Sara and I were up in the Hunter Valley for the past couple of days and had a really good time. I do, however, think we got a little carried away as this is what we brought back.
Filed under: m.o
Its been over 3 years riding my trusty 2004 Honda CBR 600 F4i and the time finally came to upgrade. As a slightly early Christmas present to myself, I today just picked up my brand new 2007 Honda CBR1000RR Fireblade. I took a dodgy blurry pic of it after I got home, but the battery went flat in the Digital SLR and I was too lazy to recharge it and go take another photo ;P
It was a pity that the weather was so crap today or I would have been out all day riding it. I’m really *really* happy with it so far. So I think if the weather is good tomorrow I’ll be putting it through its paces 
Filed under: m.o
It came up in a topic of conversation between a couple of friends and the ‘better half’ over the weekend, reguarding how long I’ve been playing World of Warcraft. I did join the game a little later than others *cough* ..
Account Created:
June 18, 2006 1:23 AM PDT
So there ya go..
Another bit of trivia; WoW will be 3 years old next week, it was released on 23/11/04 
Filed under: World Of Warcraft, m.o
I bought an Apple Macbook Pro a little while ago! Now this is very significant coming from someone who has been a linux zealot for such a long time! Plain and simply though, I got tired of the instability of Transgaming’s Cedega product, which really is a modified version of wine to run your popular windows games on linux.
I have been using cedega for quite some time, and up until recently have been very *very* happy with it. As a heavy World of Warcraft user, I need to periodically use a voice communication software like Ventrillo or Teamspeak. While Teamspeak does work under linux, it is a complete pain in the ass to use while World of Warcraft under Cedega is running. Ventrillo is almost fsck’ing useless , no wait.. it IS fsck’ing useless.. *sigh*
I also started experiencing random crashes , more and more often, when playing WoW under Cedega and I could only attribute this to using it under Cedega so I finally got the shits with it to a point where I went out and bought a new 17″ Macbook Pro, one of the new ones with a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU’s in it. I must say, its a freakin impressive looking machine. While it has taken a while to get used to the interface after using Fluxbox for so long, it really is quite a nice interface. There are still things that really annoy me but thats what I get for leaving a perfect (!) linux desktop (yes, if only games manufacturers would make them for linux as well as windows/mac…
So the difference in gaming persormance I bet you are asking.. well.. at first it was pretty shit.. I was really *really* disappointed considering I had spent so much on a new laptop to replace my main desktop for the sole purpose of gaming. It turns out that there was a minor World of Warcraft tweak which completely turned those performance issues around. I now get more than 100ms network latency and around 30-50 frames per second improvement over running on linux. The Macbook pro has 2 x fans which dynamically change their speeds based on how hot the CPU or GPU are and when I am in certain graphically intense locations like Netherstorm, the fans kick in to their higher speeds and its rather audiable, but when I’m in these areas I tend to have the sound/music up and don’t really notice it too much at all. When I’m not gaming, the laptop is so quiet I really can’t hear a thing at all.
I also had to pick up another new pair of Sennheiser headphones that used USB as the mac requires an amplified microphone which most microphones aren’t. So When I tried plugging in my previous sennheisers with the separate jacks it wouldn’t use the mic, and I was forced to use the one built into the laptop. While this laptop mic is quite good it caused problems when i was sitting back away from the laptop or leaning over looking at another screen/pc.
After a great deal of issues trying to get a Sennheiser PC165 from any Australian store, I ended up getting a brand new pair of Sennheiser PC166’s from amazon.com which arrived within 3 working days and saved me over $100 from buying it locally which I also was rather impressed with. The PC166’s also perform really really well and I would have to say are my current favourite set.
Filed under: m.o
We moved house a few weeks ago into an almost new town house from an older town house of around 1 MILLION years old.. (ok, I exaggerate.. it was only maybe 20 years old) so we are pretty happy. The cats are happy too ;P Not unlike a lot of other people, the owners of our previous place decided it was the right time to sell and the new owners wanted to move in. Luckily enough we knew this was coming for maybe a year before it happened so it was no great surprise.
The move itself was rather uneventful which was great. Took a few days off work to do the move which was really handy. The only problem we really had was pertaining to our ADSL relocation. This actually turned out to be good in a way as it gave me almost a week and a half with no internet access and a good excuse not to play World of Warcraft. This allowed me to catch up on downloaded TV episodes. It was quite amusing that even though I had a lot of downloaded TV episodes that I hadn’t gotten around to watching for months yet I was still ahead of the Australian Free to Air broadcasts of the same shows.. Australian TV is really quite pathetic 
… I did write a whole lot of shit about Internode and my decision to change ISP’s but I deleted it in favour of a condensed version instead. The reasons essentially came down to the following:
- Internode screwed up my relocation request causing over a week long outage
- Was connected for 2 days then suffered an 8 hour outage, on a day that I was intending to work from home *arugh*.
