::A Geek in Korea::

I have a bad habit of restlessly installing games and utilities from the web without sometimes knowing what they will do to my system. Installing and uninstalling applications in the Synaptic menu is so easy, sometimes it’s a disservice. “Oh well, I’ll just uninstall it if it sucks and try something else” is my mentality when using Linux these days. It’s really that easy, and it’s encouraged to try something that “works for you”. That’s what freedom is all about.

The problem, oddly, wasn’t FROM Linux being too easy to install, but from Windows games being too easy to install too. I had been using WINE for a little while to play Blizzard games. I’ll get in a phase when I want a really focused RTS experience, but then realize I suck at those games and will uninstall them after a week.

The problem is, installing and uninstalling in WINE isn’t as straightforward as it is in Windows, so I get lots of orphan files sitting around not working anymore. If I uninstall a Linux .deb file, I can check to see if it’s gone, or if the configuration files are still around easily enough. Even when I go digging into WINE’s folder, I still can’t get rid of all the files I need to remove a game from my system. I’m not sure if Uninstalling is unsupported in WINE, or I just don’t know the procedure. (Almost positive it’s the later.).

Anyway, spurred on by a Kubuntu user in the forum, I installed the Kubuntu desktop with Synaptic. It’s literally a few clicks to install an entire desktop environment. No wonder I get in trouble with how easy Linux can be sometimes.

I wanted to check out Kubuntu again, as I hadn’t used it in a while, and KDE is getting a lot of hype these days with their impending KDE 4 release. The install went smoothly, but I realized that I have a lot of duplicate applications in my menus. I got rid of most of the applications I didn’t use, but hit a conflict with media players. The KDE application kaffeine tried to play all my media files, but didn’t display video. Unacceptable. Even uninstalling or removing configuration files didn’t solve the problem.

“Nuke it from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.”

In a move that is probably complete overkill, I backed up all my pressing new material that I wanted to keep. I went ahead and completely redid all the partitioning and reinstalled everything. However, since I had decided I was in this for the long haul, I nuked my Windows partition along with my previous Linux install. Windows free? Almost.

Since I was reinstalling, I’m trying to set up a multiuser environment for the first time. I set up a separate /home partition for our personal files so that I don’t have to lose my own information if I ever need to reinstall windows again. This is highly recommended to do when installing Linux the first time, but with my Windows partition sitting around wasting space I never did it before.

The ultimate goal is to get my wife using Linux on her own. This is not a simple undertaking. My wife isn’t fatally tech allergic, but it might give her a rash from time to time. She doesn’t have any background in computers, so it might actually be easier for her to learn Linux. She doesn’t have to “unlearn” any bad habits like I did.

I went and installed VirtualBox so she can use Internet Explorer to surf Korean websites from within a virtualized Windows XP environment. Since it’s “in a box”, she can’t really break it, and there is no virus threat. I don’t need Internet Explorer on my desktop, so I don’t need to install it twice or fiddle with permissions. Besides setting out a few icons for her to use Openoffice, she’s all set now.

The idea is that I can set up the computer for her so it “just works” without having to worry about her messing up some of the tweaking I like to do. She gets what she needs without the ability to break anything (permissions!), and I get what I need as well. Our files will be separated from each other, so we don’t need to worry about messing with each other’s work.

That’s the idea, at least. I’m not exactly a sysadmin. I got the box back up and running the way it used to (without all the extra applications in the menus) in a few hours. With everything still being “fresh” the system seems a lot more snappy and responsive.

I’m slowly learning keep my finger off that “install” button. If it isn’t in Synaptic, or run as a standalone application, I’m not going to go out of my way to make it work. At least, I won’t this week.

In an effort to never remove my Cowon D2 from my ear as I trek back and forth to various locations around the city all day while on my summer intensive schedule, I’ve took it upon myself to find more podcasts relevant to my interest.

I’ve even gotten into a groove, where I know which podcasts are due for an update, and I get all excited for “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me” Mondays. Wednesday is “The Naked Scientist Day“, etc. My site isn’t called a “Geek in Korea” for nothing. Yes, I listen to geeky podcasts. That’s just how I roll.

My two newest discoveries are related to some of the podcasts I used to listen to. It turns out that Mur Lafferty, who wrote and performed the series “Heaven” over at Podiobooks, also hosted a horror short story podcast called “Pseudopod“. There is also a Science Fiction short story podcast called “Escape Pod“.

