FYI – This site is undergoing some construction. I have been working on a new theme/design for this website as well as building in some new content and features.
The design may intermittently seem incomplete and certain content may appear broken until I get everything ironed out.
Stay tuned…
A while back I wrote a post about managing music on Linux.
Since then I have bounced back and forth between using Rhythmbox and the Listen music player. In preparing music and playlists for our upcoming wedding (no way in hell I was going to rent a crappy DJ) I have been putting these players through their paces. I have been listening to song snippets, creating large playlists, smart playlists, transferring files etc.
With this work I have brought both Rhythmbox and Listen music players to their knees, causing crashes left and right. Frankly they have both pissed me off to the point of no return. Rhythmbox crashed and somehow lost/wiped all my playlists which I spent hours creating.
Rhythmbox (0.12.3), besides being very boring, works very well except for one thing: if you start double-clicking quickly from song to song, it will momentarily hang for 30 seconds at a time. Sometimes it comes back and works for a bit, other times it comes back and will no longer play at all (I have to restart it). This one bug, which I found to be filed in launchpad months ago (still has no fix) kills this app for me, unusable in my mind.
The Listen player is my favorite (v0.6+). I’ve come to love its “dynamic” mode and the queue centric behavior, unique layout. However, as much as I really really want to love this player, it crashes all the time.
What about Amarok? Screw it, I’ve tried, just do not like its layout, never figured out how to get devices to work right. If I can’t get something working quickly I dump it.
Bashee.. no.
So… I have been avoiding, but recently decided to download and try Songbird. It is a cross-platform music app, built on Mozilla technology, open source blah blah.
Long story short, it does what I want. Actually, I love the mash-up pane for instant artist info. I got it running quickly, added a few add-ons so I have a now-playing queue playlist similar in function to the Listen player, yet can browse my music similar to iTunes and Rhythmbox. Best of both worlds. I tend to prefer simple “lightweight” apps, and Songbird is “heavyweight” in my mind because of the integrated web browsing that I don’t see myself using. Yet, so far… its solid. Me likey. At least I can make some progress now…
I forgot to post up this one. From a MBM ride earlier in July on the Ginny Trail with Ryan and Dave:
The last couple times we attempted this trail we started late forcing us to descend early due to lack of daylight. We were again pushing it this time for daylight, yet crested the top just in time to catch the sunset.
BTW, other MBM postings are over at our still in progress project site: cotw.
Our garden has not only made a come-back from hail damage this season, but has started to produce! Here’s what we picked just this morning:
We have been enjoying mini-strawberries, banana peppers, zucchini, squash, cucumber, and various herbs. Tomatoes and tomatillos are on their way. Don’t think the broccoli survived. The watermelon plant is growing, but I don’t see any watermelon yet.
Woot!
I recently updated my system at work to Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty. It provides a more native environment for our development tools. With Hardy, I had to back port and find hacks for things to meet requirements.
Anyway, now happily running 9.04 32-bit, installed VMWare Server 1.0.9 to run a Windows XP Pro client on my Ubuntu host. I found that something in the newer X server is mucking up keyboard mappings to VMWare such that the arrow keys, page up/down, home, delete etc. and number keys do weird things like opening menus and programs.
After some time, I found that I could at least workaround the problem by hard coding broken keymaps like so:
In ~/.vmware/config (create it if it doesn’t exist), put the following:
xkeymap.keycode.108 = 0×138 # Alt_R
xkeymap.keycode.106 = 0×135 # KP_Divide
xkeymap.keycode.104 = 0×11c # KP_Enter
xkeymap.keycode.111 = 0×148 # Up
xkeymap.keycode.116 = 0×150 # Down
xkeymap.keycode.113 = 0×14b # Left
xkeymap.keycode.114 = 0×14d # Right
xkeymap.keycode.105 = 0×11d # Control_R
xkeymap.keycode.118 = 0×152 # Insert
xkeymap.keycode.119 = 0×153 # Delete
xkeymap.keycode.110 = 0×147 # Home
xkeymap.keycode.115 = 0×14f # End
xkeymap.keycode.112 = 0×149 # Prior
xkeymap.keycode.117 = 0×151 # Next
xkeymap.keycode.78 = 0×46 # Scroll_Lock
xkeymap.keycode.127 = 0×100 # Pause
xkeymap.keycode.133 = 0×15b # Meta_L
xkeymap.keycode.134 = 0×15c # Meta_R
xkeymap.keycode.135 = 0×15d # Menu
yay google.
Two summers ago JJ and I went for a mountain bike ride up the Old Flowers jeep road. The highlight of this ride was that on the way down we were flying along when all of a sudden J’s tire rear blew out with a vengeance. Upon inspection we found a full utility razor blade lodged in his rear tire. Somehow a razor blade was on the trail, probably falling off some jeep or truck, and J happened to ride over it just so that it sliced the tire wide open.
Fortunately at the time we were close to the bottom, made a crude repair with a new tube and my handy athletic tape to patch the sidewall… good enough to get back to the car.
We laughed about the event saying “Man, that’ll never happen again!” What are the odds of picking up a razor blade!?!
Yesterday was bike to work day in Fort Collins. Yes, I biked to work…. took the road bike for speed (I’m always late). On my way home, I was heading west on Drake between Timberline and Lemay. I was heads down and cruising at a good ~20mph pace. I caught the glimpse of two razor blades for a split second before POW, CLANK, Pah-CHING … and quickly came to a stop. A razor blade lodged in my back tire, hit the rear brake caliper and shot out the sided. My sidewall was slashed wide open and it nicked the tube. Fortunately I was able to patch the tube, had CO2 with me, and used the ‘ol dollar bill trick to patch the sidewall. It was good enough to get home.
The amount of broken glass and goat-heads are bad enough in the Fort, now watch out for razor blades!
Second big MBM session of ‘09. This was also a new one to me and Ry. J used to ride this years ago but hasn’t checked it out in forever… also close to his new house down in Littleton.
We rode the dirt road 7-8 miles or so to where we could pick up the Colorado Trail. Along the way, we goofed around a bit:
And saw this:
The Colorado Trail was sweet riding. In fact, I’ve almost covered the majority of the Colorado Trail now and its always good stuff. Here we are stopping for a quick breather:
I need to get a camera with higher ISO speeds for action shots, but was playing with taking shots while riding on the dirt road back to the car. Here’s one of the MTBNINJA in fighting form:
Over-the-shoulder shot of J:
Click through any of the photos to go to our flickr page. Cheers.
