Boo
Posted by voice | Filed under Stuff
Yes, this blog still exists and yes I still look it over every once in a while, just felt like letting anyone who sees the blog know this.
A Little Cleanup
Posted by voice | Filed under Stuff
Yeah, you may have noticed a few post went disappearing, namely the ones revolving around a incident last year in the Sonic Community that I was a part of. Needless to say I’ve come to realize that said posts were rather pointless and were childish in nature, more so than some of my other rants. So I made the decision that since I’ve basically come to the point were I just don’t care about it anymore I’ve gone ahead and removed related posts and putting it behind me.
Yet Another ATCS Monitor Experiment
Posted by voice | Filed under Stuff, Techie
Interested by a website left in a comment in a previous posting about ATCS Monitor I decided to see if I could get sort of the same thing going myself. While the site in the comment apparently used VBScript, and no longer works, I decided to go the ghetto way of doing things, running the program on a server and having Irfanview take a screenshot of it every 45 seconds. The end result is this, naturally it looks pretty rough due to my method of acquiring the screenshot but I myself am not a VB programmer, nor a .NET programmer.
Oh, in case you’re wondering, the UP Geneva Subdivision stretches from Clinton, IA to Chicago and is the UP mainline that runs through Rochelle, IL.
It is now down.
This will probably not be coming back anytime soon, or at least not until ATCSMonitor can run on Wine without a issue. Its become too much of a time consuming hassle to get Windows working for such a small item. Sorry.
Ubuntu 9.10
Posted by voice | Filed under Techie
Is almost here…
ATCS Monitor on the iPhone
Posted by voice | Filed under Techie
Recently I became the owner of a iPhone, I know, right now AT&T and Apple are the devil, I’ll see how things pan out in a year or two. However I have to say I have been enjoying the fact that I actually use the phone more often then I thought I would, especially for organizing and whatnot, the POS freebie phone I had before had problems doing this. Anyways, I happen to like trains and watching trains, the term for this being “Railfan”, and as such knowing where the trains are is usually a plus.
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Cheesy Ad for RSN Forums
Posted by voice | Filed under RSN2.O
Yup, we infact do have a message board and as per usual it needs moar activity. Feel free to join in on the conversations taking place there. So of course the first question I’m sure is on your minds is “why the fuck should I join your forums?” I got no answer to that other than its not strictly a sonic message board, theres already enough of them, albeit sonic’s face is attached to it. I’m working on expanding the forum’s coverage and of course more activity on the forums would help me to achieve that goal. It also helps in that I’m one of the few administrators in the Sonic Community that isn’t a complete egotistical prick, just saying.
Seeqpod Is Gone, Now What?
Posted by voice | Filed under Techie
So if you’re like me you were pretty pissed off when Seeqpod shutdown back in April. If you don’t know what happened long story short is that the RIAA went ahead and sued the little man into oblivion because they couldn’t play ball with the big boys like Google or Yahoo, seems to be a reoccuring theme with the RIAA.
That doesn’t mean we’re out of luck just yet though, you see, because all browsers download static content to your computer in the form of a Cache File. While this wont work for streaming solutions that use the Flash Streaming system, like LaunchCAST (if thats still up), it does work for a majority of other sites. How do you retrieve this treasure-trove of goodness? Well at least on Linux its very very easy…almost too easy. Assuming you use Gnome and Firefox…
- First off, you’re going to want to open up your home directory, on Gnome this is under Places.
- Once you open that you’re going to need to find Mozilla’s hidden directory where they store all of their stuff, hit Ctrl+H to expose the hidden directories and go on ahead from there.
- Go into the ‘firefox’ directory, this will be different almost every time you clear out your Cache, but you’re looking for a folder that looks like ’32rnp081.default’ and clicking on it.
- One more folder to go, click on ‘Cache’ by now your pwd should be /home/youraccount/.mozilla/firefox/.default/Cache.
Once there you’ll find a bunch of crap but at least on my system music is identified with a musical note icon, making identification a lot easier for me. Drag the file to the desktop, append .mp3, and there you go, you’ve just obtained a song for free from the internet. A word of caution however, since I used the google method to find mp3s, you’ll be hit up with a lot of false results and pornographic ads but thats all part of the game, you’ll also find that the quality of the mp3s is rather varied.
