http://rlv.zcache.com/ubuntu_rocks_mug-p1687251842722515612ob3n_210.jpgWhile this isn’t a reason for productivity or efficiency it certainly improves your mental state throughout your work day.  When you get experienced with linux you literally feel like a wizard.  Because, more often than not, it is more efficient to do things sans GUI you really get into the guts of the system, and because of the customizability of absolutely everything those guts begin to evolve over time, guided by your hand and personal style.   Not just in the aesthetics of the operating system but also the very command structure in terminal.  You build shell scripts for absolutely everything and so as your O/S ages it becomes more and more unique to you meaning that even another experienced linux user wouldn’t be able to sit down and accomplish what I can accomplish with my OS.  This causes a very deep and personal connection with you OS, as it works the way it works only for you and no one else.  So when you are going nuts in it, uses all of the little nuances that only you know you completely feel like a wizard because for anyone else looking over your shoulder, even another linux user it will look like magic at times.  Now for a non-linux user you can literally get away with renaming yourself Gandalf the Grey without anyone questioning it because none of what you are doing will make any sense at all but the results from your magic will be so far beyond what they even thought was possible in terms of efficiency, productivity, organisation and overall coolness with an operating system.

I mean shit, when I’m up late writing articles in the dark I literally light my screen on fire and work by the burning glow of the virtual flames

As any of you who are following me on twitter know I ordered the beautiful, sleek and very white Soundblaster Arena headset last week from newegg and today I moseyed my way down to Puralator to pick em up!  Happy happy joy joy.

Seeing as there are little no reviews of these kind of things specific to linux I thought I would share my thoughts on the first day with my new lover and how they react to my other lover: Ubuntu.  I’m not going to go over packaging and all the other nitty gritty details that most reviews dive into, I’ll just let you know the one thing you care about: How do they sound?

Well up until now I’ve been using  a pair of Panasonic earbuds (Best pair of ear buds I have ever owned for bass which is saying a lot as these cost me 30,000 pesos – 15$ – in Colombia and they out perform my $200.00 Bose buds sitting in my room) and the sound has been fairly impressive up until this point so it would take something pretty special to really make me say ‘wow’.  Obviously an over ear headset is going to outperform buds but the quality of those buds was so high with the music I listen to that I wasn’t sure at how much to expect.

If you want to skip the review and just get to the goods I’ll lay it out right here: Do NOT waste your money on these headphones.  Without the bullshit proprietary drivers that run only in windows these headphones will consistently disappoint you at absolutely every turn.  The same can probably be said for all USB headphones I would imagine and these are no exception.  So until creative gets out of the last century and open sources their drivers these headphones will no doubt be put to use as a paper weight versus anything else.

First Impressions

In linux, to be honest, the difference isn’t astronomical as far as what they are delivering.. Clearly these things are 10 times the size of ear buds so the overall sound is a lot richer and a bit boomier when it comes to the progressive house I listen to.  Putting on classical the sound is a fair bit cleaner although it going to take something at 320k to really hear the difference in sound.  Again because it’s an over ear experience the sound comes through richer as well.

In windows you can take everything written above and multiply it by 10.  The sound is insanely deep and booming when the equalizer is adjusted.  These things rattled on my head and massaged my soul with amazing thumping beats.  It’s enough to make me almost want to go into Windows to do as much work as I can.  Shit that sound was impressive..  I made sure only to take a taste of it though, just a few seconds or else I would probably be in Windows right now.  So keep in mind non of the limitations I describe here have anything to do with the hardware, this is a badass headset.  It all comes down to the lack of proper support and drivers for linux.  GGAHHH!!!

Volume

Now this is a USB only headset and I am guessing that is playing a part into why I am unable to really crank these things.  I mean don’t get me wrong it goes moderately loud but it doesn’t pound my head like when I had my Bose set which plug directly into the audio jacks.  I mean I can feel the beats but it’s not leaving my ears ringing after a long session of Jan Waterman which is the only way to listen to such brilliance. I am able to amp it up more through pulse for classical music than I was with my buds but with trance it starts to distort when I dance around 170%.

As you can guess it the same cannot be said for the windows experience.  These things fucking exploded on my head.  It was so loud, so deep and so bloody distortion free that I had to shed a little tear for not being able to experience that in linux.

The Microphone:

Truth be told one of the main reasons I’m buying this is the mic.  I haven’t done an IndustryBroadcast in months and months and month because my old usb mic kicked the bucket.  So a critical criteria was mic quality and most of the reviews had nothing but good things to say about the mic.

