Procrastination - geek motivation.

It's approaching deadline season, that time of year where every lecturer at University wants something from you.
This also means that it's the time of the year when I spend 70% of my time procrastinating, and avoiding doing the 'something' that the lecturers want, often with interesting results.
I seem to have outdone myself this year. In order to avoid writing a 4-page report, I've switched from KDE to Gnome *again*, extensively compared Linux's alternatives to Quicksilver (namely Katapult and Gnome-Do), searched for (without success) a new phone that will integrate nicely with my laptop, finished securing my Debian media server, drank 8 (I think) cups of coffee, and two bacon sandwiches.
Not only does that mean I have to rush my report, and probably won't get any sleep before work, but it means I have a good week or two of blog-fodder.
Watch this space. (or rather, the space above this, where the new posts go. Yeah, I'm picky when I'm tired).

If anybody needs to get hold of me this summer, I'll be preparing for, attending, or recovering from, both Leeds Festival and Give It A Name. :-D
If you're lucky enough to be attending, say hi - it shouldn't be hard to spot the computer geek at the front of the Silverstein and Billy Talent crowds :)

Different distro, just as hilarious.

I feel my geeky ability has improved since I began using Ubuntu, sometime in June of 2007.
I've abandoned GUI settings windows in favour of nano-ing my way through /etc.
I can get all the settings right.
I just can't do them in the right order.
Allow me to elaborate...

After a sudden urge to go distro-shopping, I installed Debian 4.0 on my Media Centre/File Server/Spare-box-I-mess with.
CLI-only, headless, configured through SSH. I was feeling all very happy and geeky.

At the moment, this box has 3 functions.

1. Sit there and hum.
2. Serve up my music over Samba.
3. Serve up my files over SSH.

Being a paid-up, card-carrying member of the tinfoil hat club, I began editing /etc/ssh/sshd_config, even though it was approaching the time that most folk wake up.
I'm nocturnal, what can I say?

Protocol 2 only, yup. RSA-based authentication, course. Disable root login, naturally.
Once I'd saved that, I decided it would be a good idea to add my laptop's RSA key to the authorized_keys file. *After* I set it to use RSA authentication...

And so, with a sense of tedious inevitability, I find myself dragging an old CRT monitor over to the machine, to undo the series of (perfectly sensible) steps I took.

Coming soon! More blog posts of my incompetance.

Let's talk about feelings.

I'd hate to give the wrong impression.
Reading my last post, some may have formed the impression that the blog is to become dark and gloomy. Quite the contrary, the last post was simply the product of a couple of days without sleep. Dark and gloomy has it's place - my music collection - only sporadically will it spill over into blog posts.

For the sake of capriciousness (which may or may not be a real word) - a shiny, happy, blog post.

It's been snowing overnight in England. At least, that's what the thick blanket of snow on the ground would lead me to believe. (any other theories for how the snow got there in the comments please).

I was fortunate enough to wake up early and see *real* snow. That is, snow of the white variety, before the inevitable onslaught of traffic and small children transform it into a grey, mushy substance. I'm also fortunate that's it's Sunday, so I may be lucky enough to avoid venturing outside, into the aforementioned mushy substance. Given the nature of the area in which I live, pedestrians are almost obliged to be pelted with snow, or, later today, pelted with mush.

Which seems to be a great excuse to stay in and attempt to fix my laptop - concurrent upgrades to Ubuntu Hardy and KDE4 havn't been kind.

So there you have it - a *nice* post. There was snow, there's a definite geek angle towards the end, and not a hint of sarcasm.
I'm going to go listen to something gloomy.

***Bonus points to anyone who spotted the Lagwagon reference in the title. Your prize is in the mail. ***

Been a while...

In one of the darkest corners of rainy England, a light appears in a window, at the top of a tower.
A little past six in the morning, and Capricorication Towers has seen it's first visitor in a couple of months.

As I write (type?) this, a dozen or more excuses for my lack of posting spring to mind, some quite convincing, but I'm using none of them.
My little blog has been downright neglected. To explain why would be to reveal details of my recent life that have no place on the internet, or indeed, outside of my head.

Suffice to say, my recent change of circumstances afford me a lot more time, some of which I intend to spend reviving my fledgling blog.

The same circumstances also appear to have changed the way I'm writing. This post already appears more dark, sarcastic, and wordy, than my previous efforts. I may yet decide to delete some of the more jovial posts here, for the sake of consistancy.

I'm not sure what all this means in terms of the style and direction of the blog, but at the very least, it won't become another of the dead, forgotton, corners of the internet.
Watch...this...space.

iPod Touch - The Good, the Bad, and the Pretty

A friend of mine just bought an iPod Touch (1), and despite my usual dismissal of anything made by Apple, I took a look at it anyways...

Savour the moment, because I won't say this often...
Apple. Did. Good.

The Good
I'm really impressed with the motion-sensitive features. If you hold it the right way up, you get the 'Now Playing' view. But tilt it on it's side, and you get the cover browser, where you can flick through albums by album artwork. My friend doesn't share my music collection OCD - most of the covers were missing, but I'll bet it looks awesome when they're all there.