All of this being said, I cannot stress this enough, you need to support the bands you love, find some way to give your money to the band (I try to avoid giving to the record companies because they tend to take 90% of the profits anyways, whos the thief now RIAA?) be it either going to live shows our purchasing gear from the band’s website. Support the artists, not the companies that do absolutely nothing other than record songs, which can be done on a standard computer by the way.
ACEN 2009
Posted by voice | Filed under Stuff
Been a while since I did a update so I guess its time for another. I just recently arrived home from a weekend at a Anime convention held annually in the area named Anime Central, ACEN for short. Not much really to say other than I had a fun time and actually managed to escape with more than a dollar in cash. Heres some picture highlights from the weekend:
There are plenty more available here
Sega Genesis Tribute Album
Posted by voice | Filed under Stuff
Not really sure how long this has been out, and since I dont keep in the loop with the sonic community anymore I only just found out about this. Its a interesting compliation of music by fans of Genesis video games and worth a listen if you feel like you need to waste some time. Heres a short description from the website
This is a tribute to the runner up of the 16-Bit console war, the Sega Genesis (or Mega Drive). This is a collection of 39 tracks, new and old, for a console constantly considered full of suck. Does this album prove otherwise!? I like to think so.
They have the album available for download on their site but I have also opted to mirror the zip file on my server, you can download it by clicking the cover art below.
LOSER: A Sega Genesis Tribute
A Big FU to Windows Advocates
Posted by voice | Filed under Rant, Techie
So yeah, I love how I constantly hear how Windows is superior to Linux because “it just works”. Well you know what, the past 5 hours or so I’ve found that to be a complete bold-faced lie. My sister got a Toshiba Satellite A215-S7422 laptop from BestBuy a while back and has spent that time dealing with Windows Vista Home Premium edition. First off, let me state how horrible the cooling is on this laptop, I installed speedfan because it felt like the laptop could cook an egg and I was proven right, Windows Vista just idling was making the laptop a toasty 81C, holy crap. My sister had asked repeatedly in the past if I could just remove Vista and install XP on it, and until recently I had refused because Windows as it is is a pain in the ass to install.
Eventually I cave in and tell her I’ll remove Vista from it, however she had also asked about installing Ubuntu, out of curiosity. I decided I’d go ahead and install Ubuntu because she doesn’t do PC gaming anyways and I figure if she doesn’t like it I can just install XP. Her laptop is running a AMD Turion64 X2 processor so my natural move is to grab the amd64 copy of Ubuntu 8.10. I had had problems in the past with the 64bit version of Ubuntu, mainly getting certian programs to run, but I was very surprised when I installed it, unlike the previous attempt on my Dell laptop this installed fairly quickly and with no problems. The next step most Linux users are familiar with is determining what works and what doesn’t and then finding the appropriate drivers for those devices; however, everything worked out of the box, including the ATI graphics, the only issue was finding the 64bit version of applications I use and know she’d be using. All in all I had her laptop setup and ready to go in about 1 1/2 hours, not too shabby considering installing the standard 32bit version of Windows XP usually takes about 3 hours if you dont have the drivers or SP3 already downloaded.
Initially my sister tells me, when I give her the laptop back, that she was joking about installing Ubuntu, however I told her twice that I was going to install Ubuntu and heard no objections, but she decided to give Ubuntu a try, then she asks me if I can dual-boot her laptop like I have done with my desktop and laptop many many times before, its very simple for me to do now. However, again since its a 64bit cpu I figure I’ll install Windows XP 64bit Edition. Things begin to degrade quickly when I start up the installer, the old dos-looking installer bit, not the graphical setup part. About 70% into installing the laptop suddenly shuts off, I figure its a battery or loose conection, so I fix them and try it again, 21% this time before the laptop shuts off. Its about then I notice that the cooling-fan part of the laptop is barely touchable its so hot, the laptop had been shutting off due to overheating. This is the first time I’ve ever had to deal with a piece of hardware that overheats from just installing a OS, and this didn’t happen to me when I was installing Ubuntu.
The problem was eventually solved when I took the laptop out into the garage, a cool 23F, and let it to install in there which surprisingly worked. Next step, install drivers, easier said then done and this is the point where I gave up. Google searching for 64bit drivers over a span of 3 hours turned up only one driver that actually worked, the ATI video driver, everything else hasn’t worked or for some reason is hosted on a shitty filehosting site called rapidshare, aka rapidshit. At this point I’ve decided I’m going to try Windows XP 32bit but not until tomorrow, I don’t wish to spend my whole evening working with the black hole that is Windows.
