Funny email received saying my mining.bitcoin.cz wallet has been requested to be changed. I didn’t request anything if the sort, so reported it. I’m fairly sure this is my fault for reusing a password on both MT Gox and mining.bitcoin.cz. There was nothing in my MT Gox account or the mining.bitcoin.cz account, do nothing to be lost. Anyone else had this?
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Just discovered desktop recording feature in Gnome 3:
Alt-Ctrl-Shift-R to start and stop. Small red circle appears in bottom right of screen while recording. Recordings are saved in webm format in the home directory with the filename shell-YYYYMMDD-#.webm (YYYY – year, MM – month, DD – day and # is a sequential number).
I will update this when I find out how to change settings (frame-rate, …).
UPDATE: Perusal of the source code reveals that the frame rate is hard wired in at 15 fps. So if you need more flexibility you will need to use something else. It’s still a great tool to have built in for casual use!
There is a lot of talk at the moment about Gnome 3.0. Released on 6 April 2011, it will be included in Fedora 15 and probably a few other distributions. Some people love it, some hate it.
I personally don’t mind change. I started using Gnome shell a few months back. The way I see it Gnome is changing, and my options are get used to Gnome 3, try Unity (another story) or look for something else – Xfce or KDE most likely. Having used Gnome 3 for a short period, I have found that the interface helps focus me on what I am doing. It’s unobtrusive, and hides lots of potential distractions away.
Much of the noise I am hearing about Gnome 3 is its lack of customisability – It offers a fairly standard interface. I think this is generally a good idea – too much customisation leads often to a mess. However there are a few things I would like to change, but couldn’t find a way.
Until now.
I am using Fedora 15 as my main OS, and read the release notes just to see if there was anything I might be interested in coming soon. I came across a brief note in the release notes:
2.1.1.1.2. How do I change settings?
Click on the user menu at the top right and select System Settings. For more advanced preferences, install the gnome-tweak-tool package.
Ahh. A quick ‘yum install gnome-tweak-tool’ later and I have a far more customisable Gnome 3.0. Here are some highlights:
Under Shell you can change which buttons are displayed in the titlebar, and alter what happens when you close the laptop lid. This is particularly valuable to me, as I often close my laptop when moving and don’t always want it to suspend.
The Fonts options allow you to effectively change the dpi of the screen, and alter the fonts – something I have seen a lot of people desiring.
The File Manager options allow you to enable the file manager to control the desktop – restoring traditional desktop functionality. This is useful for unmounting removable drives. You can also remove the wallpaper. I’m sure someone has a use for this. I don’t.
You can change the behaviour of titlebar actions in the Windows menu. I found out that the middle button does something (I just bought a wireless mouse for my laptop – now I actually have a middle button 
).
The Interface section gives you options for changing gtk theme among other things. I’m generally happy with the standard so haven’t played much with these settings.
So there you have it. Gnome 3 is here. I like it, and think the developers have done a wonderful job. Many of the gripes people are having can be solved with the installation of a small configuration tool. So give it a try!
Note: some people don’t see how they can use programs that normally put an icon on the taskbar (Skype and Dropbox being two popular ones). Hover in the bottom right corner, and you’ll find a shaded bar appears, and there they are!
For those of you looking for a quick and easy way to get you RaLink RT3090 Wireless 802.11n 1T/1R PCIe working properly in Fedora 14, here it is.
My RaLink RT3090 Wireless 802.11n 1T/1R PCIe is in my MSI Wind U135, and the good news is that it is supported in the latest kernel (2.6.35 currently), but the staging drivers from the kernel are not included in the standard Fedora 14 install. I’m not sure what the reasons for not including them are (possibly stability, or copyright reasons), but they do have them at http://rpmfusion.org/ .
So first off, you will need some sort of connection to the internet. This could be over a wired connection or, my favourite, hooking your phone up to your computer with a usb cable, and sharing your 3g or wifi connection with the computer. My HTC Desire happily connects in Fedora 14, and if usb tethering is enabled in the options on the phone works perfectly.
