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.

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.

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 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>”

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

So I’ve been going through a real LOTR kick lately.  After finishing watching the Extended version Trilogy again, I then went through all 6 DVD’s of the Making of and now I’m going through the Cast Commentary of each film.  I suppose watching all of this and immersing myself in the Film project has given me an immense appreciation for the incredible effort that went into this film, I would say more so than any other films in human history.  I say this because I feel that this could be directly responsible for how I feel about LOTRO.

After finishing the films again I was left with an incredible desire to explore this world in much more detail and on my terms.  A testement to the amazingness of our times that now that option is available to me.  My problem however is that I wanted to explore a world as rich as the one created in the films(visually) or as captivating as the world created in the books.  Perhaps this was an unfair expectation in Turbine but upon entering Middle Earth in Lord of the Rings Online I was immensly dissapointed, and my guess is that many other players also are.

Visual: When you watch the films there is absolutely no mistaking that the world of cinema has never seen works that match the visual authenticity and sophistication of LOTR.  Not strictly from a CG perspective but speaking of the set designs, the blacksmiths working around the clock, the seamstresses, the miniatures, etc etc.  Everything for these films shattered records previously thought to be impressive.   This is something Turbine should have taken into account when they decided to create Middle Earth for the masses to explore, clearly they aren’t expected to match the quality of the film, however I would expect them to take the same fervor in attention to detail and groundbreaking effects relative to other online games.  They however did not.  The infinite small details that make the story in the book come to life, and those of the films that suspend all disbelief are no where at all to be found in the game.  With the expectations that the films set for this the gameworld seems bland and vanilla no matter where you are looking.   It is simply another generic online game that looks no better and in many cases worse than many others.

Gameplay: Again absolutely nothing ground breaking here.. The quests are incredibly tedious for the first 10 levels with ZERO hook to get you interested in the story.  The very very beginning introduction starts off with you defending a courtyard, which is a step in the right direction, however after that it is simply one rat quest after another, interspered with fedex quests here or there.  There is an epic quest storyline that goes on but has zero compelling features in it and the fact that the hero you are following is so much weaker than yourself makes it even more insulting.

You can start off as any of the main characters in the story: Dwarf, Elf, Human or Hobbit however there is no major major differences between them.  By this I mean they share 90% of the same classes throughout, so each race serves mainly an aesthetic purpose which can be good in a way as it allows you to play your favorite class and explore the hobbit world or the elves but there is no real compelling reason to choose one over the other or any reason to feel special about being an elf as there is a human of the same class out there that is identical to you without the pointy ears.

There are some slightly innovative mechanics for combat but really nothing to write home about.

Lastly, once you get your first character above lvl 10 you are able to do ‘monster play’ which allows you to start a lvl 60 evil character(orc, spider, worg etc etc).  This could prove interesting as it opens the whole world up on the other side so I’ll give them that.

Price: There doing something right here.  You can sign up for a 10 day free trial and convert it for 9.99 / month.  No box fee which is nice to see.  However compare this to a game like Requiem, which is 100% free, looks much better visually and has more exciting and developed gameplay from the start and that 9.99 still seems overpriced.

At the end of the day it seems all too clear that either Turbine bit off far more than they could chew, or their main intention here was to cash in on the immense success of the brand – wanting to take as little risk as possible due to the fact that almost anything they produced would be gobbled up by hordes of rabid fans.   Consequentially what they ended up producing was a product that visually can’t compare to it’s competion let alone attempt to step into the massive shoes that Peter Jackson created for the brand, and gameplay wise has nothing unique to appeal to players over any of the other games offered out there.  This strikes me as a major disservice to the Brand in general, once you know what went into writing the books and then the insanity that went into creating arguable some of the greatest films ever made.  Perhaps Turbine was doing the big corporate thing and playing it safe or perhaps they bit off more than they could chew, either way I see them in a slightly tarnished light because of this project.

In a world with so many high quality free mmo’s being produced these days(Requeim, Shaiya, Last Chaos to name a few) if you want to step into this arena and charge people money for a monthly subscription you had damn well be able to justify it on all fronts… LOTRO does so on none, which saddens me to no end.  Someone please call Bethesda to fix this mess!