I'm sure other people have pointed it out, but pygame is an excellent choice to get started. Python is fun and easy (*criminally* fun and easy), and a lot of the wrapper classes will use similar names as the real-deal c/c++ libraries.
Seriously. I made a graphical mp3 juke-box player (like for drunk people at parties), and my code to keep music playing looked something like:
def keep_music_playing():
if !pygame.sound.is_busy():
song = get_song()
pygame.sound.play( song )
else:
pass
def main():
thread.start( keep_music_playing, 5000 );...*so* much is taken care of for you already. Don't trust my code, as I haven't untarred my 10gb home directory backup (and I'm not going to) in order to tell you how easy PyGame makes things.:^)
I've got a nice big flat-panel monitor with natural resolution of 1280x1024. After too damned many of those "artsy cool" sites (even business/news sites!) stuffing the font size to 6px tall, I changed konqueror settings to minimum 10pt, medium 16pt, and life is much better.
My rules:
1) NEVER NEVER NEVER hard code the font size. You are teh suck if you do this.
2) Try to include buttons or graphics with in the previous rule. It does no good that your 6px font size is not created with [small][/small], but with photoshop instead. Hard to read is still hard to read.
3) Think: With JavaScript mojo, you could make your site use different stylesheets for older people and have a "large print version". So you design your site to look alright with a large print version, and default to small print. STOP! What happens if you default to the large-print version instead? Less maintenance, less hassle, and easier to read for everybody. Plus less to write since bigger sized content needs less actual content.
One day you will be old too, and hopefully by then, your children will realize that hardcoding font sizes is dum. Use margin: 1em; instead of margin: 10px;... use font-size: xx-large; instead of font-size: 24pt; or font-size: 50px;
I'm a little bit confused as to how this is different from Debian's handling of Perl modules? Most any perl package (ie: "Date::Manip") is available as: "lib-perl", like "libdate-manip-perl".
Since they're Debian packages, you get full dependency upgrades, security updates (ie, for CGI.pm) mostly for free, although I'm guessing you're not going to get all the newest / latest / minor / crappy modules. Is that the only advantage?
apt-get install typespeed and I play a game or two. Gets my fingers going, and ready to type for the rest of the day. Nothing is more annoying than trying to type and solve the world's problems when you have fat fingers in the morning.
I've looked at a surprising number of program's source code. abcde, www-mechanize, ode physicis libraries, perl stuff, php stuff, python stuff, parts of the ogg utilities. Mostly because it doesn't have some feature that I want, or it does something that I'm interested in doing, and want to know how hard it is. It might not be much, but a cursory overview can tell you whether the author knew what they heck they were doing, and auditing even one code path (or even one function) can be helpful. Try it some time. If you're using debian: apt-get source abcde. I use it all the time as my "reference to how the hell bash programming works":^)
Already on the knoppix CD's... but it's not enabled by default. All you have to do is "su - ; apachectl restart", and you're good to go. Play fun games with mount, and make sure you understand what you're doing so you don't get haxored.
I ran into this little program called "Namazu", which is kindof a simple (web accessible) search engine, and kindof a really neat version of "grep".
Basically can run full-text searches against text that you have on your local HD and build up indexes. Reasonably fast, from what I can tell. Also has support for DOC/PDF, through some interesting method. If it doesn't, look for "catdoc", which will let you (usually) get plain text from a word.doc. Mmmmm, proprietary file-formats.
apt-get install namazu catdoc, for those who are enlightened.
Once upon a time I read this book and posted a review on kuro5hin.org. It was a good book, and it's still on my shelf (meaning I haven't seen myself able to give it away or sell it yet). Keep an eye out for it at your local Half-Price books.
try the game "typespeed" (apt-get install typespeed, don't know how else to get it)
For a while, I gave up on all video games, because I realized I wanted 1) mental challenge (and mental zone-out), and 2) increase skill means increase rewards.
Debian has it right, from my perspective. To install package foo, I use apt-get install foo. There are several gui (gnome for sure, don't know about KDE) frontends which allow you to do basically the same thing.
When running with stable, I've got an @midnight cron job which checks for updates to the system against security.debian.org and sends a mail out to our team notifying if there are any security updates available.
To fix it: apt-get upgrade foo.
To change from the MTA exim to the MTA postfix (because our "company standard" changed): apt-get install postfix. Warning, exim will be removed, is this ok? [n]
This is as simple as system administration gets. Maximum 5 minutes a week to keep a stable secure system running. Maximum 10 minutes to install damned near any package in the debian archive.
