It seems like there's a steady stream of games flowing into the Apple Appstore. Some are awful, some are obviously simple reskinning of existing games, but if you don't mind sifting through the dross, you can find some true gems. "I Dig It" from InMotion Software is one of those gems.
Recently I was successfully marketed to by Woot.com and aquired an Asus EeePC 900 Linux netbook. For those who are not familiar with these puppies, they're hyper-small fully functional 'laptop' computers, scaled down to be the size of a hardcover book. The Netbook article on Wikipedia is a good summary of these devices.
The Asus EeePC 900 is an 'older' version (hence the reason I got it for only $149) with 512meg of RAM and a 4 gig SSD drive. It has all the basic features you'd expect for a laptop - wifi, decent screen, touchpad, USB ports, good battery life (about 3.5 hours), etc. In all respects, it should be a geeks dream. A fully functional Linux box that is only a few pounds, and can run for hours.
So why am I considering handing it off to my son?
The main problem is that in the current portable computing environment, the 'slot' that Netbooks like the EeePC can fill is narrowing rapidly. On the 'full laptop' side, there's a trend toward longer battery life, lighter designs, and stuffing all the functionality of a full desktop machine into a portable form. Many people don't even have desktop machines anymore, they use their laptops for all work (that's my situation). On the other side we have the emergency of smartphones like the iPhone (which I have). The iPhone is an enormously capable device. I can read my email, chat online, browse the web, play games - all the things I'd likely do on my laptop if it were small and light - the space that the EeePC and others are shooting for.
Even in the face of all this, I really did give the EeePC a try. I carried it around for a week, trying to see where I'd use it and where I wouldn't. I never 'clicked' into it in any particular fashion, due to a number of obstacles that were either filled by my iPhone or by my laptop:
Given all these issues, I find myself either picking up my iPhone to twitter or check something on wikipedia, or get out my laptop if I'm going to do any real work.
So what to do? The current plan is to reload the EeePC with Eeebuntu and evaluate that. If it's stable, is able to browse youtube, run Python's IDLE environment, and play nethack, then it will be a perfect upgrade for my son, as he's outgrowing his XO laptop.
You see that switch on the side of the iPhone? That little switch that means "Be quiet, I'm in a place where a vibrate will do?"
Pay attention to it!
There is absolutely no excuse to write a game, app, utility, or tool that starts making sounds or playing music upon startup if that switch is set to 'silent'!
At the moment, I'm talking to you, Ezone, and you're Crazy Snowboard app, that, despite having the phone on "SILENT", you start playing music loud and clear upon startup!
iPhone App Developers. PAY ATTENTION TO THE SWITCH!
Sheesh!
Just a quick one before I head off to my next meeting. My latest addiction for the iPhone is called 'iDracula'. It's sort of a mix of Diablo vs Quake vs Robotron. The 19th century 'van helsing'-esque setting is beautifully rendered, and the soundtrack adds the appropriate head-banging necessary for any good vampire slaughtering.
There's a great video of it in action on YouTube.
One thing I have to comment on - this is the first interactive action game on the iPhone that I feel gets the controls right. They use a pair of 'wheels' on the screen - one for motion, one for firing. Given the iphone's lack of any other gaming controls, this seems to be an excellent compromise, allowing very easy motion and action.
There are a few known bugs. Settings aren't being saved between games, it's occasionally tricky to switch weapons in mid-melee, and there are occasional pauses. I picked it up off the appstore during a sale for $1, but it's easily worth a lot more than that.
I hope the developers do continue to update it - a larger play area, or a decent levelling mechanism (finish this level, waste the bosses, move on to the next level) would be a definite win.
I have this ongoing personal philosophy. "Don't get too wedded to a single environment, because the designs will channel your way of thinking, and those 'new fangled' ideas about UI's and systems? They they may have something there, give it a try."
To that end, not long ago I switched from KDE to Gnome. That has had it's ups and downs, but regardless of whether it's been a good move or not, I now understand Gnome a lot better.
One of the tools I've used the longest has been X-Chat - a fairly decent IRC client that does pretty much everything I want in a client. I have screenshots of me using Xchat going back many years - a sure sign it might be time to try something else.
A few years ago, I posted about reading books on my Treo - an exercise I thought I'd never enjoy, but in the end, enjoyed quite a lot.
Ever since I got my iPhone, I've been considering setting up an ebook reader, but never got around to it. Recently I found the Classics app, a reader for the iPhone that is set up to provide a series of 'classic' books for the iPhone.
The reader app is quite good, and very easy to navigate (and pretty to look at). What I've been enjoying the most though is that the books that are available are, as the name implies, all 'classics' - books I should have read, but never got around to.
I finished reading 'Flatland', and now I'm about halfway through 'Robinson Crusoe'. As always, it's convenient having books with me at all times. I suspect when i'm done with these books, I'll look at another reader app for other books, but for now, Classics makes it so I have at least 15 books with me at all times.
Because you obviously had too much spare time.
Grow Tower is now up for your Grow pleasure. My best while tinkering this morning is 14, but already the animations make me want to try for higher.
I've had my iPhone for a few months now, and gone through the brain replacement that's sometimes necessary to use Apple products, so I think it's time to talk about some of my favorite iPhone applications.
At the top right now is AirShare from Avatron. It's a simple app that starts up on the iPhone and sets up an active WebDAV enabled HTTP server. With some tools under windows, mac, or linux, you can mount that DAV as a filesystem, and voila, you have your own portable wireless data repository.
Admittedly, what I really do is play a lot of games on the phone. So, here's a quicky list of some of my favorites:
The potential for the iPhone to be a powerful gaming platform I feel is only just being realized. More and more high resolution excellent games are coming out, and the phone handles them with great aplomb. I'm looking forward to finding more.
It seemed like a simple question. Consider the problem of [a], a collection of ripped music from a large CD collection, [b] a server containing said mp3's, located on a bookshelf in the corner, [c] a very nice Bose Lifestyle 48 audio system, and [d] a couch potato like myself wanting to listen to that music, but not willing to walk over to the workstation, hook up a monitor (it's normally headless), and play something.
There were several things I wanted under the general heading of "I want to listen to music stored on that machine," but no clear path in sight.
So how to approach this problem?