These two podcasts are really well done. Professional writers submit stories to these two podcasts. They are performed professionally, but available for free. People donate money to the podcasts, or buy archival CDs to get old podcasts. That money then goes to paying the artists that submit their work. It’s street performer style creation. Drop a buck in a tip jar if you like what you hear. I really like this model of supporting artists.

But that’s not all! Mur Lafferty also does the podcast, “I Should be Writing“, which I listened to long before I knew anything about the Heaven series and became a fan of her writing. Seems I’ve been sucked into a web of all things Mur Lafferty and I didn’t even know it. She was doing another podcast called “Geek Fu Action Grip” which is on hiatus, or possibly dead. If it was still going, I’d probably be listening to that too by now.

I’m still rocking the occasional podiobook too. “How to Succeed in Evil” is recommended listening. At least my commutes to work haven’t been boring.

This was inspired by the article: Things to do before you die, Geek Edition. It turns out I’m well on my way to completing this list.

1. Visit Akihabara

I went to Tokyo for this exact reason. It’s extremely geeky. Actually, most of the people are bordering “Nerd/Otaku/Complete Social Outcast”. This place exists as the nexus to 1000 different geek subcultures that could only survive in this weird environment. Once you walk into a huge, multi-level comic shop and see an “Adults Only” section filled with the strangest fetish items ever, you’ll weep. It’s something to experience once.

2. Attend A Meet* (To Do)

I haven’t exactly done this. When I was big into the online Mst3k community, I never went to a convention or anything. I’ve been to comic conventions, but I didn’t know anyone there before I went, so it doesn’t count.

3. Meet An Online Friend and “Hit” it Off

Done this. Less said about the experience, the better.

4. Earn the Title of 1337 In An Online Game

I’ve played games to a high level before. I rarely stick around to be a “elite” player because something shiny distracts me and I move on to something else. My high level Lich in Nexus War was pretty 1337 though. I could farm an entire hospital for corpses without lifting a finger with my army of zombie slaves. That was pretty cool, but not really worth the effort and time to get there.

5. Design, Implement, or Suggest an Idea That Someone Else Uses.

I’ve done design, and implementation of databases. I’ve done elaborate data modeling both in college, as well as for theory in a few jobs. I’ve designed a database for a college radio station, but it didn’t go into production and regular use. (My group sucked.) If I ever get around to learning how to actually code well, I’d be able to do this more easily.

6. Be First In Line For A Product Launch

Nintendo DS. Launch. I was staking out various vendors all over the city to find one. There was no line to speak of because no one else knew what it was. I’ve waited to be on a roller coaster on the first day it was available to the public. I’ve caught midnight screenings of movies that were opening first in Korea.

I’ve never done this for profit, and usually people who insist on this get nothing but lame, “FIRST!” bragging rights. I’m more likely to sneer at someone that camps out to attach importance to an item than I am likely to do it myself. (Seriously, people were camping out for The Phantom Menace. That HAD to hurt.)

Results:

With this post, I’ve firmly established my geek credentials. Nevermind I’ve written on a website called “A Geek in Korea” for six years now.

I’d like to add a few more on the list:

My additions:

7. Log a World Famous Site on a GPS device

Yeah, everyone in Korea been to Seoul, but do you know how far away Seoul is from any point on the Earth? What about Cape Town? Tokyo? The Great Wall of China? I’ve got them all on my GPS. I do this on every vacation.

8. Finish an entire series of novels, movies, or games by an author or company

Sure, you’ve read the Lord of the Rings, but have you read the Lord of the Rings, but what about The Silmarillion? The other novels the person made? Short stories? Collected works? Letters?

I tried to do this as a child with Rohl Dahl. I even read short stories and his adult works to try to complete the list. I’m close to doing this with Kurt Vonnegut. At one point, I read all the Buffy the Vampire novels available. (This is one of my deepest, darkest shames.) This is a LOT easier when the company, or person in question, is dead.

9. Convert a friend into a fan of a geek television show, or OS.

I’d recommend Battlestar Galactica. It’s worked on two coworkers so far. I also made a few people fans of Buffy, and Mystery Science Theater 3000 in college. Don’t be pushy. OS Advocacy can work here too. I’ve gotten two people using Ubuntu Linux the same way.

10. Create a list of geeky things to do, then do them. The post them on your blog.

I totally just did this.

My favorite transcoding and all around video editing program for my Cowon D2, Avidemux, has released a new “preview” version. I’m a touch wary to try out new preview level software on a program I use regularly, but this update came with one awesome feature I’ve been waiting for. Avidemux now has .FLV support!

What the hell am I talking about?

