Recently I damaged the JetDirect card of my HP LaserJet 4050, because I accidentally drawed the network cable in the wrong direction, so the plastic cap an the card holding the cap broke off.
As a new card costs about 20-30 Euro, which I as a poor student simply do not have, I had to solve the problem otherwise. I discovered that my desktop computer doesn't have a LPT port anymore, but the laptop does. So I alwas printed using that laptop.
Now I thought, why don't access the printer via network, as the laptop is running all the time? So, to do it as easy as possible I simply installed samba, uncommented some lines in /etc/samba/smb.conf, hacked some 'restart smbd' in the terminal (the Samba start script was switched to upstart) and just selected the now shared printer on my desktop pc (which runs on Win 7 again -.-).
Plus now I can easily exchange files between laptop and desktop pc. Horray!
Thursday, July 01, 2010
Sunday, June 06, 2010
Upgrading the T42p to Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.04 LTS)
A week or so ago I upgraded my IBM ThinkPad T42p(which is a very good laptop for a (now) very fair price of ~400 Euro on ebay) to Ubuntu Lucid.
Upgrade ran quite easily although the upgrade application had some visual bugs, but everything harmless. I hadn't enough space left on the first try, so it was time to delete some "garbage" applications (a good moment to do so :)). A big minus was that you cannot leave the installation unattended because sometimes windows pop up asking regarding this or that package. Okay in a way this makes sense, but why isn't the installations first simulated? The user could be asked for decisions which are then remembered to go through the upgrade process silently...
Well, after everything was done, I rebooted. I counted from splash screen on and didn't came to 10 until the login screen showed up.
First thing I discovered was that the backlight was dark and if setting to maximum via function keys, it went dark again after a while. Luckily I'm not the only one with this issue. Found a temporary fix on some ubuntu forum and everything is fine again now :) I also removed the PPA version of Firefox and Thunderbird to install the stable ones(much better regarding Firefox - I once had to use Opera for 3 weeks!) and everything is running fine again :)
I even discovered that Rhythmbox is a very good and nice replacement for Wine + Foobar 2000 (which runs nicely but has no "from system to playlist" file drag & drop). One thing it lacks of is silence skipping.
In foobar there is a plugin where pieces of a track are skipped if they are below a volume level (e.g. -48 dB) for a certian time, which is really useful for tinier DJ-ing. You can put a 10 seconds crossfade and a 3 Second silence detection for below said -48 dB and foobar could become a good replacement of a hundred bucks audio software for smaller parties.
Next thing to do is to extend the home partition on LVM, it is running out of space with no chance to save some any more....
Upgrade ran quite easily although the upgrade application had some visual bugs, but everything harmless. I hadn't enough space left on the first try, so it was time to delete some "garbage" applications (a good moment to do so :)). A big minus was that you cannot leave the installation unattended because sometimes windows pop up asking regarding this or that package. Okay in a way this makes sense, but why isn't the installations first simulated? The user could be asked for decisions which are then remembered to go through the upgrade process silently...
Well, after everything was done, I rebooted. I counted from splash screen on and didn't came to 10 until the login screen showed up.
First thing I discovered was that the backlight was dark and if setting to maximum via function keys, it went dark again after a while. Luckily I'm not the only one with this issue. Found a temporary fix on some ubuntu forum and everything is fine again now :) I also removed the PPA version of Firefox and Thunderbird to install the stable ones(much better regarding Firefox - I once had to use Opera for 3 weeks!) and everything is running fine again :)
I even discovered that Rhythmbox is a very good and nice replacement for Wine + Foobar 2000 (which runs nicely but has no "from system to playlist" file drag & drop). One thing it lacks of is silence skipping.
In foobar there is a plugin where pieces of a track are skipped if they are below a volume level (e.g. -48 dB) for a certian time, which is really useful for tinier DJ-ing. You can put a 10 seconds crossfade and a 3 Second silence detection for below said -48 dB and foobar could become a good replacement of a hundred bucks audio software for smaller parties.
