• Low recording volume in Skype and Ubuntu Hardy

Become A Master Twitter With Twhirl

This is a good intermediate video for anyone who has installed twhirl and wants to get more out of it. Some of the information seems dated, and other bits are just plain wrong (everyone can see replies using @username). But for the most part, this has some excellent info.

Oh, one other thing I disagree with: reducing the number of people one follows. There are a lot of people that I follow that post about a variety of topics, nothing that I could create a search on. So I follow them.

I am loving the static Search columns on Twhirl, btw. I have a few search tabs always open (#bsg, #highlandsranch, #xfce). This is amazingly useful, and I completely agree with eddale about how much more powerful twhirl makes Twitter.

Mount St. Helens

A coworker and I were talking about the Mount St. Helens eruption, and I had to do some research. This video from the BBC is easily the best of the bunch, showing a time lapse of the eruption itself, plus photo documentation of the aftermath. Must see if you haven’t already.

So yeah, I am so totally out-of-date with the newsgroup world that I had not heard about par2 files. Nor nzb files, actually, but that’s a topic for another day. It turns out that par2 files are simply parity files, which can help recover from missing parts of multi-part binary posts. Fortunately, with my usenet provider (Tiger Usenet), retention is high enough that I don’t really have to worry about it. But for those of you looking for assistance with Ubuntu (or other Linux flavors) and par2 files, there’s an execellent tutorial available from the alt.binaries.blog.

I decided to install Skype on my Dell 1521 laptop running Xubuntu Hardy. Installation of Skype went fine, and Skype’s audio playback worked fine. Skype was also able to use the laptop’s built-in webcam, which was pretty cool, too. However, it appeared that the laptop’s built-in microphone was not working. After some testing, though, I found that the mic was working, the volume was just amazingly low. Like ghostly whisper quiet. It took me a while to figure out how to fix this, but in the end, the following worked:

1. Set the input to Digital Mic
2. Go into alsamixer and <tab> to change to Capture mode
3. Set the slider for Capture and MUX up to the highest possible
4. Exit out of alsamixer
5. Go into Skype, and change the audio devices to one of the HW0 options
6. Save, then exit out of Skype
7. Go back into Skype, change the audio devices to Default Device
8. Save your config changes

Once I did the above, volume was at a very audible level for both input and output were perfect in Skype. And I can cross one more thing off my to-do list.

I found an ultra-handy guide to displaying/setting the system clock in Linux (and, theoretically, most other UNIX-like operating systems. I always lose track somewhere when I am working with the system clock. Not via the Set Time/Date bit on the Gnome or KDE clocks, mind you, but from the CLI. So a guide like this is invaluable in helping me remember how to adjust the date and time, and then to save that as UTC time in the hardware clock.

All Your Base Are Belong To Us

A classic bears enjoying over and over…