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Category Archives: Linux

What’s new?

Been working on a few things.

Linux Section:

Updated Zaurus Kino2 reference, the new 0.4.2 is out, and it is pretty sweet.

I found a problem with my tutorial for encoding movies for the zaurus.  The audio sync is messed up again.  The only way I can get it to work is encode the video with mencoder, then use AVIDEMUX to encode the MP3.  I will update the section tonight.

As a work in progress, I have most of the DVD9 to DVD5 tutorial up.  A dozen or so more screenshots and it will be complete.
In the words section, I brought over a Blog entry and expanded it out a little.
Linux never ceases to amaze me, though.  On my Athlon XP 2200, I was ripping/encoding a DVD, listening to OGG music, chatting online with a Java application, editing my webpage, with an FTP client open, while compiling the latest mplayer, all at the same time…on 512 meg of ram.  I would love to see windows do that.  The music never skipped once either 🙂

 

Posted by on March 7, 2005 in Linux, Zaurus

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Ah, computers, aka money making machines for hucksters

Listening to the radio on the way to work inspired this entry.

I heard ad after ad about ‘geek squad’, Anti-virus software, and the new AOL which protects you from the all the bad guys.    Well, I just makes me chuckle how much money is made off of Mircosoft’s shoddy products.  I know why Linux is unsupported and slow to adopt in PC’s.  None of the software companies want to loose their revenue stream of fixing, essentially, broken products.  My Linux computer just zips along, working and working and working.  If it wasn’t for having to move, my  uptime would be in the the YEARS range.  That’s right, my computer has never crashed, EVER.  It has not locked up, slowed down due to adware, or really changed over time.  I don’t run a server, it is just a desktop machine, and that’s it.  I am connected to the internet 24-7 and I don’t have a single virus, adware, or hacker on board.  I have a modern, non-fragmenting file system.  That’s right kids, I never have to de-frag my hard drives.    I have a journalized file system, a real one, NOW.  Not like WinFS, which may never appear.  How much did the software cost me?  Nothing.  Is it legal? You betcha.  Can I just hand you a copy and not worry about copyright law?  Sure can, in fact they encourage it.  Is it perfect?  No, but it sure is fun to play with.  I do have security updates, which don’t require me to re-boot my machine.  Anything short of replacing the kernel does not require a reboot.  My software is updated often, and quickly as new vulnerabilities are found.    Well, all I can say is enjoy your buggy, slow, virus/ad/spyware ridden computers.

 

Posted by on December 14, 2004 in Linux

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More Boring Encoder Stuff

Did some more playing around, and I found I really hated the audio in the recommended encoding, so this is what I came up with:

mencoder dvd://1 -aid 128 -srate 48000 -vop scale=400:300 -o /home/david/movies/zaurus/Transformers_Z2.avi -oac mp3lame -lameopts preset=96:mode=0:vol=8 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vhq:vbitrate=175:autoaspect -ofps 15 -sws 2

The preset=96 gives you 96kbps audio MP3, and the mode=0 gives you true stereo.  The file size is not too bad, less than 200 meg, and it can stream over my wireless 802.11b network.  Time to get a bigger compact flash card.

 

Posted by on October 9, 2004 in Linux, Zaurus

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Computer is alive again

I had a hard drive fail on my computer (1 of 3).  It contained a good chunk of my operating system and my home directory.  Well, everything is back to normal now, and I have a new 160g drive, giving me just over a quarter terabyte of storage.  It did have trouble installing a newer version of Mandrake Linux, so I just put 9.1 back on there and it works fine.  Only 6 more days until we close on our new house.

 

Posted by on May 21, 2004 in Linux

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Stuck in a rut

Computers and the high tech world are stuck in a rut.  The computing world is boring.  Is there anything you can do today that you couldn’t really do 10 years ago?  Listen to music?  Make movies?  Well, people were doing that over 100 years ago.  Organize your life?  Keep notes?  Need a tablet PC to do that? Not really, you can do it with a sheet of paper.  I have watched computers grow from the 64k machines of my childhood to the multi-gigahertz machines of today, and I am amazed how little more you can do with computers now.  Except for the internet (but there were BBS’s and e-mail back then), there has not been much change.  I still use a word processor, which is still not really WYSIWYG.  I still use spreadsheets, and I still play games.  All the same things I was doing when I was 11 years old.  In fact, some things were easier back then, like drawing programs.  I loved drawing on the old computers.  Now I hate it.  We need something new, something you really can’t do in the real world.  I don’t know what it is, but whoever comes up with it will be a billionaire.

 

Posted by on April 6, 2004 in General Comments, Linux

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