Quick reminder for folks that we’re having a Central Ohio Fedora 9 Release party tomorrow (Thursday) night at 7pm. For more details, click here.
Archive for Linux
iAudio U2
Earlier this week I received my iAudio U2 that I ordered off of Amazon.com. I’ve been looking for a while for a portable music player that played nicely with Linux, and also handled Ogg Vorbis files, since most of my music collection is in this format. The U2 meets both of these criteria, and also is real small to boot. Sweet. The only downside I’ve experienced so far with it is a limitation of 50 folders to sort music. This isn’t that big of an issue for me since I went with the 1 GB model.
Technorati Tags: iAudio
Various Bits
Martyn released a new version of Gossip today, so I spent this morning working on pushing this out in FE. It should be available later today, since FE is in the midst of a massive rebuild due to the upcoming FC5 release.
What else has been going on? I’m about half-way through writing the GStreamer backend for the Nautilis-Flac-Converter. Ross Burton pointed me to a project (Sound Converter), that is similar in use, for examples on how to implement it. Unfortunately, since it was written in Python, I wasn’t really able to use any code from it. It did help me figure out the pipeline I needed to use in GStreamer to convert the FLAC file, though. For example, to convert a FLAC to an ogg vorbis file with gst-launch (a tool that builds and runs basic GStreamer pipelines), I would simply run:
gst-launch filesrc location=02-Rebirth.flac ! flacdec ! audioconvert ! audio/x-raw-float,rate=44100,channels=2 ! vorbisenc name=enc quality=0.6 ! oggmux ! filesink location=02-Rebirth.ogg
Basically, in the extension I’m just recreating this pipeline, which will allow me to switch parts of the pipline with the approriate elements for encoding. I’m using large chunks of code from Sound-Juicer, so the work so far has been fairly minimal. Depending on how much time and motivation I have, I’m hoping to finish this up in the next couple of weeks.
KYEO
Been fairly busy the last couple of weeks, so naturally my posting here has been fairly sparse. I did manage to finally put together my bike trainer last week, though. Unlike Ken’s experience, I didn’t run into any problems setting it up. Well, that’s not totally true, since I spent forever removing my new WTB VelociRaptor from my rear wheel, and replacing it with my old bald WTB EnduroRaptor. Once I finally finished that crappy job, it was a cinch putting together the CycleOps Magneto Trainer. I’ve only used it for a few days, but so far I’m pretty happy with its performance. It’s a little loud, though if I threw on a road tire that would probably cut down a little noise. I was a little worried at first that it wouldn’t provide enough resistance, but so far that hasn’t turned out to be true (this could be due to not having ridden in about two months).
Yesterday, I wrote a Nautilus extension (Nautilus-Flac-Converter) to convert FLAC files to Ogg Vorbis. Here’s a link to the GnomeFiles page for it. My main reason for writing the extension was so I can easily encode my FLACS that I’ve archived to DVD, without having to drop to a command line. As is, the extension doesn’t allow me to do that, since you can’t write to the FLAC directory since it’s read-only (DVD). In my next version, I’m going to add a folder chooser button, so you can encode files to another directory, which should fix that problem. It’s a pretty quick hack, so I’ll probably release a new version later this week. After that, I’m gonna look at using GStreamer to handle the encoding, since it will allow me to easily add MP3 support without needing to add any patent-encumbered code to the extension. It will also allow me to remove the quality option from the initial dialog window, since that will be handled by the GStreamer profiles (for an example, look at how Sound-Juicer handles it). The only thing the dialog would need to show would be the format you wish to encode to, and where the files should be written to. Of course, adding GStreamer support will be significantly more work since I’ve only played around with it sparingly, so it will be a while before I implement that.
Gravel
Well, I finished adding the gravel today to the backyard. Wasn’t too bad, though the humidity today was unreal. Now I just need to move all the stones to the back yard, and I’ll be pretty much done for the week.
Haven’t had much time for Fedora stuff the last week or so, though I did manage to push out the latest version of Gramps for FC4 today. The development branch should be finished building later this evening, and hopefully will be pushed out tomorrow.
Fedora & Eclipse
Finally got around to upgrading my system last week to Fedora Core 4 test 3, since it would make my life easier while working on my packages at Fedora Extras. Also, it would allow me a chance to use Fedora’s natively-compiled version of Eclipse. I’ve heard a lot of good things about Eclipse, so I figure I’ll force myself to use that instead of Emacs for a while, and see if it improves my productivity.
Jabber
Ken pointed out a link on how-to setup Jabber support in iChat. The only thing that it could do a better job of, is pointing out that not all the Jabber servers support all the different IM protocols.
Speaking of Jabber, here’s an interesting use of it by the UCC to monitor the open/closed status of doors. Very cool idea.
Update: I’ve decided to use a different Jabber server, so my new Jabber id is bdpepple@njs.netlab.cz.
Gossip & Galago
Spent this afternoon building the packages for Fedora Extras that are needed for Gossip. Overall, Gossip is a pretty cool Jabber client, though I definitely could use the spell-checker that’s being added in the next release. Now that Apple has added Jabber support to iChat, I can hopefully look at using only Jabber in the future.
I’ve also started to package Galago, which is a framework that monitors IM presense. It’s pretty cool, in that it ties-in IM presense in applications such as Evolution, and could very easily be added to other applications. Unfortunately, I’m having problems with compiling it under the current Fedora development packages (FC4), so I’ll be spending some time over the next fews days ironing out those bugs.
Ubuntu
Last weekend, I ended up loading the latest version of Ubuntu on an empty partition to give it another look. For a relatively new distro, it’s pretty amazing how far they’ve come in such a short time. In some ways, they are already ahead of Fedora, just in the sheer number of packages available. As such, it gave me a chance to easily play with some of the new Mono applications that are being worked on, since they are easily installed from the Ubuntu repositories. The one application that most impressed me was Muine, a music player. The interface is probably the best I’ve seen so far, very intuitive to use, unlike the many iTunes and WinAmp clones out there. The only downside is that it depends on Mono, which adds a hell of a lot of bloat to it. As such, I’ll be sticking with Rhythmbox for the time being. Also, in the above picture, I’ve got an example of the contact lookup applet pulled up with my card. The applet ties into Evolution data server, so I just need to type my contacts last name, and select the appropriate contact.