Next thing to do is to extend the home partition on LVM, it is running out of space with no chance to save some any more....
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Amplifiers and ground loops
In the students home where I lived, a bar was openened yesterday and I had to put some professional audio equipment there which I lend from a good friend of mine. It was a very big success and my first time I was the DJ, but people sung and danced 8-)
Because the whole equipment, means the amp rack, 2 top speakers and one huge subwoofer of exactly the size of an ground loop. I assume my computers power supply unit is responsible for that (its been actually 20 Euros, which was really cheap for 420 Watts some years ago).
Today I luckily found a very nice solution around this issue: My work laptop does not produce a ground loop, so it is predestinated for a PC to amplifier rack connection. On my main PC I use foobar2000 (there is no good linux alternative and sadly, I'm on windows again for some reason). So I found edcast which is capable of streaming to Shoutcast and IceCast from foobar(it's actually a DSP plugin). Because I hate Winamp and Icecast is OSS, I used the latter. Now it nicely streams my foobar playlists to the VLC media player of the laptop. Theres a control delay of about 5 seconds, but regarding the point that the audio gets ogg encoded and VLC buffers 1200 ms, I'm really fine with that.
Now the whole students home has to listen to the music I like, it is very loud in my room now. I even changed my IM status message to "Students home now listening to [track] by [artist]"...
Because the whole equipment, means the amp rack, 2 top speakers and one huge subwoofer of exactly the size of an ground loop. I assume my computers power supply unit is responsible for that (its been actually 20 Euros, which was really cheap for 420 Watts some years ago).
Today I luckily found a very nice solution around this issue: My work laptop does not produce a ground loop, so it is predestinated for a PC to amplifier rack connection. On my main PC I use foobar2000 (there is no good linux alternative and sadly, I'm on windows again for some reason). So I found edcast which is capable of streaming to Shoutcast and IceCast from foobar(it's actually a DSP plugin). Because I hate Winamp and Icecast is OSS, I used the latter. Now it nicely streams my foobar playlists to the VLC media player of the laptop. Theres a control delay of about 5 seconds, but regarding the point that the audio gets ogg encoded and VLC buffers 1200 ms, I'm really fine with that.
Now the whole students home has to listen to the music I like, it is very loud in my room now. I even changed my IM status message to "Students home now listening to [track] by [artist]"...
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Goodbye Windows, welcome Kubuntu
Yesterday I discovered that my Windows 7 RC1 reboots all 2 hours(which I already had expected) and there was a Kubuntu 9.10 CD lying on my desktop. As I successfully use it on my company's laptop with no issues, I decided its the right time to install it for my private everyday use, too.
Said and done. But after installing the nvidia drivers plus a dist-upgrade, KDE won't show anymore and I discovered it was not 64-Bit. Jens recommended me to try Kubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.04 beta 2) and now I am a really happy and satisfied Kubuntu user.
The installation process itself was quite laggy, but finally it worked fine, including current Firefox and Thunderbird (yeah, finally 3.0). Before I did anything other, I searched for proprietary graphics drivers (for my NDVIA card) via the "Hardware Drivers" utitly of KDE. Surpise, surprise, everything already set up and running fine! WLAN - no problem. Sound over S/PDIF - no problem(just push up the digital device in Multimedia settings for all media types).
When it came to S/PDIF for VideoLAN player, it costed me some time, but finally I just tried setting the sampling frequency to 48000 and it worked fine again :)
Then a pidgin here, a KsCD there, all fine.
I even installed a really cool game called Kobo Deluxe (a 2D space shooter) which ran without any issues!
It came me into mind that the (K)ubuntu logo, the nice-looking ring, could be a wedding ring: Once you get first familiar and then married with Ubuntu Linux, you won't be able to betray it - it's just to awesome to really going back to windows :D
Besides Windows 7 costs about 85 Euro for Home Premium with nearly no usable software(okay except Media Center maybe) and with Ubuntu (and other Linux distributions) you can get everything for free, can take a look at the source, report bugs which are quickly solved in most cases and there's so many free software available in places where the appropiate windows replacement would cost hundreds of dollars. Just think about The GIMP vs. Adobe Photoshop...
