Category: Blog

Workaround for nVidia Linux driver TV-out scaling problem

If you’re using a GeForce 8×00 graphics card and the binary blob from nVidia you’ll may notice that the picture on your TV is slightly larger than the area the TV can display; a part of your desktop will be invisible.

That is pretty annoying, especially when watching movies with subtitles and half of the subtitle is unreadable just because of that.

Now, the following is a little something that works fine at least for Mplayer…

Mplayer provides the command line switches -screenh and -screenw which you can use to rescale the movie on the TV a little bit. For me, the following command line works out pretty fine:

mplayer -screenh 725 filename.mkv

Give it a try, play with the values and let’s hope nVidia will fix this nasty issue one day…

Adobe Air for Linux

A test version of Adobe’s Air for Linux is available for public consumption now. Tweet-r as well as the Pownce client work fine, there are some visual problems with alpha channels, though.

It is great to see that Adobe does release a Linux version, this should help adoption of this technology a bit. Even better, of course, would be a simultanous release on all platforms.

Fruitless?

Composing music can be a very fruitless and hard thing to do.

Especially so when all your music talent lies in being able to play the pianica a bit, but that’s about it then. Thankfully there are several programs out there that will cheerfully make up for one’s own misses and provide easy and intuitive tools.

In the past I’ve been using Myriad’s Melody Assistant. It’s a very capable program for writing and rendering music. You can import Midis, change their notation, the instruments and render your stuff out to an MP3 if you want to.

Recently I started tinkering with music creation again after a long recess, I’ve been using FLStudio and it’s absolutely great. It has all the features of Melody Assistant plus a some real stuff for quickly producing and editing songs. There’s a waveform editor that allows you to do slicing, looping and sampling from within the program, a bunch of drumkits, VSTi support and support for soundfonts. It’s a real treat to be able to do work so swiftly, especially when you’ve got a basic knowledge only. There are several versions of the program out there starting from about 50$ up to 300$. Still, that’s pretty cheap if you consider the costs of applications like Reason.

And things get better from here on: FLStudio works fine with Wine on Unix. It does have the expected amount of visual glitches and minimizing is a no-no but apart from that the application works flawlessly. That’s not only cool for FLStudio and Wine but also for Linux 🙂 .

Monodevelop no longer broken

Yeah, I don’t really know what’s different now. A fresh checkout from trunk, a quick compile and Monodevelop is back in action. It is actually the first version I’m using in a long time, I’ll try to get a little more into Mono and Gtk# now as Qyoto still seems to be a little in the future for everyday use across different platforms.

So, as a little test of some of the Mono namespaces I’ve built a quick and dirty (I really mean it!) program that writes a user-selectable number of feeds from Liferea’s liferea.db back into XML files (RSS2):

If there’s any interest I’ll polish the code to be less prone to errors and post the sources.

By the way: Weekend, yay.

Quick hint: Use SharpDevelop more often

There are quite a number of things that were stripped from Microsoft’s proud Visual Studio Express series. One of them being the resource editor in C++, another one being a buttload of templates for your project type. Like… let’s say… Windows service.

Now, while I dug myself through the documentation on how to write a service the more obvious and easier solution was ignored: Use SharpDevelop. It comes with a lot of handy templates… like Windows service. It can do a lot more though; the new beta version features support for XAML, respectively WPF, which is quite a nice addition.

So, best thing to do (if you don’t want to skim out the money for the full version of Visual Studio) is to use both IDEs side by side.

Keepin’ it TLD

Jahahaha, diese wunderschöne (?) Seite ist nun auch über eine TLD zu erreichen: tsukasa.eu grüßt!

Bisher ist das Ganze im Prinzip nur eine Weiterleitung, aber mal schauen, wenn ich Jidder mit Pizza und Cola bestechen kann, gibts evtl. die passenden Modifikationen an meinem geschnorrten Webspace, die hübschere Kaskadierungen ermöglichen 😉 .

By the way… lebt mein Administrator du jour eigentlich noch?

Feeling adventurous

Today I upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.5 RC1. Yes, I know it is supposed to be a testversion but hey, I simply cannot resist that many new cool features.

WordPress finally has support for galleries and YouTube goodness right from the bat. The new Dashboard looks awesome (yay, no more Tiger Administration!) and is a real step forward. The only thing I’m a little sad about is the fact that OpenID auth doesn’t work anymore (plugin simply didn’t make it through the conversion, Jim!).

Take a look at the great new features that are coming up and please look amazed. May be the right time for Adobe to finally get their team together for a version of Air Linux. That’d be awesome because the new WordPress just screams for a blogging client in Air, tailored especially for WP 🙂 .

Geez

With all these buyouts, account changings and whatnot I’m seriously starting to go nuts I guess.

Wanted to login into my flickr account today and had to probe for the correct combination of OpenID, Yahoo id, Live! pass and Ene Mene Miste usernames/passwords. Gosh, I wish more applications would be OpenID compatible.

That… or just stop buying/selling all your webservices 🙂 .

