Author Archives: Richard

Dead blogs

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

I thought I would try a little exercise today.

There is a list of the top 100 Irish blogs at Justin Mason’s site.  Now this list is old, but unfortunately I don’t know just how old.  However I reckon it dates back to some time in 2008.  For my little exercise, I thought I would test those sites to see just how many are still active.

The vast majority are indeed still there .  Some however came up completely blank or are restricted access.  I decided to test the sites I could access and see how recently they had been updated.

How do you define a redundant blog?  I decided that if it hadn’t been updated in the last 60 days then it was probably dead.  The result is a little disappointing.

Of the 100 blogs, over half [53%] haven’t been updated.  If I use a tighter figure of fourteen days, then 60% are gone.

Now the list claims to give the top 100 sites by Technorati Rank so it is not a comprehensive list of all blogs.  However one would assume that to gain a listing, the blog would have to be fairly popular, and the author would have to be reasonably dedicated, to the 60% death rate is a little surprising.

Maybe they are right.

Maybe Irish blogging is terminally ill?!

Media streaming on an iConnect

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

Well over a year ago I bought an Iomega iConnect USB hub.

From day one it didn’t work and I documented some of my troubles on this site.

A couple of weeks ago to my amazement it started working properly.  I haven’t a clue why as I did nothing to it.  I didn’t upgrade software or anything.  It will have to remain a mystery.

One of the features of the iConnect is that it is a media streamer.  I had disabled this during “the troubles” so I re-enabled it and stared loading some music onto an attached drive.

I have no experience of media or uPnP so it was an interesting experience.

The first thing I learned was that the metadata on each and every track was critical for success, and also found that some of the tracks off my CDs had incorrect information in them.  A misspelled item on one track would isolate that track from the others which ended up in a messy setup. This meant I had to do a lot of editing.

I have a reasonable selection of CDs and the only method I could think of at first to edit metadata was to load each track into Audacity.  This was a very lengthy and very time consuming progress so it was clearly out of the question.  That’s when I found EasyTAG.  This is an excellent little program that did everything I wanted and did it quickly and efficiently.  It even batch processed a full CD (or rather a full directory of files).

Another problem I had was caused by a little quirk of the iConnect – it could categorise any track it found on the drive, but I was unable to play anything that was further than one directory from root.  If, for example I had a file /pop/Beatles/Abbey Road/Something.mp3 it would be listed in the Media stream but wouldn’t actually play.  Being a somewhat methodical sort of bloke I didn’t like the idea of dumping every single file into the one spot without ordering them in some sort of fashion.  I decided that changing the file names would work well.  However the idea of rewriting a thousand or two filenames didn’t appeal.  I installed Métamorphose and that proved perfect for the job. Now I could rename my files as, for example /pop/Beatles_Abbey_Something.mp3, simply by adding “Beatles_Abbey_” as a prefix to every filename.

My final problem was that several of the albums were in FLAC format which was fine but bulky.  I decided to convert all the files to MP3 format as it suited my needs better.  Here I came across SoundConverter which was a little slow but very happily ran batch jobs so it was just a question of pointing the program to the relevant directories and leaving it to it.

It was a lot of work, but worth it.  I can now play my entire collection on a Wifi portable or on the PC which save a lot of time and effort hunting for CDs!

Essential Linux Software

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

In the last couple of days, for various reasons I have completely reinstalled Linux on this machine.

One of the great joys of Linux is the ease with which a reinstall can be done.  A Windows reinstall is a slow process and when it is complete there is the tedious and lengthy process of reinstalling all the software, if you can find all the disks and the licence codes.  Even then, the chances are you have lost all your settings for the various programmes and you have to customise them all over again.

With Linux, it is a simple matter of restoring your Home directory from backup and that’s that.

However there are still some programmes that have to be reinstalled.  There is no fear of having no CDs or licence codes as they are already available on the Net.  The problem (if you can call it a problem) is remembering which programmes to install.  For that reason, I have made a little list as a reminder to myself in the future.  I have called this “Essential Linux Software” but that just means it is essential for me.