First thing that rocks about it is that it is detachable.  So if I’m out or whatever and don’t need it, I don’t need to have it sticking off my head.  Definitely like that.  The quality of the sound is decent.  It’s nothing amazing by any stretch, and this has nothing to do with the software as it sounds the same in windows.  My voice comes across as really damn deep, almost unnaturally so for those who are used to hearing me through my built in lappy mic, and while they claim this is a noise canceling mic, when I was in windows with the proper drivers loaded and software running I really didn’t pick up a crystal clean sound even though all windows were closed and appliances off in my surrounding area.  It was dead quiet in my apartment and i was still getting a bit of noise that I had to clean up with Audacity.  So overall the mic works decently but I wouldn’t buy these just for that.. If you’re doing podcasting you’re better off getting a proper mic and a proper pair of headphones.  If you’re gaming then these will definitely do the trick and make you sound like a manly man while you’re at it.

Size, Shape, Comfort

My ears are totally covered, I picked these up at 2pm today, and outside of a workout and dinner I’ve had them on ever since.  Totally comfortable, no pinching or anything anywhere.  Cushioning is soft and fluffy and I have lots of room inside for my ears

The Design:

See picture above, these things are badass!  I bought these because they received the best overall review of any gaming headset around and they were under $100.00 at New Egg.  I also haven’t bought a SoundBlaster product in 15 years so it felt awesome to support a company that’s done so much to change the audio landscape of the digital world.  But I am not going to lie and say I wasn’t super super stoked to have this gorgeously designed throw-back to 1980′s sci-fi on my head.  I mean if storm troopers are grooving to good tunes they are doing it with the SoundBlaster Arena on their head, and dammit so am I!  This goes for the color and general shape, but these bad boys are sleek and not bulky by any stretch.. I was actually surprised at the small size of the box when I picked them up.  I was expecting, from the pictures, that these things would be much more obtuse and large but they are the perfect size.  That and the black on a white body is brilliant.  Best looking headset on the market in my mind.

So there you have it!  If you want something that just cranks the sound out and you are using linux only I would go for a Senheisser or something else that goes into your audio jacks.

• The sound quality is good in these,  overall decent but nothign to write home about and my ears certainly aren’t going to be bleeding(in the best way possible) anytime soon.  I’m almost considering running VMware all the time just for music because these things absolutely rock in Windows.  So if you’re a windows user put your money into these bad boys, they will rock your world like nothing else.
• Mic is decent, good for gaming, decent enough for podcasting but nothing to write home about at all.  If you’re serious about casting go and buy a professional mic for $70.00 and use a cheaper $30.00 headset.  If you are gaming this is the way to go.  The mic detaches which is a huge plus
• Design rocks the cock, these are wicked looking phones that set your head apart from the rest
• Comfortable as anything else.  But phat padding around the ears with plenty of room will keep the tunes coming for hours and hours without discomfort.

Bottom Line:

Do NOT, and I repeat DO NOT waste your money on these headphones if you plan on using them primarily in linux.  Contrary to the reviews the microphone is nothing out of the ordinary and the sound quality in linux is the same as the $10.00 pair of Earbuds I picked up in Colombia.  These headphones will be a complete waste of money if you cannot use the proper drivers to support them.  Nothing against creative in particular, but USB headphones which require proprietary Windows Only drivers to run will completely underperform and dissapoint you at absolutely every turn.

Hope that helps, if anyone has any suggestions for how to improve the audio quality to something approaching windows I would love you forever!

So it seems that I’ve had a similar experience to a lot of people changing their wallpapers in ubuntu.  You’re scrolling through a bunch and in the list you notice this one called cosmos that doesn’t quite looks like the rest.  “Hmmm, what’s this?’ you think.  This looks like a bunch of images stacked on top of each other.  Could it be?  And yes, it is, it’s a multi-image slideshow that can have as your background that rotates on a schedule that you choose.  I immediately sat down and started figuring out how this thing works and in the end it was pretty simple, time consuming to setup as you have to input a ton of values into an xml file but simple.  I’m not going to go into huge detail about how it works if you want to read more head over to http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/create-custom-transitioning-background-your-gnome-228-desktop

So today I stumbled upon a motherload of amazing 3D space art at http://joejesus.deviantart.com and I go completely gaga over space art.. My wallpapers are all sci-fi scenes, I just can’t get over how breath taking some of these are.  So I raided the guys stash and ended up with around 30-40 new pieces for my wallpaper slideshow and like hell was I going to enter all of these in by hand so off I went searching for a nice little script that would do it for me.  I mean come on, one of the reasons I’m a linux user because I gave up the notion that time consuming repetitive tasks were something that you had to do by hand and sure enough I found a wonderful gentlemen over at the ubuntu forums who coded up a beauty of a script that worked like a charm.  So make sure to head over to : http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=9578962 and give the guy a big thank you hug for saving you hours of work, and read the instructions on how to use it.