What this does not consider is "new" software. Based on how well Debian-stable works (I would absolutely recommend it for newbies), if you want the latest and greatest you have two choices:
1) Do it yourself.
2) Pay somebody or some company to do it for you.
The problem is that few linux users (non-contributors, this peterley guy included) have figured out that they have to pay with time (or money) or they have to shut the hell up and deal with it.
Learning how an application work depends 100% on consistency of how the application performs. I'm going to bring up Vim here (and windows as well).
Eg: From bash:
wget http://www.slashdot.org/
vim index.html/<INPUT<enter>df>ggPa<enter><esc>VG x... I typed this vim command from memory (except that slashdot uses uppercase input instead of lowercase input tags), without checking what would happen in vim. It grabs the first "input" tag and deletes the rest of the file. Because vim can be unambiguous and regular, I can get at what I want without touching the mouse (of course), and without having to see the results. Vim doesn't "autotab me sometimes" if my search string was over or under a certain length.
In windows:
<windows-key> + R
IEXPLORE.EXE
Ctrl-L<enter>http://slashdot.org/<enter&g t;
Alt-V, C
Ctrl-F, <input<enter>
<home>Shift - End, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-V...I can't do better than this (and I also typed this from memory, because I don't have a windows box at home;^), because there is no "regular" way to find the end of the input tag. So I end up getting more than what I wanted, and have to either look at the screen (first), or use the keyboard / mouse to navigate and delete what I want.
When the application that you are using behaves predictably in all situations, you can *allow* yourself to type faster than the computer or your brain can visually process the results. If you have to type, then wait to see what happened (because it's not consistent), then repeat that process, you'll be spending a lot of time waiting to see what happened.
On the other hand, if you know what the keypresses do, and what they do is consistent, you can really get your interaction speeds up. That's one reason why I hate the text editor in this custom windows application that we're using at work. Somtimes it tries to be "helpful" and skip over punctuation when you are using ctrl-left-arrow, or ctrl-right-arrow. This means I can't unambiguously select the word before my cursor or after my cursor (because I never know if the thing is going to skip over the word I want to select, or even jump to a line above or below the one that I'm on!)
If you are trying to improve the speed at which "experts" can use your system, then spend some quality time with vim, and make a few rules:
0: always takes you to beginning of line (never goes to previous line)
$: always takes you to end of line (never goes to next line)
x: always deletes a character (never changes your line)
[esc]: always gets you out of input mode (synonym: always puts you into command mode)...understand *why* it's good that typing "<esc>00" in vim will always put you at the beginning of the line, and never move you a line up. Understand why it's good that in windows that <windows key> + R always opens up the run dialog, and that when you press enter, the application you're running always has focus (unless you hold down control while the app starts up?? I think?). Regularity is a good thing.
I've successfully had two sound cards in my leenoox box before, hooked up to a hardware mixer so I could play with mixing MP3's. Now I've moved to ogg, and don't have the second sound card anymore (it was a $10 ISA thing), but based on my experiences, it's pretty durned easy.
Basically, just make sure you're using kernel modules for your sound card, and most of the sound card drivers support more than one card (you might need to read the documentation in the kernel source, or do some googling to figure out if any special parameters are needed).
Then, you have/dev/dsp0,/dev/dsp1, and/dev/mic0,/dev/mic1, and use your normal encoding / streaming / etc methods.
Whee. Easy peasy. The command formats from above are almost certainly wrong, but it should be enough to give you an idea. In the end, though, I would recommend the "stereo, 1 station per ear" method, because that's a lot easier / cheaper than any of the other solutions.
In a similar vein, could somebody tell me why we don't have a concept of ExecAs( "$username-nobody" ) yet? It would just seem to make sense that you would want to give regular users the ability to Exec a program (sudo) as their very own non-entity (for me, that'd be "rames-nobody"). It would certainly make interacting with the internet / outlook / evolution style apps a lot more safe.
With linux, and using Debian, I'm at the point where I can say "Screw everything except what's in/etc and/home". But my/home directory is vitally important, and the *last* thing I would want a worm / virus to take out. The first time a buffer overflow in the Macromedia flash plugin takes out 50% of linux user's home directories is the only time people will pay attention to this problem (unfortunately)!
