Logitech USB headset & Ubuntu/Linux

My wife had an unused Logitech Stereo USB Headset 250 kicking around the house that I took into the office today. Joy of joys! Ubuntu/Dapper recognized it and both the headset *and* microphone work out of the box.

Just like Microsoft Windows ;-)

Democracyplayer on Ubuntu/Dapper

The good folks at GetDemocracyNow.com provide debian packages for Ubuntu/Dapper, but didn't get the dependencies quite right. After intalling the two democracyplayer packages from their Ubuntu download page, I needed to also install the following packages:

$ sudo apt-get install libboost-python1.33.1 libgtk-mozembed-ruby mozilla-psm

There is a ton of great content!

Moving photos around behind f-spot's back

I've been using f-spot since it showed up in Ubuntu/Breezy and have been keeping all my photos in a directory structure like this:

/PHOTOS/Photos/2006.06.30/
/PHOTOS/Photos/2006.07.01/

But sometimes I've forgotten to unclick the "Copy file to the Photos folder" box in the photos import dialog and end up with photos under ~/Photos/. Recently I checked and found there were almost a gigabytes worth of photos under there.

So this is what I did to move them to under /PHOTOS/Photos/ and keep all the tags and metadata correct.

• Back up /home and /PHOTOS to an external USB. I love rsnapshot.
  $ rsnapshot daily
  


• make an extra backup of the f-spot database
  $ cp ~/.gnome2/f-spot/photos.db photos-backup.db
  


• Start poking around the f-spot database and updating it.
  $ sqlite3 ~/.gnome2/f-spot/photos.db
sqlite> .schema photos
CREATE TABLE photos ( id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY NOT NULL,
time INTEGER NOT NULL,
directory_path STRING NOT NULL,
name STRING NOT NULL,
description TEXT NOT NULL,
default_version_id INTEGER NOT NULL
);

  


• See how many photos are in ~/Photos...
  sqlite> select count(*) from photos where directory_path like '/home/marc/Photos/%';
260

  


• Take a look at a few of them to see the path names...
  sqlite> select directory_path from photos where directory_path like '/home/marc/Photos/%' limit 0,10;

  


• Update the pathname to my prefered one. I've added an 'a' to the end just so I won't overwrite an existing directory.
  sqlite> update photos set directory_path = "/PHOTOS/Photos/2006.06.22a" where directory_path = "/home/marc/Photos/2006/6/22";
sqlite> .quit

  


• Make the directory and move the files to the new location...
  mkdir /PHOTOS/Photos/2006.06.22a
mv -v /home/marc/Photos/2006/6/22/HPIM117* /PHOTOS/Photos/2006.06.22a

  

Repeat for each directory. I did it all within emacs' shell so cut-n-paste made it a snap.

Another list of Ubuntu essentials

Mark Pilgrim has compiled his list of Ubuntu essentials -- time to add some KDE goodness to 'My Ubuntu/Dapper Configuration' page...

More on Dual Monitor with Ubuntu/Dapper

This is a follow on to last week's post about Dual Monitor on Ubuntu/Dapper

I've been using the xorg.conf-ati.20060621 configuration at work with two monitors, but when at home the laptop didn't degrade down to working with the one LCD monitor of the laptop. So, here is a new configuration that lets you switch between a single monitor mode (1024x768) or one large one (2048x768) that can be 'slid over to' by using the mouse. The key press is Control-Alt-+ (the + over on the side where the number entry is). On the laptop, it is Control-Alt-blue_Fn-?

Here the is xorg.conf file:

xorg.conf-ati-works-with-one-monitor.20060624

Dual Monitor on Ubuntu/Dapper

I've noticed a number of people asking about dual head support in dapper on #ubuntu, so here is my setup:

This hp/compaq nc6000 laptop/notebook that has an ATI card:


$ sudo lspci|grep VGA
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV350 [Mobility Radeon 9600 M10]


I have two head monitors working with both the 'ati' and the closed source 'fglrx' drivers.

Here are the configuration files:

xorg.conf-fglrx.20060621 -- works when booting without the second monitor

xorg.conf-ati.20060621 -- when booting with out the second monitor attached, it still thinks it is there. Some windows may pop up on the unreachable monitor.

