Hacking
Hackbook Air
Feb 5th
Alright so I bought myself a new toy, a little handy netbook. It is a bit nicer to carry a 10-inch machine, instead of a 17 inch laptop around. In the shop they wanted to sell me all kinds of crap, for example Norton 360 anti-virus. When I said I didn’t need it, he asked me 3 times if I was sure about that (like Windows asks you about 3 times for everything). I didn’t tell him that I didn’t plan on keeping Windows on the machine, I didn’t want to confuse him.
It’s an Atom chip clocked at 1.6 GHz, 160 GB drive, 1 GB RAM. It has 3 USB ports, VGA out, SD Expansion, multiple card readers, built-in webcam, audio out, microphone in, and built-in microphone, and a glossy 10.1 inch wide screen display. RAM and hard drive are replaceable. Battery lasts for about 4-7 hours, depending on what you do.
Before XP Starter Edition could even boot, I prepared a bootable USB stick with the full Ubuntu 9.10 live CD, then deleted all partitions and put Ubuntu on. I could have gone for the Netbook Remix, but I wanted the full user interface. Quickly transferred my theme data from my primary machine, installed Global Menu Bar and Cairo-Dock, and boom!
Adium message styles in Pidgin (Ubuntu Karmic)
Jan 7th
I always liked Adium on OS X a lot, it’s the Mac fork of the famous Pidgin, a multi-protocol messaging client. I really LOVE Pidgin – but one thing was always missing – the fancy look. But finally, it can be helped!
Here’s what to do. These steps are for Ubuntu 9.10 only.
1. Open up a terminal, and type (or paste):
sudo apt-get install pidgin-dev libpurple-dev
2. Next, add the WebKit repository, as Adium styles require WebKit on the Mac. You have to open up the Software Sources tool under System/Administration/Software Sources. There, click on “Other Software”, then “Add…”, and paste this line:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/webkit-team/ppa/ubuntu jaunty maindeb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/webkit-team/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
The content will reload as new software just became available.
3. Back to the terminal, and paste:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install libwebkit-dev
This will install required development files for WebKit.
4. Next, download THIS FILE, save it to a location of your choice.
5. In a terminal, do
bzip2 -d /path/to/pidgin-webkit.tar.bz2
to extract the file.
6. In the extracted folder there are two folders which we need to copy into your libpurple folder. This is how to do it:
cp /path/to/pidgin-webkit-folder/message_styles ~/.purple && cp /path/to/pidgin-webkit-folder/plugins ~/.purple
Close Pidgin entirely and open it again. Go to Tools / Plugins, and behold your new entry!
You can now go, to use themes of AdiumXtras.com. Beware – some themes will not work, most of them will however.
To install a new theme, download any one of your choice, extract the zip, and in the folder you will find another folder named “NameOfStyle.AdiumMessageStyle”. You need to copy this to
~/.purple/message_styles
Once you have it in there, again go to Tools / Plugins / WebKit, then select “Configure plugin”. There you will then see a list… In my example I installed iChadium, a iChat emulating message style:
As you can see you can select any sub-style you want.
Once done, behold your all-new shiny Adium on Ubuntu!
Introducing: The Emperor’s Screen
Oct 19th
As you might have seen before, I managed to hook up 3 screens to my machine instead of just 2, and managed to stretch EVE on all of them, which is otherwise not possible with Vista.
Now, to complete the setup, I bought two screens of identical size to the 22 inch which I already had, and arranged them beautifully together. A window to another world. The Emperor’s Screen.
Total diameter is about 1.4 meters, and total possible resolution is 5760 x 1080 (!!).
Black is beautiful. So is EVE.
To The Power Of Three
Oct 12th
Last EVE related post in a while, I promise! If you had enough of me and EVE, you should stop reading now… otherwise read on to see my latest trickery and hack.
So. On this year’s keynote of CCP held in Iceland (Fanfest), they had shown quite a cool feature: the game on multiple screens. This kinda inspired me, I thought it has to be possible to do this already. And what followed was yet another odyssey into technology and the question: can it be done?
The inspiration for me was one photograph… this one:
New Eden extended by 3
Obviously you have to be able to connect three screens. Now you see the problem is, that most graphic cards, even expensive ones (apart from things like ATI’s EyeFinity) only let you connect a maximum of two screens at any one time. However for EVE, with your ship always in center view, having the ship in one piece is quite important to the experience of the game, so you need either 1 or 3 screens.
