hda1; design, geekery and ranting

Processing, Arduino and PureData

Yes, I know it’s the first update for a long time and I’m afraid it’ll have to be quick. Just you know that I’m playing with Processing 1.01 at the moment and it is awesome.. I finally got some help and got my Arduino running, so the next few projects will be based around physical interfaces and visualisation. Plus I had the pleasure of attending Synaesthesia Happy Hours a workshop run by Goto10 at Goldsmiths on using PureData and Pure-Dyne for creating A/V from stock market data. Check back for updates on these and much much more…

Quick KDE 4 Update

Just to give you an update really, I decided re-install Kubuntu last week and went straight to the KDE4 remix immediately and I haven’t looked back. This is definately a usable, albeit buggy environment.

it's official Dell Mini 9 available in the UK with Ubuntu

According to this page Dell are now selling the Mini 9 with Ubuntu in the UK. However, I don’t know what the situation is in the rest of Europe, if you can tell me I would love to know, just chuck it in a comment and I’ll see what we can do about it by way of hassling customer service departments, etc…

Rocking with the Plasmoids

hmmm…., the Plasmoids, sounds like a band name doesn’t it, now theres an Idea…

Anyway, to the purpose of this post, I put KDE 4 on my system a while back and through a combination of instability on it’s part and mild incompetence on mine I managed to completely b0rk xorg, all fixable, but it gave me enough of an incentive to leave it well alone for a while. Don’t get me wrong I was dead impressed with what I saw, I love the idea of having the web tightly integrated into my desktop, but at the time it just wasn’t stable enough for me, so I just went back to KDE 3.

However KDE 4.1.1 was released recently and well, being the punishment-monkey I am I installed it last night… I was very pleasently surprised as it seems that KDE 4 is finally starting to realise it’s potential as a working environment.

That isn’t to say that it is completely stable, I’m not ready to completely ditch KDE 3 as there are still a few important things to sort out.

Firstly the system tray plasmoid doesn’t seem to entirely working yet, for instance the icons don’t always follow the border of the plasmoid when you resize it, so quite often I’d end up with a blank box with all the app icons offset above it, though closing an app from the system tray seemed to fix this, until the box was next resized. Also it seems almost to lock up as all the icons dissapear, again leaving a blank box.

I also found that the application launcher seemed to crash the environment when dragged in certain ways. Which brings me on to my next issue, when the system goes down like this you loose any amends you have made to your setup, including any feeds you have added to the RSS reader.

Though on the positive side it is really nice to have folder views integrated into the desktop itself, and also the rss feed reader looks really cool just scrolling away at the top of my screen.

I think the most positive thing is the fact that the flexible layout makes it possible to do away with many frequently opened apps that would normally run in their own windows, saving on desktop real-estate. for instance I can have two frequently used directories open as Folder View widgets and save myself opening an instance of Krusader to copy between them. This alone may sound trivial, but coupled with the ability to embedd web apps like Twitter* (can we have an identi.ca widget plx) into your desktop means your experience becomes a lot slicker.

I have only been using this for a day at most and I feel that I have barely scratched the surface of the available functionality, so on the whole when the stability and reliability issues are sorted I can see KDE 4 being a really powerful, easy to use and above all beautiful tool, capable of taking on Mac’s OSX, which as far as I am concerned is the gold standard in ease and speed of use for UI.

As ever I will keep you posted with updates, and if I get time I will post some screenshots too.

*the Twitter widget seems just to kill my KDE 4 install as soon as it logs me in.

Dell Inspiron Mini 9 Update

I got off the line to the Dell Chatbot today with some good news, the Mini 9 will be available WITH UBUNTU in the UK (I’m assuming this means in the rest of Europe too) in October. No news yet as to whether youll be able to order extra RAM or get colours other than Black, but it’s a start. Stay tuned to see if they actually release this or not, if they do expext an in depth review here.

Lets hope that have Dell actually realised that there are Linux users outside of the ‘States.

Converting video to play on your PSP

I own a PSP and as previously mentioned I run Linux, which, I will admit presents me with the occasional problem with managing hideously proprietory devices such as the PSP and the iPod, now Amarok removed my iPod woes about two a year and a half ago, which just left the problem of encoding video for the PSP. Now there are a few command–line utilities to do the job, but occasionally I do like to just have a GUI to do the job for me.

So after the umpteenth Google search today I came across PSPVC. Hopefully this is the answer to my problems.

The only downside is that you have to compile it from source but it’s a fairly painless process

I followed these instructions from the Ubuntu webpage

1. Go to http://pspvc.sourceforge.net
2. Next use the following command to install the dependancies sudo apt-get install nasm libfaac-dev libxvidcore-dev libgtk2.0-dev liba52-dev, I also had to install Yasm but this may differ for you
3. Then unpack the source package from step 1
4. Go to the directory you unpacked the source code to and run the following command sudo ./install.sh and your machine will build you a piece of software.

To use your freshly minted software all you need to do is type pspvc into the command–line and you’ll be presented with your GUI for the encoder

Now this is Beta software and I am putting it to it’s first test as I write this post so I don’t know whether it actually works yet, so I write an update here later.

edit: it’s now 24:15 and the video i have sent to encode still hasn’t quite finished cooking, so I’ll leave it going overnight and tes it on the PSP tomorrow.

edit: it’s now 05:45 and I’ve transferred the encoded video across to my PSP and the file is not supported by the PSP, I will invesigate further when I get the chance a little later on today, so much for watching an episode of the Shield on the train today.

edit: it’s now 09:03 and I have updated my PSP firmware from 3.90 to 4.04, and it made bugger all difference..

edit: having read through the support forums aparently PSPVC is discontinued and a new (unnamed) project will take it’s place. Also the full res profile doesn’t work on the PSP official firmware but the lower rez versions do, so I will try that.

edit: I have found the (temporary) solution, all you have to do is encode the files as mpeg-4 rather than h264/avc and my PSP will accept the files. So I get to watch The Shield on the way home tonight.