Taken for granted

Situation one:

I needed to mount an ISO image I had in Windows to view its contents. Solution in Linux: mount -t iso9660 -o loop my.iso /mnt/tmp. Solution in Windows: download and install a program specifically for this from a third-party (Daemon Tools) that installed some scary system-layer DLL that I don’t quite trust.

Situation two:

Unreal Tournament changes the refresh rate for my monitor to 60hz while running. Gives me a bit of a headache. Solution in Linux: the problem doesn’t exist, since refresh rate is set as constant, and doesn’t change just because a game wants to take over the screen. Windows: a registry-level hack to the NVidia drivers to enable a refresh rate lock that isn’t available in the new control panel. Switched to the old display properties NVidia panel, and when the screen blinked to bring it up (why does it do that?) the display wouldn’t come back. It didn’t go out of range, because the monitor indicator stayed green (it turns yellow when the display is out of range), Windows just screwed up. Required a hard reboot. Finally enabled the damn thing so I can play Unreal Tournament in Windows without my eyes bleeding.

And people say Windows is easier to use.

Owned.

So Microsoft Reader books such as this one are obviously not available for us poor Linux users to read, right?

WRONG!

Thanks to a neat little program called Convert Lit (or CLit, for short — ooh, how nasty! ), we can easily extract LIT format books into HTML format.

So we have this:
stephen@bupu ~/book $ ls -a WelTime.lit
WelTime.lit


And we do this:

stephen@bupu ~/book $ mkdir WelTime
stephen@bupu ~/book $ clit WelTime.lit WelTime/


After some conversion, we get this:
stephen@bupu ~/book $ ls WelTime
Contents.htm ~cov0005.htm PCcover.jpg stylesheet.css title.jpg WelTime.opf
copyright.html cover.jpg PCthumb.jpg thumb.jpg WelTime.html


Open up the WelTime.html in a browser and we get the book! Bwahaha! That’s what you get for greedily protecting your silly little proprietary formats, world. We’re onto you.

Quake 2, prettified.

QuDos (http://qudos.quakedev.com/) is a sourceport of Quake 2 that allows lots of prettified stuff plus enhanced textures. Result: pretty shots like this.

(Note: I did a contrast correction on that shot since it was originally dark — gamma correction in-game made it a lot brighter and shinier.)

What I noticed was that the result of using several of the game’s filters was an effect very similar to the XBox 360’s so-called “superior” graphics capabilities. I knew that it always looked almost like a filter rather than better graphics (sure, the screenshot is at 1024×768, but a lower resolution looks just the same — the increased resolution just smooths out the jaggies), but now that I’ve seen this, I’m really convinced.

I knew sticking with my Dreamcast was a good idea.

Audacity

Audacity is Free software for recording and editing audio. Though I really have never played with it much until now, since I had no way to record things.

I have a cheap microphone (one of those bendy desk things) that always worked fine in Windows but would not in Linux. Oh, I could turn it up in alsamixer and hear myself over the speaker, but none of the audio recording programs (including Audacity) would capture the audio. I figured it was either something terribly wrong somewhere, or (more likely) a simple misconfiguration. Of course, after many, may tries in the past to get it working, I finally figured it out today (one of the Capture configurations in alsamixer wasn’t enabled. So, long story short, it works now, and I can play with Audacity.

Oh, the things one can do with one’s voice… echo, pitch shift, slow down, speed up, distortion, reversing… it’s quite awesome. Even my crappy voice can sound quite ominous with almost no work at all.

There’s even Windows and Mac versions of this awesome software. Give it a try.

Not a paid advertisement, I swear!

Firefox 2.0 Final

It’s here. Get it. Now.

Windows users: you have no excuse anymore. Microsoft released IE7 and it was terrible. More of the same. No significant progress in standards compliance. Ugly interface. Features blatantly ripped off from other browsers. A security hole (a major one, no less) on the first week of its release. Pathetic.

Right now my machine is hard at work building FF2 for Linux (my Windows install already has it up and running). What is unfortunate is that I have to manually build it because somehow the Gentoo ebuild cannot optimize it as well as I can with my .mozconfig. No idea why. The ebuild version just runs a little slower (scrolling is laggy and page rendering isn’t as snappy).

My .mozconfig:

mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/obj-@CONFIG_GUESS@
. $topsrcdir/browser/config/mozconfig
ac_add_options --enable-optimize="-O2 -march=pentium4 -mmmx -msse -pipe"
ac_add_options --enable-default-toolkit=gtk2
ac_add_options --enable-xft
ac_add_options --disable-tests
ac_add_options --enable-official-branding
ac_add_options --disable-debug
ac_add_options --enable-svg

Edit: Why in the world does WordPress screw up code, even in <code> tags? A double-minus becomes a small dash, and the normal quotes become these weird double-backquote things? Geez, I hate crap like that. Use normal ASCII please, especially when I freaking specify it!