This is so not right.
No, it really is just what you think it is.
Thanks, fish-shaking, whatever to Cathy for this.
While sitting around waiting for Starcraft 2 to be released, why not try out some of the other excellent offerings out there? Personally, I've been itching for some "You, move there, you kill him, you, build that" action for quite a while, and I was not particularly up for reinstalling Warcraft on the windows machines.
I had taken a look at Battle for Wesnoth about 2 years ago, and while I found it 'interesting', it didn't really grab me. I checked the project page, and saw a lot of work had been done on it, so decided to give it another try, and boy am I glad I have.
I won't go into details about the game. There's a very nice Youtube trailer here that shows some basic gameplay and highlights the amazing artwork that has gone into the game. Artwork tends to be the achilles heel of many opensource games. Getting good artwork (and in the amount necessary) is very difficult. The Wesnoth folks have filled in their entire tileset, characters, and dialogs with very clean, professional artwork. It's a joy to play.
Check out the Youtube video of the trailer.
Sure, by World of Warcraft standards, this game looks primitive. But the gameplay is intricate and detailed, no rough edges nor incomplete implementations. There is a decent music soundtrack, and sound effects in the game are amusing and bolster the enjoyability.
And it's free. And runs under Linux, Mac, or Windows.
What more could you ask for?
Today I am full of Mad Love for DigiKam, the photo manager distributed with KDE. I've been using it off and on for a few years, and for one reason or another, I would stray away and use manual file copies for a while.
As of about a year ago though, I've moved to using it full time for managing the (sometimes hundreds) of pictures I take in a given session. There's a whole slew of wonderful functions in it, but the ones that made me finally stick with it can be summed up as follows:
It's become almost a truism that if you use a Linux machine for your desktop, you must be running Firefox as your web browser, and Thunderbird as your mail client. The former is certainly more prevelant than than the latter, but even so, both of these programs are fairly common in the greater Linux community.
However, despite their popularity, they have their drawbacks. On the Firefox side, the program suffers from it's core dependance on XUL, the XML based rendering engine that is at the core of the product. While XUL is remarkably flexible, powerful, and useful, it is also a performance hog. Firefox, even on yawl, my desktop machine, which should have enough oomph to drive it, can come to a painful crawl after only a few hours of use.
The memory leaks in Firefox are well known, and to Mozilla's credit, they are being addressed in Firefox 3, currently under development.
On the Thunderbird side, I've been having some absolutely infuriating problems with sending mail. Hitting send will regularly cause a pause of 5-10 seconds in my complete desktop before the mail actually gets sent. I've checked DNS, my SMTP configuration, everything, I can't find the problem.
So why not use this opportunity to play the field?
Here there be dragons...
For the last week, I've been on a No Mozilla campaign, with an audience of one. I have on occasion needed to start Firefox (most notably to view Google Calendar), but for the most part, I've been using Konqueror, the browser within KDE, as my primary web browser.
Konqueror has been remarkably stable and useful, I will happily admit. It is noticeably faster than Firefox in almost every way, and I've seen only 1-2 websites where rendering has failed completely (noteably Google). KDE's inherent ability to allow keyboard redefinition has made the transition to Konqueror quite easy (for instance, Firefox uses ^L to jump to the address bar and edit/copy/whatever your current URL. Konqueror has ^L bound to 'clear address bar', something that was driving me bonkers for a few days, before I realized I was simply using the wrong function. A quick key redefinition, and I was happy again).
For the most part, all my plugins are working correctly as well. Konqueror adapts the Flash, Java, and Shockwave plugins as used in Firefox without any problems. In stream videos and animations work just fine.
Will I continue using Konqueror? Most likely I'll stick with it for a while. I do miss a few basic things though. For instance, I use Google Browser Sync to make sure all my bookmark folders are synced across all my machines. My Konqueror installation does not have my, er, large selection of bookmarks I've accumulated. Secondly, I've been using Sage as my RSS reader (as it syncs in with the Firefox bookmarks quite nicely). That naturally won't work with Konqueror, so I'm without a centralized RSS reader right now.
Even with these niggles, I'm finding myself using Konqueror more and more. Speed, stability, and functionality. How pleasant!
Great Dave, but what about mail?
Oh yeah, the mail. Well, this one doesn't have quite as happy a story.
In my journey away from Thunderbird, the first choice was naturally KMail, the mail component of the Kontact system in KDE. I'd used KMail on and off several times over the year, and I'm sad to say, it really hasn't improved at the pace other applications have. In many ways it's quite pleasant to work with, snappy rendering, good layout and feel, complete and workable dialogs, but it still suffers from a Linux 'half complete' feel. The keyboard bindings for mail navigation are obtuse and, oddly, impossible to reassign (I even have a bug open on it - it's still not fixed). The thread model in KMail is abysmal - making it very easy to freeze the entire interface on very large mailboxes, etc etc.
So KMail was okay for a bit, but wasn't cutting the mustard for regular use. The next natural check was of course Evolution, the Gnome mail client.
I've used Evolution off and on a lot over the years, and in general, it's okay. I don't particularly like GTK based apps (I find them overly hungry for screen real estate, and a bad combination of eye candy and ham-handed attempts at UI design), and Evolution shows many of these traits. However, even with those faults, it's not a bad client. I got it up and running without any problems, and it's working fine.
So why am I gripey?
I miss Thunderbirds spam filtering. I get a LOT of spam. My monitors regularly log 500-700 spam messages a day into my inbox. boomer does an awesome job of catching the lions share of the spam (about 80%), but the rest shows up in my inbox. Thunderbird was catching perhaps 90% of -that- spam, and tagging it for me. I could review what was tagged, agree with whatever it set, hit "purge", and it would all go away.
Evolution has very rudimentary junk filtering, and it's not catching much of this spam. I'm finding myself spending much of my time just deleting spam messages, and growling.
Conclusions
Will I stick with Konqueror for a while? Yes, I think so. I have to rethink my RSS aggregation and viewing. I'm not keen on a locally managed RSS list (because I change machines so often), but I'm also not excited about a remote 'web' based system (Web 2.0 can bite me, and old sk00l type applications are not fast enough for my reading habits). So that need is still missing.
