john.pithed.org

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.