First on my list is VirtualBox.  This is essential not only for testing other flavours of Linux but also for running Windows for the odd programmes that won’t run on Linux.  Naturally I will have kept all my virtual machines intact in my /home backup!

I have to include Filezilla despite its small problems.

Another one I like is Alacarte.  which is a nice little program for tidying and editing the Menu.

I am a great fan of Audacity.  However, to record off the soundcard I also have to install pavucontrol.

Skype is another essential, and again all it’s settings and history can be restored from the /home backup.

Another programme that isn’t exactly essential but is just too good to miss is Google Earth.

For my browsing and mail I like to use the absolute latest versions of Firefox and Thunderbird and therefore use the nightly builds (called respectively Nightly and Earlybird).  As I have both installed directly in my /home directory they are automatically installed from backup.

All the above can be installed directly by using Synaptic Package Manager or Software Manager.  There is one little programme that I like which has to be manually installed.  That is Grub Customizer.  Installation of this requires a wee bit of Terminal typing.  The lines are –

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:danielrichter2007/grub-customizer
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install grub-customizer

The one feature of this little programme is that apart from being a good Grub editor, it can set Grub to load to the last used OS.  On a dual boot machine with Windows, this is very handy as for example Windows may need to reboot after an update.  In a normal Grub, Windows will try to reboot into Windows, but will actually end up in Linux, if that’s the default OS.

Occasionally I like to delve into the strange world of Twitter.  For this I use Tweetdeck which requires Adobe Air.  The latter is simple to install once you know how!

I’m sure there are one or two I have missed.  I’ll add them at a later date if necessary.

Any other suggestions?

Linux Mint 12 causing Filezilla to crash

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

When I recently installed Mint 12 Lisa, I discovered I had a problem with Filezilla.

My usual method of dragging a file from the remote pane to local caused Filzilla to crash spectacularly.

My good friend Kirk over in the States discovered the cause (Filezilla requires the wxWidgets library which apparently is missing in Mint 12) and the following is the fix……

In Terminal, run the following –

sudo apt-get install curl

Follow that up with –

curl http://apt.wxwidgets.org/key.asc | sudo apt-key add -

In Software Sources (or else in Software Manager –> Edit –> Software Sources) add the following –

deb http://apt.wxwidgets.org/ natty-wx main

and

deb-src http://apt.wxwidgets.org/ natty-wx main

Back in Terminal, run –

sudo apt-get update

Finally run –

sudo apt-get install python-wxgtk2.8 python-wxtools wx2.8-i18n

That’s all.  Filezilla should now run with no problems.

With thanks to wxpython.org and in particular, Kirk

Footnote:  When I originally published this, I accidentally omitted the instruction about “curl http://apt.wxwidgets.org/key.asc | sudo apt-key add -“.  The fix will work without this line but it will case an irritating popup about security keys each time an Update is done.  Sorry about that!

Linux Mint 12 (Lisa)

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A couple of weeks ago I installed Linux Mint 12 (Lisa) on this laptop.

It wasn’t without problems as the ATI video card seemed to object.  I tried the two drivers suggested by Mint and neither worked.  It either reverted to a basic GNOME desktop or else presented me with a screen where have the text was randomly missing or pop up windows had their contents screwed up.  In the end I removed all the drivers and for some reason it then worked perfectly.

Since then, I have installed it on two other machines.  The first of those again gave some problems [using a Nvidia card] but once again adding and then removing the drivers seemed to cure the problem.  The third machine [an ATI card] installed perfectly first time without touching the suggested drivers.

My original intention was to run Lisa using the MATE desktop which carries the old Mint Menu.  However, to my surprise I like the new GNOME 3 interface.  It took a couple of days to get used to but I am happy with it now, even though I still try to check the time at the bottom right corner of the screen.

There are a couple of very small niggles that annoy me.  One is the lack of any apparent method to customise the top and bottom bars.  For example, it would be nice to be able to increase their height to make the icons a little bigger and more visible.  There seems to be a general lack of right-click options which is frustrating at times as it means a trip around the houses to find some functions.

One feature I missed straight away was the ability to edit the menus.  In the end I installed Alacarte.  Problem solved.

Generally speaking though, I am happy with 12.  A tip of the cap to the crowd in Mint!