Will I stick with Evolution? Perhaps, if I can fix the spam filtering problem. Evolutions handling of multiple accounts is FAR better than Thunderbirds (have a bug open on that one too), and the UI is one I can deal with, if if if...
I'm just never satisfied I guess.
What is seemingly the bane of existence for most non-Microsoft users is the constant problem of "How can we share calendars?" Exchange does this extremely well, and there are many a Linux zealot, when confronted with the "Okay, we'll try Linux. How do we share calendars?" has had to hide in shame.
For me, the problem has been "how do I sync my Treo 650 so I can see my family and friends' calendars, without having to manually do some rigamarole involving synchronizing through some Windows based custom tool?
My savior may have arrived in the form of a tool called GooSync.
The concept is simple. The world in general has failed to come up with a standard calendaring system that actually makes sense, and allows multiple people to share, view, and update each others' calendars. iCalendar, while very good for publishing calendars and allowing people to subscribe to them for viewing, does a poor job of allowing others to update someone else's calendar.
Along comes Google Calendar. Ahh, a good, interactive, free calendaring service that allows multiple users to share, update, and publish calendars interactively. Not only that, Google Calendar has a published API specification that allows users to write programs that interact with it.
I had been using CompanionLink to hotsync my Google Calendar down to my Treo, but after months of complaints to their tech support and sales department, explaining that without multiple calendar support, their tool had only limited functionality, and after they even said to me "If you can figure out a way to keep the calendars synchronized without duplicating entries, feel free to tell us how" (and I did), and still not getting an update, it was time to look elsewhere.
GooSync has a number of very strong advantages over CompanionLink and, frankly, any other tool I've seen so far.
That last item bears closer scrutiny. Once the GooSync client is installed on your phone, all subscriptions and maintenance to your calendar list is done via Goosync's website. Want to add a new calendar to your phone? Go to the website, say "show me all my Google calendars" (and it does), and click the checkbox next to the one you want to show up on your Treo. On the phone, run the Synchronize function in the GooSync client, and 30 seconds later, your Treo is updated with all the new entries.
I've tried this with my own calendar, and shared calendars I have write access to, and it works perfectly. No duplicate records, nothing showing up in calendars that I didn't have there before, it just plain works. I now have full control and view into all my Google Calendars from my phone.
With all the gloom and doom about the PalmOS platform (both from me, and also from very well known tech blogs like Engadget), this is a small ray of sunshine. Note that GooSync supports a ton of different devices, so even if you don't have a 'smartphone' per se, you can probably sync your Google Calendar to your device.
Yay technology, and thank you Google for making it possible, and thank you GooSync!
About 6 months ago I was having a conversation with my roommate Beth, talking about her aging Dell laptop. She was considering getting a desktop machine to use as her primary workhorse for her up and coming graduate student immersion.
I thought a bit, and said "Hey, I could probably get you something decent. We could even make this an interesting experiment. Tell you what, I'll get you a machine, but it'll run Linux. Up for it?"
"Sure!"
And we were off...
I'm trying out a new tool today called ScribeFire.
The idea is to provide a rich user interface for doing blog postings via a Firefox plugin. I've tried this a few times before with other tools, and have always gone back to just using plain old HTML pages.
So far, the interface is useable, and appears to support many different blogs (including Livejournal, Wordpress, and other content management systems).
It appears to also support editing existing postings and content, but maybe it's because PG has several thousand posts, the list never actually came up.
The intriguing thing is that ScribeFire is supposed to support Drupal, which would be awfully handy for some of the work we're doing, but I can't seem to get it working.
Folks who do LiveJournal, WordPress, Blogger.com, or Movable Type should definately give it a try.
I haven't been doing much reviewing lately, but I thought I'd point a couple of the folks who keep whining about the lack of Linux games to the fine work at Introversion Software.
I just completed the demo for Darwinia, a sort of 'Populous meets TRON' game.
Darwinia is very much a 'god game' in that you are 'above' the life forms you're interacting with, but, like Populous, you can't directly control them. You can influence them in several ways ("All citizens, you feel an urge to move sort of in that direction!"), but can't give the "you guys, move there and build a building, you guys, there and shoot them" sort of detail that's common in things like Starcraft.
From Introversion's page:
The world of Darwinia is a virtual themepark, running entirely inside a computer network and populated by a sentient evolving life form called the Darwinians. Unfortunately Darwinia has been overrun by a computer virus which has multiplied out of control. Your task is to destroy the Viral Infection and save the Darwinians from extinction.
The plotline does sound somewhat trite, and there's certainly an 80's-esque flair to the entire game. It's modelled very heavily on TRON in imagery and concept (a model that Introversion seems to use a lot), so the rendered playing feels very much like one of those graphics demos you oo'ed and ah'ed at the first time you saw an SGI machine (well I did, anyway). If you make sure you're not being overly critical and immediately jump up with "Gosh, Doom3 blows this away!", you might find yourself enjoying yourself.
First of all, it's a Linux-enabled, full GL, full sound, network enabled, multiplatform game. There's no 'hack' or backsupport or Wine-fiddling here, the game has native Mac, Windows, and Linux builds. Installation was a matter of downloading the demo and running the installation script. On my machine, running Ubuntu, it installed and ran without a hitch, in full screen high resolution, and some phenomenal refresh rate (I noticed -zero- lag in any of either the cut scenes or actual gameplay, when I had several hundred characters moving on the screen).
Introversion has made it 'de rigeur' to have full Linux ports of all their games, and they have several that are top notch. I'll be taking a look at others shortly. But if you're into god-games, and have a Mac, Windows, or Linux PC, and don't mind a new twist on the game with a good story line and comfortable game play, this is a game you should definitely check out.
It's about time I did something with some of this horsepower on my desk. So this week I fired up a couple toys just to have some fun.
A long time ago on a laptop far far away, I chanced across a new game called Puzzle Pirates. It was from a new outfit on the block calling themselves Three Rings. It looked fun, and even better, ran on Mac, Linux, and Windows without problems due to the wonderous portability of Java. I was impressed then, but stopped playing after a year or so and moved on.
Now ThreeRings has done it again with a new game called Bang! Howdy. Lets take a look...