Just COOOL! 8-)
Said and done. But after installing the nvidia drivers plus a dist-upgrade, KDE won't show anymore and I discovered it was not 64-Bit. Jens recommended me to try Kubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.04 beta 2) and now I am a really happy and satisfied Kubuntu user.
The installation process itself was quite laggy, but finally it worked fine, including current Firefox and Thunderbird (yeah, finally 3.0). Before I did anything other, I searched for proprietary graphics drivers (for my NDVIA card) via the "Hardware Drivers" utitly of KDE. Surpise, surprise, everything already set up and running fine! WLAN - no problem. Sound over S/PDIF - no problem(just push up the digital device in Multimedia settings for all media types).
When it came to S/PDIF for VideoLAN player, it costed me some time, but finally I just tried setting the sampling frequency to 48000 and it worked fine again :)
Then a pidgin here, a KsCD there, all fine.
I even installed a really cool game called Kobo Deluxe (a 2D space shooter) which ran without any issues!
It came me into mind that the (K)ubuntu logo, the nice-looking ring, could be a wedding ring: Once you get first familiar and then married with Ubuntu Linux, you won't be able to betray it - it's just to awesome to really going back to windows :D
Besides Windows 7 costs about 85 Euro for Home Premium with nearly no usable software(okay except Media Center maybe) and with Ubuntu (and other Linux distributions) you can get everything for free, can take a look at the source, report bugs which are quickly solved in most cases and there's so many free software available in places where the appropiate windows replacement would cost hundreds of dollars. Just think about The GIMP vs. Adobe Photoshop...
Just COOOL! 8-)
Thursday, April 08, 2010
Combo.fm or how I learned to really love last.fm
In a recent post I wrote about the new client and combo stations(plus some technical details in the last one).
What is a combo station? A combination of last.fm radio stations, which are coonnectable by using "and", "or" and "not" (plus some nifty extra options, I'll come back to that point later on).
As it took always a very long time to create those combo station urls by hand, I wrote a nice application(which seems to be stable, but also may contain bugs). So I'd like to introduce you into Combo.fm, as I call it. Written in pure Java, using NetBeans(too bad it's not eclipse, but NB has the better GUI creator :P) and the best thing: GPL license(with the restriction of non-commercial use) and source included :) Note that the Last.fm API bindings for Java by JRoar are used, you can also obtain a fresh copy from http://code.google.com/p/lastfm-java/
But I guess you came here because you want to listen to combo stations, so click the link below(sorry for hosting on RS, had no better place atm):
Download Combo.fm
You can run it via "java -jar ComboFm.jar" from the ComboFm/dist/ folder from your OS console. (Hopefully a linux distibution :P)
For Windows users:
Usage instructions
Basically you just select a station type on the top left, select or type a value at the combo box beneath and hit "Add->". If you want to change the logical connector, you can just select the station on the right from the list box and select another(like 'and' or 'not'). Thereby, you can ignore the 'or' of the last item(tiny UI bug, doesn't affect the result). Don't worry if you added a station by mistake, you can just hit "Remove" to remove the selected station from the list.
Now let's concern with the sliders and the checkbox at the middle left.
Mainstream controls the amount obscure/mainstream music you want to listen to(left = 100% obscure, right = 100% mainstream). Setting this to 100% obscure will result in an interesting station.
Web browser url:Paste direcly in your browser's address bar and hit return.
Radio client url:Listen to the station with your favourite Last.fm client.For desktop client, paste the url in the text box of the player's start screen(where you tune into stations) an hit play.
My Personal opinion is that combo stations drastically improve the listening experience of the Last.fm radio, even if you only play with the sliders you can listen to very awesome tracks you didn't knew yet or of which you forgot the name a very long time ago. Good Job, Last.fm. I really love it!
And to you, dear reader:
Happy listening! I hope you enjoy Combo.fm right in these minutes.