It wasn't some guy in his garage, and the data was presented in graph form (not chart). You can assume that for each data point, the testing methodology was the same, and that the trend-line results were the most important pieces. Besides, they admit up front that they're only trying to improve kernel performance, not guarantee that Apache version $foo.0 can server 2000 hits per second.
I actually like a left-handed trackball, especially when I'm using and O.S. that has focus-follows-mouse (trackballs don't slide around on you).
Plus, when I mouse with my right hand playing too much Quake or Urban Terror or Tribes2, my right hand gets all messed up. This way, I can't play FPS with a left-handed trackball, and thus forces me to be more productive.:^)
I was just trying to do this myself (actually, originally wanted to get a "rebroadcaster" going for a radio-station -> icecast connection so I could listen to a radio station at work w/o having a radio at work. Wow, that's much geekier than a walkman.:^)
Anyway, try this. It ends up with about a 10s delay for me to encode / re-encode.
## command to oggenc line-in and play it out again. rec --type=.wav -o - | oggenc - -q 5 -o - | ogg123 -
Try removing the oggenc line, and do something like the following:
rec --type=.wav -o delayme.wav & ; sleep 6 ; play delayme.wav...and don't forget about the "tee" command, which will allow you to "duplicate" an output stream (ie: record one to disk, for archiving, but realtime play the other one).
I never realized how much fun this kind of stuff is... and consider: plug in a radio overnight and OGG the station to disk. (or do it all with a Hauppauge WinTV/Radio card and you can cron up specific radio shows as you want). With OGG, I'm getting ~25 mb / hour on quality 5 (approximately 64 kbps, which is almost exactly the quality I can get from radio broadcasts). Burn each show to CD and bring it in to work, and skip through all those annoying "Laser eye surgery" commercials, but still listen to the music. You can probably get all this automated w/o much trouble at all, which is the coolest thing about linux for me. Sometimes it's tough to remember just how much power and control you can have by putting simple, well-designed commands together.
New logical stream (#1, serial: 68036320): type vorbis Vorbis headers parsed for stream 1, information follows... Version: 0 Vendor: Xiph.Org libVorbis I 20020717 (1.0) Channels: 1 Rate: 22000
Nominal bitrate: 50.000000 kb/s Upper bitrate not set Lower bitrate not set Warning: EOS not set on stream 1 Vorbis stream 1:
Total data length: 183817997 bytes
Playback length: 435m:34s
Average bitrate: 56.267717 kbps
Actually, you *can* use pipes, very similarly to what's done on Linux... it's just that not as many DOS programs support being used as a pipe.
Next time, try ":!find str" when you already have a selection. "!" executes, and because you have a selection, it will be filtered through the "find" command, for the string "str". Very useful for trimming down 50mb log files when you don't have Grep.
Also, buy it from TuxGames... they report all sales to the manufacturers as "Linux Sales" so that's one less thing to worry about. Actually, I've been having pretty good luck with a few titles under WineX (found some cheap games and they work really well under WineX). It might be nice if TuxGames stocked some of the older game titles which are 4 or 5 supported by WineX (ie: Baldurs Gate 1, Black & White, etc) and then reported those sales as Linux sales. (are you listening Michael?)
Heresy, heresy! I hear the cry. But these older games are never going to be native ported to Linux. I'd be willing to pay $30 instead of $20 to buy them from a Linux store (this means $$ for TuxGames) where I knew that the game had a good chance of working (this means no stress for me) and that the manufacturer would know that people are using Linux to play their games (meaning that they'll consider it in the future).
Only after the games have dropped in price to ~$20 in regular retail channels, though. Transgaming is making a big deal about how WineX supports WarCraft III really well out of the box. That *is* exciting, but I still have hope (actually, I don't) that Blizzard will port it to Linux. When WarCraft III is on the $19.99 shelf, I have no hope that it'll ever be ported to Linux, so at that point, I'd be willing to buy it from TuxGames.
I don't remember who said it, but this is a case where we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Apple can't even get OGG support into their iTunes dealie. Why would they risk change with their phobic user-base, with an untried format that ~50% of the internet can't use?
