Archive for November, 2005
Tagging music via Wired
Posted by Biffster in Digital music on November 29th, 2005
Wired is running a great article on the basics of tagging digital music files:
Tagging song files makes it easier to manage a library. Want to see every song that was released in 1986? No problem. Want to sort your collection by song genre? That’s easy, too. Tags also make it possible to manage how music files are named on a PC, and where on the hard drive they will be stored. It’s simpler to store the 11 files that make up The Replacements’ Let it Be in a folder bearing that album’s title, rather than storing all 30,000 tracks in a single folder. I also prefer verbose file names that show a lot of information about the track (The Replacements—Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash—10—Johnny’s Gonna Die.mp3 is a lot more descriptive than Johnny’s Gonna Die.mp3). The renaming features in both programs are essential.
I second the suggestion for Tag&Rename for Windows users. For Linux, I recommend Easytag. Either way, tagging programs are absolutely necessary for anything but the smallest digital music collections.
Truly friggin’ awesome: video games emulated in your browser
Well, to be more precise, these are video games which are emulated in Java, with a web-based front-end to find and launch games. But the end result is that one finds and plays video games directly from your browser!
Theoretically, this is browser- and platform-independent: as long as your platform can run a jvm and your browser supports a java plugin, you’re golden. I’m playing these in Ubuntu via Firefox 1.0.7 without any problems. Roc-n-Rope. Awesome!
Out with smbfs, in with cifs?
Posted by Biffster in Debian/Linux on November 29th, 2005
I tell you, I learn something new every day. Apparently, smbfs is out and cifs is in for mounting remote Windoze shares.
The problem is that SMBFS is basically screwed up & orphaned. The guy who was the maintainer – Urban Widmark – has basically dropped off the face of the earth, is no longer taking emails, & has evidently essentially said “screw you guys” to all the people who were using & depending upon SMBFS (ya know, I’d understand if something came up, but just to vanish without apology or explanation is pretty crappy behavior). So what do we use instead? CIFS. Which is supported. Which is in the kernel. Which is what you should be using NOW.
And I’ll be damned if changing the filesystem type from smbfs to cifs, then remounting, didn’t work flawlessly for the shares from my wife’s WinXP machine. Very cool!
OOoMacros
Posted by Biffster in Miscellany, Open Source on November 29th, 2005
I think the title says it all: macros for OpenOffice.org!
An error on your part does not an Ubuntu bug make
Posted by Biffster in Blogs, Debian/Linux on November 27th, 2005
So while installing Ubuntu on a laptop, Technopotamus allowed the Ubuntu installer to install the wrong keymap for his laptop. When his keyboard doesn’t work the way that he expects it to after the install is done, he blames Ubuntu? Huh?
This problem is actually rather assinine. During the install process, it autodetects the keyboard. I thought it said it was going to use US default, but im not sure, i pressed enter relatively quickly (i didnt expect linux to mis-detect anything). Then it installed relatively well; about the same as Debian Sarge. Anyway, then when I booted up, the keyboard doesnt work – most of the keys didnt do anything, and a few of them displayed messed up letters, or the wrong ones. This was definitely NOT the US-default keymap i had selected (later I discovered that it had autodetected my “standard 104 keyboardâ€? as German or Hungarian or something).
(emphasis mine, to point out exactly where things went wrong in the install)
Technopotamus, an error on your part does not an Ubuntu bug make. Next time, be sure that you are selecting what you think you are selecting. Hardware detection always has the capability to be flaky at times. That’s why the Ubuntu intaller prompts you to confirm that what it found is actually what you have.
Quake 4
Posted by Biffster in Debian/Linux, Games on November 26th, 2005
Take one part Quake 4, mix in one part iD’s official Linux binaries, one part Quake 4 Linux FAQ and one part patience. Mix them all together and you have one of the best games for Linux ever!
It took a bit of work, partially because of problems with the libsdl installed on Debian-based systems (including Ubuntu) and partially because I didn’t realize that the Linux installer doesn’t install all of the needed files from CD 1. But after I got it up and running, I was simply amazed. This game rocks, and it rocks hard in Linux. I don’t have the fastest system (Athlon 2500+, 1gb ram, nVidia 6600), and was worried about game performance. Which was silly of me. The game is solid at 1024x768x32-bit color. And it looks gorgeous!
This is truly friggin’ awesome!
Heard it from a friend, who heard it from a friend…
Posted by Biffster in Blogs, Open Source on November 24th, 2005
Found a blog entry that was linked to through
firefox.blogcarnival.com stating, “This blogger says the WordPress folks may not have the best of open source intentions.” The original blog author posits that it’s not necessarily good that WordPress authors are making money based off of WordPress’s popularity.
I say: wtf? WordPress is open-source and continues to be so. And as long as it is, who cares if the WordPress team makes some cash from it? That’s one of the great things of open source: it is still possible to make money off of your completely open, free code! Anyone that would bitch about someone making money off of open source is simply unclear on the concept.