Note: Combo stations is a pre-alpha feature of Last.fm, so you take the consequences if you use Combo.fm for listening to these stations! I am not responsible for what you do and cannot take any risks resulting in the usage of Combo.fm.
What is a combo station? A combination of last.fm radio stations, which are coonnectable by using "and", "or" and "not" (plus some nifty extra options, I'll come back to that point later on).
As it took always a very long time to create those combo station urls by hand, I wrote a nice application(which seems to be stable, but also may contain bugs). So I'd like to introduce you into Combo.fm, as I call it. Written in pure Java, using NetBeans(too bad it's not eclipse, but NB has the better GUI creator :P) and the best thing: GPL license(with the restriction of non-commercial use) and source included :) Note that the Last.fm API bindings for Java by JRoar are used, you can also obtain a fresh copy from http://code.google.com/p/lastfm-java/
But I guess you came here because you want to listen to combo stations, so click the link below(sorry for hosting on RS, had no better place atm):
Download Combo.fm
You can run it via "java -jar ComboFm.jar" from the ComboFm/dist/ folder from your OS console. (Hopefully a linux distibution :P)
For Windows users:
- Create a file named "runComboFm.cmd" inside the folder to where you unextracted Combo.fm
- Open it with Notepad(right click -> Open With -> > Notepad/Editor)
- Paste the following code:
@echo off
java -jar ComboFm/dist/ComboFm.jar - Save file, close Notepad and run the file by double-clicking on it.
- Have fun ;)
Usage instructions
Basically you just select a station type on the top left, select or type a value at the combo box beneath and hit "Add->". If you want to change the logical connector, you can just select the station on the right from the list box and select another(like 'and' or 'not'). Thereby, you can ignore the 'or' of the last item(tiny UI bug, doesn't affect the result). Don't worry if you added a station by mistake, you can just hit "Remove" to remove the selected station from the list.
Now let's concern with the sliders and the checkbox at the middle left.
Mainstream controls the amount obscure/mainstream music you want to listen to(left = 100% obscure, right = 100% mainstream). Setting this to 100% obscure will result in an interesting station.
- Repetition steers the repetition rate of the artists.
- Discovery switches discovery mode on or off.
Web browser url:Paste direcly in your browser's address bar and hit return.
Radio client url:Listen to the station with your favourite Last.fm client.For desktop client, paste the url in the text box of the player's start screen(where you tune into stations) an hit play.
My Personal opinion is that combo stations drastically improve the listening experience of the Last.fm radio, even if you only play with the sliders you can listen to very awesome tracks you didn't knew yet or of which you forgot the name a very long time ago. Good Job, Last.fm. I really love it!
And to you, dear reader:
Happy listening! I hope you enjoy Combo.fm right in these minutes.
Note: Combo stations is a pre-alpha feature of Last.fm, so you take the consequences if you use Combo.fm for listening to these stations! I am not responsible for what you do and cannot take any risks resulting in the usage of Combo.fm.
Combo station urls
In this blog post I'll tell you how to create Last.fm combo station urls. Last.fm station urls always start with "lastfm://". For combo station urls, an example might look like
The point I did not mention yet is that there are some nice options available. Let's change our query a bit:
Note that the options are all optional and thus have a default value. Connect name and value with a ':', except for the opt: values. If a value contains a space, it must be enclosed with double-quotes(""). Known Issues
Very much thanks to Norman (nova77LF)(glorious creator of the Radio Query Language) for clarification on some points :)
lastfm://rql/dGFnOnBvcCBub3Qgc2ltYXJ0OiJMYWR5IEdhZ2EiSee that long character string after rql/ ? That is just simple Base64 encoding and RQL means "Radio Query Language". If you'd use a decoder like this one,it will decode to
tag:pop not simart:"Lady Gaga"So, there are key-value pairs and logical connectors (valid ones are 'and', 'or' and 'not'). The above query means "play everything in direction of 'pop' tag, but not Lady Gaga's similiar artists". I think you got the idea...
