asciipr0n

Ubuntu doesn’t install the offensive data files for the fortune program by default. To install them just run:

sudo apt-get install fortune fortunes-off

Every now and then I like to set up a Linux instance in VMware to try out new software or to have a sandbox for development. Lately, I’ve found that Arch Linux has some nice features that make it perfect for that kind of setup.

First, it’s unobtrusive. you get a bare basics environment and nothing else. The base install includes little other than the essential packages and lets you build from there. It’s minimal and lightweight with install ISO’s weighing in at around 360MB and the netinstall ISO’s just under 180MB.

When you need more than the base install, Arch Linux has a package system called pacman, which is a breeze to use. Installing a package often involves little more than executing “sudo pacman -S <package name>”. And since it’s is on a rolling release cycle, there’s no need to wait for the next release of Ubuntu to get the latest packages. Configuration is done via text files; adding services to run at start up requires just an edit to /etc/rc.conf. If you need to build packages, Arch Linux provides the Arch Build System, which is a ports-like build system. If you can script in bash, you can build a package.

Good documentation is also available straight from their site. You don’t need to troll through dozens of forums to figure out how to get something installed, you go straight to their wiki, where there are guides on everything from the basic installation procedure to setting up Linux containers. The wiki also hosts translations of these guides in a variety of languages, which I imagine would be helpful for non-native English hackers.

Arch Linux reminds me a lot of my first Linux distro, Slackware. Both are minimalist, functional, and allow the user to maintain a lot of control over the system. There isn’t much hidden behind the curtain. Arch Linux, however, throws in a packaging system and more current packages. Getting it set up and running couldn’t be easier. For that, it earns a place in my toolbox.

I’ve got two 24″ monitors that I use side-by-side in TwinView mode in my home office, so when I look for desktop background images I hit up Mandolux. Mandolux offers free and original wallpaper in a variety of sizes for even the largest displays.

The only wrinkle in all of this is that Mandolux splits the larger widescreen backgrounds into separate left- and right-hand images. However, since I run my display in TwinView mode, my desktop is essentially a single 3840 x 1200 display ( two 1920’s side by side). For the Mandolux wallpapers to display correctly on my background I need to merge the two images into one. I could manually stitch the two images together with an image editing program like GIMP, but since I downloaded a dozen of the background images to try out, doing it manually sounded dauntingly tedious.

That’s when I remembered that the ImageMagick suite of tools includes the ‘montage’ tool. The ImageMagick tools can be installed with the following command under Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install imagemagick

Then, to stitch the images together I ran the following command:

montage mandolux-ga2k6-*-1920.jpg -tile x1 -geometry +0+0 mandolux-ga2k6-3840.jpg

in a directory containing mandolux-ga2k6-l-1920.jpg and mandolux-ga2k6-r-1920.jpg (left and right side images, respectively). It is also worth noting here that the first filename precedes the second filename alphabetically, so the files are laid out from left to right in that order.

The result is mandolux-ga2k6-3840.jpg, which is a file with both images merged into into one 3840 x 1200 image.

Youtube user datamosher has posted a 3-part tutorial on how he created the video for Chairlift’s “Evident Utensil”. He essentially normalizes a set of video clips into a common format with FFmpeg, then uses avidemux to append them together and to remove keyframes. He has also made available a toolkit which includes both FFmpegX and avidemux for OS X.

Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, One Must Fall: 2097? Any of these ring a bell? Chances are you’ve played these when Microsoft’s DOS was the predominant PC operating system. DOSBox makes playing a lot of those classic DOS games possible on a wide range of modern operating systems. In OSX, however, it’s not just possible to play these games, it’s very to easy to set up as well with Boxer, an application that bundles DOSBox with an OSX frontend.

After installing Boxer, dig up a copy of your favorite old DOS game that’s supported by DOSBox. Copy the files into a folder on your Mac (you do still have a 5.25″ floppy drive, right?). Start up Boxer and drag-and-drop the folder where indicated. That’s it.

Drag-and-drop your games here to install.

If the game needs to run and install or setup program, Boxer will give you a chance to do either before starting the game. Boxer even comes pre-bundled with Commander Keen 4 and demos of Epic Pinball, Ultima Underworld, and X-COM: UFO Defense. There are additional pre-packaged demo games you can download separately as well.

No, your browser is fine. It’s not your bandwidth either.

This music video for “Evident Utensil” by Chairlift reminded me of “The Aesthetics of Failure” (pdf), an article written in 2000 by Kim Cascone about the then emerging work focused on the “glitches, bugs, application errors, system crashes, clipping, aliasing, distortion, quantization noise, and even the the noise floor of computer sound cards.” Focus on these limits of technology or “failure”, Cascone argued, forces the audience to not only rethink the definition of music, but also remind them of the tools involved in its creation.

While Cascone’s article used digital audio and music as examples, this video is an excellent contemporary example. Videos streamed over the Internet are often of such low-quality that we have come to expect the blocky, pan-chromatic artifacts. This video reproduces the abberations so faithfully that one wonders if the glitches are genuine or intended. Like breaking the fourth wall, the tools used to present the video (video encoder/decoder, internet delivery, etc. ) are no longer something the audience is supposed to look past, but now something to brought to their full attention.