Before you start hacking around with your xorg.conf, save a copy somewhere safe.

w32codecs for ubuntu 'hoary'

The stock Ubuntu repositories don't include the w32codecs (wmvdmod.dll, etc) so xine, mplayer can play WMV and other formats. Basically the package puts 127 DLLs in /usr/lib/w32codecs.

So, I temporarily added the following line to my /etc/apt/sources.list

deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ testing main

And then did this:


apt-get update && apt-get install w32codecs


I then commented that line out since and apt-get upgrade would have picked up a bunch of updated packages from that repository.

Getting the bleeding edge iPodder on Linux (debian/sarge) mini-HOWTO

Lately, I've been using the bleeding edge version of iPodder from CVS (which confusingly is in the
iSpider directory) Here is how you can grab a copy for yourself:

$ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/ipodder login
CVS password: (press return)

$ cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/ipodder co iSpider

[tons of informational messages about downloading iSpider]

$ cd iSpider
$ export PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/wx-2.5.3-gtk2-unicode:$PYTHONPATH-unicode:$PYTHONPATH
$ python iPodderGui.pyw

... And fire up your favorite dev tools!

iPodder GUI on Linux (debian/sarge) mini-HOWTO

I've been using the ipodder beta on
my laptop that runs GNU/Linux Debian/Sarge in the command line only mode. But over the holidays there was and update to wxpython that gets the GUI working.

This is what you need to do:

$ alien --to-deb ipodder-1.1.2-1cl.noarch.rpm
$ sudo dpkg -i ipodder_1.1.2-2_all.deb
$ export PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/wx-2.5.3-gtk2-unicode:$PYTHONPATH-unicode:$PYTHONPATH
$ /opt/iPodder/iPodderGui.py

and enjoy...

comment spam

The daily comment spam is getting worse and worse -- easily 100+ per day. It never makes it to the website because WordPress is setup so I need to approve all postings, but it is a PITA to weed
through the spam to find the occasionally real comments.

I've seen on Jeremy Zawodny's blog that in order to post, you need to type *his* first name in one of the forms. Not rocket science if a human is making the posting, but perhaps just difficult enough for the spammer's script to fail. The other nice thing is you can always change the question to something equally as trival. Say, "what the the color of the sky?" or "3141592 is my favorite number, what is my favorite number?"

Jeff Barr posted an entry on exactly how to do that in Wordpress. The only thing that was a little tricky was the change to wp-comments-post.php was on line 22 in my copy of the file. The difference because the file is a DOS format and emacs displayed it with ^M^M at the end of each line (essentially halving the
number of line Jeff saw.

The changes work for me...

listening to podcasts on a less than optimal mp3 player

Today some of the kids have a 5 hour fencing competition and I wanted to get caught up listening to some podcasts. The problem is the cheap little RCA Lyra 1080B has a couple problems with listening to long mp3s. When you pause playback for more than a few minutes, the device turns off, but on restart it resets to the beginning of the mp3. Also there is no way forward ahead within an mp3.

So looked around google for a way to split mp3s into smaller chunks and found
mp3splt.

This is how I load up the mp3 player with podcasts now:

Copy those 'casts I want to a tmp directory and then:

mp3splt -f -a -t 5.0 *.mp3

Which splits all the mp3s in the current directory into 5 minute chunks.

Then copy those chunks to the player mounted on /mnt:


find . -name "*00.mp3" -printf 'cp -v "%p" /mnt n' | sh


Off to the competition!

[update: Griffin got 3rd and Trevor 6th in novice Epee 12 and under while
Spencer came in 4th for 13 and older]

Creating an audio blog reply using Festival

I listened to Dave Winer's Coffee Notes for 24-Oct-2004 podcast on the way home tonight and felt compelled to reply to him with an audio reply email about Richard Scoble/Scooble's voice mail. Here is how I created it.

* Get the Festival Speech Synthesis package for your Debian GNU/Linux box


$ sudo apt-get install festival

[...bunch of status about installing a festival and dependancies removed...]
$


* Create a snappy reply. I like emacs. This is exactly what hi-dave.txt looks like:

Hi Dave!

This is Marc No-zell and I just listened to your Coffee Talk with
Richard Scoble. It sounds like Microsoft's voice mail system is using
a descendant of the DECK-talk system that was created by DECK in the
1980s.