You know those flash video files you watch over at Youtube? The ones you can search for and easily download with Democracy Miro? Now you can easily turn those files into files for viewing on your Cowon D2. Following the screencast I made, you can easily have tons of videos available to watch on the go.

The new build doesn’t only add that useful feature. There is also .mkv support! (Matroska isn’t supported by the D2) Not only has .flv support greatly enhanced Avidemux, but there is also crash detection and recovery support. Now if you make a mistake, you won’t lose all your options! It just keeps getting better.

Tips:

Save Custom video settings:

Want a tip for speeding up your Avidemux usage? You can save custom settings so that you don’t have to go through all the menus each time you load a video! Here’s how (From Doom9 forums, Wiki) SadaraX posted this wonderfully helpful information:

1) Open a video
2) Select the video codec you want (like x264) (In our case, we’ll use Xvid)
3) Configure codec with the options you want (No B frames, 320×240 or smaller…)
4) Save the file as a Project file somewhere….
5) Open that project file in a text editor (like vim, notepad, wordpad, etc)
6) Now you need to edit and remove whatever you do not want to be loaded as a preset
** You must leave the line that says “var app = new Avidemux();”
** If you want to keep the filters, leave the //** Filters ** section, if you want keep the video leave the //** Video Codec conf **, and so on.
7) Save the file in $HOME/.avidemux/custom with a .js as the file extention

This should spare people of the tedium of working through the file settings every time for similar files.

Append: (Joining files of similar types together)

If you download a video in many parts, perhaps a series of files you want to watch by the same person, use the “append” option. As long as the videos are the same size and format (and they should be if they all come from Youtube or most other online video sources) then you can add them together easily. After you append the files, just save it as one large .flv file. Then you can use Avidemux to transcode it at once, instead of as a bunch of individual files. This would be an ideal way to watch, say, “Chad Vader” as a movie instead of lots of short skits.

Turbo Mode: (When quality isn’t that important)

In testing the new .flv mode out, I used the “turbo” mode (available in the Configure, encoding options for XviD files). This is a single pass encode. This isn’t as small or as good of quality as the two pass encoding available, but it’s faster. I was able to encode files faster than real time and watch them immediately. I’m not sure how much faster they are, but the quality of most files from Youtube aren’t extremely high in the first place. Even if you do multiple passes, you probably won’t see a significant difference from the turbo mode single pass encoding.

Enjoy the new features of Avidemux!

Two days ago, I was flipping through the television channels as I always do. My wife was using the Internet for checking something, so I was hanging out with Yoshi. Suddenly, I noticed a problem with the screen. The lower half of the screen was still working, but the image at the top was shrunk to two thirds the size, with large black bars going across the screen horizontally.

Hmmm.

I told my wife about the problem, but it’s not like we watch that much television anyway. We talked about it for a little bit, then forgot it until today. We were sitting around before we had to go to work, so I turned on the television to show her what I had meant about the television being “strange”.

This time, the two black bars extended down the entire sizes of the screen. It made the screen look better, like there was some sort of reverse wide screen effect going on, but at least things were proportional again. We probably would have been satisfied with a broken but semi-functional television for our needs, but then we both started smelling ozone and smoke.

Minor electrical fire in the belly of the television perhaps? The television was at least a decade old. We had picked it up years ago for my old apartment used. It had served me well, and I don’t feel I got ripped off even if it is now a large plastic shell sitting in my living room.

I unplugged the set. We’re planning on selling it to the electronics recycle truck the next time he stops by the apartment complex. Since it’s been raining, we haven’t seen him in several days. He’ll help us carry the set out and offer us cash for the scrap parts. That’s certainly better than paying someone to take it away.

We went pricing new televisions today. No one is thinking of dropping two million won on a nice flat screen, but we saw some lower end units that could double as an over-sized computer monitor that I’d love to have. We’d have to snake wires through the house on the ceiling to get it to work, but I’m sure the delivery people would do that for us for a marginal fee. One wireless mouse and keyboard later, and I’ve got a new monitor for surfing on the couch!*

(A man can dream, can’t he?)

I went to my local game shop. There was a crowd around the display, and someone was rocking out to American classic rock. This could only mean one thing: Guitar Hero had arrived in Korea. This is the first encounter I’d ever had with Guitar Hero. I watched a beginner strum out the Toadies.