About a year ago, I switched my primary source code control system from the venerable old CVS to the (relatively) new kid on the block, Subversion. On the whole, I've been ecstatically happy with the system. It patched many of the ridiculous problems with CVS, and added on things that opensource community has been asking for for ages (like 'rename'), but never made it into CVS.
Now I have all my projects stored in SVN, and my main client is using it as well for their code (they've chosen to go with SVN and are planning to End Of Life their VSS server - to the dismay of no one).
Subclipse
One of the best tools that made this switchover workable (aside from SVN's similarity CVS in many respects, particularly on the command line) is the Subclipse plugin for Eclipse. Subclipse provides a great easy to use interface into SVN servers, giving all the functionaly one would have on the command line via a very simple, tightly integrated GUI.
One thing that had been bugging me, however, was the access methodology I was using to get to my (remote) SVN server. It involved setting up a tunnel in SecureCRT (though Putty can do it as well), and then telling subclipse to use my 'svn://localhost/stonekeep' repository.
While doing some surfing, I found that Subclipse supports the svn+ssh syntax for specifying the repository. "Great!" says I, "I won't need to set up the tunnel each time!"
A few more fiddles, a pleasant discovery of a configuration screen in Subclipse, and I had an SVN over SSH connection to my repository, even using my ssh key pair.
Danger, Will Robinson!
But wait! All is not well. When I tried to browse the repository from Subclipse, I quickly hit this error:
Could not open file system at /var/lib/svn/stonekeep
(13)Permission Denied: Berkley DB Error while opening environment for file
system /var/lib/svn/stonekeep/db: This vexed me, because I had been having no problems accessing the repository locally on the server, and over my ssh tunnel. Both used the locally running 'svnserve' on the repository host, so why wasn't the svn+ssh connection using it?
The answer comes in the SVN documentation, and via a little research:
What's happening here is that the Subversion client is invoking a local ssh process, connecting to host.example.com, authenticating as the user harry, then spawning a private svnserve process on the remote machine, running as the user harry. The svnserve command is being invoked in tunnel mode (-t) and all network protocol is being “tunneled� over the encrypted connection by ssh, the tunnel-agent. svnserve is aware that it's running as the user harry, and if the client performs a commit, the authenticated username will be attributed as the author of the new revision.When running over a tunnel, authorization is primarily controlled by operating system permissions to the repository's database files; it's very much the same as if Harry were accessing the repository directly via a file:/// URL.
The Problem With This
I'm really unhappy with this model. The problem is that now the user must have read/write access to the entire repository tree. When using a local socket connection (or one over ssh via a normal tunnel), the Subclipse client connects directly to the svnserve process running on the repository box, and interactions with the server happen under that processes ownership.
The svn+ssh protocol does not use the svnserver on the target machine. It tunnels the command to a user-invoked svnserve process, and that process must have read-write access to the repository.
"Well gosh, that doesn't seem too bad. What's the issue?"
The issue is that to make this methodology work, I have to give the user read/write access to the repository tree. Meaning, they could happily type 'rm -rf /var/lib/svn' and destroy the entire repository. Even worse, the configuration files (including the password / access file, which has passwords in plaintext) must be made available to the general users.
Why svn+ssh doesn't simply make a local socket connection to the svnserve process already running, I don't know. But I can find no way to make that happen.
The fix?
As far as I can tell, there really is no direct fix for this. There are various workarounds, which the SVN documentation discusses, including setting up an 'svn user' for the svn+ssh logins, and the possibility of using unix groups for permissions, but I feel that if you have a listening socket server on your repository host, you should use it, not introduce a second methodology and have to jump through hoops to implement it.
For now, I have to abandon the svn+ssh possibility, and go back to my hand-configured socket tunnels. There's no real loss here - they work remarkably well, are very secure, and quite stable. The slight annoyance of having to open up a SecureCRT session before doing work in Eclipse is just that - a slight annoyance. I've dealt up until now, and I'll just continue to deal.
I have an ongoing project dream. Someday, have a fully functional suite of opensource-driven services available to our community that gives, if not the full functionality of something like Exchange, but gives enough so that the users can interract and exchange information cleanly, without having to jump through hoops or pay ridiculous amounts of money or subscribe to proprietary, predatory application suites.
I made another step toward this lofty goal this week.
I have been looking for writing this review for quite some time. A grand triumph in geeky innovation, platform utilization, and clever use of available technologies. A step forward in mobile communications, entertainment, and convergence in the media, communications, and personal networking space.
Unfortunately, that's not how it turned out.
Have to point this handy tool out to folks.
Because of the complexity of my desk, I can't really have a pile of keyboards and mouse lying around. I switch between machines constantly, and switching keyboards would just drive me batty. I had been using X2VNC for quite a while, which, while 'okay', had it's own quirks. One of which was it couldn't work in reverse (I could go from an X host to a Windows box, but not the other way around). It also wouldn't let me slide from an X display to another X display. Pretty limiting.
Enter Synergy2, a simple client-server tool set that lets you configure multiple displays to a single 'server' that controls the mouse and keyboard. With Synergy2, I'm able to configure all my machines in whatever configuration I want. At the moment I can slide my mouse off my primary Linux display onto my WindowsXP box, across it's display, and onto my laptop.
That's pretty neat, but.. the kicker? Synergy2 manages clipboard cut n paste operations across machines. If I slide over to hunter (the laptop running Ubuntu linux), highlight something and click 'Copy', then slide back to my primary desktop on yawl, I can just click 'paste' and it works. This is miraculous to my eyes!
If you run more than one machine on your desk, I highly recommend Synergy2. Available in apt repositories everywhere.
Web games. There's zillions of them. Find your way out of the room, play Zork, all the fun in the world can be found on the web somewhere. Everything's been done to death.
Or has it?
I have to blame blk for pointing me at a very simple webgame. I'd tell you the name of it, but... well, it doesn't have one.
The premise is simple. Go to n.nfshost.com. You'll see a nice big black page with the number one on it. This is the beginning of the game. Your task, find the next page. This one is obviously '1.html'. Hmm, what could the next page be... ahh, clicking on the '1' gives you the page '2.html'. Okay, pretty good Now, though, what could be the next page? Probably... 3.html. But there's no link to it, so maybe typing it into the web browser will work. Aha! It does.
Now find the next page.
And the next.
And the next.