P.S. The “failure” reproduced here is the accumulation of visual artifacts left behind by motion-compensation video compression methods without sufficient (or perhaps dropped) keyframes.

Update May 12, 2009: Video embedding for video above was disabled by request. Here’s a link instead.

For recreating the video arcade game experience on the PC, MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is the standard. It works by recreating the hardware circuitry of older arcade machines and loading the game software within this emulated environment. Everything from the CPU, video, sound, and RAM chips is emulated. Under MAME, a wide variety of arcade machines are emulated, from the old Williams machines that ran Joust to the newer CPS3 systems that run the Street Fighter III series. Emulation support for new systems is also added from time to time.

While the official release of MAME is built for Windows, various other flavors of MAME are released for a variety of platforms. One such flavor is SDLMAME, which is easy to build in just about any *NIX environment that supports the SDL library. Another feature of SDLMAME is that it follows the official MAME releases closely: updates to MAME are quickly added to SDLMAME.

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When I finally got around to upgrading my Ubuntu install to 8.10 (“Intrepid Ibex”) earlier this week, I ran into an issue with my keyboard. Yeap. My keyboard.

My left-arrow key no longer worked. My right arrow-key didn’t work. My up-arrow key became Print-screen. The first thing I did was hit the Ubuntu forums, where I found about a dozen “solutions” which either didn’t work or were just plain hacks. I finally found one that worked for me:

1. Open up /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist with your favorite text editor. Make sure you open it up with root privileges.
2. Add the following line into that file. Save, close, and reboot.

   blacklist evdev

Apparently, this was a known issue in the release candidate, but they went ahead and did a general availability release by just documenting a temporary solution in a forum. Breaking keyboard functionality (it worked perfectly in 8.04) is not the way to win new users, especially when the distribution is billed as user-friendly. I’d rather they push their release date back than have a show-stopper like this make it’s way out the door.

I’ve been thinking about getting a MacBook since before the new aluminum ones were recently announced. I’d like make sure that welcoming my first Mac into my barnyard of computers will go as smoothly as possible and without any regrets. However, since this is the first release of a new laptop case design from Apple, I expect there will be some issues as is the usual case for first-run Apple products.

Already, a few issues have been reported in a few forums.

• The battery/HDD cover doesn’t close flush against the case or has gaps.
• Problems with connecting external displays via DVI or VGA.

The Apple Defects wiki hasn’t reported any issues yet with the new late-2008 MacBooks or MacBook Pros, but I’m sure they will trickle in as the year wraps up. Are any of you dear readers unfortunate victims of defects in the new MacBook/Pros?

Update 10/4/2008: Looks like the trackpads are having issues now.

Those who know me will note that, at best, I am reluctantly impressed by what Apple has to offer. The operating system and hardware work together, for the most part, seamlessly. As a fan of Linux and open-software in general, I tend to eschew the closed paradigm that Apple depends upon to keep their platform humming along harmoniously. Nonetheless, I am often forced to concede that there are things that Apple does right with it’s laptops.

The new MacBooks that debuted this week, I have to admit, are tempting me. The new unibody aluminum design is damn slick and feels very solid and substantial in my hands. The new multi-touchpad feels very natural to the touch. Even the internals have been simplified. I think Jony Ive was right when he said “it’s more beautiful on the inside than the outside”.

That said, there is a design choice that I find highly questionable: Apple’s decision to create a proprietary display connector for a standardized display interface. While DisplayPort is a license- and royalty-free industry standard which has a standardized connector, Apple chose to design its own connector and called it Mini-DisplayPort. Not the display interface standard, mind you, just the connector.

Earlier this year, I bought my first of two Dell WFP2408 LCD monitors, which were one of the first displays to feature the newly standardized DisplayPort interfaces alongside the more common DVI connectors. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to use the DisplayPort connectors because Apple does not conform to the connector standard nor do they currently offer a Mini-DisplayPort to DisplayPort adapter. I can, however, elect to purchase a $30 Mini-DisplayPort to single-link DVI adapter. If I had a 30-inch LCD, I could choose the rediculously priced $100 Mini-DisplayPort to dual-link DVI adapter that’s about as large as the power adapter and also takes up a USB port. Conveniently enough, however, Apple has just started selling a new 24″ LCD monitor featuring their own Mini-DisplayPort connector.

After spending a fairly good premium on an Apple laptop, I don’t think it’s quite fair to force a customer to buy a $30-100 adapter for Apple’s non-standard DisplayPort connector. At the least, I feel Apple should include a Mini-DisplayPort to DisplayPort adapter with their laptops. Each time I feel tempted to enter the beautiful, walled gardens of Apple, it’s these little catches that make me think twice.

Update Oct. 17. 2008:

Looks like I’m not the only one griping about this.

Update Jan. 30. 2009:

I  bought a MacBook on Jan 6.