I was tapping my feet along to the tune, but it was clear it was new to the person with the guitar shaped controller. While rocking out to classic rock tunes seems like a lot of fun, I’m not about to drop the cash for an X-box 360 with special controller for one game. If my Playstation2 still worked, maybe. (Scowls)

There is an alternative, if you don’t mind looking a little goofy. Frets on Fire is a Guitar Hero clone for the PC. It even runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac! While it doesn’t come with a cool guitar controller, it would work if you used an adapter and plugged in one on the PC. Normally you simply take your keyboard and use the F1-F5 keys, with the Enter key acting as a “pick” for the string.

Yes, it’s exceedingly dorky to use a keyboard as a guitar, however, Frets on Fire does have an advantage over Guitar Hero. You can download music and create your own “tabs” or the key presses that the game uses. Thus, if you wanted to import your own music into Frets on Fire, it would be possible! That’s really cool! There are also modifications available that let you change the backgrounds and the game mechanics.

There are music “packs” available where people have created the tracks for popular artists already available too. I haven’t done anything except play with the free tracks available with the game though. I’ve got carpal tunnel already trying to bend my arms and trying to use all five keys at the proper time. Game setup is an breeze in Ubuntu. Download and run. There is no .deb package available however that I could find.

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yhn_TDc1zk[/video]

There are a ton of videos available at video sites that show how cool both Guitar Hero and Frets on Fire are when played by guitar or keyboard gods.

I gave the game a few tries, but I’m hopelessly bad at it. Still, it’s a really fun concept, and another proof that there are games for Linux that people might want to check out.

I have about twenty to thirty minutes every day spent with Yoshi walking him around the apartment complex and the nearby park. I normally spend this listening to podcasts from various sources organized through podcastready. I’m up to about twenty podcasts now, some daily, some weekly, all of them very interesting and entertaining.

While I tried out Librivox for free classical work, I found the recording quality highly variable at times. It was fantastic for finding old classical works, but sometimes it was difficult to listen to the people recording them. I wanted a more professional sounding set of books.

I stumbled upon Podiobooks around the same time, and while I found a few novels that sounded promising, I never made the dive and started listening to them. Sometime two weeks ago, I had finished all my podcasts for the day and wanted something to bring with me to work. I decided to download one of the books, Earthcore. It had been the most downloaded book at the time, and it was also the highest rated.

While there were good free classic audiobooks at Librivox, there were new novels from new writers at Podiobooks. I just had to find a few books I liked. Since they were free, what was it going to hurt to give a few books a try?

Immediately upon listening to the first installment of Earthcore, I knew I had made a good decision. The quality of the production was leaps and bounds better than most of Librivox. The story was interesting too. I was hooked.

I listened to Earthcore for the past two weeks, only finishing it last night as I came home from work. Upon completion, I found Heaven, another book I’m totally digging. This book is part of a series, and the third book isn’t even finished being recorded yet.

It’s not like I’m going to run out of material waiting for the Heaven series to be completed though. Every day I don’t listen to my daily news podcasts, my backlog grows. I’ve got a week or more of podcasts I need to catch up on. I’ll need to go exceedingly far out of my way walking my dog to ever get caught up on all of this new, free, professionally produced material on my mp3 player. This is exactly the sort of thing that keeps my mp3 player in my ears whenever I step outside on my own. I’ve always got something interesting to listen to instead of endlessly tracking down new music. This stuff comes to me instead. I’m totally gaga for this, as stimulating English language listening material outside of television or bar talk is at a minimum here. I just hope I don’t drown.

Using gtk-recordMyDesktop, I recorded a screencast of how to convert and resize .avi video files to work with the Cowon D2 using Avidemux, a free video editor for Linux. Upon further review of the previous sentence, very little of what I wrote happen to be words, so perhaps I should explain.

I own a Cowon D2. It is very useful. I adore it. For the longest time after I got it, I had problems figuring out ways to get video working with it correctly. Something had been giving me problems.

It turns out that when playing files, the Cowon D2 can’t handle B-frames. You don’t have to worry about this when you use the bundled Windows software, but I’m running Linux 100% of the time now. What was I going to do?

I struggled to find some solutions. Iriverter works most of the time. It’s cross platform running Java so it works almost anywhere too. If you can’t use Iriverter, or if it gives you problems, try Avidemux.

Avidemux more robust. It lets you do a lot more things with a wide variety of formats. I only created a simple guide to get things working for the Cowon D2. Further tweaking, for example, might be needed for widescreen videos on a small screen (I scale video to 320×176 resolution to preserve the black bars) (use the check box and slider on the resize filter menu), or changing the audio is possible to shrink the size of videos even further. That’s your preference.

This screencast for anyone using the Cowon D2 that had no clue how to get video working correctly. I hope it helped!