Each page provides a hint as to what the next pages' url will be.
Need a hint? DON'T GOOGLE IT! Some bright folks have put the entire URL list on the net, and it really takes all the fun out of it. You will need to use google for some of the hints, but just be careful about where you click.
As I am wont to do, I was curious about the motivation behind this nifty game. It seems so simple, I wonder how it came about. After a big of digging, I managed to get ahold of Jonathan Whiting, aka 'Piglet', who agreed to a quicky interview on the game...
I found this one while doing my daily browse through Digg. It's a tool from Google that lets you sync multiple Firefox installations in realtime. I personally have 3 different machines... nowait, 4... that I run Firefox on, and being able to seemlessly keep my bookmarks, cookies, form elements and tab/button bar layouts synchronized is a total win, not to mention having an off-site backup of all these goodies.
I recommend starting this on the machine you have your most complex and involved bookmark mechanism on, as when you add a new machine to the mix, it appears to import your saved bookmark collection from Google Sync, and then synchronize. So the first one in should be your largest. I probably have 400 bookmarks in my setup, organized into dozens of categories.
As found via DesktopLinux.com.
It's been a while since I last posted about the ongoing MythTV project here at Chez Geek. For the most part it's been quiet. After coming back from Ubercon, where the box was very well received, I sort of parked it on the side and didn't touch it for a few weeks.
This week, things have gotten busy again.
I'm really getting into my new KDE 3.5 desktop based on the latest release of Kubuntu linux. The level of integration and polish that has gone into the system is constantly amazing me. I'll be chatting about various applications and components shortly, but I'd like to talk about one in particular right now. Amarok.
The Application
Amarok is to KDE what iTunes is to the rest of the world. A slicky smooth application with a ton of 'community' and 'wide world' stuff in it, but at it's core, it's a music player. Linux is certainly not without it's share of music tools, but a decent, intuitive, and powerful system has been scarce for quite some time.
Amarok fills a niche for a tool that is not only a capable player, but also manages your music collection, organizes playlists, titles, and tags, as well as keep track of what was played when, and what order it was done in. Amarok makes no distinction between a local playlist and a streaming audio feed - the entire interface handles both sources without skipping a beat.
Add onto that a popup 'banner' display that shows the current track when it changes, then disappears (without affecting keyboard focus, windows, or anything - it's a neat trick), and an extremely compact and well designed interface, and you have all the makings of an attractive and useful tool.
The Experience
I've been using Amarok as my default player now for almost 3 weeks, and I find myself pulling it out of its hidey-hole in the KDE toolbar to do basic things "Ahh, skip this track, it's boring." "Who the hell IS this?" "Switch over to that other playlist." "I just added a couple more albums to the store, rescan please." without spending half an hour navigating man pages, unintuitve menus or hacked interfaces that don't behave like any other application on the planet. It's delightful.
Other little tidbits that surprised me include things like Amarok's link wth Amazon.com. Album covers can be automatically displayed based on CDDB or FreeDB signatures, and they're invariably correct. Another one is integration with your iPod. Dock them, and you can drag and drop songs into the iPod directly. Amarok also has an interace to last.fm, a community based site oriented around music. The songs you play can be reported in as favorites / regularly played, and will update the 'popular songs' info on the site.
Conclusions
Amarok may be one of the best applications out for KDE, but it has great company with all the other improvements in KDE 3.5. Stay tuned for other reviews, but if you have a chance, take a look at Amarok now. You won't be disappointed.
One of the best Firefox plugins out there, Web Developer has gone to v1.0 as of January 1st.
I reviewed this plugin last year and I still use it on a daily basis. The latest version has tons of new features. Check it out via the Firefox 'get extensions' option.
"It's really unstable"
"It's painful to set up"
"Good luck with all the yak-shaving!"
Poppycock! I come to you happily reporting on the successful installation, configuration, and implementation of MythTV.
For those not in the know, MythTV is an opensource (aka Free) system that mimics much of the behaviour normally attributed to a Tivo. At it's very root, it is a Linux-based Personal Video Recorder (or PVR) that allows cable (and DVD and other mediums) to be stored, displayed, and manipulated in realtime, effectively turning an ordinary PC into a home video component.emotes.
Alas, MythTV has a long history of being INCREDIBLY complicated to get running. Starting with a baseline Linux install, people have talked of months of twiddling network drivers, card configurations, database problems, and video drivers all to get the system into perfect 'balance', at which point the system would work fine, but the process would ultimately leave a bad taste in the mouth of the implementor. Hardly a glowing recommendation.
Recently though, some bright folks have built up KnoppMyth, a MythTV installation wrapped into the well-known cd-based distribution, Knoppix. Knoppmyth allows you to go from a powered off 'blank' machine to the MythTV main menu - system installed, configured, and drivers ready to be enabled, in less than 10 minutes.
It wasn't without a few hiccups - mostly due to the smoothness of the installation, it was easy to try and go right into viewing online video without actually configuring the image capture boards. The system has an enormous array of configuration options which can easily baffle a newcomer, but in the end I was happily watching Comcast cable on my VGA monitor, and able to tune around the entire spectrum, complete with on screen programming guide.
For reference, here's my configuration:
I'll be exploring this system more over the next week or two, but so far, I'm exceptionally impressed with what the KnoppMyth folks have done in bringing a previously complex and potentially painful installation into something mere mortals can attempt.
In my ongoing quest for "Really Good Software", I tend to get grumbly about the vast quantity of software around for Microsoft platforms that 'just plain works'. It's polished, clean, and looks great. Occasionally though, I come across gems under Linux that are just as good.
In this case, we're not talking just as good as Windows. We're talking "Far better than 90% of the crud out there". I'm talking about K3B the KDE CD/DVD Kreator.
Anyone who has done CD burning under Linux knows that there's tons of tools for command line manipulation of volumes, but woefully few that run in GUI space, let alone do it well. K3B has the benefit of an outstandingly complete, polished, and well-designed interface, on top of the fact that 'it just plain works'.
I recently used K3B to burn a copy of KnoppMyth to a CD on my T40 Laptop. I originally grimaced at the thoughts of what this might entail, but a quick 'apt-get install k3b', plus another install of 'cdrtao' (which K3B thoughtfully told me I needed - not in a crash and text output, but in a dialog saying 'You're going to need this'), and I was off. Speed was high, the interface was intuitive, and in 15 minutes I had my burned CD. And it worked.
