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.