Don't get me wrong, I have all *my* stuff OGGed at high quality but not everyone understands what to do with an OGG file. But I do. I always take the time to explain that OGG is better than MP3 is better than WMA, and then the reasons (Libre is better than Fees, Fees is better than DRM). Also be sure to show people the vorbis comparison page (google for it, I don't feel like whoring for karma now;^). It's an effective demonstration, and I at least got one of my roommates to stop encoding WMA's at 64kbs trash, and bump up to 128kb WMA's. Since OGG Vorbis whipped WMA's tail even at 48kbps, he suddenly felt the need to update.:^)
--Robert
Re:That *little something* still missing
on
New DOOM III Shots
·
· Score: 2
Doom3 looks like it has a full physics/sound effects engine. I was lucky enough to see the ingame booth-demo at Quake Con this year. First of all, Doom3 really will kick it up a notch as far as engines go. Second of all, during several points in the *entirely rendered on the fly* demo, they had swinging, flashing, multicolored, multi-angle lights (complete with self-shadowing bump-mapped, reflected and distorted into the glass that you're looking into enemy model/polygons). But also, remember those big burly monsters with the chainsaws in Quake1? The demo player shot one with a big shotgun while he was at the top of the stairs, and the guy's head knocked on the floor, rolled over a little bit, neck deformed, legs moved, etc. as he slid and *rolled* (with realistic looking torsion!) down the stairs. Empty barrels sound empty and bounce, ding, and dong realistically as they also fall down stairs. It'll be wild, and is definitely worth checking out. (hardware for the demo was 2.2ghz pentium, and the ATI 9700 (unreleased?) video card. Looked niice, and once again putting ID at the forefront of Why I Need to Upgrade my Computer(tm).
Seriously... This is about the only *useful* thing that I can see using processor power for. I'd much rather make a weekly run-through with this type of software rather than having transparent menus or chirpy paperclips saying "you might have leaked memory, would you like to learn how to write a memo?"
Developers workstations are *supposed* to be bigger better faster more than those of the plebes, and don't you forget it!:^)
Check out RoboDJ, made by just one of the really cool, really clueful people that hang out on Kuro5hin.org. RoboDJ replaces the default WinAmp randomness with a weighted random selector that promises to be better than the default.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure other people have pointed it out, but pygame is an excellent choice to get started. Python is fun and easy (*criminally* fun and easy), and a lot of the wrapper classes will use similar names as the real-deal c/c++ libraries.
...*so* much is taken care of for you already. Don't trust my code, as I haven't untarred my 10gb home directory backup (and I'm not going to) in order to tell you how easy PyGame makes things. :^)
Seriously. I made a graphical mp3 juke-box player (like for drunk people at parties), and my code to keep music playing looked something like:
def keep_music_playing():
if !pygame.sound.is_busy():
song = get_song()
pygame.sound.play( song )
else:
pass
def main():
thread.start( keep_music_playing, 5000 );
--Robert
apt-get install typespeed. Hooah. :^)
--Robert
I've got a nice big flat-panel monitor with natural resolution of 1280x1024. After too damned many of those "artsy cool" sites (even business/news sites!) stuffing the font size to 6px tall, I changed konqueror settings to minimum 10pt, medium 16pt, and life is much better.
... use font-size: xx-large; instead of font-size: 24pt; or font-size: 50px;
My rules:
1) NEVER NEVER NEVER hard code the font size. You are teh suck if you do this.
2) Try to include buttons or graphics with in the previous rule. It does no good that your 6px font size is not created with [small][/small], but with photoshop instead. Hard to read is still hard to read.
3) Think: With JavaScript mojo, you could make your site use different stylesheets for older people and have a "large print version". So you design your site to look alright with a large print version, and default to small print. STOP! What happens if you default to the large-print version instead? Less maintenance, less hassle, and easier to read for everybody. Plus less to write since bigger sized content needs less actual content.
One day you will be old too, and hopefully by then, your children will realize that hardcoding font sizes is dum. Use margin: 1em; instead of margin: 10px;
--Robert
Hi. Our uni (UT-Dallas) put this together. Hi B/M. :^)
Demo site:
http://olbe.studentgov.com/
Project page:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bookex/
Have fun. These seem to be reasonably successful implementations.
--Robert
I'm a little bit confused as to how this is different from Debian's handling of Perl modules? Most any perl package (ie: "Date::Manip") is available as: "lib-perl", like "libdate-manip-perl".
Since they're Debian packages, you get full dependency upgrades, security updates (ie, for CGI.pm) mostly for free, although I'm guessing you're not going to get all the newest / latest / minor / crappy modules. Is that the only advantage?
--Robert
apt-get install typespeed and I play a game or two. Gets my fingers going, and ready to type for the rest of the day. Nothing is more annoying than trying to type and solve the world's problems when you have fat fingers in the morning.
