Bloggy

So I’m a pretty big fan of the Amazon MP3 Music Store. It has had very few tracks which I wanted to grab which weren’t available. It’s cheaper than the iTunes Music Store as well. I realize this is the case only because the music labels are tired of getting their terms dictated to them by Apple so they decided to open up the competition and make the deal more enticing. But that works in my favor so that’s awesome. Only thing I’m afraid of is that that music labels will try to do something dumb and try to start adding DRM copy protection to the music again (which breaks the music on my players). But anyways, back to my original point: Amazon’s MP3s even come with the cover art built-in to the track.

I noticed this when I tried playing some of my purchased tracks on my laptop this past underway with Amarok, and noticed that it displayed the cover art just fine. After a bit of work now that I’m back in port I’ve managed to add display of built-in cover art to JuK as well. The patch is available as an attachment to KDE bug 103118. In addition (what the bug was reported against) if no cover is present JuK will look for cover.jpg in the same directory as the music file like many other media players do. No screenshot, it looks just like normal JuK cover art support, only JuK pulls from more sources with the patch.

As far as where this lands I’ll have to email core-devel. I returned to port way too late for the 4.1 feature list :) so this may have to wait for 4.2 (depending on how much toward “bugfix” people are willing to lean). But if people want to test that’s fine. ;)

On a related note, if you’ve been using JuK and notice a bug that is egregrious (i.e. you can’t even play audio because JuK always crashes when you click Next, you can’t add files, etc.) please leave me a comment so I can prioritize. I have limited time so I’d like to make good use of it in time for KDE 4.1.

I already know of the fact that you can’t seem to drag-and-drop tracks to playlists anymore for instance (which hampers my routine at least so I’ll try and fix that soon).

Posted by mpyne under KDE & Programming | 4 Comments »

So Mario Kart Wii came out the other day. Given that every Mario Kart ever has been at least a great game, we picked it up immediately.

I’ve only played it in versus mode, both competitively and cooperatively with my wife, in racing and both battle modes, and I can definitely say that this is the least pleased I’ve been with a Mario Kart title ever. I’ve actually thrown the Wiimote (luckily a mattress was in the way) :(

My major gripes? Well, let’s list:

• I’m actually not upset at the Wiimote-as-steering-wheel controls. They take getting used to and I don’t think they’re as precise as normal analog stick controls (I haven’t tried yet however) but as long as you recognize that about 350 degrees full left to full right is the complete range of motion you’ll adapt. Try to push more and you’ll simply confuse the game into steering the wrong way. This is something that could be improved by a stand or something that has a mechanical stop, at least you’d know when you hit the full range of motion. But again, you’ll at least get used to this.
• The first major concern for me (and this is huge) is that they seem to have drastically changed power sliding. In Mario Kart 64 and Mario Kart Double Dash when you power slide you can kind of adjust the direction you slide. They seem to have significantly reduced this in Mario Kart Wii. This significantly ramps up the difficulty. Turn too early and you are pretty much guaranteed to go over an edge or run into the wall. Turn too late and you are pretty much guaranteed to go over an edge or run into a wall. Even if you don’t spill out you’re likely not going to be pointed in the right direction once the turn is done. Probably the safest bet is to never power slide (or leave it in Auto) but then you will slow down a lot through every turn.
• Oh, and when you do run into a wall (and it will be frequent), you are practically guaranteed to lose 2-3 places each time. This would have been OK as a difficulty-enhancer had they not combined it with the penalty on power sliding.
• One thing that I hoped they would fix at some point is the rubber-band logic that allows the CPU to basically completely annihilate you just for doing well in a race. Do too well and all of a sudden you will have disasters rained down upon you as if from on high (and then you will no longer be in the first half of the leaderboard). In previous Mario Karts it would go from happening randomly to conveniently happening on the second or third lap. Now it just seems to happen all the time instead.
• Also cool is when you get hit by an item, and then get hit by a passing kart, and then get hit by another item (or two, you’re already hosed at this point). This happens in every Mario Kart game. But I think I’m already up to about half the number of times that it happened to me in Mario Kart 64 and Double Dash combined.

It’s not all bad news. I watched my wife play one-player and even though she made a lot of mistakes playing through her first time, she rather easily took first in all 4 races she played. Apparently my strategy will have to be trying to stay in 12th the whole time and hoping for good items. In addition the stages are inspired, both for racing and battle modes. I’m going to stay away from online play because that merely leads to me getting my face stepped on by someone I can’t so much as throw my soda at, but it’s nice that it has the option.