Here’s the script, just copy and paste this into a file, chmod it to 755 and you’re off to the races:

#!/bin/bash
echo “<background>”
echo “  <starttime>”
echo “    <year>2009</year>”
echo “    <month>08</month>”
echo “    <day>04</day>”
echo “    <hour>00</hour>”
echo “    <minute>00</minute>”
echo “    <second>00</second>”
echo “  </starttime>”
echo “  <!– This animation will start at midnight. –>”

if [ $# -lt 4 ]
then
echo “usage: $0 <hold duration> <fade duration> file1 file2 …”
echo “example: $0 60 5 /path/to/dir/*.jpg /path/to/dir/*.png”
exit 1
fi

hold=$1
fade=$2
first=$3

#remove hold parameter
shift
#remove fade parameter
shift

while [ $# -gt 0 ]
do
echo “  <static>”
echo “    <duration>$hold</duration>”
echo “    <file>$1</file>”
echo “  </static>”
echo “  <transition>”
echo “    <duration>$fade</duration>”
echo “    <from>$1</from>”
if [ $# -gt 1 ]
then
echo “    <to>$2</to>”
else
echo “    <to>$first</to>”
fi
echo “  </transition>”
shift
done
echo “</background>”

So I started getting this error today when trying to delete some files and load some new ones onto my Sansa MP3 player.  It would tell me that the file system was read only.  I tried a sudo chmod -R 777 but that didn’t work so off to google I went..

Finally found that by remounting the filesystem like this: sudo mount -o remount,rw /dev/sdd1 /media/~ it fixed it up in a jiffy.  Well those are my paths and my device names so it would obviously be different for you but hopefully that helps

Now if this above solution does not fix your problem try to manually umount the mp3 player and then remount it with the following command options:

sudo mount -a -t vfat /dev/sde1 /media/~ -o user,exec,dev,suid,rw,umask=000

This solution will also work for USB flash drives that are being mounted with either root only write privileges or as read-only file systems

Being a FreeBSD user I just got used to a very nice feature that would allow me to autocomplete commands based on my history.  So for example if 15 commands ago I had typed ‘cat filenames1 > filename2′ and I wanted to retype that command I could just type ‘cat’ and then press up and it would go through my history and bring up the last command I typed starting with ‘cat’ until I got back to the desired command, only bringing up those in my history starting with ‘cat’ of course.

Unfortunately this isn’t the way it works in linux, in linux pressing up, no matter how much you’ve typed so far will just take you back through the command history.  Sure you can press ctrl-r but I couldn’t be bothered to figure that out.  Besides there is a much cooler way to go about it.

what you  do is to edit /etc/inputrc:
vi gedit /etc/inputrc

somewhere around line 40 is the following:

# alternate mappings for “page up” and “page down” to search the history
#”\e[5~”: history-search-backward
#”\e[6~”: history-search-forward
Uncomment those lines, close term and open an new one and viola!  It works the same but with page up and down instead.  Beauty!  If you didn’t know about this at all go in there and turn it on right now because man this is a time saver and a half.  You’ll thank me later!

So I was having a problem with my external USB hard drive lately.  The USB connectors on this LG laptop are a bit shady so things get disconnected if you bump them and this would happen with my hard drive.. The problem being that if the Hard drive was disconnected like this and not properlyy unmounted that it wouldn’t come back up 50% of the time when I plugged it back in.

It would show up when I run fdisk -l and in dmesg but when I try to mount the drive it would return with the error ‘special device does not exist’.  The only way I could get it back online was to reboot the machine, until now!

I tried installed usbmount and pmount but neither fixed the problem.

After some research I discovered the MAKEDEV command.  So what I tried was to run MAKEDEV from inside of /dev/ and it would give me an error: “.udevdb or .udev presence implies active udev.  Aborting MAKEDEV invocation.”

So I went on and looked into /dev/.udev/ and found a /failed/ directory which had a blocked file in there referring to the hard drive that wasn’t mounting.  For some reason I ran the MAKEDEV [device] command here and VIOLA, it worked.  Apparently it just needs to be run in a directory that doesn’t have a .udev subdirectory in it

So for me the command was MAKEDEV /dev/sdd and it created sdd1 through sdd10.  Not sure what the other ones are for but I was able to mount sdd1 properly and access my hard drive.  I mean this is a pretty backwards work around but I can access my hard drive without rebooting, so I’m good to go!

So to sum it up, if you have a device that isn’t mounting properly but you can see the device with #sudo fdisk -l then:

1. try creating a temporary directory for your new mount points
2. Then run MAKEDEV [device] inside of that directory.  So if the partition your trying to mount is say /dev/sda1 then you’ll want to run MAKEDEV /dev/sda and hopefully that gives you access without needing to reboot.

