john.pithed.org

The way Ubuntu handles media keys has been weird for a while now. Whenever I press them the volume either goes to 0 or 100 and the new notification system starts flickering. I disabled the notification system (which was otherwise really nice), but then the old volume notification system kicked in.

I don’t really need to be told what the volume is, as long as its comfortable. So I decided to change the volume with aumix instead of whatever GNOME uses. The way of creating custom keyboard shortcuts in GNOME is not terribly intuitive (”click the part that says disabled, not the title of the new command, idiot”) but I eventually figured it out.

While I was at it, I remembered the throttle controls from Freespace 2. The [ key sets your throttle to one-third, the ] key sets it to two-thirds, \ opens it to full and Backspace sets it to zero. I believe these were also the controls for TIE Fighter. So I decided to use them as volume controls, in conjunction with the Windows key that I only use for custom commands anyway. These controls save a lot of button mashing to adjust the volume, like when something is really loud or soft and you want to change it quickly.

Up until now I’ve been hovering my cursor over the volume system tray icon and using the scroll part of my trackpad to change the volume. I think this will be much better when I get used to the controls. It also makes me want to play Freespace 2 again. I know it runs on Linux because it was open sourced, but since ATI dropped support for my graphics card, it probably will be unplayable. TIE Fighter on DOSBox might run more smoothly on my crippled hardware, though.

Well, one of the themes of this blog (like oh so many others) is long periods with no posts. Well, I finally resolved something I posted about long ago, and some additional followups, so instead of coming up with new ideas I’m going to rehash old ones.

A while ago, I complained about the lack of good podcatching software for the iPod Touch. Either they are for pay, or they are free and they don’t work. I have nothing against paying for programs, but I held out hope that I could piece together my own solution.

I’ve known about bashpodder for a while, and I played with it a little bit back then. I never had much use for it before, because I would either use Amarok’s podcatcher and then sync them to my old ipod 5g or download podcasts directly from websites on my ipod touch. I always figured I could get bashpodder working on my ipod because I have the shell (MobileTerminal).

I never really got around to doing it until a couple of days ago. I’ve never done shell scripting, but I could kinda figure out what was going on because of the similarities to other languages. I removed the stuff I didn’t need, like the playlist creation and the folder creation that organizes podcasts by date. I simply made it download the files to the same folder as the script. This may seem kind of messy, but I just like to listen to podcasts once or twice and then delete them. I don’t like keeping them, especially on the ipod when I have less then 8GB to work with.

The main modification I made was to make it only download the first podcast in each feed. That’s usually all I listen to, and I wanted to minimize the number of downloads that happened when I first ran the script. I also added some output, which shows which files are downloaded. After everything worked on my laptop, I transferred the scripts and configuration files to my ipod. After sorting out some file permission issues, everything just worked. I set the link ‘bpod’ in $PATH to run the script and it looks something like this:

I’m actually surprised at how well it all worked, and how easy it was to do. You can view my modification of bashpodder here and visit the bashpodder site for more info.

In other ipod news, ifuse (mount iphone/ipod touch via USB) had a release a while ago. I remember installing from source and having it not work previously, but I installed it using their ubuntu repo and it worked quite well. My one main problem is that it automagically mounts to /var/mobile/Media/ (I think), while most of the files I work with are in /var/mobile/Library/ . I’m sure there is a way of changing it, but much like figuring out bashpodder, I’ll probably take a long time to get to it, especially since I’m fine with working over ssh.

Finally, vlc4iphone has been updated, and it actually has buttons! However, it still doesn’t fork audio into the background when the screen is sleeping, so it remains fairly useless, so I won’t be listening to my oggcasts on my ipod anytime soon without transcoding.

Ok, today I went to the bank (Scotiabank, if you care to know) because I lost my debit card, and in the bank there was a poster hawking the new chip and pin debit and visa cards. There have been a lot of commercials by visa and the banks about this stuff. I figured I would jump, so I said I wanted one. First, they had to give me a regular and immediately cut it up to give me the chip and PIN card. Yup, bank operations make a ton of sense! /sarcasm

So I plugged the card into the bank reader and the teller shoots it up with my info. I ask the obvious question, whether or not the chip will work with the older ATM’s, and she says no. These machines have got to be 10 years old, but the saddest part is they only recently replaced their old monochrome screen machines. Plus, the UI on all of their machines sucks. When you want to withdraw money, you have to enter a number value and make sure its a multiple of twenty. Most other banks have the most common multiples of 20 preset onto the side buttons, and give you the option to punch it in.