The Firefox Google Reader Notification add on lets me in on when my feeds are being updated. It’s been sitting at zero all day today, so I thought that there may have been a problem. I aggregate my RSS feeds with Google Reader. Today there was a widespread Google Reader Outage. I was affected from the outage and left pondering what to do lacking my daily updates. I need my feeds.

I’ve been checking websites with syndication far longer than the average blogger. Back when I was big into litestep customization, I used to check dozens of sites for the latests updates, themes, and widgets. I was around in the RDF days when sites had to bend over backwards to offer syndication, and there were only a few aggregating tools around. I was there, blogging in the winter with frozen digits, walking ten hours to post a nugget of news, and I liked it!

I knew a good thing when I saw it and wasn’t surprised when eventually people caught on to using RSS on everything. Now it’s just something required for me to even consider keeping up with someone’s work.

It’s grown from a hobby worthy convenience into something huge. I don’t check those old feed anymore, but I use my RSS feeds more than ever. I keep track of fifty or more feeds, and I add and remove sites depending on their content and updates. Having a good feed promptly updated will keep me returning to your site.

I can fire up my computer and check to see everything that has been written since I last checked, easily, in one place, quickly. When I read something, I can revisit it in detail, search for it later, or keep it in a special place to share with friends if I so choose. As far as rapidly increasing the amount of information I process to keep up with things I find interesting, it’s must.

After my last vacation, my feed had swollen to over 600+ posts. If I go over a day without checking, I’ll end up with hundreds of things waiting for my attention. Most of it is trivial stuff that I don’t need to actually read. A political site I check updates once or more every hour, and I don’t do much more than scan a headline to see if it is the most current for the topic before I move on. I still like to keep my waiting queue down to zero, and sometimes I can go for an hour or more reading really interesting news.
I still have some RSS holdouts that haven’t set up their own feed readers. I’ve converted one friend, and am working on one more. I’m fighting my addiction to surf perpetually (a habit easily formed with you get enough RSS feeds waiting) by using the TimeTracker Firefox extension. It lists the time I am spending surfing at any site other than my own, or any sites I define as an exception. It’s already helping me get my RSS habit back under control.

A few days ago I had a post eaten by the SPAM filter in Wordpress. It seems the IP address I have still gets put on SPAM blacklists from time to time, despite not having any recent failed scans in the last year to prove it was my machine that was sending out the SPAM.

I called the local ISP and told them I want to switch my IP address. They said I should be getting a new one each time I log on, but I assured them this was not the case. I’ve found a few workarounds and Linux commands, but they weren’t fixing the problem.

We told them that we weren’t running Windows when we called their tech support, but the person they sent over to look at the problem didn’t know how to use Linux at all. In fact, he didn’t even know how to access the Internet without Internet Explorer. No joke. He asked me, “How do you get onto the Internet without Explorer?” (Huge sigh.)

I knew it was basically going to fall to me to fix the problem immediately after that. He wasted a few more minutes of our time before admitting defeat and asking us to install Windows before we call next time we have a problem so he could “fix” it easily. (Sigh.)

It hasn’t been all time wasting disappointments. I’ve actually been getting a lot of work done recently with different applications I’ve found scattered around the Internet. I’ve posted some snippets about these before, but I’d like to bring them back up since they’ve really impressed me:

Juploader. Like Flickr, but find the official Flickr Uploadr lacking? Have tons of vacation photos you need to sort through with multiple permission levels, lots of tags, and lots of organizing to do? I’d highly recommend checking this application out, as it streamlines the process in a very visual, friendly way. It saved me hours of time organizing my Cambodia vacation picture sets. It’s Java based, so anyone can use it.

I was always organizing, transcoding, and manipulating videos to play on my Cowon D2 for my commute to work. I was always running out of materials to watch after a week. You can eat up a lot of television when shows are stripped of commercial distractions, which meant a lot of converting and processing time.

Podcasts are my new daily walking commute media. Podcasts are a pain to organize and get downloaded. If I had to do the transfers for each individual file myself, what’s the point? Podcast Ready + mypodder has automated the process entirely. I pick out the podcasts I want to subscribe, add it to my list, plug in my player, and have it download everything for me. It’s platform and player neutral, so anyone can use it on any player. Awesome. I had enough material on my D2 loaded for my trip that I never listened to the same program twice on a flight and always had something new to listen to as we flew

As for finding new software? GetDeb has been a wonderful resource for new programs to try out. Beware, some of the stuff available is beta, so it’s usually better to find the program in Synaptic and install unless there is a new feature you are dying to install.