Edit 2: Okay, this is odd. I went back and re-added the code tags and now it works. OOOOOOOOOOOoookay… maybe someone at WordPress heard my griping…

Gentoo to remove XMMS

Gentoo devlist

So basically, the problem is that they don’t see any upstream XMMS activity for a while, and there are a few minor bugs that pop up on their buglist for it, and all of a sudden they decide to drop one of the best (and my personal favorite) audio player for Linux?

Gentoo, what are you thinking?

I know there is nothing stopping us from using Portage overlays or just straight compiling it ourself to use XMMS. But come on, there’s a lot more unmaintained garbage polluting your portage tree that doesn’t even compile half the time, let alone run right, and it’s still in stable. Why don’t they get rid of those? Because they are some Gentoo maintainers’ pet package. They justify killing XMMS because there are supposedly “better” audio players out there. From the package.mask message:
# Use anything but this, like media-sound/audacious
# media-sound/amarok media-sound/mpd media-sound/rythmbox  [sic]
# media-sound/muine media-sound/banshee

Amarok is an unintuitive, heavy, bloated pile of garbage that crashes more in one sitting than XMMS ever has from the first time I used it. Audacious is buggy and very crash-prone. “Rythmbox”, or Rhythmbox as anyone with half a brain spells it, is slow and has several lockup issues in my experience. Muine and Banshee won’t even run half the time, and when they do, they don’t stay up long. XMMS is rock solid compared to these players.

Yes, I’m mad over this decision. Just because some brain-dead devs at Gentoo drool over Amarok, which can’t even directly play a song from my library until I put it in my “playlist” then move over and click it, doesn’t mean that they can’t take a few moments out of their time to provide a few patches here and there to XMMS. At least keep it in unstable if you don’t want to accept the responsibility of maintaining it.

A Linux distro without XMMS? Are you insane, Gentoo devs?

*sigh*

Yabause – Sega Saturn emulation.

Being an emulation fan, one system that I have always wished would have better emulators was the Sega Saturn. Other game consoles during that time (PlayStation, the Nintendo 64) have nearly flawless, fast emulation (ePSXe and Mupen64, respectively). Saturn, unfortunately, has not been emulated as well, supposedly due to the complexities of the Saturn itself.

Occasionally, I dive into Saturn emulators for Windows and often find them lacking. So I went to try a Linux emulator called “Yabause” to see how things were in Saturn emulation. Sadly, I didn’t have much luck with all of my games:

* Virtua Racing – shows title screen and best times list, but won’t go into the game
* Sega Rally Championship – won’t even boot
* Panzer Dragoon Zwei – starts the FMV sequence and resets the emulator.
* Pebble Beach Golf Links – Runs, very slowly, but excess flicker and inability to draw the course at all (it looks like you are standing on water).
* Virtua Fighter 2 – Works, kind of — runs very slowly, background is glitched during fight
* World Series Baseball II – resets system randomly, seems to work through title screen (as far as I got)
* Myst – Actually works (!)
* NHL 97 – Major graphics glitches, buggy menus
* Quake – major glitches

I have more games (I bought tons of Saturn games when they went cheap ) but at this point I pretty much gave up. Saturn emulation just ain’t at a decent level yet, sadly. Oh well, least it wasn’t a total loss – I found my missing NHL ‘94 Sega CD disk in one of the Saturn CD cases.

Why Linux is Better.

“RIP: silly quotes.” — me

Yeah, I’m terrible at updating every single (week)day. I’ll still try, but some days when you have other things on your mind, or you fall asleep too early, one just forgets. So I’m doing an entry this weekend to make up for missed time.

Anyway, it’s not much of an update; just wanted to share a site:

Why Linux is Better

About time!

No silly quote today, I’ll just jump straight to the good news.

The freakin’ Flash 9 beta for Linux has finally arrived!

Haven’t played with it much but so far I’m very impressed. The audio sync problems: gone. Speed issues: mostly gone. Weird bugs that come up every once in a while: no sign of any yet.

This is just a beta, though, so bugs could crawl out. Yet it’s better than any of the old Flash versions for Linux. I’m very relieved that it’s finally here so not only can I view Flash 8/9, but also watch things on YouTube without the audio lagging up to a full second behind the video.

Quick Post: RSS

“Coming up: I couldn’t string together two sentences to save my life — tonight…” — From “You Don’t Know Jack”, and quoted in AMV Hell 3.

Boring day, so I decided to get some RSS feeds going. I really wanted something standalone and dedicated to the task (which means no using Firefox’s internal program, or Thunderbird’s), so I found Liferea (LInux FEed REAder) which seems to do the job well. It’s a very simple reader that lists entries much as a newsreader or mail program would, with feed sources in one pane, the headlines in another, and the content in the third.

I’m quite impressed so far. Give it a try if you are interested.

i love my lips