So then I go to try it out. I head to the grocery store and get some lunch. When I get to pay, I use the chip slot on the keypad. I wait for five seconds and … nothing happens. Then the cashier looks at me like I’m an idiot and tries to show me how to swipe a card. I come to the conclusion that their cashier system hasn’t been updated to work with the chip reader.

So the whole push to get these cards is pointless. If the ATM’s don’t have it, and the stores without the readers don’t have it, and the stores WITH the new readers but don’t give a shit about setting them up, there is no added security.

My $0.02.

Of late, I’ve been really enjoying the Linux Cranks podcast. It’s got a very laid back progression that works great. Originally, they were putting it out in ogg and mp3, but at the beginning of the year, they proved how hardcore they were by going ogg only to deliver maximum freedom-y goodness. I heartily support this decision, but my poor iPod Touch that fights freedom from every angle? Not so much a fan.

Of course, having Cydia is the only way this thing is usable. I download all the podcasts I need a la carte, whenever I want them. But ogg… the iPod isn’t quite ready for yet. vlc4iphone is a port of VLC by Zod and it can actually play ogg files.

The downside? Its essentially a proof-of-concept at this point. Theres almost no UI, with no time progression bar, and no play/pause button, so if you wanna listen to something, you gotta do it in one go. Also, it isn’t able to run in the background, so when you lock the screen, it pauses. So essentially, to listen to Linux Cranks I would have to leave the thing on a table with the screen on for two hours. I might as well listen to it on my computer at this point.

I wish Zod could hook up with the guy who did dTunes, as that player works splendidly. As with pretty much everything with the iPod, I will have to wait for the hackers to meet my needs. I don’t mean to rush them, but I just seem to run into waiting for things a lot.

But wait! This morning I saw that ffmpeg is available on Cydia! Yay, I can transcode it into an mp3!

Not so much. After I learned how to use ffmpeg for that purpose, I set it upon the ogg.

The hardware is simply not up to the task. To encode just 10 minutes of the show at 64 Kbits/s took over 20 minutes.

Ok, so now I’m back to what I did last week, which was to transcode it on my laptop and transfrer it over ssh. Thats when I found that transfers over ssh go fast for about 10 seconds before tanking at around 80-90 KB/s. This week, I was at school while trying all this, and the Wi-Fi here has driven me into semantics many times. Needless to say, my efforts to redownload the ogg, trancode it, and transfer it were hindered by crappy bandwidth.

Just in case you were keeping score:

Play the ogg

Transcode the ogg

Download, transcode, and transfer the ogg

FFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUU

Oh well, I’ll do that last one again later.

The other day I was talking to my dad in the car. He was mentioning some things that were currently broken on his SAAB. He then mentioned that among SAAB drivers, SAAB stands for Something Almost Always Broken. I thought this to be contradictory because I know he loves that car, and he replied that the fun was in tracking down the broken stuff and fixing it.

I couldn’t help but see this as an analog to Linux. Fortunately, computer problems are much more mundane than problems with large hunks of metal moving at high speeds. Still, I agreed with him, as things breaking is part of the fun.

Linux is at the market share where it does not receive the same kind of attention from mainstream developers, or that ugly monster that is hardware drivers and compatibility. This is where most problems seem to lie.

Today I was trying to run a Java Web Start Application. Normally this is done seamlessly by the ubiquitous Java Runtime Environment. However, when I tried, nothing happened. So I went and prayed to the great Google in the sky, and it sent me an answer. Sun’s 64-bit version of the JRE for Linux didn’t work for some reason. So the blog post succintly showed me how to get the 32-bit version and run it without clashing with the default JRE. Worked like a charm.

