Ubuntu 9.04 and Bluetooth.

It doesn't work so well.

Which is funny because when I was testing 9.04 beta only a few weeks before the final release it did work, but caused some havoc with the Nvidia 188.xx drivers so I rolled back, looking forward to being able to happily sync my phone with Evolution.

Having done some research, I have found out that Bluetooth and 9.04 work OK but only with certain hardware. The bad news is that the hardware it works with is not so common in general. One of the most popular Bluetooth dongles (KY-BT100) doesn't work with bluez-gnome or bluezman.

If I get it going, I will let you know.

Free .co.cc domain names

You are not going to believe this stuff. Seriously.

The .co.cc domain is giving away domain names ending in .co.cc without the usual crap of tags and embedded things when you choose a domain name.

Some of the shorter and more obvious ones are either gone already or available for a fee.

Doesn't it sound rather like the common name for a male chicken? Isn't that something you can twist into something more commercial? Or at least genital? Go get your cocc into this. Heck - it's free! I'm not even an affiliate - I earn nothing from this - I just wanna give you a hot tip. Nothing required in return.

Check it out: http://www.co.cc/

I'm sure that some of you clever and dirty minded fxckers can find something that's deeeee-lish and profitable. I know I have.


Peace out.

HTPC solutions.

I love my semi-HTPC.

What's a semi-HTPC? It's like an HTPC, but not quite so hardcore.

I get really bad free to air television reception here. I can see the tower a couple of kilometres away from my lounge room and the building has a good antenna, but when they rewired it some time ago for digital TV some wit decided that the terminal in the master bedroom was more important than the one in the lounge room. I didn't like FTA-TV anyway, so it's no big loss. For these reasons, I didn't want to install tuners in my HTPC. Besides, there was no room in the case after I put all the hardware I wanted in there.

The most usual Linux based HTPC solution is MythTV or the MythBuntu distro. This setup wins, pretty much hands down, compared to others that are available.

XBMC is really great too, but after playing with it I found it's not the best fit for my needs. One of the characteristics I found to not be what I wanted is how slow it is when it is shown a new NFS share. My HTPC box has about 2Tb (i.e. >2000 Gb) of content. The content is mostly my DVD collection ripped to the server so that I can watch what I want, when I want and preserve my DVDs in mint condition - especially the box sets.

After looking around, I found Elisa Media Centre. It works well and works simply. NFS shares don't bother it too much. It has a reasonably low overhead. The user interface is pleasant but is more file oriented than others so it's not a 'new appliance' to learn for non-tech members of your household. Well worth a look. Heck - just install it and try it.

Peace out.

More on TuxGuitar...

It's a few days since the last post about TuxGuitar and it breaking under Ubuntu 9.04.

Somehow, magically, it seems to work for me again.

Timidity is running as a process at boot time, tied to alsa, and is working fine.

I didn't do anything to make it happen, it just happened. It seems to be 'one of those things' that happens around new distro time when something gets patched and something gets broken and then everything seems to be fixed.

Except for bluetooth... but that's another episode.

Peace out...

TuxGuitar and Ubuntu 9.04 Upgrade.

Oops. Another broken application.

I'm an axe-head. OK - I'm learning guitar and use TuxGuitar to listen to guitar tabs in GuitarPro format so that I can play along and get the sound of the tune into my head, not to mention to decide whether I want to learn the piece for acoustic guitar or my beloved fat little Johnson Delta Rose electric.

Anyway, TuxGuitar is borked. Let's unbork it!

* Uninstall tuxguitar and the optional banks, etc with your favourite app manager or be totally uber and do it from the shell.

* Go get :

http://sourceforge.net/project/downloading.php?groupname=tuxguitar&filename=tuxguitar-1.1-ubuntu-x86.deb&use_mirror=softlayer

and install it. There will be a warning that it's a later version than in the distro and may not have as much support. For the amount of support the distro is giving this one, who cares? Tuxguitar and the users are the ones making this package so very valuable.

* Try it and see if it works. If not...

* Do 'timidity -iA -Os &' at the command line. Watch what port is reported by timidity.

* Set that port in the Settings - Sound section of tuxguitar. Now it's working isn't it?


Certainly not an elegant solution, but at least it's working for now. I will update you if and when there is a proper fix for this.

Cheers!!

Ubuntu Themes

Ever get the feeling that the standard Ubuntu themes are a bit dull? Me too.

There's no point in me re-inventing the wheel or touring someone else's work as my own (as far too many bloggers do), so just go check this out:

http://www.junauza.com/2009/04/15-beautiful-ubuntu-gdm-themes.html

Cheers!!