Wine to go 1.0 soon

Now that is news, my fellow subjects!

Wine, the not-so-much-an-emulator program that bridges the gap between Linux and Windows, is about to hit One-point-O in a not so distant future. It took 15 years to get to this point and Wine is an absolutely remarkable piece of software. There are some interesting ideas floating out there as well, so I’m absolutely never going to get tired of watching it evolve.

Anyway, Wine 1.0… what can I say? I’d love Wine to be less Johnny-on-the-spot and a little bit more reliable sometimes. But then again, I’m primarily using it to run games like Team Fortress 2, so I’m in no position to complain about freezes. Wine works for just about everything by now and I’m eagerly looking forward to your 1.0 tarball 🙂 .

Tsukasa reviews: Cherry eVolution STREAM vs. Cherry G80-3000

A while ago something terrible happened to me: My beloved old keyboard reached it’s critical mass and gave up. A catastrophe for me, I always considered that keyboard as "just right" for me. Sure, the insides were corroded after all these years, the keys had lost their printing and you wouldn’t want to look into the thing because it was yuck… but it was "just right".

So I had to get a new keyboard. And not just any keyboard would do. I don’t fancy things like displays or buttloads of extra keys on my keyboard, for a very simple reason: First of all, they probably don’t work out of the box in Linux and even more important — I simply don’t use shit like that.

I spent some time doing research and came up with my two choices:

  • Cherry eVolution STREAM
  • Cherry G80-3000

Let’s take a look at each of the keyboards. You can find photos of the devices on my flickr account.

The Cherry eVolution STREAM is a very flat, notebook-like keyboard. It features 6 extra hotkeys (of which none work in Linux out-of-the-box). It isn’t as flat as Apple’s grotesque creation but way smaller than the G80-3000. Included is a PS/2 adapter so you can use your brand new USB keyboard on the good ol’ PS/2 port as well. Price was about 20 Euro.

Typing on the eVolution STREAM is a breeze for people who’re used to notebook keyboards. Personally I find it quite irritating that the Windows key is so big and the spacebar so small, but I’m probably just nitpicking. Really nasty and a showstopper is the fact that some keys start acting funny when you pour dirt and other stuff (i.e. salt) onto them, the keys get stuck, it’s a pain.

The keys have a hard, greasy feedback just as I’d expect it from something that resembles a notebook keyboard.

The Cherry G80-3000 is a monster. I decided to get it because it is the base for Das Keyboard II, a gadget I admire a lot but I’m too much of cheapskate to get it. I said it is a monster. If you take a look at the photos I uploaded you may get an idea of what dimensions this keyboard has. It is less of the width but more the height that make it so nice; the keyboard resembles the old IBM ones I always enjoyed typing on.

The G80-3000 does not have any fancy extra keys. Just as the eVolution STREAM it is a USB device and comes with a PS/2 adapter. Price hits the 50 Euro mark, so it is definetively in another league than the eVolution STREAM.

The special thing about this keyboard is that it uses gold-plated mechanical switches instead of your run-of-the-mill rubber plate thingy. Because of that the device is loud. Yes, a keyboard that is loud. If you enjoy placing baseball cards onto your bike, you’ll just love how loud it is. The tactile feedback from this keyboard is just great. The keys are "just right". It is hard to explain but if you’ve ever had the chance of typing on a IBM keyboard you’ll know what I mean.

The design and key layout is old-goes-well, no fancy experiments here. It is definetively for the better, why change something that works fine. It is virtually impossible to make the keys not work.

So, what kind of review is this? No comparison? Only a brief overview? Good lord, yes.

What can I say? I like both keyboards but I like the G80-3000 better. Sure, it costs more than twice as much as the eVolution STREAM but it pays: The STREAM feels a little cheapo, the keys won’t last for more than 4 years if you work with it extensively. The G80 on the other hand will last for about 10 years (according to the maker).

Gamers should stay away from both of these keyboards I guess. None of them are really "optimized" for playing your 233th installment of Counter-Halo or whatever. Gamers will also miss all the flashing lights, displays and extra keys. But to get work done (i.e. programming) both keyboards are fabulous. The G80 is still better though, the special characters are easier to reach thanks to a little more standard key placement and the different "levels" of the keys (I can’t get used to that on notebook keyboards, sorry).

So, are 50 Euros well spent on a keyboard? I sure think they are. It is a companion through your daily amount of work and when you get to know it better you’ll probably increase your characters per minute.

Is the 20 Euro eVolution STREAM bad, then? By all means, no. It is a stylish keyboard for people how enjoy typing on a flat device. I’m probably just not cut our for that and always prefer a "real" keyboard. The money is well spent, though, it works perfect as a second keyboard (for your notebook, i.e.) and should not be disregarded.

What is the conclusion then? I guess, Cherry makes good keyboards. There are better and cheaper ways to find this out but it has been a fun week and I’m happy to have great input devices en masse now. Just in case the G80 should fail me within the next 10 years 😉 .