Most of the time I don’t have to fix anything with Linux. However, problems do arise, and some of them would be totally bewildering to the average Windows or Mac user. I’m not going to go into a you-should-switch diatribe, but I will write about my first experiences with conversion soon (hopefully).

My first year with Linux? Awesome. Never going back. Stuff like that. Yeah.

Long time, no see, blog!

I’ve been very busy with school the last 2 months or so. I’m about to go into exams, and I’ll be busy throughout the Christmas holiday, so it’ll probably be a very long time before another one appears.

Suffice it to say I’ve been maintaining my manual podcast downloading habits on the iPod Touch, and neglecting my actual music. However, there have been several developments on that subject worth noting.

First, the new 2.2 firmware for the iPhone/iPod Touch has baked in podcast support. However, without the ability to delete them, this is useless, as I don’t have iTunes, and I never plug it into the computer unless I want to charge it. I’m still going to upgrade, as I’m running 2.0 still, and it’s beginning to feel very sluggish.

Second, as you may have heard, Apple DMCA’d the ipodhash project, but the EFF has raised their mighty finger to waggle it in Apple’s face, in a move that is made of win and freedom. I’m hopeful that Fairplay will be cracked before this gets resolved. Also, it looks like iFuse is getting closer to a release, and with the two working, the iPod might actually function as an … iPod. Regardless, I think this will be the last thing I will ever buy from Apple, as their hijinks are just getting ridiculous.

Third, there is a great video demonstation of a functional boot of iPhone Linux that has hit the intarwebs (and highly dugg) that gives me all kinds of hope for the future.

Finally in some non-iPod material, I am planning to try out the 64-bit alpha of Flash. 32-bit flash on Xubuntu is quite unstable, as I have to restart Firefox fairly regularly. But apparently the alpha is already superior. I just need time to set it up.

Thats whats going on right now that’s got my interest, and I will post again later with impressions of iPhone OS 2.2 and 64-bit Flash 10. Until then, I’ll get back under the rock I’ve been hiding under.

Been a while, busy with life, whatever.

First of all, I’ve reached a happy medium with the iPod touch, manually downloading the mp3’s for my podcasts and listening to them with dTunes. However, my dreams have been realized, as there are now at least three podcatchers available through Cydia, but two of them, including the infamous Podcaster, are rigged to lock after a certain amount of time or uses and can’t be used unless you pay them. Now I’ve got nothing wrong with paying for software, but I just don’t won’t to.

So I went with MobileCast, which is free (both as in speech and beer). Its been out for a while but I was annoyed at what I thought was the inability to remove feeds. I finally got around to googling it, and the function for deleting files is actually the most elegant I have seen. You swipe your finger to the left, and the delete button comes up. Brilliant, but not so intuitive, as it is not congruent with how first party apps do it.

One other reason I kept using dTunes is its wonderful ability to keep playing when you close it to go to another application. However, this advantage has recently been lost with the advent of Backgrounder, which gives any app the ability to run in the background. However (as the notes for Backgrounder will state) the iPhone/ iPod touch hardware is not very well suited to multitasking. I have noticed that doing anything while listening to an mp3 gets very pokey and slow, and sometimes the background app will simply crash.

On the syncing front, the efforts for breaking the iTunesDB hash have shifted to the iFuse/libiphone project, and definite progress is being made. Its hard sometimes to decypher the programmer-speak on the mailing list, but it looks like its getting close.

As a final note, I just wanted to vent my frustration at the App Store, where I can’t even get the paltry few apps I actually WANT because they aren’t available for the Canadian App Store. Pandora, Stanza, and Galcon Lite are are denied to me.

My hopes for a built-in podcatcher for the iPod touch is nearly realized. As I was scanning the Cydia package list I discovered two cool new things.

The first is a Mobile Safari download plug-in that allows you to download many types of files. This makes the browser a lot more functional then it was. The plug-in has come leaps and bounds since the version in the link.

The second package is dTunes, a music player that plays files downloaded with its built-in browser. But as I discovered, it saves the songs to the same directory as Safari does, and plays any song in that directory regardless of where it came from. I like this because you don’t have to open up dTunes when you find an mp3 in Safari, you can just download it on the spot. It also means I can ssh files over and play them totally independent of the iTunesDB.

