Monthly Archive for May, 2006

Kind of Bored

Published on May 28, 2006 in Gaming and General. 0 Comments

Armagetron Advanced is such a cool game. I’m slowly learning all the tips and tricks of it. Getting better, I guess.

I recently discovered that an old computer that I would have never thought supported the OSx86 Project now does whereas my so-called “good” computer doesn’t at all. That really ticks me off because the OSx86 Project is illegal. It violates the DMCA (1) if you download a pre-patched Tiger installation disk and (2) if you try to install it on any non-Apple computer (because you would be circumventing the TPM). Even if you use your own installation disk and patch it, that would be illegal. It would be really cool to have Mac OS X and Windows XP (as well as maybe Fedora) all on the same computer, especially if you didn’t have to buy a new Mac to do it. But alas, you can’t. Oh well.

I’ve never really discussed the strange battery problem that I have been having with my laptop. I’ve got an HP Pavilion N5470. It’s actually a very nice laptop except for two things. One, the hard drive is a bit old so it has become very loud. And two, the battery lasts for 10 minutes. Well, that’s what it seemed like. In fact, I bought a brand new battery and it worked for about three months before it started to last for 10 minutes too. Even more interesting, it would jump from about 50% to 3% (having steadily gone down from 100% to 50%) instantly. Anything below 5%, my laptop hibernates. This was really getting annoying because I had no clue why such a problem was occuring. Until one day, when I decided to test it out by leaving it on the BIOS setup screen for as long as it would last. This way, there would be no Windows Power measures taken. And what do you know, it lasts for an hour and a half with full screen brightness, etc. Then, I tried my older battery. It lasted for about 45 minutes. So I have concluded that the battery power is still there, but the method of reading the amount of power left must be faulty in some way. I did some research on this and found out that if the battery has a bad cell, it will cause the power meter to read all sorts of strange stuff.  But recently, my computer has been saying 100% for about an hour and then drops down to 0% and lasts a while longer.  In fact, it says 0% while I’m typing right now.  I can’t seem to understand why a good battery that registered properly for a couple of months all of a sudden started to go bad.  One of the possibilities was that the power measurer in my computer is faulty, which is perfectly possible.  But the other is that my laptop is causing something to happen to the battery.  As of right now, I’m not sure.  I intend to buy a new hard drive though; probably a $50 40gB hard drive off eBay because that’s all I’ll ever need for a laptop.  And I’ve turned off Windows Power Management in order to let my laptop run for more than 10 minutes.  It works quite nicely.  Now I’ve got to figure out manually how long it will last, though.

Ramblings

Published on May 19, 2006 in General. 1 Comment

http://www.artlebedev.org/portfolio/optimus/

*Drools.*  I want one of those when they come out.  That looks like such an awesome keyboard.  That reminds me.  I broke my space bar from just simple wear yesterday, but was able to fix it quite easily.  The little rubber contact beneath the space bar had worn out so I just popped out my Insert key (who uses that key anyways; I don’t know anyone who does), took out the rubber thing from that, and replaced it with the worn spacebar rubber thing.  So now, my spacebar works very nicely again.  My insert key works too in the rare event that I will ever use it.  I’ve actually got 2 keyboards and 2 mice attached to this computer.  The first set, a Microsoft Office keyboard and a Microsoft IntelliExplorer mouse (it’s from around 2001 or 2002, I think; doesn’t have horizontal scroll support) is for doing my day to day stuff and the second set, a generic laptop-like keyboard with a generic HP mouse attached, is for gaming so that I won’t ruin my good quality hardware.  The reason why I call it a laptop-like keyboard is because the keys are indeed very similar to a laptop in size and the way they are pressed.  I got the keyboard for an extremely cheap price, as well as the mouse.

Anyways, the link goes to a company designing a new type of keyboard that uses organic LEDs instead of labelling their keyboard so that the keyboard can change in an infinite number of ways.  The examples the have their are setups for Quake, Photoshop, Cyrillic, and standard English.  I think that this is a really great idea because I sure as heck can’t remember all 15 million combinations in the GIMP.  What a clever idea…

Okay enough ranting.  I eventually plan to look into the issue with MoPiD (or rather MEncoder) where the sound is off-sync.  I’ve got some other ideas for an updated version of MoPiD 1.5 too.  I also hope to incorporate ElvisF’s excellent logos for MoPiD.

MoPiD 1.5 Released!

Published on May 13, 2006 in Code. 0 Comments

Well my eyes are red and bleary, but I finished MoPiD 1.5.  Enjoy the new GUI and general improvement thanks to the total rewriting of the system.  I’ll be putting an icon made by ElvisF on the iPodLinux forums in soon, but here’s the testing release so far.  Enjoy!