- Automated Internode relocation process whereby they create an alternate account (username_new) and do some kind of a switch over when told by telstra that the new location had been provisioned didn’t exactly work in the automated fashion as it was intended.. yet another Internode fuckup :\
- 3 phone calls to Internode’s support and/or accounts teams whereby the calls averaged 50 minutes of on hold music before speaking to a human.
- One of the above phone call instances involved a support person verbally promising to return my call within 1 hour but this did not happen, I had to call back and *wait* again..
- 2 of the above mentioned phonecalls started outside of their indicated peak periods so I’d hate to see the wait during their peak periods.
- Internode released new but significantly more expensive plans
- I refuse to pay more than $100 a month for internet (I’ve gone by this personal rule ever since the dial up days)
- Internode cannot provide me with ADSL2 yet other ISP’s (iinet in particular) can.
Furthermore when I tried to cancel my service there were the following issues:
- Cancellation could only be done online.
- Online account cancellation was again poorly worded where ‘not required’ fields _were_ actually required to be filled. In this instance I left contact mobile number as I *obviously* would no longer have internet access to get my mail. That and I wanted to ensure that if they contacted me it was by voice. This caused the form to fail and I had to resubmit with the additional contact details.
- After submitting the form, a week passes by and I did not receive as much as a verbal or email confirmation that my cancellation was recieved.
- Followup email to their accounts department yielded no response.
- Followup phonecall again was on hold for 30 mins (they do have a callback service which in this instance I used but didn’t get a call back for quite some time afterwards)
- The return phonecall advised that someone had just then actioned my request and sure enough 10 minutes later I could no longer gain access to my home machines remotely.
*peers up* even in point form the above is still a long list of irks that I had with them..
So.. now I wait patiently for Telstra to remove the codes from my line which will enable me to get ADSL2+ from iinet. Past experience from other guys at work indicate that this will only take a couple of days so we’ll wait and see..
Filed under: m.o
Today is day 3 of what was supposed to be a nice relaxing 4 days off.. The first day and a bit was great, then it took a turn for the worse…
To begin, the Thursday was really quite good; Sara and I went to see John Mayer at the Sydney Entertainment Center on Thursday night. As Sara was a member of some wacky Fan Club she left early in the day to go to a sound check, to do secret squirrel things those wacky fan club weirdo’s do.. Anyway, I met up with her afterwards, and checked into the Novotel Darling Harbour and had dinner at their restaurant. The food was probably the best I had tasted in a long while and their service was impeccable, I was really quite impressed. Later we wandered down to the Entertainment Center and sat in our FRONT ROW seats! hehe, I’ve never been in a front row, at least not since I was a teenager crowd surfing in a mosh pit of some punk band.. They were Section B, Row 1, seats 1 & 2 which meant they were slightly offset from center, they were pretty remarkable seats. Sara’s hard work at getting into work nice and early, refreshing the Ticketek web page like a maniac the minutes leading up to the official time the fan club tickets went on sale obviously paid off ;P The concert was pretty good , I quite enjoyed it. Sara managed to get some decent photo’s and she is normally incapable of taking non-blurry photos, so a job well done on her part
After our stay overnight, we decided to wander off home of which I had now started mentally preparing myself to have to deal with Sara’s Windows XP machine which had a failing 80Gb disk drive. I had earlier in the week ordered a replacment 500Gb SATA drive to replace it with and it merely was supposed to be an install of WinXp on the new disk, copy what data I could over to the new disk and restore anything else from backup tape.. This however turned into an all night event! I met problem after fucking problem with the pathetic thing they call Windows XP. Ok, I know its an ageing Operating System, but surely they can have *some* support for sata controllers?! The worst part about it is that you are required to use a fucking floppy disk to do the whole F6 at installer boot type deal, point it to the floppy with the sata drivers deal .. but seriously, who the fuck uses floppy drives these days?! It turned out that all bar ONE of my floppy disks were dead and the only functional floppy drive was in my pc, which I can’t stand powering down because its Linux and doesn’t have to! The only reason it even had a floppy drive was because I no longer have the floppy blank face place to my case anymore, its just a gap filler! So anyway.. Off I go and shut down my box, switch the hardware over so I can get an OS on Sara’s new disk but no, the pathetic windows install cd would refuse to complete its initial startup unless a Parallel ATA disk drive was present on one of the IDE controllers! **ARRRUUGGHHHH!!!**