I’m going to go try playing it one-player and seeing if I can at least get some entertainment out of it in solo mode. It’s not like I can return it and get my money back. :-/

Posted by mpyne under Personal | 5 Comments »

So before I went underway our car had developed a trouble causing the Check Engine light to come in continuously. No abnormal sounds but being nuclear-trained has taught me not to live with “locked-in” alarms or warnings. I wasn’t able to troubleshoot it in the limited time I had before deploying so I asked my wife to make sure it got investigated when she had free time.

She took the car to the dealership. She actually had to make two trips; apparently there were two separate faults that would have caused the light to come in by this time. Nothing mechanical luckily, but apparently at some point while the dealership was troubleshooting the issue they had to unhook the battery. Doing this activated the anti-theft feature of my radio; it would not play music unless I typed in the anti-theft code. This code was included on a card which I was supposed to remove from the car and keep in a safe place. Needless to say, I had removed it from the car, and it is still in some safe place, nowhere to be found.

So my car radio has been silent for about a month and a half now. I finally got the time to really dig into this issue since the dealership apparently is completely unable to figure out what the unlock code should be. A little browsing on the Internet and apparently many people have had the same issue, and the unlock codes are few enough to list in one paragraph.

So I went and wrote them down and typed them in one by one. After about a dozen tries the radio started working again. Yay! I will record the code in my KWallet this time; it is the only thing which I reliably can count on being there. In case anyone else develops this issue with a Chevy Aveo, I found these posts helpful: automotive forums and Yahoo! Answers.

Posted by mpyne under Personal & Useful Tricks | 2 Comments »

I think I blogged earlier about the Dell Inspiron laptop I bought with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed. I managed to use it sparingly underway (had I known beforehand how little free time I would have I wouldn’t have bothered but that’s a different story). It was cool showing some of the other officers the programs where I’m listed in the credits though.

Anyways, one of the first things I did when I got back of course was to make sure it was fully updated. And wouldn’t you know it, they had just released Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), and would I like to upgrade it asked me. Well I’m a sucker for upgrades so I went ahead and clicked OK.

It actually went 99% smoothly. The 1% this time was that my sound no longer worked afterwards, which was unfortunate. Luckily a little searching around revealed a post on Ubuntu Forums from someone with a different laptop but an identical problem. It appears that the pre-loaded Dell driver for the modem replaces the audio driver so that when the kernel was upgraded but the driver wasn’t, sound broke. Uninstalling the Conexant HSF Modem driver (hsfmodem in Adept Package Manager) reinstalled the correct driver and things were fine. I didn’t even have to reboot.

If the Dell-added weirdness hadn’t been added this probably would have been a seamless upgrade. The differences appear strictly cosmetic at this point however. I know PulseAudio is now floating around in here somewhere but ALSA still works so that’s fine.

Posted by mpyne under Computing Troubles & Personal | 1 Comment »

So now I’m back in town again, after a fairly harrowing (for me) patrol. Apparently being chem-radcon officer is a lot of work for inspection. The final grade is apparently classified so I won’t remain on the topic for too long, but I didn’t do too bad at least, which is all I can do really.

Tons more fun was had; I think I actually slept more and saw more movies when I was qualifying than I did this run. (You are supposed to neither watch movies nor be sleeping for no reason until you are qualified ;) Once, I actually got 12 consecutive hours of sleep… and promptly got the nickname “12 down” for the rest of the run. *sigh*

Either way though if you’ve sent me email or left me a comment and I haven’t replied back, well, that’s the reason. I’m living in a different house now so I’ll probably still be busy unpacking but feel free to drop me an email if you need something now that I’m back.

I have noticed much improvement to KDE 4, which is exciting to see. Unfortunately my sound still does not work, but I haven’t troubleshooted (troubleshot?) it at all yet. I’ve also applied the usual 15 or so security upgrades I seem to usually have waiting for me when I pull back in. Now it’s time to think about what computer upgrade I will treat myself to after this last patrol.

Also, two thumbs up to Super Smash Bros. Brawl. If I can figure out how to stop running into the walls I may eventually give two thumbs up to Mario Kart Wii. TODO: Make a TODO list for the new house and stick to it.

Posted by mpyne under Personal | 3 Comments »