K3B embodies what CAN be done if developers take the time to complete and polish their apps. There's nothing like this in the Windows world - all the 'tools' I've seen for Windows (that are proprietary and usually cost money) are pale shadows compared to K3B. Bravo!
I'm always on the lookout for new Jabber clients to work with. I've been using Psi for the most part over hte last year or two, but the ETERNAL wait for an upgrade is driving me bonkers. Not that I just want more features, but there's a bug in 0.9.3 that screws up adding new people to your roster. So I have to switch to Gnome-Jabber to add / modify my roster list. Yuck.
I came across JBother about 8 months ago, and gave it a quick try. It was good - a full Swing-based client that seemed to have a lot going for it, but it wasn't quite stable yet.
Now JBother is up to v0.8.9b, and so far, it looks like a winner. The configuration screens are clean and easy to figure out, the client is snappy and complete, and the addition of a 'plugins' function, where I found a workable 'systray' tool pretty much nailed it for me. I now have a working systray-docked client that lets me do everything Psi and gnome-jabber did, plus MUCH more.
JBother supports freefloating or docked windows with tabs, similar to Exodus. Conferencing, transport management, debugging windows, logging, adjustable themes - they're all in there.
If you use Jabber, give this one a try.
Occasionally I find myself on the rougher side of situations while sticking to my guns regarding not using Microsoft products. Anyone who has had to interract with offices running only Redmondware are all too painfully reminded that Outlook users love sending PDF and Word and Excel attachments, frequently as the entire message, with the Word doc containing something like "Busy for lunch?"
Many of the issues facing "LINUX OR DIE" users like myself have been addressed by the fantastic work going on with OpenOffice, which lets a user open and view and manipulate Microsoft-based documents pretty handily. Couple that with a good GUI mail client like Evolution, and you've pretty much got what any Redmondware user has.
One thing has been missing, though... a decent PDF viewer. There are several opensource viewers that use various incarnations of GhostView to render the documents, but these tools are prone to twitches in the format that cause failed renderings, or just won't run at all.
I recently received a PDF that KPDF and GPDF simply would not open. It was generated by an architect, and contained a diagram I absolutely had to view. Ready to post a scathing commentary to the blog about how Adobe was not supporting Linux, I went to their site, and tried to download Acrobat 7.0 PDF viewer for Linux.
And succeeded.
It was right there on the download page. A single RPM or .tar.gz file, that installed via an simple shell script. I was able to specify a subdir in my home dir (no root requirement), and it is now running happily on my desktop.
This is not a skimmed down 'bone' thrown to the Linux community. This is the full fledged Adobe Acrobat 7 reader, complete with tweaks specific to the Linux environment (like a configuration screen that asks what mailer do you want to use - and lists various well-known Linux clients, including Evolution).
The tool allowed me to navigate, browse, zoom in and out, and fiddle with the PDF I needed to view without any problems. I was somewhat amused to note that the viewer was running some sort of ad display engine in the upper right corner of the window, but it was easy to ignore.
The reader was not specific to any particular Linux version. I'm personally running Debian Sarge, which is generally not supported by the 'big business' folks, but as I said it installed and ran perfectly.
Glad to see some companies are getting the hint.
Or, another title... "If you BitTorrent, please try Azureus"
I've recently been tinkering with BitTorrent to pick up some old TV show episodes, handy for when I'm on the road travelling. My first forays into the world weren't so promising, as the clients and tools were pretty primitive.
Then I came upon Azureus.
This is as full featured, complete, and beautiful an application as I've seen anywhere. It's written in Java, obviously with the SWT toolkit, and is simply striking in its detail and complexity. It even includes a live animated display showing the 'swarm' of machines you're connecting with to do uploads and downloads.
I've been using it off and on for the last day or so, and I'm staggeringly impressed with how well it works, and how complete and detailed it is.
If you're interested in BitTorrent, check out this system.
My current work has me heading down to New Jersey every few weeks to work with my client on our various projects. After the first 2 drives (4 1/2 hours or so), I decided that I needed some way to keep myself sane on the drive. The first trip involved cabling up my laptop to the stereo so I could listen to the MP3 collection on it while driving. This proved... less than optimal, and I began considering XM Satellite Radio. Last week I marched into Best Buy and picked up a SkyFi2 receiver.
The Service
XM Radio is a satellite-based radio service that provides about 250 channels of 'digital radio' to a special receiver. It is a subscription service, requiring a monthly charge and activation. There are no 'levels' of subscription, such as in cable television - once you're subscribed, you have access to everything. The channels vary widely in content, from Major League Baseball through classical music. The service is activated based on your receiver ID. Receivers can be moved from vehicle to vehicle (or in the case of the 'MyFi' receiver, carried around with you like an iPod). You can activate multiple receivers, but there's a (smaller) charge per additional unit. Many of the units are mobile, and can simply 'undock' from one car, and 'dock' in another (or into an at-home unit).
The Equipment
As mentioned, I have the SkyFi2 receiver, which is sort of middle of the road as far as receivers go. It has has a 'dock' arrangement that lets you remove the receiver or hide it when parking, which is a win. The receiver has a clear easy to read display (both in daylight and at night), and is easy go use to navigate stations and presets. Mine has a very stiff 'wheel' on it, which I may bring in to get serviced (it should turn smoothly), but other than that it works fine. The unit comes with an external 'magnetic mount' antenna, a 'cassette-style' hookup for stereos (it also can transmit on several FM bands, but I found as I was driving I'd drift in and out of range of various FM stations, which would conflict with the FM transmitter), so I opted for the slightly more cluttery arrangement with the cable, but didn't have problems with interference. This will definately require a more permanent installation though, since the receiver now has 3 wires coming out of it (power, antenna, and audio).
The receiver does provide some excellent functions over traditional radios. The biggest is having a realtime display of the current channel, track and artist. You can add other things to the display (stock tickers, etc), though I can't imagine that would be safe for a driver :). Another big win is the ability to 'pause' music or shows - for instance to go through a toll booth, or get food from a drivein, or whatever. The receiver 'spools' the show up (and shows how far behind realtime you are), and lets you play and catch up when you're ready. Up to half an hour of paused music can be stored.