The point I did not mention yet is that there are some nice options available. Let's change our query a bit:
tag:pop not simart:"Lady Gaga" opt:mainstr|0.55 opt:rep|0.6 opt:discovery|trueHuh? Lots of opt(ions)! mainstr stands for "Maintream", where the value range is from 0-1(0% to 100%). The less the value, the more unknown artists will occur in your station. Same goes for rep(etition), but in this case you can control the artist(or track?) repetition rate. I think "discovery" is kind of self-explanatory(discovery mode on/off). Here you got a nice table with names, values and descriptions:
| Name | Value | Description |
|---|---|---|
| user | [username] | personal station |
| library | [username] | a users library |
| [username] | loved tracks of user. After Nov 17 2010 this station is not available anymore! | |
| rec | [username] | recommendations for a user |
| neigh | [username] | neighbour radio of user |
| [tag of user]|[username] | Personal tag radio of a user. The '|' is NO or!. After Nov 17 2010 this station is not available anymore! | |
| [playlist-id] | A playlist station. Use user.getPlaylist API call to get playlist id's of a user's playlist. After Nov 17 2010 this station is not available anymore! | |
| adv | [username] | Play a user's mix radio. |
| simart | "[artist name]" | Similiar artists of an artist. Keep the quotes around. |
| tag | [tag] | Global tag radio |
| group | "Group Name" or [groupid] | Group radio |
| opt:rep| | [0-1](default: 0.5) | Specifies the track repetition, means how long it will take until the track is played again |
| opt:mainstr| | [0-1] (default: 0.5) | Type of tracks played(obscure to popular) |
| opt:discovery| | [true|false] (default: false) | Discovery mode on/off |
- Discovery mode is subscribers only.
- In the Base64 RFC specification there is a space after 76 characters in the encoded string. Apparently the web and the desktop client cannot handle this space, so you have to remove it and everything will work fine.
Very much thanks to Norman (nova77LF)(glorious creator of the Radio Query Language) for clarification on some points :)
Sunday, March 28, 2010
In short: The advantage of no power
In the second week of this month I went to munich again, because working together in the office with Jens and Manuel is much more fun than sitting there alone.
Somehow I forgot that USB-cable I usually use to charge my cell phone, so it ran out of battery after a few days. Since then I was very astonished how I good I can live without it. The reason for this might be that mainly used my cell phone as a (alarm )clock with telephone/SMS functions. First I used KAlarm to wake me up with my favourite music, but this wasn't very energy friendly(okay I want a beach right in front of my appartment in Dortmund, but not THAT fast :P), so I bought a normal alarm clock which can receive the time signal of the atomic clock in Frankfurt(its signal range is over 1500 km, so you might be able to receive it as well). Purpose was that if I travel around putting batteries in and out, I didn't want to have to set the current time each time and it costed about 8 € which is a fair price.
Since the batterys got no power, I do have it, means total control over when I want to call, to whom and so on.
This is real freedom! I just love it :)
Maybe I should buy a wristwatch and put the cell phone away (nearly) forever...(and the secret services would not be able to trace me anymore....big brother is watching you ;) )
Somehow I forgot that USB-cable I usually use to charge my cell phone, so it ran out of battery after a few days. Since then I was very astonished how I good I can live without it. The reason for this might be that mainly used my cell phone as a (alarm )clock with telephone/SMS functions. First I used KAlarm to wake me up with my favourite music, but this wasn't very energy friendly(okay I want a beach right in front of my appartment in Dortmund, but not THAT fast :P), so I bought a normal alarm clock which can receive the time signal of the atomic clock in Frankfurt(its signal range is over 1500 km, so you might be able to receive it as well). Purpose was that if I travel around putting batteries in and out, I didn't want to have to set the current time each time and it costed about 8 € which is a fair price.
Since the batterys got no power, I do have it, means total control over when I want to call, to whom and so on.
This is real freedom! I just love it :)
Maybe I should buy a wristwatch and put the cell phone away (nearly) forever...(and the secret services would not be able to trace me anymore....big brother is watching you ;) )
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