Here’s where the first problem comes in. Most mainboards only allow you to connect ONE PCI-Express graphic card. With 16x speed that is for immense bandwidth and thus graphical processing. How do you fit it a second PCI-Express card when your board only takes one? Well. You see it is technically possible to connect a second 16x speed card onto a slot with only 1x speed. Problem is there is a physical blockage. So I went and by hand removed the block on the right side, allowing another card to fit in. Obviously you only get 1x speed instead of 16. This isn’t pretty and voided my warranty – but it works!
A bit crammed, but… well:
Don’t worry, the cooling is perfectly fine. They are not touching – even if it looks like that. Besides the cheap one is a passive cooler – so everything’s… cool. With those two finally placed in, I could in theory attach a maximum of 6 screens… Whoa!
Fancy a TV wall? Six screens, maybe? For now, let’s just use three.
Everything is working. Drivers installed, and the screen is in fact detected and Windows says it now has a new display adapter. The screen is showing its wallpaper. I am impressed about myself how far I have gotten already.
Next problem is that Vista does not allow for horizontal spanning (like you have 3 monitors on your desk, but Windows thinks it is one). This was removed in Vista and is not coming back in Windows 7. Windows XP however did this. With the so-called Windows Display Driver Model, or WDDM, which Vista and W7 uses, spanning is not possible. So full-screen on 3 screens is a no-go. But my journey didn’t end here.
There is this little nifty hack called SoftTH (Software Triple Head). This effectively forces any DirectX based game to use all screens. How does it work?
The image is rendered on your expensive beloved graphic card. This tool then takes care of the rest and divides the image by three, and sends the parts onto its respective screens. Left to left, center to center, and right to right. This involved a bit of configuration and I can provide you with my config file if you need it.
And that was it. EVE is now forced to use all screens! Thus, my command bridge is now complete. Bask in the presence of the most immersive gaming experience. EVE To The Power Of Three.
Threesome: Main view in the middle, communication and information on the left, sensors on the right
Can someone tell me why I didn’t use Kubuntu before?
Feb 19th
Right, so I have been playing around with Kubuntu, my new main desktop system, for like 2 days. There has been a bit of trickery and tweakery going on, like for example you have to tell ALSA that you are on a MacBook Pro Revision 3 in order to make the headphone jack work. Well I like to fiddle around with stuff, and I think I finally got my setup working and start to feel comfortable.
Here are just a few screens of the built-in functionality of Ubuntu – this is not Compiz – but it works just like it (I don’t necessarily need the Cube to be honest). There are some features I have grown attached to – I am so glad they are not missing. Others however are from Mac OS X. Like this one in my first screenshot.
Why has Cover Flow not been implemented as task switcher in OS X?
You can obviously have more than 4, but 4 Spaces kinda do the trick for me.
They call it Expose… thanks for porting that too.
Stay iTuned. On Windows, Linux, Mac.
Thing was with iTunes that I copied the entire collection of mine to an external drive as it was, then installed WINE and iTunes 8.0.2 – and then copied my collection over to my Music folder in /home, as it was, and BOOM! iTunes recognized all of it, including settings, ratings, and does even support Genius. I was genuinely surprised… WINE really has come a long way. And yes, iTunes wobbles just like the other windows do. Bujaka!
Leopard Pro Tip: How to watch porn at work [NSFW]
Oct 4th
When Leopard was released, it came with over 300 new innovations. Today, I wanna share with you how you could use one of those innovations to entertain yourself in the office if you’re bored.
Pimp My MythTV: Now with YouTube support
Aug 10th
So this weekend I was kinda bored and was thinking about something productive I can do so I wouldn’t be sitting at home, alone, lonely, and dying from boredom. Well of course some geeky stuff comes to my mind. I was thinking that it would be cool if MythTV, my PVR solution of choice, would have YouTube support. According to MythTVNews, there was no way up until then for YouTube to be integrated. The plugin Mythbrowser doesn’t do Flash, neither can any MythTV software play FLV files.
However, MythTV does provide convenient options to change that, like use a different browser. And suddenly we are in business here.
So… what exactly did I do? Basically I created a two web pages – one is standard HTML using an external Javascript as help, and a PHP file which connects to the API of YouTube. In this case I started off with the Featured list (which is the last 25 videos that have been featured. Ah yes, thanks IBM).