--Robert
I've looked at a surprising number of program's source code. abcde, www-mechanize, ode physicis libraries, perl stuff, php stuff, python stuff, parts of the ogg utilities. Mostly because it doesn't have some feature that I want, or it does something that I'm interested in doing, and want to know how hard it is. It might not be much, but a cursory overview can tell you whether the author knew what they heck they were doing, and auditing even one code path (or even one function) can be helpful. Try it some time. If you're using debian: apt-get source abcde. I use it all the time as my "reference to how the hell bash programming works" :^)
--Robert
Already on the knoppix CD's... but it's not enabled by default. All you have to do is "su - ; apachectl restart", and you're good to go. Play fun games with mount, and make sure you understand what you're doing so you don't get haxored.
--Robert
I ran into this little program called "Namazu", which is kindof a simple (web accessible) search engine, and kindof a really neat version of "grep".
.doc. Mmmmm, proprietary file-formats.
Basically can run full-text searches against text that you have on your local HD and build up indexes. Reasonably fast, from what I can tell. Also has support for DOC/PDF, through some interesting method. If it doesn't, look for "catdoc", which will let you (usually) get plain text from a word
apt-get install namazu catdoc, for those who are enlightened.
--Robert
Hi.
Once upon a time I read this book and posted a review on kuro5hin.org. It was a good book, and it's still on my shelf (meaning I haven't seen myself able to give it away or sell it yet). Keep an eye out for it at your local Half-Price books.
--Robert
try the game "typespeed" (apt-get install typespeed, don't know how else to get it)
For a while, I gave up on all video games, because I realized I wanted 1) mental challenge (and mental zone-out), and 2) increase skill means increase rewards.
Cheeze-ball typing game fits the bill perfectly.
--Robert
Debian has it right, from my perspective. To install package foo, I use apt-get install foo. There are several gui (gnome for sure, don't know about KDE) frontends which allow you to do basically the same thing.
When running with stable, I've got an @midnight cron job which checks for updates to the system against security.debian.org and sends a mail out to our team notifying if there are any security updates available.
To fix it: apt-get upgrade foo.
To change from the MTA exim to the MTA postfix (because our "company standard" changed): apt-get install postfix. Warning, exim will be removed, is this ok? [n]
This is as simple as system administration gets. Maximum 5 minutes a week to keep a stable secure system running. Maximum 10 minutes to install damned near any package in the debian archive.
What this does not consider is "new" software. Based on how well Debian-stable works (I would absolutely recommend it for newbies), if you want the latest and greatest you have two choices:
1) Do it yourself.
2) Pay somebody or some company to do it for you.
The problem is that few linux users (non-contributors, this peterley guy included) have figured out that they have to pay with time (or money) or they have to shut the hell up and deal with it.
--Robert
NEVER AUTO-TAB ME if you don't do it everywhere!
/<INPUT<enter>df>ggPa<enter><esc>VG x ... I typed this vim command from memory (except that slashdot uses uppercase input instead of lowercase input tags), without checking what would happen in vim. It grabs the first "input" tag and deletes the rest of the file. Because vim can be unambiguous and regular, I can get at what I want without touching the mouse (of course), and without having to see the results. Vim doesn't "autotab me sometimes" if my search string was over or under a certain length.
...I can't do better than this (and I also typed this from memory, because I don't have a windows box at home ;^), because there is no "regular" way to find the end of the input tag. So I end up getting more than what I wanted, and have to either look at the screen (first), or use the keyboard / mouse to navigate and delete what I want.
...understand *why* it's good that typing "<esc>00" in vim will always put you at the beginning of the line, and never move you a line up. Understand why it's good that in windows that <windows key> + R always opens up the run dialog, and that when you press enter, the application you're running always has focus (unless you hold down control while the app starts up?? I think?). Regularity is a good thing.
Learning how an application work depends 100% on consistency of how the application performs. I'm going to bring up Vim here (and windows as well).
Eg: From bash:
wget http://www.slashdot.org/
vim index.html
In windows:
<windows-key> + R
IEXPLORE.EXE
Ctrl-L<enter>http://slashdot.org/<enter&g t;
Alt-V, C
Ctrl-F, <input<enter>
<home>Shift - End, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-V
When the application that you are using behaves predictably in all situations, you can *allow* yourself to type faster than the computer or your brain can visually process the results. If you have to type, then wait to see what happened (because it's not consistent), then repeat that process, you'll be spending a lot of time waiting to see what happened.
