Dang's Weblog » Uncategorized

Apparently, Best Buy is more evil than I thought.

Daniel — Mon, 24 May 2010 19:41:43 +0000

It appears that Best Buy has been jacking up prices in their ads. So, if you bought anything marked “As Advertised” recently, you probably got shafted. Too bad they’re the only option for some things in town. I never thought I’d miss Circuit City.

Fedora fail

Daniel — Wed, 05 May 2010 00:16:45 +0000

Fedora doesn’t have focus follows mouse in either the default installo or the livecd. Fedora: you fail.

Happy earth day

Daniel — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 12:00:27 +0000

Here’s some litter on your driveway. Enjoy.

Wordpress-mu upgrade

Daniel — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 00:15:44 +0000

A shiny new version of wordpress-mu now adorns this site. Yay! Maybe, now that it can upgrade itself, I’ll be more proactive about upgrading, rather than falling 4 (yes 4) major versions behind…

Hopefully all my old posts don’t show up as new on the planet. If they do, I apologize.

Pulseaudio merged volume considered harmful

Daniel — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 16:15:21 +0000

I’ve been playing with Fedora a bit recently, and it has that pulseaudio merged volume thing that I read about recently. Basically, the volume keys on your laptop move the “main” pulseaudio volume, which is a composite of Master and PCM. Half the “main” range is Master, half is PCM. This is a great idea, theoretically. It gives you twice the volume resolution range, since the volume of those two are additive.
However, in yet another case of pulseaudio fail on common hardware (intel-hda), if *either* Master or PCM goes to zero, the volume output is muted. Thus, if my main volume ever goes below half, there’s no sound. Simple solution: never make either go to zero unless “main” goes to zero.
In other volume problem news, something about Fedora has caused my volume to not be properly saved on reboot. When it comes up, it’s just below half, and therefore muted. When Is start rhythmbox, no sound. Changing the main volume has no effect (maybe it’s the other one that’s muted? beats me). If I open the volume slider in *rhythmbox* (which is most of the way down after boot) the volume suddenly jumps to maximum, and blows my ears out. Fortunately, I know that now, and I take off my earphones before doing this… I can then use the volume keys to lower it to just above half, which is a decent volume. Good think I don’t want it quiet, tho, as that’s not possible without opening the ALSA mixer directly…
So, partial fail to pulseaudio, partial fail to fedora, it seems. If all the fail goes to one, I apologize to the other.

Sound issues aside, Fedora has been fairly decent, on the whole. And, in all honesty, sound has never worked properly for me on anything but Gentoo…

No more rewrite?

Daniel — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 13:28:37 +0000

Supposedly, thanks to Steve, I should have WP no longer messing with my text! Let’s see:

find . --name "*.c" -exec grep -H "dang rules!" {} \;

Did it work?

Deaf but good range?

Daniel — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 22:01:51 +0000

Created by Train Horns

In spite of the fact that I cannot hear quiet sounds well, I apparently can hear a good range. Wonderful. Only sounds most people can’t hear bother me.

G1 tether

Daniel — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 16:53:04 +0000

posted from my n810 tethered to my G1. It’s slow, but rocks!

Closest Book Meme

Daniel — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 18:48:43 +0000

Okay, the meme has finally reached Planet Gentoo, so here’s my entry.

Grab the nearest book.
Open it to page 56.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Now, there’s some question as to what constitutes a “book”. Do the ebooks on my n810 in my pocket count? If so, what’s a “page”? And which one is “closest”? How about the ISO spec sitting next to me? Does that count? I’m going to go with “no” for all of those, and go for the closest bound, published book. Since I’m at work, this is a technical book.

(Note: this is page 57, as 56 is blank)

The address conversion functions convert between a text representation of an address and the binary value that goes into a socket address structure.

This is from “UNIX Network Programming” by Stevens.

Bravo, Nokia!

Daniel — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 14:22:36 +0000

My Nokia n810 had been having screen issues for a couple of months now. Specifically, the touchscreen had been flakey. Usually, this means that taps went to places other than where I tapped, and I had to constantly re-calibrate the touchscreen. Quite annoying, to say the least. However, occasionally, and increasingly frequently, the touchscreen had just stopped accepting taps. Some combination of opening and closing the screen, pressing on spots, and sometimes even powering off and on would eventually fix it.

Notice all the past tense there. Since my n810 was bought end of November in 2007, it’s still in it’s 1-year warranty. Since the end of that warranty was approaching fast, I decided to bite the bullet, and RMA it. In about a week, I have a nice, fixed n810. No hassle, no fuss. Thanks, Nokia!