Then you need to go to http://rpmfusion.org/ and enable the RPM Fusion repositories on your sytem. The package we want to install is part of the free repository, so only that one needs to be enabled.
Once you have done that, installing the required kernel modules is as simple as opening a terminal, su-ing to root, and typing:
yum install kmod-staging
Yum will then run through, download the package, and install it. Once yum is finished, a quick reboot is in order and your wireless should be working! Enjoy!
(should you come across any problems, the first thing you should check is that wifi is switched on, either by switch or key combination [Fn]+[F11] on the MSI Wind U135)
UDS for Maverick took place in the last week, and though I would have loved to have attended, life and uni prevented me. Thankfully though some videos of the talks as well as various interviews with some Canonical employees, and prominent community members have been made available at http://video.ubuntu.com/uds/maverick/. They are Ogg videos, encoded with the Theora video codec, and the Vorbis audio codec. Nice and free, but unfortunately my freedom hating and rights revoking PS3, which doubles as my media centre, doesn’t play them back. I store music and video on a USB hard drive connected to my router, which has a media server, which streams files to my PS3.
ffmpeg is my first port of call when doing any video conversion, as it normally performs brilliantly, but for some reason, no matter what options I used, I was unable to produce a video file that wasn’t blocky, and completely wrong coloured. See a sample below:
I pumped the bitrate right up for this as well.
I have no experience using MEncoder, but I gave that a try, and got similar results. VLC player has a conversion function, but I have never managed to get this working. Even the built in presets have never produced a proper video file, with the ones I have tried either coming out as 3 seconds long, or looking as above, and missing the audio track.
A program I have used for converting media for my (freedom hating once again) iPod is Handbrake, but only ever in Windows. Most recent versions of Handbrake included in Ubuntu had gui issues, with controls not being wired up correctly (resulting in the Start button never being ungrayed out).
Luckily these issues seem to have been fixed in the development version, and so if you checkout the latest source, and build from scratch, it seems to work.
The instructions for building the latest version from source are here.
Once you have followed those steps, you should be in possession of a working copy of HandBrake.
You can start the application by running it from the System menu, or by running ‘ghb’ from the command line.
The program is fairly simple to operate, you click Source, and select the file you wish to transcode. Then select where you want to save it. For straight PS3 usage, I just go with the default profile, which sets most settings sensibly. Then hit Start, and the file will appear in the queue and start transcoding. You are then free to select more files to be transcoded and add them to the queue. You can see the progress of the current operation at the bottom of the window, and hitting the Show Queue button will show you the current queue in a new window:
and if you look closely you can see the UDS videos all queued up and currently in the process of transcoding!
There is one more step before you can play these files (in my set up anyway). I’m not sure if this is the PS3 or the Media Server (TwonkyMedia Server) built into the router (Linksys WRT160NL), but Handbrake names the files with a .m4v extension, and while these will play fine in most players, the PS3 likes it if you rename them to .mp4. Simples!
That is all there is to it. The HandBrake team have done a wonderful job of creating a simple program which just works, and I am grateful for the hard work they have put in, that makes my life a bit simpler.
Any comments, go for it!
Just came across this little gem on facebook:
Someone I do not know had clearly missed the last month of campaigning, had decided to ignore what was going on, and then on the day of the actual election, asked the people she knew on facebook who she should vote for. She voluntarily gave up her right to independent thought by not making herself aware of the current political situation, instead relying on the wisdom of those she knew on facebook.
The reply is fantastical. Vote labour, because the other two will stop tax credits, and leave immigrants in the country to work (spelling corrected).
So now the person who didn’t care to actually find out parties policies to allow herself to make a decision of her own, based upon her personal political ideas, now decides to vote Labour, because the other two will take away tax credits, and allow immigrants to work.