I'm creating this audio reply using the Festival Speech Synthesis
System on my Deb-ian GNU Linux laptop. Neener, neener, neener!

Well, thanks for the Coffee Notes!

Now I did do a little cheating here. Festival follows strict pronunciation rules and sometimes gets words wrong. For example my surname would be said as 'nozzel', so I spell it how I want it to sound. The same is true for DECtalk and DEC, which sounds like 'dec-tork' and 'december' (trying to be a little too clever ;-)

* Convert from text to wave format:


$ text2wave hi-dave.txt -o hi-dave.wav


* Convert from wav to mp3 format


$ lame hi-dave.wav hi-dave.mp3



* Listen to the result:


$ xmms hi-dave.mp3


Sample of Griffin's stop motion movies

Griffin was the sole director, producer, photographer and set designer for this mini-movie.

All I did was knock down the resolution for the web version (the original is 20M, this is only 2M)
and run the magic command to convert it to an animated GIF image (convert -delay 20 *.jpg output.gif).

[Check it out!](http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/griffin-stop-motion-snake-video-small-format.gif)

Send kudos to Griffin by sending email to his first name @ his last name dot com

making stop-motion videos

This evening Griffin and I made some stop-motion videos using some clay figures he made and my HP camera.

[Take a look](http://www.nozell.com/blog/data/griffin-video-02.avi)

This is how we did it:

* Set the HP 318 Camera to the lowest resolution, turn off flash
* Screw in the little tripod I got years ago for one of the first webcams
* Have plenty of light
* Take about 90+ photos
* dump onto my Linux/Debian laptop (gphoto2 --get-all-files)
* Convert to an animated gif ( convert -delay 10 IM*.jpg out.gif) with a 10/100 second delay. Realize it is a huge 20M file
* Convert to AVI ( mencoder "mf://IM*.jpg" -mf type=jpg:fps=7 -ovc lavc -o output.avi) which gives a much smaller (~1M) file.

Repeat until the batteries need to be recharged.

Some tips to (re)install grub on an HP ProLiant server

Yesterday I needed to fix the MBR of a ProLiant (Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 2.1) by reinstalling grub and grub-install just won't work.
grub-install assumes that the boot device is in the form /dev/hda or
/dev/sda and since most ProLiant use a SmartArray RAID controller its
boot device is typically /dev/cciss/c0d0.

So, in order to recover this is what I did:

* In /etc/grub.conf (a link to /boot/grub/grub.conf) uncomment the
line that looks like this:

     boot=/dev/cciss/c0d0
     

* Make sure /boot/grub/device.map is setup right and looks like this:

        (fd0)     /dev/fd0
        (hd0)     /dev/cciss/c0d0
     

* Run grub like this:

   /sbin/grub --batch --device-map=/boot/grub/device.map 
        --config-file=/boot/grub/grub.conf --no-floppy
   grub> root (hd0,0)
   grub> setup (hd0)
   grub> quit
  

Hope that helps!

Using ssh and VNC for customer demos

First connect to the demo system and start a href="http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/">vncserver running
there. If you are already logged in, simply vncserver. Or be
fancy and do this from your desktop: ssh your@demo.labsystem.net
vncserver

Now setup an encrypted port redirection using ssh from my desktop to
the demo system. VNC uses po
rt 5901 for desktop :1, port 5902 for
desktop :2, etc.

$ ssh -f -C \
        -L 5901:127.0.0.1:5901 \
        -l marc demo.labsystem.net sleep 7200

Now run a vncviewer on the local machine. Be sure to use the command
switches below which give better performance.

$ vncviewer -compresslevel 9 -encodings "tight copyrect" localhost:1

Now have your field person also create a ssh port tunnel (of course
they need an account on the demo system as well) and also run
vncviewer. Now both of you can control the keyboard and mouse for the
system. The performance can be surprisingly good if you have a least
T1 speeds. Across a slower DSL, it is usable, but you feel the delay.

kio_fish: Use ssh to access files via konqueror

I stumbled across this while messing with debian's apt-cache search. kio_fish is a KDE extension that provides a way to browse a remote directory usingssh. There is no need to setup an FTP or web server on the remote system as long as you have an account there. Just point konqueror to fish://user@home.system.com.

BTW, depending on your KDE installation, you may need to also install liblcms

Take a look.