By the time I had figured out the crap deal with the ide, sata, boot sequence bullshit it had gotten late, and I had really wanted to spend a good part of my 4 days off playing World of Warcraft and levelling up my characters but as it would turn out, its day 3 of my 4 days off and I haven’t even logged in.. *sighs*
So anyway, there comes today when I finally get the sata drivers into the winxp installer , it boots and i can see an OS.. problem solved yeah? No.. I need to install drivers for wireless card or the network card to get online and get patches etc but guess what? All the USB ports will not function once the OS loads until it gets more drivers. The BIOS sees the usb keyboard, Linux sees the USB keyboard, but then the freshly installed WinXP OS starts, it can’t see shit! Given that I’m a 100% Linux person for work and at home, I’m completely shocked that Operating Systems out there *still* are unable to get things right! It has been so long since I have come across a system that has hardware that has no kernel support (aside from dodgy assed IBM server gear, but lets not go there). Sure enough I pull out an old Knoppix CD and am able to boot, get on the network, mount NTFS filesystems, rsync Sara’s data from the failing disk to the new one without *any* problem, but expect windows to do that? NoooooOooo… The last straw, as you are probably wondering from the title of this post, was all of the above combined with the inability this morning for windows to actually get to its login screen.. This was it, I had enough, I didn’t want another windows machine in this house at all!
This is about the time Sara and I start talking even more seriously about moving her to an Apple Mac. A decision was quickly made and we ended up wandering off and picking up a sexy little Apple Mac mini! It took approximately 30 mins to go between cleaning up Sara’s computer desk, removing the old hardware, unwrapping the Mac mini, gawking at it whilst taking photo’s for gallery purposes (and Arithon’s enjoyment) to having it up and running, on the wireless network and already patched to the latest patch levels!! If only I had of done this years ago, I could have allocated my time much better than spending hours and hours on end getting Sara’s Windows machines configured with all the drivers, updates, patches, security fixes, patches and service packs…
All I have heard from Sara’s computer room all evening is little squeals of excitement, and yes, I’m sure she really is still playing with the Mac mini! It really does have some sexy features, I’m really impressed with it and wouldn’t mind one myself. Apple sure have done an extremely impressive job with their Operating Systems since the days I remember playing with Eliza on some ancient Apple Mac back in High School.. The next test is to see if I can get World of Warcraft running on it and if so, I can’t see what’s stopping me from using one of them as a gaming pc in my computer room. Currently I play World of Warcraft using Transgaming’s Cedega on my Debian unstable/experimental machine, which works really well, but I’m missing certain things like apps to chat via voice with fellow team/guild members. Yes, I know TeamSpeak works under linux, and I do have it running nicely, but not everyone uses this. That and I just want one ;P
Edit: OMG, wasn’t that a rant!
Filed under: m.o
Congrats to Anthony! Well done dude
Filed under: m.o
2007 has been rather interesting so far. I have been settling in with the new job, bought a funky little remote control helicopter which has spent more time waiting for replacement parts that I have broken than actually in the air, upgraded from crt’s to some fat assed lcd’s, upgraded to an insane amount of disk storage in my computer room, finally moved to mythtv for the media pc downstairs, found out that I have high blood pressure (lol, no surprises there) and also confirmed that I have high cholesterol… joy!
The health things were no great surprise, I already knew about the blood pressure from all the times I had given blood and I knew I was *not* eating healthily while I was working at IBM. So..in the last month I have picked up myself a funky little Polar RS200 heartrate monitoring watch that has a shoe attachment to detect distance travelled and have started jogging! For those who actually know me, yes, your eyes are not deceiving you, I’ve actually started doing it! 
I got a little carried away a week or so ago and jogged all the way to Cronulla which was a pretty good effort, a 7km round trip which is pretty good for someone who used to walk from front door to the garage, then a whole 5 mins from car park to work. I have also started a half assed diet which has been pretty good. I feel much better for it, and I’ve even lost about 4-5kg in just a month which is good.
In regards to mythtv, I’ve pleasantly found that its progressed significantly since I last tried using it. I still don’t like the mythfrontend, but that’s cause I’m not a windoze gumby who likes clickity clickity icons. I have configured my media pc with fluxbox and a custom fluxbox menu to fire up firefox for mythweb, nautilus, mplayer & totem. I also blame this on not having a remote to properly utilise the mythfrontend, but even if I had a remote, I doubt I’d use it. I currently use a wireless Logitech MX610 mouse which does the job very well, especially when you can program its additional buttons to do things like pause, volume etc.