The main page contains div elements which house the information, such as the big image, title and description. The selector image is a simple Photoshop of about 5 minutes, and is controlled by the up and down keys on the keyboard. The script in the back checks where we are, and if the bottom or top is hit, it acts accordingly (probably a real cheesy approach to do that). The list itself on the right side is done with the PHP page and displayed in a borderless iframe element, which in turn is controlled by the Javascript.
I could have taken simple screenshots, but you might not believe me. So I took some photos of my MythTV UI as it is right now, and how the YouTube UI looks like.
Again: The YouTube thing is web-based and not a direct part of MythTV… but it was the only way I think this could be achieved.
The theme in MythTV is called “Pear-ody” and you can get it here.
If you’re interested, I have put up the piece of work for download if you like, so you can extend it or beef it up. GET IT HERE.
Now for the photos!
My MythTV once loaded
YouTube is now available for ya pleasure dude
Featured only – for now
Here at last. YouTube from MythTV. The AppleTV way.
A video playing from my written UI. It works alright…
As a comparison: this is the original YouTube UI as it is on AppleTV machines right now. I think I’m close.
So what’s up next in games, or even watching TV?
May 26th
Well the obvious answer to this one would probably be ‘even more high-def’. Okay, admittedly, at some point an image can reach such a depth that it is no longer distinguishable from reality. Some experts in Japan are working on the successor of HDTV, named UHDTV (Ultra High Definition TV). But don’t expect that to be near any household soon.
But that’s not my point. Next thing up is making it even more realistic, making you even more a part of the game or movie as you already are. And just how do you do that?
The Wii is getting closer by tracking movements in three dimensions of the controller, and by doing so rendering the image according to the movement you made. Pretty cool. But… we’re still looking at a simulated 3D image.
Okay. In the end, a screen is a screen, and everything is bound to its surface. But there are tricks or you can fool your brain into thinking that what you see is an actual window, with full three dimensions. Meaning that when you move your head, everything else moves with you, like it would in the real world.
Johnny Chung Lee, from the Carnegie Mellon University, became aware that this effect needs to be achieved for truly stunning 3D experiences. Make your screen a window into another world. A real window.
And so he did.
Watch this.
Now we wait for the next console generation.
iPhone SDK release date
Feb 22nd
So the second last Friday of this month is here. With February coming to a close very quickly, Apple is yet to announce the exact release date for the software package that would open up the iPhone and iPod touch to developers. It has been rumored that Apple is holding a secret, yet unannounced event for this matter. Linkin Park was rumored to play at this event. As it turned out, they did play for Apple, but for iTunes Live (expect to see this as a new iTunes Originals in the iTunes Store).
If Apple is indeed holding an event for the SDK release of the mobile devices, then they MUST send out an invitation today, as Apple always sends out invites one week in advance. If we don’t see an invite today, then there won’t be an event, but it is possible that the SDK is still getting released in a press release.
Either way, it’s gonna be cool. The only thing I can predict with a fair certainty is that the SDK will probably require Firmware 1.1.4, and new apps – free or for purchase – will appear in the iTunes Store.
Stay iTuned.
SEtv (BAtv Take 2)
Feb 9th
Some months back I was showing off a multimedia PC I have built, that I named BAtv. The first two letters are the initials of the street in which the house is from which I have moved away last weekend. The box had the aim to provide a richer, centralized multimedia experience that should also include standard TV. The technically the box worked, but several drawbacks did not make it worthwhile.
The banner I used when I presented the BAtv box on the earlier version of my homepage
The big and main drawback was basically the TV card which could only take in an aerial signal and had no MPEG encoder on it, which caused a 4-5 second delay in displaying the image. Subsequently it took 4-5 seconds until a switch of a channel or every other remote activity became visible, as the card fed directly from the in-house TV receiver from the provider NTL. Another drawback was the playback of some movies, which simply did not work at all sometimes or incorrectly. Although the movie database worked perfectly fine, so did the retrieval of TV programme information.
The main start screen of BAtv – a bit of AppleTV
Well, I gonna give it another shot then. Over the weekend I will re-construct the box, but firstly use more up-to-date software such as Fedora 8, and the latest MythTV release. However, as I don’t watch TV that much, I gonna leave TV out. For me I have discovered, it’s about movies, movies, and movies. So I gonna center Take 2 around movies. I gonna give it a new UI, and then make it available for download.
The new name is SEtv (System Error TV). Stay iTuned.