Month: September 2008

  • Converting rm to mp3

    Recently I’ve run across a realmedia stream that I really want to convert to mp3 (mainly because my portable player can’t read rm files. I’ll talk about capturing rm streams in another post, but this one is going to talk about converting from rm to mp3.

    For starters, it’s possible to use mencoder for this as follows:

    (more…)

  • Visualizing 4 spatial dimensions

    I’ve always had more than a passing interest in astronomy and physics… so when I found reference to this video series explaining how to visualize four spatial dimensions. Multiple spatial dimensions are the domain of math, but I’ve always suspected that the universe has 4 spatial dimensions… anyway interesting stuff to think about.

  • Has Asheville NC Run out of gas?

    Asheville NC Gas shortage, has some links and a gathering of prices and availabilities. It looks as though many stations in the Asheville area are out of gas.

  • Need to install Ubuntu linux on an HP Pavillion a6400f?

    Linux does quite well on this machine, but there is a problem with the built in ethernet (gigabit adapter). The hardware appears to be detected correctly, but the network card doesn’t really work with the driver. Thankfully it’s a fairly easy fix… thanks to the ubuntu forums.

  • Megaupload alternative

    I guess the better way to put this is that this is an alternative way to download from megaupload. megaupload.com is a file storage site. If you pay them you can have unlimited downloads, but normally they limit downloads to single ip addresses. (As well as limiting simultaneous downloads.)

    I’m not certain of the ins and outs of how they’re doing this, but xmegaupload.com provides an alternate way to get to files if you’ve hit your maximum limit. (In fact altering the megaupload link to have xmegaupload.com was working last week as a way to get to megaupload files.)

  • Alfa 500mw usb wireless

    I’ve seen some high powered wireless cards from Senao, but… 500mw I think is the most powerful wireless radio I’ve seen. This Alfa USB adapter appears to require 2 (!) USB ports for full power, but it can use just 1. It also appears that this is a USB wireless adapter compatible with linux (even some of the wireless scanning utilities on linux as well…)

    (more…)

  • Ubuntu Linux Software Raid – Replacing a Failing Drive

    Sometime back I setup my home server running Ubuntu Linux (6.06 – Dapper Drake LTS). I used two pairs of drives to do raid cloning. Two IDE drives were for the main system structure and two SATA drives for Audio/Video storage as well as CDimages and other large file sharing on the local network. Well… I noticed the hard drive light was on solid and sure enough one of the two SATA drives had failed. (I didn’t get my status email because I’d done a network structure change and didn’t update my local mail setup…) Anyway… replacing it was a pain in the neck only for the physical access to the box. Everything else worked as it should.

    (more…)

  • Linux – Convert PDF to TIF

    Recently I had a request for help with some free pdf’s I’ve published elsewhere. I wasn’t really keen to spend a lot of time for free supporting free pdfs and really just wanted to give an alternative file format. (I suspected the pdf format may not have been one that their computer liked. So, I wanted to convert to a tif image as that’s something that should be universally usable. Some quick websearching reminded me that in linux it’s a very simple conversion. In fact, the command line program convert is all you need.

    (more…)