Last but not least is the ability to 'tag' certain music or artists, so that if another station starts playing an artist you want to hear (or a show, or whatever), the unit will alert you that something is starting elsewhere. I haven't done this yet, but if there were certain shows I didn't want to miss, that would be handy.
The Stations
What is a radio service without content? XM provides 250 or so channels of programming with a wide variety of content. After scanning through the listing several times, and listening a bit to each one, I'm slowly settling down into a dozen or so I enjoy. Many of the stations have live DJ's that introduce and comment on the pieces being played (though the receiver includes the feature of showing the channel, artist, and track being played - and it's updated in realtime), but it's nice to hear a real person on occasion. My only beef with the station programming is they have commercials. This is a pay-for service, the last thing I want to do is listen to an add for Viagra in the middle of a Blues concert. I find this incredibly annoying, and would even consider paying a slightly higher premium to avoid the commercials
As far as generic programming, the stations are good. Some are excellent (in my opinion), and some are just boring. I would have liked to see less channel space used up by specialty or limited audience bits that are repeated elsewhere. (For instance, there are 40 some odd 'local' stations. If I'm in Boston, chances are I don't need to hear traffic conditions in Chicago, but I have both a Chicago and a Boston channel on my receiver). Also, there are 5-6 major league baseball channels, and 4 Nascar channels. If there is a limited number of channels in the XM system, they should work on a subscription mechanism that lets you tune what channels you receive. I'm never going to be listening to MLB or Nascar programming, why is a third of my channel selection used up by them?
The good, the bad, and the ugly
So now I've been using the system for a week, and have some pretty detailed impressions of it. So here's the basic rundown as I see it. I spend anywhere from an hour and a half a day to several hours (for the road trips), so I'm probably a fairly typical user:
Conclusion
For $11 a month for the service, I think it's worth it, particularly for people who do regular road trips or even longer commutes. The inclusion of not necessarily 'mainstream' content makes all the difference (things such as NPR, Folk radio, etc). Some more flexibility would be nice, and higher quality audio would be a huge win, but for now, I think I'll stick with it.
In the ongoing quest to keep myself entertained, I try to rummage around looking for good distractions to while away the hours between the time I declare "I can't work anymore" and the time I can safely say "It's time to go to bed."
My earlier solution to fill these hours was Kobo Deluxe, which, while still an outstanding game, gets wearing after a while. Not to mention crampy on the hands.
I recently discovered ArmageTron, the most accurate reproduction of the infamous Lightcycle 'game' in the 1982 movie 'Tron I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot of 'em.
Now, I, like other geeks, had daydreams about that lightcycle game for the longest time. I even wrote a version of it for the TRS-80 called 'Gridrunner' that was a load of fun, but hardly as visual as the movie.
ArmageTron reproduces the exact look and feel of the movie game. The scrolling green grid, the whine of the motors on the cycles, the exact left! right! left left! action of steerig the bikes and everything. The game designers have also brought in things that puzzled me in the original movie, but make the gameplay perfect.
For instance, your lightcycle runs faster if it's close to the jetwall of another cycle. If you're brushing up against it, it's the fastest. This doesnt' work for the arena walls (so you can't go tearing around the outside of the arena), but it does make chasing someone else interesting. The person behind doing the chasing has the advantage of picking up speed, the person being chased has the advantage of being able to make a right angle turn directly in front of the chaser.
In keeping with the original premise in 'Tron' (that the programs were actually small autonomous creatures living inside the computer - and they could think live and die on their own), the AI opponents in the game are named after well known applications that are known to be somewhat tempermental. This is presumably to give you satisfaction ramming them into a wall. It works. There's nothing like tearing off in pursuit of 'Outlook' and slamming it into a wall.
I installed ArmageTron via the Debian Sarge packages, so installation took only took a few seconds. The game is rock solid and very playable, though does require a fully functional GL installation. I haven't tested the networked version yet, but variable-level AI is quite a challenge in its own right.
This is a fast paced, well designed, and extremely well executed game, taking a simple concept, with a baseline for presentation, and making it an eminently playable game. Kudos!
I do a fair amount of 'web development', meaning I tend to write things that are viewable via a web browser. Whether they're posted on my blog, or on other sites I sometimes maintain, generally my preferred 'user interface' is a web browser.
I've been using a plugin for quite a while called "Web Developer Extension". It's a set of tools that integrates tightly with Firefox and lets you do all the things a web developer needs to do to make sure his or her application is displaying properly.
The most useful feature I've found is 'Outline block elements' and 'Display ID and Class Detail' - these functions change your displayed page and draw lines around all your block level elements (such as 'div' and 'table' and 'span'), and can also label them with what class and ID they are.
When dealing with multiple nested CSS elements, this sort of display can save HOURS trying to track down what element belongs to what container, particularly when working with content management systems like Movable Type.
The plugin is non-intrusive, and is only triggered when you select it off the menu. I can't imagine doing web development without it.
For a long time now, I've been searching about for a mechanism to synchronize my bookmarks from one machine to another. There are times when I run Firefox on more than one machine at a time, and the bookmarks have become one of the more valuable resources in my desktop setup.
Lo, along comes Bookmark Synchronizer, a Mozilla extension that adds the capability of publishing or retrieving your bookmarks from a server at any time, including whenever you start or shut down your browser.
The installation and configuration was trivial using Firefox's excellent Extensions manager, and I made a copy of my bookmarks onto my main server inside 10 seconds. Now I can import that file (in the documented XBEL - XML Bookmarks Extension Language format), anytime I need to, as well as publish changes into it
I do have one or two little nitpicks. I would like to be able to 'sync' without going into the Extensions window, selecting bookmarks synchronizer, clicking Options, then clicking Upload now. A hot button somewhere in the browser would be a lot easier. The other way the sync happens is automatically when starting up or shutting down Firefox, which also makes me a bit nervous. Usually the only reason I shut down Firefox is due to a crash or instability - throwing another function in during that situation may not help the situation.
But other than these comments, the tool works perfectly. A very easy way to move bookmarks from one machine to another. Bravo!
