Entries Tagged 'Technical' ↓

So, I recently bought a Nokia N800, partly because of all the N810 news I’ve seen recently and partly because I wanted a cool new toy. My roommate recently bought an iPhone, which for all of the hype, is kind of lame. Don’t get me wrong, the interface is really slick and using the ‘net anywhere is kind of cool, but it’s a closed system that people keep hacking to add functionality. It also has a really low resolution and doesn’t support Flash, which is pretty lame.

The N800 on the other hand is based on Maemo Linux, is totally open, already has full VoIP functionality, fully supports Flash (meaning YouTube and all-Flash sites work just fine), has about twice the resolution of the iPhone (so I don’t have to keep zooming and scrolling websites) and has a ton of really cool apps. GPS? Check! USB OTG? Check! Expandable memory? Check! True multitasking? Check! Mozilla browser? Check! VNC, SSH and VPN access? Check! Video chat? Check! It even has Skype and Gizmo clients and a port of Pidgin, the greatest chat client ever. Sure I don’t have Internet access anywhere my phone works, but WiFi is so easy to come by that it’s hardly a factor for me. If I really need to I can pair it with a Bluetooth phone and use it that way.
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Well, trying to post consistently on here isn’t working either I guess, as it’s been like 6 weeks since I last put something up. So, the new goal is to post quick and small things.

First, Xubuntu! The main drive on my desktop crapped out on me, so I was forced into reinstalling Linux. I had been runnign Ubuntu 6.10 for a while and it was in dire need of a refresh anyway since I botched the nVidia drivers on day 1 and never cared enough to start over. I’ve been reading a lot about how great Ubuntu 7.10 is and I got used to using Gnome, but it always just felt so slow and I also read that Xubuntu (which runs Xfce) was a lot faster. So, that’s what I decided to install. Continue reading →

I finally got the WPG2 plug-in working and I have to say it’s pretty much exactly what I wanted.

I recently got Gallery2 installed and I imported all my photos into it. Now that I got used it, I’m very happy with it. There really is no wonder why so many people use it to get their photo albums online.

Anyway, to keep this short, if you are looking for a usable way to integrate your blog and your photo gallery, get yourself WordPress, Gallery2 and WPG2!

I have been using Linux on my desktop for some time now, but I have never bothered to get the “Back” button on my optical Logitech mouse to work. While using the same mouse at the office, I got very used to hitting the button to go back a page in Firefox and I now had a desire to make it work under Linux
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I’ve always had free versions of certain file recovery programs but I never had a chance to use them. Well, I had plenty of chances I guess, but no real reason, until today. See, I had moved some images off of my camera and onto a computer. I was writing a script to rename and move those files to another machine, but the script was wrong and I ended up deleting all the new pictures I had. I had also removed them from the camera, so I was screwed….. until I remembered my file recovery tools.
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For a few months, I’ve been having problems with my computer. About a year and a half ago, Windows simply woudl not run for more than a month or so before getting a twitchy and needing to be completely removed and reinstalled. I took that as my que to run strictly Linux on the machine and never looked back. I had a solid year of install going when all of a sudden KDE started flaking out. My setting weren’t saving and certain colors in the theme weren’t working at all. Anything GTK-based was completely messed up.

Having gotten used to using KDE, and having recently install Ubuntu on my laptop (which I love now), I opted to install Kubuntu. After about 2 months of using Kubuntu, the system started getting flakey again and would lock up randomly. I thought it was a KDE issue since it was the same version I had been using on Gentoo. So, after trying out a handful of LiveCDs to see what I would dig, I installed PCLinuxOS, which ends up being pretty bloated, but I had a completely working system with all the functionality I needed at the time (including MP3 and video playback) in a matter of minutes. But, like Kubutu, the system was still halting, and halting often.
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So, I don’t think a lot of people know about this (and a quick Google search seems to have confirmed this), but you can send SMS messages to your phone (and other phones) by simply sending an email. I have used this a bit in the past to send messages to friends and have recently started using it to send myself monthly reminders about things (like paying bills and such).
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First, let me say that Ubuntu is pretty awesome. Those of you new to Linux should look into it, it’s pretty easy to figure things out and get everything working. Those of you who have been using Linux for a while will find it very easy to use and will have no problem setting up and configuring it. It’ll save you a ton of time getting things up, and you still get the stability and usability of Debian, so you’re all set.

One thing it is lacking, like almost all distros are lacking, is the ability to play proprietary audio and video formats. This includes a lot of really common formats, like MP3s, WMA, DVD, and WMV to name a few. The simple reason is licensing; in order to play these formats in Linux, you may need to break some laws…. kinda. It’s all fair use though, so it should be legal; but there’s that annoying DMCA issue. Anyway, long explanation short, the distros can’t include the means to play these types of files.
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Recently, I realized that you can extract image information from images in Linux. I was tipped off by playing with Gallery2, which shows you all kinds of information about the image; the dimensions, the date and time the image was taken, the camera used, exposure info, flash info, etc.

Upon looking further, I found the ‘exif’ program. I used that for a while, but the information it spits out, while extremely extensive, was not really usable. It would require a ton of parsing to grab even simple information out. Digging around further, I found out that Imagemagick has it’s own ability to read EXIF info. So, I wrote a little script to read that information out.
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