I’d been having a chronic problem of shimmering red dots appearing on my LCD screen every time I tried to use a DVI cable instead of a VGA cable. The dots appear around areas of high contrast like the border between a window and the background or even in the wallpaper itself.
I had previously tried many different graphics cards and a new power supply and finally came to the conclusion that it must have been something to do with my motherboard since my wife’s computer with nearly the same monitor didn’t have the same problem. It really didn’t occur to me that it could be the cable.
So what’s wrong with using the VGA cable, well for one I was losing a few lines of my desktop on the top edge of the monitor, you’d think that the resolution would be 1:1, but evidently something is lost in the digital to analog to digital conversion. I could live with it, but it constantly annoyed me every time I noticed the tops of windows being cropped.
A few days ago I was particularly annoyed, so I did some more research and I found a few other possible causes besides overheating graphics cards and bad power supplies. There were posts about some bad nVidia graphics card drivers, but I wasn’t running the specified version. So on a whim I took the DVI cable from my wife’s computer and replaced mine. What do you know, it worked.
Until now I didn’t think that the quality of the DVI cable mattered. It’s a digital signal so unless the cable is very long one cable shouldn’t be any better than another. Evidently I was wrong. I purchased a cheap DVI-I single link cable from Best buy and now my display runs just fine over DVI.
Posted by benjamen as DVI, VGA, computer at 1:10 PM UTC
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I’m not sure what changed, before I wasn’t able to forward my voicemail from my Tracfone to my Google Voice account, but now it just works. I had previously done some research on the web and found that Tracfone doesn’t allow call forwarding which precludes using another voicemail service
So I was playing around in my Google Voice account and for the heck of it decided to see what would happen if I clicked on the “Activate Google voicemail on this phone.” At one point I know Tracfone was using T-Mobile in my area, so I had tried using the T-Mobile settings to forward voicemail, but Tracfone must have changed to AT&T, because I tried using the AT&T instructions and it just worked.
Initially I tried calling my cell from my land line to test the voicemail switch, but for some reason instead of getting a greeting I went straight into the voicemail backend, you know the “you have X new messages” part. It turns out that I have direct access to Google Voice enabled on my land line, so it was going through some sort of causality loop. I temporarily un-enabled GV on my land line and called my cell again — this time I was greeted by my on cheery voice telling me to leave a message. Unfortunately (or fortunately) this means if my wife calls my cell phone from our land line she can’t leave a message, but I’ll still get a missed call notification
Posted by benjamen as Google Voice, Tracfone at 2:50 PM UTC
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I installed DOSBox on a Kubuntu Karmic machine to play The Incredible Machine, but I couldn’t get the sound working. I read a ton of forum posts about trying to get DOSBox working with Pulseaudio to no avail. Then I discovered that my Pulseaudio wasn’t working anyway.
I needed a way to tell the SDL (Simple Direct Media Layer) that DosBox should just use my soundcard like KDE was doing. One of the steps that kept coming up in the PulseAudio “fixes” was to type the line:
export SDL_AUDIODRIVER=pulse
or
export SDL_AUDIODRIVER=esd
before running DOSBox. I wondered if there was another setting for soundblaster or intel. So I googled SDL_AUDIODRIVER and found that there was a dsp option. So I typed:
export SDL_AUDIODRIVER=dsp
before starting DOSBox and viola I have sound.
*I’m not entirely sure it was necessary but in the process of trying to get Pulseaudio working I installed libsdl1.2debian-all.
Posted by benjamen as DOSBox, Karmic Koala, Kubuntu, Pulseaudio, linux at 12:56 PM UTC
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First let me just let me say that Amarok 2 blows! Why they screwed up such a great program is beyond me. You can always install Amarok 1.4, but why go backwards when players like Songbird are moving forward.
Unfortunately Songbird doesn’t seem to work out of the box with Kubuntu, the correct GStreamer packages don’t seem to be installed — even when you use a debian package! Maybe it’s just me but I’ve tried it on a Jaunty machine and a Karmic machine and I couldn’t get music to play back on either. It would just give me some cryptic error about alsasink and auotaudiosink. So here’s my short tutorial on how I got Songbird working.
- First I removed all GStreamer packages. This step may or may not have been necessary, but I mucked about for long time before I decided to start from scratch. It has the side effect of removing openoffice.org too, but you can just reinstall it when you’ve got songbird running.
- Reinstall GStreamer with this command:
sudo apt-get install libgstreamer0.10-0 gstreamer0.10-x gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gstreamer0.10-plugins-base gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev libgstreamer0.10-dev gstreamer0.10-plugins-good gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly
- Install the correct songbird package from Skyzim
sudo dpkg -i <package name>
- If you are using NVidia drivers remove the libvisual plugins.
sudo apt-get remove libvisual-0.4-plugins
That did it for me.
