Nozell, rhymes with Oh Hell

I recently recorded an event using my little Creative MuVo TX FM mp3 player. It created a 22M WAV file of reasonable quality, but lame and audacity had problems converting it to an MP3 file.

The work around is to open the original wav file with audacity and then File->Export as WAV. The resulting wav file is about four times as large, but is in a usable format. From there use your favorite tools to create an OGG or MP3 file.

It appears the problem has to do with the way the MuVo encodes the wav:



VOC001-original.wav: RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, IMA ADPCM, mono 8000 Hz
VOC001-clean.wav: RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, Microsoft PCM, 16 bit, mono 8000 Hz



My wife had an unused Logitech Stereo USB Headset 250 kicking around the house that I took into the office today. Joy of joys! Ubuntu/Dapper recognized it and both the headset *and* microphone work out of the box.

Just like Microsoft Windows ;-)

The good folks at GetDemocracyNow.com provide debian packages for Ubuntu/Dapper, but didn’t get the dependencies quite right. After intalling the two democracyplayer packages from their Ubuntu download page, I needed to also install the following packages:

$ sudo apt-get install libboost-python1.33.1 libgtk-mozembed-ruby mozilla-psm

There is a ton of great content!

I’ve been using f-spot since it showed up in Ubuntu/Breezy and have been keeping all my photos in a directory structure like this:

/PHOTOS/Photos/2006.06.30/
/PHOTOS/Photos/2006.07.01/

But sometimes I’ve forgotten to unclick the “Copy file to the Photos folder” box in the photos import dialog and end up with photos under ~/Photos/. Recently I checked and found there were almost a gigabytes worth of photos under there.

So this is what I did to move them to under /PHOTOS/Photos/ and keep all the tags and metadata correct.

• Back up /home and /PHOTOS to an external USB. I love rsnapshot.
  $ rsnapshot daily
• make an extra backup of the f-spot database
  $ cp ~/.gnome2/f-spot/photos.db photos-backup.db
• Start poking around the f-spot database and updating it.
  $ sqlite3 ~/.gnome2/f-spot/photos.db
sqlite> .schema photos
CREATE TABLE photos ( id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY NOT NULL,
time INTEGER NOT NULL,
directory_path STRING NOT NULL,
name STRING NOT NULL,
description TEXT NOT NULL,
default_version_id INTEGER NOT NULL
);

• See how many photos are in ~/Photos…
  sqlite> select count(*) from photos where directory_path like '/home/marc/Photos/%';
260

• Take a look at a few of them to see the path names…
  sqlite> select directory_path from photos where directory_path like '/home/marc/Photos/%' limit 0,10;

• Update the pathname to my prefered one. I’ve added an ‘a’ to the end just so I won’t overwrite an existing directory.
  sqlite> update photos set directory_path = "/PHOTOS/Photos/2006.06.22a" where directory_path = "/home/marc/Photos/2006/6/22";
sqlite> .quit

• Make the directory and move the files to the new location…
  mkdir /PHOTOS/Photos/2006.06.22a
mv -v /home/marc/Photos/2006/6/22/HPIM117* /PHOTOS/Photos/2006.06.22a


Repeat for each directory. I did it all within emacs’ shell so cut-n-paste made it a snap.

Mark Pilgrim has compiled his list of Ubuntu essentials — time to add some KDE goodness to ‘My Ubuntu/Dapper Configuration‘ page…

I’ve posted some extensive notes on all the post-installation configuration steps needed to make an Ubuntu/Dapper standard install the way I like it — dual head, personal & corporate email, network manager, f-spot, etc

Check it out: My Ubuntu/Dapper Configuration

This is a follow on to last week’s post about Dual Monitor on Ubuntu/Dapper

I’ve been using the xorg.conf-ati.20060621 configuration at work with two monitors, but when at home the laptop didn’t degrade down to working with the one LCD monitor of the laptop. So, here is a new configuration that lets you switch between a single monitor mode (1024×768) or one large one (2048×768) that can be ’slid over to’ by using the mouse. The key press is Control-Alt-+ (the + over on the side where the number entry is). On the laptop, it is Control-Alt-blue_Fn-?

Here the is xorg.conf file:

xorg.conf-ati-works-with-one-monitor.20060624

I’ve noticed a number of people asking about dual head support in dapper on #ubuntu, so here is my setup:

This hp/compaq nc6000 laptop/notebook that has an ATI card:


$ sudo lspci|grep VGA
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV350 [Mobility Radeon 9600 M10]


I have two head monitors working with both the ‘ati’ and the closed source ‘fglrx’ drivers.

Here are the configuration files:

Before you start hacking around with your xorg.conf, save a copy somewhere safe.

I just picked up a Creative Webcam Live! which does a reasonable 1024×768 snapshot and 640×480 video resolution for $49. At first it looked like I’d have to build the spca5xx kernel module for Ubuntu/Dapper, but it is now included in the default kernel & modules packages.

Just plug it in and start using one of the many video capture packages like camorama, webcam, camstream, motion, gqcam, etc and start playing around!

FWIW here below the fold are my loaded kernel modules:

(more…)

I’m sitting in MySQL bootcamp today and wanted to have some ajaxMyTop eyecandy running on my laptop while doing the labs.

Unfortunately ajaxMyTop is written to PHP5 and I’m using PHP4 on Ubuntu/Dapper. These are the steps needed to get it working:

* Install php4-domxml (apt-get install php4-domxml)

* Restart apache2 ( sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart )

* Grab the modified processlist.php from the ajaxMyTop forum on sourceforge here and replace the one provided by the 0.5.5 kit.

* Create a dbconfig.inc.php that looks something like this:


<?
$dbHost = "localhost";
$dbUser = "root";
$dbPass = "YOUR-ROOT-PASSWORD";
$db = mysql_connect($dbHost, $dbUser, $dbPass);
?>