RSS Feed04 January 2009
Volsched Release
A few people have expressed their interest in the VolSched source, so here it is! I haven't actually tried deploying it from this tarball, so let me know if it doesn't work. Hopefully I've remembered to include everything I need to include.
This is released under the MIT License, a copy of which is included in the tarball. This basically means, use it as you will.
23 November 2008
Automatically Downloading Album Covers From Amazon Using Perl
I recently started using SqueezeCenter to stream music from my home computer to my computer at school. It has a nice AJAX web interface, and is a pretty slick system. The web interface will display cover art for each album. I've never cared about cover art before. At home, I use mplayer on the commandline to play my music, so I would never see the cover art. I keep my music meticulously organized into directories by artist and album, so I don't need a fancy music player with a library and such; in fact, those programs drive me absolutely insane. But, since SqueezeCenter can display album art, I suddenly wanted album art.
I found a few applications that download album art from Amazon, but none of them did exactly what I wanted. First, they would all try to download album art baesd on the artist and album found in each music file's tag. This doesn't work perfectly, especially since my music is in a multitude of formats (most of them non-MP3), and since I meticulously organize my music it's not necessary anyway. So that was problem one. Problem two is that they all wanted to either embed the cover art into the music file (fine, if excessive, for MP3s, but bad for other formats), or save the cover art somewhere based on the artist and album found in the tags. This was a big problem, since for much of my music the tags don't exactly match the directory names.
25 August 2008
Xubuntu on the HP 2133 Mini-Note
After getting tired of the default SUSE on my Mini-Note, I decided to install Xubuntu (my Linux of choice). It didn't all go smoothly, following the wiki instructions, so I thought I'd write it up here. Note that these are instructions for installation from a USB drive. Doing it from an external CD drive may be easier, but I don't have one of those.
23 August 2008
I Bought One
So, I finally decided to stop waiting for new processors and just buy an HP Mini-Note. I've had it for about a week now, and I'm very happy with my purchase. It's a bit slow playing flash videos sometimes, but for the most part it seems perfectly adequate in terms of speed.
I bought the $549 version, with the 1.2GHz processor, 120GB hard drive, and 1GB of RAM. I've ordered a solid-state drive for it, but it's back-ordered at the moment. I expect that'll provide a bit of a speed improvement. If it helps the battery life, too, that'd be nice, but I'm not expecting it to. The battery life seems to be about the advertised 2 hours, which is fine with me.
The screen is gorgeous. Everyone who sees it is impressed with how great it looks (even my hard-of-sight father). Text is a bit small, but I'll take that over not being able to see a whole webpage. The keyboard is also as great as expected. I can type on it comfortably, with very little adjustment.
Overall, I highly recommend this notebook to anyone looking for something small. It's more expensive than an Eee or an Aspire One, but for me the screen and keyboard are well worth it. If HP puts the Nano in it, I expect it'll kill all competition.
31 July 2008
The Imperfect World of Netbooks
Ever since I saw an Asus Eee for the first time, I've thought I'd like to get a little laptop to carry around at school. I don't want or need a desktop replacement - I have a fully-functional desktop computer at home. I don't even want a full-size laptop, as I find them too large for me to carry around everywhere. However, the Eee is so incrediblly small and light that I can actually see myself carrying it around. And it does everything I need - runs Linux, has a web browser, has ssh, etc. So, it would seem perfect.
Not so fast, though. The original Eee had two problems that kept me from buying one:
- The screen. 7" just isn't very big.
- The keyboard. It's tricky to type on. I found myself hitting quite a few wrong keys.
So, the vast range of recently-released 8.9" mini-notebooks should be perfect for me, right? Still a no go. I have yet to see one that I'm prepared to buy at the moment. Allow me to elaborate.