References:
Installing Songbird [Ubuntu Documentation]
GStreamer Setup [SongBird Wiki]
NVidia Driver Issue [edsalisbury.net]
Songbird Installer [Skyzim]
Posted by benjamen as Jaunty Jackalope, Karmic Koala, Kubuntu, Songbird at 9:05 AM UTC
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I’ve posted about finding tracfone promo codes on Fone-Review.com, but I found an even better site PrePaid.com.
I just added minutes to my Tracfone today and the Fone-review site failed me — now of the codes worked. So I did a Google search for “tracfone promo codes” and the PrePaid.com site came up.
They have a gigantic table of codes and listed next to the code is the last date it was tried.
UPDATE: Unfortunately this site seems to be gone now. Back to my friend Google I guess.
Posted by benjamen as Tracfone at 1:15 PM UTC
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Does it annoy you that the print preview window has been neutered in Firefox for Ubuntu? You may have this problem in other Linux distributions or operating systems too. Here is what it looks like:
Thanks to a little help from Only Ubuntu Linux I fixed the problem on my system by setting “print.whileInPrintPreview” to true.
Now my Print Preview window looks like it should:
HOW TO Enable Additional Print Preview Buttons in Firefox
Posted by benjamen as Ubuntu, firefox, linux, printing at 2:04 PM UTC
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I’ve been using eReader to read eBooks on my iPod Touch, but a recent update removed the ability to load your eBooks onto the iPod from your own webserver. They claim they’ve fixed it now, but instead being able to browse directories for books you have to create some convoluted file linking to each book.
The next best reader is Stanza, but it only takes books of the epub format. Thanks to calibre, you can convert most formats to epub. As a bouns you can turn on a server that allows you to connect with your iPod and download the books you converted.
What I don’t understand is why so many people praise Stanza. Compared to eReader it’s bloated and slow. For no reason in the middle of the book, the spinning wheel appears and you have to wait 30 seconds to get to the next page. Same thing if happens when you start the program, turn on the iPod, or go to a bookmark. eReader did take a little while to load a book, but once it was loaded, there were no more delays. I’ve read 4 books with Stanza and it is just barely usable.
From what I understand part of the problem with eBook readers is that Apple limits their functionality. I think that the other problem is the companies who develop these programs want to lock you into their system and make it difficult to use books from any other source. There’s really no reason to lock you into a single format or limit the places you can get books from other than corporate stupidity. It’s sad really. The iPod Touch and iPhone could be really great platforms for reading books.
Posted by benjamen as Stanza, eReader, iPhone/iPod Touch at 6:33 PM UTC
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Lets say you have two computers, one named TOM and another named JERRY. A good router will allow you to set it up so that if while you are on TOM you type:
ssh user@JERRY
You connect to JERRY without having to resort to using JERRY’s IP address.
After switching from dd-wrt to the Tomato firmware for my WT-54G, I found that there was no place to specify the local domain, so it wouldn’t resolve local hostnames properly.
I got a clue from a post on Ponderer.org. He’s setting up internal hostnames and the first line in his dnsmasq custom configuration sets his domain name. So I added this line to my dnsmasq custom config on the router
domain=cartoon
All of a sudden the hostnames start to resolve. This is of course assuming that the two computers are already setup to use the domain name cartoon.
* All computer and domain names have been made up to protect their true identites.
Posted by benjamen as dd-wrt, router, tomato at 1:35 PM UTC
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When you are ready to export your edited video, Kino includes a number of canned scripts for transcoding it into a variety of formats such as flash video. Unfortunately when using the scripts you have little control over the encoding options. If you want more control, you either need to write your own script or better yet modify one of the included scripts.
To get started you can start by reading the Kino User Guide, specifically the Export/Other section. In this section you find out that the scripts are located in $prefix/share/kino/scripts/export/ — $prefix is just a variable name that is specified at compile time. To save you some time for Kubuntu the location of the scripts is /usr/share/kino/scripts/exports.
Copy the script you are interested in modifying and ffmpeg_utils.sh to $HOME/kino/exports/ ($HOME of course is your home directory). You’ll probably have to create both the kino and export directories. Then modify the script to tweak the encoding options — make sure you change the title and profile names so you can tell it from the origianl script, save it, and restart Kino. Your new script should be one of the drop down options for Tools.
Posted by benjamen as Kino, linux, video at 12:43 PM UTC
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I started a side blog to blog.electronsmith.com called journal.electronsmith.com. The thought that the journal site would be more of an auxiliary brain to catch stuff that I watched to remember, but it takes too much time to maintain something like that so I rolled all the posts over to this blog and closed down journal.electronsmith.com.
Wordpress really made my day. It was so easy to move the posts over I couldn’t believe that it was actually done. All I did was export the posts from journal.electronsmith.com to a file on my desktop, import them with blog.electronsmith.com, and choose what users the posts would map to. I just need to clean up some duplicate categories, but other than that — Done.
Posted by benjamen as Wordpress, blog, productivity at 2:02 PM UTC
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