This is a huge advantage to me, as I can actually get CONTENT onto my ipod (finally!) However, through all my googling, I have not seen any podcatcher that ties into this new functionality. Granted, dTunes is only 6 days old, has already been updated twice, and gained video support (pretty impressive). I just know that it has to be on the horizon.

This has strengthened my confidence for the iphone app community outside of the App Store, who are doing really cool stuff. Apple won’t let their guard down for a while, which means that the foreseeable future will be fun for the hackers who get to introduce their programs to a very large userbase. As a consumer of these programs, I am enjoying getting more and more functionality out of a device that originally had much lower aspirations.

I’m finding myself more and more engrossed in the ongoing efforts to make the iPhone/iPod touch usable with Linux. As it stands, they can’t mount via USB, and can’t be synced over ssh under the 2.0 firmware. I know that I could easily revert the firmware on my ipod and do it that way, but I thoroughly enjoy the apps, whether they’re from the App Store, Cydia, or Installer. So I’m resigned to tracking the efforts of others.

The first effort is the ipod hash project. There’s not a lot of information there, but the goal is to break the hashing algorithm used on iPhone OS 2.0 so that Linux users can sync their iPods/iPhones. I’m wondering if they will contribute this back to the gtkpod team, they don’t have much information about this.

The other effort is iFuse and libiphone, a project to mount an iPhone/iPod touch via USB. It looks like they have been successful to a degree, but are only recommending that developers install it. Syncing via USB is also still impossible because of the new hashing algorithm. This interests me because I’ve tried using my Touch with iTunes on VirtualBox, but since it doesn’t mount to USB, it can’t be connected to the VM. If the hash-breaking efforts take longer, I may have this to fall back on.

In the meantime, I’ll try to learn more useful and scholarly stuff. That oughtta kill some time.

Once again, I had a post on the go but it wasn’t very interesting, but now I definitely have a reason to blather.

Through a complicated series of transactions, I find myself with a new ipod touch. This was pretty high on the list of things I wanted, because I love computing on a small scale, and this lets me do a lot more then with my old iPod 5G (Classic, if you accept the retrograded title).

First I wanted to see what the official store had to offer, but I didn’t want to pay the $10 for the iPhone 2.0 firmware update. Who wants to pay for firmware? Luckily, it is very easy to get the firmware update for free. I actually didn’t end up looking at much of the apps there, so I moved towards jailbreaking it. Unfortunately, I felt the repercussions of that misdeed quite quickly.

I had every intention of syncing music to the touch with Amarok, but with the 2.0 firmware, Apple changed the hash algorithm used to sync music with iTunes. So I am stuck waiting for the algorithm to be broken again, unless I go and reinstall a Windows partition and run it by VM.

Another problem I have is with having to use iTunes to do podcasts, even though the thing is web enabled. I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I’ve always wanted a DAP with Wi-Fi that could download them directly. But as I found out (and expected), the touch doesn’t work that way. The file system on the touch (which can be viewed from the MobileTerminal app from Cydia or Installer) is only half there, the music and movies locked into the iTunes proprietary filesystem. Safari’s downloading capability is limited to saving photos.

The only respite from that particular issue is a webapp, the Wizzard Media Receiver, which can manage subscriptions and stream them. Originally, I didn’t really think it was useful because I had to be in a hotspot, and it’s hard to find those on the subway. However, I’ve grown fond of it, being able to listen to podcasts at home. It is a little buggy, but its in beta, so that’s expected. It also doesn’t remember where you last paused it, which is great for long podcasts that you can’t listen to in one sitting.

By this point, I should be pretty annoyed at the whole process, but I find myself becoming less fanatic about things. It’s really all my fault for buying the thing in the first place. I jumped on an opportunity (thanks, sis!) and then working to make it useful to me. And I’ve had a lot of fun in the process. I’m playing with applications and enjoying how much better the Cydia and Installer applications are then the App Store ones. I can read books on it, I can use it as a flashlight (with maximum brightness, something you won’t get from the App Store)… who needs music?

In life news, I moved, started 4th year of university, and am helping to take care of a lovely Golden Retriever named Ollie. More on that later.