I'm also impressed by the on-screen keyboard. As someone with chubby fingers, handheld devices and touch screens have always been something of a challenge for me - the only phone that I've never had trouble with was my old Nokia 3510i with it's huge buttons.
However, the on-screen keyboard on the iPod Touch just seemed to work for me, and even browsing the web and clicking on links was easy.

The iPod managed to connect to my home wireless network without a problem, even with the WPA2-PSK encryption that has tripped up a number of other devices I've tried, and with a particular third-party tool (ommm, don't tell Apple), the iPod can even ssh into my Media Server-type thing (2).

The Bad
So... the iPod Touch left me pretty impressed, but I'm not about to become a fully paid-up, card carrying Apple fanboy just yet - there are still a couple of downsides that are stopping me from running and parting with £200 of my hard-earned student loan: :)
1 - Would cost £200 of my hard-earned student loan.
Yeah, it's pretty, but a music player would spend most of it's life in my pocket. £200? I could pick up an Asus Eee PC for not a lot more.
2 - No surprises here, but playing OGG Vorbis files isn't happening on the iPod Touch, and it's unlikely to happen in the future.
Apple, take note - the actual music is *always* more important than the music player. So if I like my music in the (open, free, better quality) OGG Vorbis format, and your player doesn't support it - that's one less customer for you. And the FOSS community is growing all the time...

The Pretty


Conclusion
Despite some predictable downsides (proprietary and expensive), the iPod Touch is a bit good :)
But I'll be sticking to my Rockbox'ed Video iPod (coming soon), and my oggy musical goodness :D


(1) - I've heard a lot of people call it an 'iTouch'... It's supposed to be called 'iPod Touch'... but anyone who can say 'iTouch' without giggling like a schoolgirl has my infinite respect - I'm still laughing now.

(2) - As promised in a previous post, I'll write a little something about my Media-server type thing in the near future.

The Sound of Music

Ok, I've finally run of out of excuses *not* to convert my music collection to the free, open, ogg vorbis format.
I've kept them as mp3s for three main reasons:

1. I use my phone (Motorola L7) as a portable music player, but it only does mp3s.
2. I love my music, so my entire collection is meticulously tagged. If I convert it all, I'll have to redo the tags, right?
3. According to Amarok, I have just over 5000 tracks (2 weeks worth of listening). Converting that much music is bound to be a pain.

However, I've just got a 30GB iPod Video from a friend who just bought an iPod Touch (more on that here), and I'm planning on putting Rockbox on it (again, more in a future post). So that eliminates reason 1.

mp32ogg
Reasons 2 and 3 were taken care of when I read about mp32ogg, a perl script that converts mp3s to oggs (the clue is in the name).
It doesn't appear to have been under development since 2002, but it still does the job, so...

One of my favourite features of this script is that it can rename tracks based on their ID3 tags. It can only use the title, artist, or album name tags, but that's pretty sufficent (unless you name tracks based on track length or genre?)
The best use I've found of this, is some old tracks I had, that were victims of iTunes. For those that have never had the pleasure of the iTunes/iPod combination, when you use iTunes to put tracks onto an iPod, it renames the track to 4 random letters. (e.g. avca.mp3, hjbv.mp3, vhvc.mp3, etc)
However, running that track through mp32ogg with the --rename=%t option set (rename as title), outputs tracks with their original names. I was impressed :)

The conversion
I told it to get to work on my ~/multimedia/audio folder, re-encoding everything at a quality level of 5, renaming the new oggs with the title stored in their tags, and deleting the old mp3s when they were converted (that one made me nervous!)
It automatically acts recursively, so that's nice and easy, and it gets bonus points for being command line, so I can come and write this blog post while I'm waiting :)

Converting from one lossy format to another, the quality was never going to be perfect anyways, but saving about 0.8MB on each file is a pretty good trade-off :) (NB: 0.8MB might not sound like much, until you times it by 5000-ish tracks I have in my music collection) Considering my /home on the music centre/server thing I have (more on that in another post) was 98% full yesterday, the extra 4GB of space is nice :)

It did throw out a few errors, something about not recognising the type of mp3... which makes no sense to me. Worse still, an error stops it from working (it won't just skip the bad track and carry on), and even worse, it doesn't tell you which track caused the error.
Some quick googling didn't give any solutions, and since the program isn't being developed, I doubt we can expect a fix.
I managed to work around the error (sort of) by telling it to convert ~/multimedia/audio/A*, then B* and so on. It still missed a lot of tracks, but the majority got converted in the end.

Conclusion
And a quick listen to a couple of tracks showed no obvious decline in quality, although I'm sure I'll notice some over the coming weeks, at which point I'll start looking at ripping my CDs into ogg format.

mp32ogg is a nice simple app, it only takes a minute or so on the help page before you can set it to work on your whole collection in the background.
It's a shame that it's no longer being developed (if I'm wrong, let me know, but I can't find anything since 2002), and I would definately recommend it, despite the issue it has with some files.

Now I just need to find something for my wma and wav files :)