compbrain.net » ubuntu

qmmp

Will — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 17:58:56 +0000

I’ve gotten to rather like qmmp. It offers a nice balance of simplicity and functionality, and has the added benefit of being modeled visually after my favourite windows based media player, winamp. To make this style more complete, i’ve added the official Winamp base skin.

QMMP with Winamp base skin

The classic skin came from here. Just download the .zip and place it in ~/.qmmp/skins, open up the settings, make the switch, and you’re good to go.

Sharp LC32DA5U 720p with Intel Graphics

Will — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:22:07 +0000

We’ve got a Sharp LC32DA5U in our dorm connected to a homebuilt PC from Frys. Recently we upgraded to Ubuntu Karmic and the latest SVN releases of XBMC. In order to get a reasonable resolution out of the TV/PC combination we needed this little xrandr script to set the resolution before xbmc starts up. The modelines for this TV are not easy to track down, so here they are in script form for future reference.
#!/bin/bash # This one leaves a vertical stripe on the left #MODELINE="74.250 1280 1320 1376 1650 720 722 728 750 +HSync +VSync" # This one seems to actually work MODELINE="74.250 1280 1390 1430 1650 720 725 730 750 +HSync +VSync" xrandr --newmode 1280x720 $MODELINE xrandr --addmode DVI1 1280x720 xrandr --output DVI1 --mode 1280x720

Weekend at Lime Rock Park

Will — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:59:36 +0000

I am at Lime Rock Park this weekend for the Rolex Vintage Festival. I had to check in to a college website for course registration, so I fired up my laptop with a Virgin Mobile Broadband2Go card, and got it done. Using the modemmanager PPA with Jaunty seems to make things really usable.

Dell M1330 in a Tent

gflags for Ubuntu

Will — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 06:09:42 +0000

If you are looking for the excellent Google gflags python module as an Ubuntu package, look no farther. It is available from my PPA: https://launchpad.net/~compbrain/+archive/ppa

A quick how-to install is included below.

$ sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys E5C2D9CD
$ sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/compbrain/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/compbrainppa.list'
$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install python-gflags

Nginx PHP5 Fastcgi

Will — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 03:45:45 +0000

Quick note for myself and anyone else looking to replace lighttpd or apache2 with nginx for serving php (ala wordpress):
http://frankkumro.com/2009/01/03/ubuntu-nginx-and-php5/

Fix a Broken AVI Seek Table/Index

Will — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 16:21:42 +0000

Recently I was given a video by a friend in AVI format that caused trouble when playing it on my Neuros OSD. When I watched the video on my laptop with mplayer, everything was fine, but when you tried to seek with the Neuros it reported a video 16 minutes in length instead of the full hour it should have been. Poking around the internet I found the following solution: Use mencoder to rebuild the AVI index, and write it out to a new copy of the video.

$ mencoder -forceidx input.avi -o output.avi -oac copy -ovc copy $ mv output.avi input.avi

After that, the new input.avi should be playable, and seeking should work properly again.