Except those aren’t policies of any of the other two main parties. Both the Conservatives and Lib Dems have policies that will cut tax credits for the higher earning families, but then in real terms Labour has been doing that all along, by not taking inflation into account. It is also already legal for an immigrant to work. Otherwise why would they come here. It isn’t legal for illegal immigrants to work, that’s why their status is “illegal.” The Lib Dems have a policy of legalising illegal immigrants already living here, and taxing them, rather than letting them work illegally and not being able to tax them. But that isn’t the same thing.
I’m sure this is quite a common occurrence, and not a special case, and it shocks me that people can be so stupid. Lack of information in this time of freedom of information cannot be an issue.
Please, if you haven’t bothered to find out what the different candidates are offering, don’t vote. Leave it to those who are making informed decisions. Don’t just listen to the regurgitatings of those around you who will presume to tell you for whom to vote, especially if they are going to get it wrong.
Yesterday saw the official release of the newest version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution. I have been using it since the 3rd alpha as my day to day system, on my laptop and desktop, and have been impressed so far.
Controversy
Lucid Lynx has split the Ubuntu community in two, with controversial changes being pushed through by Canonical, the financial backer to the Ubuntu project. Much of the controversy surrounded the movement of the window buttons from the top right hand corner of the window, to the top left hand corner, and as soon as this change was implemented, there was uproar, with people arguing that Canonical have no right to force changes that the users do not want. I personally like the new button placement, and find it far more convenient. I also believe that Canonical have every right to direct the development of the distribution in whichever way they want. If you aren’t happy with it, no one is stopping you from branching off and developing your own version of Ubuntu, but with the buttons on the right. Of course Ubuntu is a trademark, and you will have to use a different name. Maybe you would like to try Mint linux instead?
Another controversy (at least early on in the development cycle) was the removal of the Gimp from the live CD. It was felt that the average user does not need or use the powerful features found in the Gimp, and that most users aren’t even able to appreciate just how good the Gimp really is as they don’t have exposure to professional level photo editing software. The decision was made to cut it out of the live cd, although it is easily installed with a quick
sudo apt-get install gimp
Removal of the Gimp left a little space to include other features, one notable addition being the Pitivi video editor. Video production is so widespread, with most mobile phones being able to record video, and the explosion of Vimeo and Youtube, an easy to use video editor is a valuable addition, and one that both Mac and Windows ship with. Unfortunately, in my experience Pitivi is not up to the job. I have experienced numerous crashes, and that doesn’t look good for the end user.
Social from the Start
New for Lucid Lynx is the Social from the Start feature. The default Ubuntu desktop now has Social networking functionality built in through the Me Menu. Here you can set up chat accounts, broadcast accounts (for facebook, twitter, identi.ca, etc) and connect to Ubuntu One. I really like this feature, as I hate having to log in to a slew of websites, and like the ability to quickly post my status, without having to wade through who was farming facebook today, and who now is king of the criminal underworld. Received tweets can be set to show as a notification, allowing you to be aware of what is going on in your circle, with out you having to context switch periodically from whatever you are doing to check twitter or whatever. I think this is a killer feature, and its slick integration with the desktop makes it seem like this is the way it should be. Seriously, you should try Lucid just for this feature.
Other Improvements
I have seen big increases in boot speed (although I still have an 8 second wait before it boots thanks to ACPI DSDT issues), HAL removal helping this out. The new colour scheme is nice, and looks easily as good as a OS X. The install system is refined, and quick, as ever.
Summary
This release is a good one. Its amazing that they managed to get all of the new features into an LTS release, and the development of the Ubuntu system, with leadership and direction driving forward the evolution of the desktop, is one to watch.
I know the iPod is representative of a lot that is wrong with proprietary systems and protocols, but there is nothing else like it out there. I was the grateful recipient of an iPod Classic 160GB in black for Christmas, and after reading what I could on the internet, I determined that it would be a whole lot easier to try using it with iTunes. So the laptop got wiped, and Windows 7 put back on it.
For approximately a month this was fine – iTunes is a capable music management program. It does tagging very well, and it functions in much the same way as the iPod does in terms of organising music, except for a few small occasions when things didn’t appear on the iPod as they did in iTunes. However I longed for the familiar Gnome desktop, with it’s consistency and speed over the clunkiness of Windows 7.