On the other hand, if you know what the keypresses do, and what they do is consistent, you can really get your interaction speeds up. That's one reason why I hate the text editor in this custom windows application that we're using at work. Somtimes it tries to be "helpful" and skip over punctuation when you are using ctrl-left-arrow, or ctrl-right-arrow. This means I can't unambiguously select the word before my cursor or after my cursor (because I never know if the thing is going to skip over the word I want to select, or even jump to a line above or below the one that I'm on!)
If you are trying to improve the speed at which "experts" can use your system, then spend some quality time with vim, and make a few rules:
0: always takes you to beginning of line (never goes to previous line)
$: always takes you to end of line (never goes to next line)
x: always deletes a character (never changes your line)
[esc]: always gets you out of input mode (synonym: always puts you into command mode)
--Robert
Basically, just make sure you're using kernel modules for your sound card, and most of the sound card drivers support more than one card (you might need to read the documentation in the kernel source, or do some googling to figure out if any special parameters are needed).
Then, you have
eg:Whee. Easy peasy. The command formats from above are almost certainly wrong, but it should be enough to give you an idea. In the end, though, I would recommend the "stereo, 1 station per ear" method, because that's a lot easier / cheaper than any of the other solutions.
--Robert
In a similar vein, could somebody tell me why we don't have a concept of ExecAs( "$username-nobody" ) yet? It would just seem to make sense that you would want to give regular users the ability to Exec a program (sudo) as their very own non-entity (for me, that'd be "rames-nobody"). It would certainly make interacting with the internet / outlook / evolution style apps a lot more safe.
/etc and /home". But my /home directory is vitally important, and the *last* thing I would want a worm / virus to take out. The first time a buffer overflow in the Macromedia flash plugin takes out 50% of linux user's home directories is the only time people will pay attention to this problem (unfortunately)!
With linux, and using Debian, I'm at the point where I can say "Screw everything except what's in
--Robert
It wasn't some guy in his garage, and the data was presented in graph form (not chart). You can assume that for each data point, the testing methodology was the same, and that the trend-line results were the most important pieces. Besides, they admit up front that they're only trying to improve kernel performance, not guarantee that Apache version $foo.0 can server 2000 hits per second.
--Robert
I actually like a left-handed trackball, especially when I'm using and O.S. that has focus-follows-mouse (trackballs don't slide around on you).
:^)
Plus, when I mouse with my right hand playing too much Quake or Urban Terror or Tribes2, my right hand gets all messed up. This way, I can't play FPS with a left-handed trackball, and thus forces me to be more productive.
--Robert
...on a 60gb IDE hard drive (just a few months ago). "Cannot install Windows NT, Hard Drive too big!"
No joke. And I have a sneaking suspicion that windows 95 wouldn't install because I had 512 mb of ram, and it didn't know what to do with it.
--Robert
I was just trying to do this myself (actually, originally wanted to get a "rebroadcaster" going for a radio-station -> icecast connection so I could listen to a radio station at work w/o having a radio at work. Wow, that's much geekier than a walkman. :^)
...and don't forget about the "tee" command, which will allow you to "duplicate" an output stream (ie: record one to disk, for archiving, but realtime play the other one).
Anyway, try this. It ends up with about a 10s delay for me to encode / re-encode.
## command to oggenc line-in and play it out again.
rec --type=.wav -o - | oggenc - -q 5 -o - | ogg123 -
Try removing the oggenc line, and do something like the following:
rec --type=.wav -o delayme.wav & ; sleep 6 ; play delayme.wav
I never realized how much fun this kind of stuff is... and consider: plug in a radio overnight and OGG the station to disk. (or do it all with a Hauppauge WinTV/Radio card and you can cron up specific radio shows as you want). With OGG, I'm getting ~25 mb / hour on quality 5 (approximately 64 kbps, which is almost exactly the quality I can get from radio broadcasts). Burn each show to CD and bring it in to work, and skip through all those annoying "Laser eye surgery" commercials, but still listen to the music. You can probably get all this automated w/o much trouble at all, which is the coolest thing about linux for me. Sometimes it's tough to remember just how much power and control you can have by putting simple, well-designed commands together.
rames@spike:/usr/local/music/106.7$ ogginfo Oct18.ogg
Processing file "Oct18.ogg"...