MoPiD 1.5 Nearly Finished

Published on May 12, 2006 in Code. 0 Comments

Well, I had 45 minutes to spare, but my FTP server wasn’t being particularly nice, so I couldn’t work on the Sandbox that much. I have begun working on it off and on, but am mainly concerned with the basic layout and structure now. But since I didn’t have access to it, I decided to work a little on MoPiD and see what I could do in 45 minutes. I doubted that I would get very far. However, as it turned out, I nearly finished it! Well, it still has a long way, but it’s getting there. I am using a library called easygui.py. Since MoPiD emphasizes ease of use, I thought I might as well take the easy road for a little bit, at least until the 2.0 series. This library allows me to easily program a partial-GUI for MoPiD. Unlike my goal for the MoPiD2, a single window with all of the options, this creates a wizard interface, which also isn’t too bad. At least it’s better than what it used to be. I’ve finished most of the functions except some minor, more-intricate ones such as analysis of the input movie and some 2bppconv functions. This shouldn’t take too much more time before I release a beta version. My hope would be by the end of next Friday to have it out. I removed some potential bugs and a lot of sloppy coding by completely rewriting everything from scratch (except for a few variables that I copied over). I got rid of some of the confusing functions that were overly complicated and coded in a hard directory system that doesn’t rely on relativity or short path names anymore. Or at least I hope that it will work. There’s more confirmation now, so that’s helpful. So that’s about it. I’m glad I found enough time to work on it. I’m quite surprised how far I got in such a little amount of time.

 Edit: Just one function to go before I can start testing!

I’m Back… Sort of…

Published on May 8, 2006 in Code, Gaming, General and Graphic Design. 0 Comments

Well, this wave of exams is over and I’m mildly tired. But happy. Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, time to provide information for some future updates.

I’m currently very busy with some other stuff right now, but in my free time, I’m trying to work on a preview of MoPiD2 called MoPiD 1.5. It will have a wizard-like GUI. I would like to be able to output the results of 2bppconv and MEncoder to a text file. Easy to do on Linux… Not so easy on Windows. And the darn directories in Windows keep messing everything up. I need to completely restructure how MoPiD finds its own directory and how it finds the paths of the files so that it doesn’t mess up with symbols. I’m toying with the idea of using a high compression mode where it first passes the file through a really high compression and then passes it through again to convert for the iPod. That can alter the filesize a pretty good amount.

I once mentioned making a parody of the MasterCard commercials for iPodLinux. I had an image that said “Downloading… 37 seconds. Installation… 15 minutes. Being dubbed the coolest geek at the Linux expo because you can run Linux on your iPod… Priceless.” It was kind of cute. But I wanted to make that into a Flash animation. Very simple to do. Eventually I’ll get around to it.

More things I want to do… 1. Make some more styles for this website. 2. Clean up all the messy code and other dust left behind from the previous version. 3. Find something meaningful to post in this blog. 4. Start working on a secret project.

Like any of those things will get done…

Well I might as well describe the “secret project” because it’s not much of a secret. I am constantly kind of annoyed at the fact that whenever I’m away from my home computers and I feel like coding a bit for my website (usually PHP nowadays), I have no way of really coding online. Well, there’s CPanel, but it uses a really bloated and slow file management system. I want to make a piece of web software that emphasizes simplicity. It has a single directory for uploads and allows one to play around with coding on the fly. It would have a built in editor that actually takes up the size of the screen so that you can see what your writing. I’m sure this has been done before and the software written by others will always be better than mine, but I think it would be a nice little coding exercise. Securing it might be a little bit more difficult, but still possible…

Okay, onto my last topic… Gaming. I mean, what kind of crazy studying is not complete without procrastination?  Recently, I bought a Neo Geo Pocket Color from a friend with SNK vs. Capcom: The Match of the Millenium in it.  I remember watching a friend playing it all the time.  That game has so many combos for such a small fighting game, it’s absolutely amazing.  You can chain all sorts of combos.  Overall, it’s really, really fun.  It’s too bad that the Neo Geo Pocket never really caught on…  The analog joystick is awesome.  Speaking of gaming, I’ve also been playing Unreal Tournament 2004 off and on, a bit of the Halo demo (old school!), and Gunz a lot…  It’s a wonder how I did any studying, eh?  Well, I studied a lot too.  And slept.

I probably had a bunch of other things to say but I’m tired of typing.  I want to start coding again soon…