now, a little eternity and a few thousand chapters more Manga experience later, I get my hands on the I''s Pure OVA. And the only thing I can think of is... what was it that I liked about it again? I started reading again and... Read More

In case you've been missing me yesterday, I was busting through some jungles, volcanoes, glaciers, marine bases, even cyber space. And when I was done, I dropped my guns and my body extension modules, grabbed some fancy laser sabre and started bashing all the enemies I took down previously for good. Like a poisonous schizoid Split Mushroom (a "schizonoid" ), a Cyber Peacock or a Jet Stingray with a jet engine in his fishy ass. Read More

Yesterday, Michel de Boer released the new and shiny Twinkle 0.9 source. Adding secure voice communication using the ZRTP protocol stack and also a new codec (G.726), it's really worthwhile to resolve the new dependencies.

With Mandriva Linux 2007.0 being about ready for launch, this package for the still current stable Mandriva Linux 2006.0 will most likely be the last new Twinkle version I build for it. Regardless, I didn't spare porting the current versions of GNU CommonC++ and the RTP and ZRTP libs to bring this new release and all it's features to our beloved 2006.0. Grab it from my repo now and phone till the lines melt!