I’ve also been bitten by a World of Warcraft addiction. Every minute I can spare I seem to be playing my characters! My primary character is a Draenai Shaman, with a Night Elf Druid alt.. I so wish I had started playing WoW when it first came out.. At the time of writing my druid is a lvl 39 and the shammy is 37.. I do have an assortment of other characters around which equates to a hell of a *LOT* of /played hours.. Its so damn addictive. Least its better than drugs As mentioned earlier, I upgraded a fair bit of hardware, including a nice new 20″ LCD monitor for my main machine, with a resolution of 1600×1200 (cause there was no way I was willing to drop from this resolution that I ran on my CRT’s) and I’m really *really* happy with its performance and quality. Screenshots don’t really show the viewable image quality, but its probably about time I did another screenshot one of these days.. maybe tomorrow, or the day after..
Oh, and for Voodoo:
Filed under: m.o
Something that I had been meaning to do for quite some time was to write a script that sets a random wallpaper from a specific directory. My window manager is fluxbox and the wallpaper setter is feh. This quite simply sets the wallpaper to a random image residing in ~/wallpapers every 30 minutes.
Changing the sleeptime variable will quite obviously change the duration between wallpaper changes. I had thought of using something like ‘at’ to schedule the wallpaper updates however if I’m not in the mood for the wallpaper that it had just set I could do a quick ‘killall sleep’ to change it again. This, however, has its problems when there are other sleep processes running, but on my particular workstation this is not an issue.
#/bin/bash
# Random wallpaper
# add to ~/.fluxbox/startup as:
# $HOME/bin/random-wallpaper.sh &
#
# $Id: random-wallpaper.sh 27 2006-12-16 12:39:28Z anton $
#
sleeptime="30m"
wallpapers="${HOME}/wallpapers"
export wpsetters=feh
while true
do
sleep ${sleeptime}
/usr/bin/fbsetbg -r "${wallpapers}"
done
Of course as you can see from the comments, you can run it from ~.fluxbox/startup, and mine is as follows:
$ egrep -v "^#|^$" ~/.fluxbox/startup
export LC_ALL=C
GSDPID=`pidof gnome-settings-daemon`
if [ "x$GSDPID" == "x" ]; then
/usr/bin/gnome-settings-daemon &
/usr/bin/gnome-volume-manager &
fi
/usr/bin/wmGrabImage -u http://mirror.bom.gov.au/radar/IDR033.gif &
/usr/bin/conky &
/usr/bin/gaim &
/usr/bin/xscreensaver -nosplash &
${HOME}/bin/random-wallpaper.sh &
${HOME}/bin/sysinfo-g15lcd.sh &
exec /usr/bin/fluxbox
Filed under: m.o
Something I was going to add to the last post, but probably deserves its own.. is how I convert my downloaded tv episodes to a format readable by my Video iPod.. Once you have the resulting mp4 file, it can be copied to the iPod using the usual method.
ffmpeg -i battlestar.galactica.306.avi -f mp4 -vcodec mpeg4 \
-maxrate 2000 -b 1500 -qmin 3 -qmax 5 -bufsize 4096 -g 300 \
-acodec aac -ar 44100 -ab 128 -s 320x180 -aspect 16:9 \
battlestar.galactica.306.mp4
You can script this in any number of ways. What I personally do is have a script that monitors a certain directory that is run from cron, when it sees a new avi file there it will go off and pump out a ‘video iPod friendly’ mp4 file of of a similar name. This is handy as I can then plug in the iPod later and the conversion is already done and I don’t have to remember the command to convert it again
Thinking about it.. one could also add something similar to this to my .bashrc file:
avi2ipod() {
fn="${1}"
if [ -f ${fn} ]; then
out=”$(echo ${fn}|sed ’s/avi$/mp4/’)”
ffmpeg -i ${fn} -f mp4 -vcodec mpeg4 \
-maxrate 2000 -b 1500 -qmin 3 -qmax 5 -bufsize 4096 -g 300 \
-acodec aac -ar 44100 -ab 128 -s 320×180 -aspect 16:9 \
${out}
fi
}
And then you can just go off and do something like:
avi2ipod /mnt/media/tv/battlestar_galactica/battlestar.galactica.306.avi
Which will in the above example create you a suitable file called /mnt/media/tv/battlestar_galactica/battlestar.galactica.306.mp4
Filed under: m.o