About a month ago, I posted a review of Puzzle Pirates. I said at the time the game looked interesting and was fun to play. A month later, I thought it might be a good idea to post an update.
I'm still playing. :) And not only am I playing, I'm addicted. This is really the first MMPORG I've gotten into, and while it isn't quite as immersive as, say, Everquest or World of Warcraft, it's still mindbogglingly addictive.
Since I wrote that article, I've teamed up with great crew, and have recently been promoted to an officer (though a junior one. I have a lot of practice ahead of me before I can consider myself a decent officer :)
The puzzles are still fascinating, but with the added bonus that the crew has to work together to make the ship run well (and this is done not only by performing the puzzles well, but also working together during swordfights and trade), it really does suck you in. I've gotten more involved in how the commerce works in the system as well, buying and trading goods, how the individual stores, islands, and the like work.
If you like puzzles, like interracting with other folks, and like gaming where you're working together to reach a common goal, I heartily recommend you take a serious look a look at Puzzle Pirates.
There are a few games in the opensource / freeware arena that are really exceptional. Complete, polished, documented, and durnit, fun to play. FreeCiv, available for Linux, Mac, and Windows, is one of them.
Could it be? Could Real have actually embraced the Linux world and decided "Hey, these schmucks aren't so bad, lets try and support them!" These are the trial and tribulations of me, a poor slob on the street, to get RealPlayer running on a Debian Testing laptop. Read on, if you dare!
In the world of blogging, and increasingly on other sites with dynamic content, a mechanism has been developed to allow a person to review all or part of a site without actually logging into it. Article headlines and content is delivered via a 'Syndicated Feed' to a news aggregator which, as the name implies, collects the feeds and displays them in an easy to review fashion. I've been looking for a good aggregator for a while, but haven't found anything I liked... until now.
I like finding cutesy little games that are fun to noodle around with. It's particularly nice to find something you can play in a few minutes that doesn't require a half hour of loading CD's and selecting playing options.
I keep an eye on Happy Penguin to see what's new in the Linux gaming world, and saw a few references to Spout, so decided to give it a go.
It's a hyper-simplistic game. You fly an abstract little 'ship' that has a vicious exhaust. You're trying to gain a maximum altitude by navigating up through simple obstacles. At any time, you can spin your ship around and use the exhaust to blast through things in your way.
The game was originally written for a small LCD display, so the resolution is gritty at best, not to mention black and white. Nonetheless, I find myself playing it a bunch. The animation of the exhaust is outstanding, and watching all the little particles flying around is just a load of fun.
For something to noodle with while on the phone or just to kill some time, give it a whirl.
Spout was originally written by Kuni. It was ported to Linux and is now hosted on mizzencode.
It began innocently enough. Somewhere in the vast communications jungle that is my interaction with the net, someone pointed me to this swords and sorcery-ish game that ran on a website. "Fine", sez I, "I'll take a look". I didn't think much of it, other than the odd name, 'Kingdom of Loathing'. To me, web-based gaming, in particular RPG games, never really seemed to be worth getting into. I'd rather play something local.
A month later, I'm still playing the game daily. I work through my daily alottment of moves usually before noon, and I'm learning all the little tricks to get more Adventures so I can advance my character faster.
These guys definitely have something.
It's rare that I get totally addicted to a game under Linux. I mean, the environment isn't really conducive to totally immersive gaming. Back in my Windows days I'd have a serious game every week or two I'd play pretty constantly until I either beat it or got tired of it. Since I've gone totally Linux, that just hasn't happened. Now, many would consider this a -good- thing, since games can in fact be total time sucking life suckers, but gosh darn it, sometimes ya just have to take a break from the full time job and just blow things up for a while.
I'm not a cutting edge sort of gamer. If I like something, I'll play it for a while. And I mean a while. I'm still playing Quake 3 Arena just because durnit, it's a fun game, and lets me, well, you guessed it, BLOW THINGS UP! When I shifted over to Linux, Q3A wasn't really an option anymore (yes, I know it's possible, but I just wasn't up for the hassle.
I've been having hassles doing some of the major editing on the blog, due to the fact that it's difficult to do serious editing in HTML Textarea windows. There's a couple ways around it, such as having an an intelligent client to edit in. I'm still searching for a good client, but it's sort of weird when we already -have- one, that being a web browser. Gotta be a better way!
A month or so ago I embarked on setting up my working environment on a laptop running Linux. The iniitial platform was an IBM Thinkpad T20 running Redhat Linux release 9. I was reasonably happy with it, but RH9 is being end of lifed, so perhaps learning all there was to know about that platform wasn't the best approach.
At a recent event, said T20 Thinkpad was stolen. But, out of adversity comes opportunity. I saw this as a reason to not only upgrade to a more powerful laptop, but also try a differenr Linux distributions. I'm super happy with what I ended up with, and knowing there are others either using this combination of hardware and OS, or are just curious how to go from scratch to full environment, this is a rundown of what my system is like, how I built it, and my thoughts on the state of the art in Linux desktops.
I've changed where I pull my blogrolls (displayed as the 'other blogs' section on Planet Geek's main page. I had been using Blogrolling, but I found their interface cumbersome, and their features lacking.
I'm now pulling the roll from Bloglines , a great site run by the same fellow who originally founded eGroups, (now Yahoo! Groups).
The other advantage is BlogLines is an online Aggregator, which can summarize multiple websites and blogs into a nice browseable form. Feel free to add Planet Geek to an account on Bloglines, and you'll see postings show up there.
The LiveJournal 'Friends' pages are an example of an aggregator, though they've tailored the concept considerably to LJ's particular view of the blogging world.
Between your own LiveJournal friends page and Bloglines, you should be able to read virtually all the news / blogs / comments sites on the net.
Ah, the joys of being your own sysadmin. I guess.
For the last 2 years, I've been doing probably 90% of my desktop work on Windows based systems. Unfortunately Intuit, my former employer, is a very strong Windows shop, and even though they were mostly okay with me running Linux on my desktop machine, the added time / effort necessary to make it all work together just wasn't there.
Now that I'm on my own, I can switch back to my natural environment, a Linux desktop.
A Livejournal Client that plugs right into your Mozilla installation via the Tools menu.
Briefly - This sucker's neat. It works, it's small, it's always there, and Just Plain Works.