So after backing up my data to my NAS, and making a bit of room on my hard drive, I put Karmic back onto it.
The library that provides all of the major music applications on Linux with iPod support is libgpod. It provides the backend operations for:-
- Amarok
- Exaile
- gPodder
- gtkpod
- Rhythmbox
- Songbird iPod extension
plus others.
So once libgpod is configured and working, in theory you should be able to use whichever music program you like best.
gtkpod seemed like a good place to start. So in Karmic, I opened a terminal, and entered:
sudo apt-get install gtkpod
This pulled in some necessary dependencies, including libgpod. This step can also be accomplished by going into the “Ubuntu Software Centre” and the searching for “gtkpod”, and installing the program that way.
I assume that your iPod has been set up on a windows machine. When you plug it in via USB, you should see an iPod icon appear on the desktop. The next step is important, as without it, if you change anything on your iPod, when you attempt to use it, it will show as being empty. We need to store certain information about the iPod on the iPod itself, so that libgpod can do it’s work. In a terminal run:
sudo ipod-read-sysinfo-extended
Once this command has been run, you won’t need to run it again, unless you reset your iPod.
Okay, now run gtkpod from the Sound & Video submenu of the Applications menu. From the Edit Menu, choose Repository/iPod Options. In the Repository Options dialog box, select the “Add new Repository/iPod…” button in the top right hand corner. In the Create Repository Dialog, select iPod as Repository Type, Choose a name for the repository (I chose Dan’s iPod), and click the “Browse” button, and click on your iPod in the folder chooser dialog.
Leave the iTunesDB backup as is, and choose your model from the drop down list. My 160GB Black iPod Classic was the xB150.
Now hit Add, and then the big “Load iPod(s)” button. The program should then fill up with everything saved on your iPod. gtkpod can be used to add and remove files from your iPod, and while basic, is functional.
This is an edited version of a letter, not sent to me, but a friend. I have edited out the names to protect the identities of those involved. This is really funny. The author of the letter does not speak English as a first language. From what I remember this is their second communication.
Dear Jane,
How are you and your family doing? And how is life all these while? I hope splendid, as for me and my family we are doing fine.
I have been longing to have a friend with a caring heart cos I’m a guy with a caring heart. I’m so ecstatic that I have found one which is you Jane. I thank God for bringing you to my way as a nice friend and I’m inviting you in to my life now as a friend, because only God brings good friendship. I’m that kind of friend you will trust without an iota of doubt because; I’m a guy with an open hearted heart though distance may lie in between us, but as long as our hearts beats for each other as good friend then the distance got no meaning in our hearty friendship. I pray to God that this our new hearty friendship should grow and be more intense as the day and year passes by if having you as a nice friend is a sin, I prefer been a sinner and still have you as my nice friend which my heart desires as a dear longs for river so does my heart for you deep as the ocean, is my desire now that I have found you as a good friend I will never let you go because you have captured my heart, please handle it with care. Loved people do say hearty friendship is frolic, vibrant, I never believe it but i’m believing now because I have tested yours which is unquestionably the ultimate. Jane, when I cogitate about you sometimes I always put up a ravishing smile on my face and say good friend like you are really hard to come by. Please come in to my world of coastal and let me spin you round the galaxy of my hearty atmosphere as a nice friend. But silver and gold I have not but the most precious gift of my heart I will give to you in abundance as a nice friend. In the name of love and life I pray our hearts beats for each other as nice friends, only God knows who and where our best friend will come from.
I prefer you loving me as a friend than giving me one of the best thing on earth cos materials things come and go but love last for eternity, my love for you in unconditional. I do think about you much more than you could guess because you mean so much to me each day and through out the year, and I’m wishing you and your family blissful, merry, happiness through out the year and entire life, have a peaceful, joyous, frolic, merry and blessed day over there in London.
Hope to hear from you soon
Thanks from your good friend
Ian