New logical stream (#1, serial: 68036320): type vorbis
Vorbis headers parsed for stream 1, information follows...
Version: 0
Vendor: Xiph.Org libVorbis I 20020717 (1.0)
Channels: 1
Rate: 22000
Nominal bitrate: 50.000000 kb/s
Upper bitrate not set
Lower bitrate not set
Warning: EOS not set on stream 1
Vorbis stream 1:
Total data length: 183817997 bytes
Playback length: 435m:34s
Average bitrate: 56.267717 kbps
--Robert
Actually, you *can* use pipes, very similarly to what's done on Linux ... it's just that not as many DOS programs support being used as a pipe.
Next time, try ":!find str" when you already have a selection. "!" executes, and because you have a selection, it will be filtered through the "find" command, for the string "str". Very useful for trimming down 50mb log files when you don't have Grep.
--Robert
Also, buy it from TuxGames ... they report all sales to the manufacturers as "Linux Sales" so that's one less thing to worry about. Actually, I've been having pretty good luck with a few titles under WineX (found some cheap games and they work really well under WineX). It might be nice if TuxGames stocked some of the older game titles which are 4 or 5 supported by WineX (ie: Baldurs Gate 1, Black & White, etc) and then reported those sales as Linux sales. (are you listening Michael?)
Heresy, heresy! I hear the cry. But these older games are never going to be native ported to Linux. I'd be willing to pay $30 instead of $20 to buy them from a Linux store (this means $$ for TuxGames) where I knew that the game had a good chance of working (this means no stress for me) and that the manufacturer would know that people are using Linux to play their games (meaning that they'll consider it in the future).
Only after the games have dropped in price to ~$20 in regular retail channels, though. Transgaming is making a big deal about how WineX supports WarCraft III really well out of the box. That *is* exciting, but I still have hope (actually, I don't) that Blizzard will port it to Linux. When WarCraft III is on the $19.99 shelf, I have no hope that it'll ever be ported to Linux, so at that point, I'd be willing to buy it from TuxGames.
I don't remember who said it, but this is a case where we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
--Robert
Apple can't even get OGG support into their iTunes dealie. Why would they risk change with their phobic user-base, with an untried format that ~50% of the internet can't use?
;^). It's an effective demonstration, and I at least got one of my roommates to stop encoding WMA's at 64kbs trash, and bump up to 128kb WMA's. Since OGG Vorbis whipped WMA's tail even at 48kbps, he suddenly felt the need to update. :^)
Don't get me wrong, I have all *my* stuff OGGed at high quality but not everyone understands what to do with an OGG file. But I do. I always take the time to explain that OGG is better than MP3 is better than WMA, and then the reasons (Libre is better than Fees, Fees is better than DRM). Also be sure to show people the vorbis comparison page (google for it, I don't feel like whoring for karma now
--Robert
Doom3 looks like it has a full physics/sound effects engine. I was lucky enough to see the ingame booth-demo at Quake Con this year. First of all, Doom3 really will kick it up a notch as far as engines go. Second of all, during several points in the *entirely rendered on the fly* demo, they had swinging, flashing, multicolored, multi-angle lights (complete with self-shadowing bump-mapped, reflected and distorted into the glass that you're looking into enemy model/polygons). But also, remember those big burly monsters with the chainsaws in Quake1? The demo player shot one with a big shotgun while he was at the top of the stairs, and the guy's head knocked on the floor, rolled over a little bit, neck deformed, legs moved, etc. as he slid and *rolled* (with realistic looking torsion!) down the stairs. Empty barrels sound empty and bounce, ding, and dong realistically as they also fall down stairs. It'll be wild, and is definitely worth checking out. (hardware for the demo was 2.2ghz pentium, and the ATI 9700 (unreleased?) video card. Looked niice, and once again putting ID at the forefront of Why I Need to Upgrade my Computer(tm).
--Robert
Seriously... This is about the only *useful* thing that I can see using processor power for. I'd much rather make a weekly run-through with this type of software rather than having transparent menus or chirpy paperclips saying "you might have leaked memory, would you like to learn how to write a memo?"
:^)
Developers workstations are *supposed* to be bigger better faster more than those of the plebes, and don't you forget it!
--Robert
Check out RoboDJ, made by just one of the really cool, really clueful people that hang out on Kuro5hin.org. RoboDJ replaces the default WinAmp randomness with a weighted random selector that promises to be better than the default.
--Robert