So today was the last straw with Evolution. It is just too buggy and too unstable of an email platform for me to use anymore so I began the dreaded migration of 1.1 GB of emails to a different client. Thanks to the awesome walkthrough below it turned out to be a lot less painful than I had imagined.

If you are using Evolution and are getting fed up of the little bugs and instabilities here and there then check out the article below on how to switch to Thunderbird:

http://maketecheasier.com/how-to-migrate-from-evolution-to-thunderbird-in-ubuntu-intrepid/2008/12/04

A quick highlight :

Migrate local mail from Evolution

First, we will migrate the Evolution mails that are stored locally in your hard disk.

Open up two Nautilus windows (if you like, you can open two tabs instead of two windows). Press Ctrl + H to reveal the hidden folders. In one window, navigate to the .mozilla-thunderbird folder. You should see a folder with name similar to i7bqvbzk.default. Click on that folder, followed by Mail and Local Folders. You should see some files like Inbox, Trash, Unsent Message etc.

In the second window, navigate to .evolution -> mail -> local folder. Similarly, you will find files such as Inbox, Outbox, Sent, Trash etc.

Now copy the five files Inbox, Outbox, Drafts, Templates, Sent from the Evolution folder to the Thunderbird folder. If it prompts you whether to replace the existing files, click Replace All.

If you have used any subfolders in your Evolution, you should see a folder with a .sbd extension (such as #evolution.sbd). In your Thunderbird folder, create a similar folder with the same name. Back to your Evolution folder, copy and paste all the files in the subfolder that don’t have a file extension to the Thunderbird subfolder.

That’s it. Restart your Thunderbird. You should see all your Evolution mails imported over.

So for the past two days I have had this problem in Evolution, my email client, where ‘m’ was the new shortcut for add attachment.. Not Ctrl+M but just M.  So everytime M was pretty it would stop what I was typing and open up the add attachment dialogue box, obviously making it impossible to write an email with any word containing the letter m in it.  I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how to change the shortcut keys for these sorts of things but today I just randomly stumbled upon it and thought I would share.

What you do is with a new email open go into the insert menu (alt+i) and use the arrow keys to highlight(but don’t press enter) then with the command select press your hotkey combination.  Or in my case I simply press the ‘m’ key with add attachment selected and then it bound m to that action.

It’s an awesome way to handle shortcuts but there is a distinct lack of documentation on it so hopefully this article will find its way onto some google searches of people with a similar dilema.

So after having the edge of my hand touch my touchpad and mess up an email for the upteenth time today I went around and did some research to see if there was a quick shortcut key or something I could press to turn the bloody thing off and then on again when I was done typing.  Well let me tell you I found something so much better!  There’s a command in shell that will automatically disable the touchpad if you’ve been typing for a set amount of time and then turn it back on automatically when you’re done..  Genius!  Genius I say!!  But what is this command you ask?  How do you enable it to save yourself endless frustration?  Well I’m glad you asked because I was just about to explain it:

The program is syndaemon and it can be enabled in shell by typing: syndaemon -i 3 -d

Where

• -i parameter defines number of seconds to wait after keyboard is used – ( 3 seconds suites me. )
• -d  parameter is used for running syndaemon in background mode ( as a daemon ).

If above command throws some error then you are using other than 9.04 release. To get it working type in terminal,

wget http://people.ubuntuwire.com/~fujitsu/syndaemon
chmod +x syndaemon
sudo mv syndaemon /usr/bin/
syndaemon -i 3 -d

Again type the syndaemon command in terminal, it shouldn`t give any error messages.

Above command has to be executed each time machine is rebooted. To execute above command automatically we can create a tiny bash script and add it to startup items.

1. Create a new file somewhere ( My BSD habits puts files like this in /usr/local/etc/rc.d/ but that’s just me ) and copy paste following into it.

#!/bin/bash
syndaemon -i 2.5 -d

2. To add above script to startup items, go to System > Preferences > Startup Applicaitons >  Add. In new  pop-up box name it something meaningful and type in the path and command.. After that click “Add”.

There you go, done like dinner    Enjoy not having the hell of your cursor selecting 2 paragraphs of text and typing over it before you know what’s going on!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th8_zKa0DKk[/youtube]

The tracking on this thing looks really impressive(“Sub-milimeter accuracy”).  To take the Wii Experience, but better, and put it on the power of the PS3 is enticing to say the least.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXYSAcXpCnM&feature=related[/youtube]

And M$ wouldn’t be outdone by Sony and is also jumping on the Nintendo Bandwagon.  Now what we really should be excited is to see, maybe not this year, what Nintendo is doing to improve it’s system so that it can stay ahead of the competition as they look to enter into a domain and market created by Nintendo.