Shameless product endorsement No. 5

Behind the scenes in this little morality play I call My Blog, I had an itch that needed scratching (to paraphrase some of my American friends).

For personal reasons, and ones that are a little off-topic for this blog, I needed a portable music player. I could have relied on a portable CD player or perhaps even a small, small laptop, but the purpose didn’t warrant something on either of those scales. I just needed something for sound playback.

And being conscious of the limitations of proprietary codecs, I decided I wanted ogg support. Video playback is for YouTube weenies, so I don’t give a hoot about that. Of course, it had to be something Linux-friendly. Coolness didn’t really rate on the grand scale of things … or I guess I should say, coolness took a back seat to portability, function, price, Linux compatibility and freedom from proprietary formats.

And I’m proud to say that I did my homework this time, and came up with a music player that I am personally thrilled with. I had quite a few options available, but the winner for me was the iRiver T7 (which I see labeled as the ‘Volcano‘ elsewhere but was just a ‘T7′ here in Japan).

This satisfied all my requirements without skipping a beat.

• Price was exceptionally cheap, at less than US$50 locally. (Support your local electronics retailer.)
• It’s light as a feather. Some people require a gizmo to have some weight; I prefer one that doesn’t weigh me down.
• It plays ogg files.
• It’s no bigger than a pack of chewing gum.
• It has an easy-to-figure-out key arrangement, and a graphical display available in two dozen languages, give or take.
• It behaves like a mass storage device.
• Ubuntu found, configured, mounted and opened it in the time it took me to turn around and look for the instruction booklet.
• It plays ogg files.
• The on-drive arrangement for music and playlists and whatnot is just basically a series of folders named as such. That means its easy to figure out where things go.
• It has a lot of options that are adjustable through the player itself, so you don’t need some sort of bricking-prone firmware update.
• It plays ogg files.
• It recharges through the USB interface, and perhaps more importantly, it doesn’t require USB2.0 as a power source. So it likes my old computers.

And as bonuses, it has a radio and can record sound, although to be honest, I doubt I’ll ever look into those options. Radio maybe, but sound recording I just don’t see a need for. Oh, and it plays ogg files.

About the only negative comment I can make at this point is that the black model — which I preferred, just as a matter of aesthetics — has play and selection buttons that are only marked as a difference between the matte finish of the player and a mirrored finish of the button. In other words, in the low light you can’t really see them, and if you’re just feeling for the button, you can’t really feel them either.

However, that’s such a superficial point of appearance that I can say it wouldn’t keep me from buying one again. If I had been thinking ahead, I might have picked a color with a stronger contrast between the body and the buttons. (Sheesh, talk about digging for something bad to say. … )

And I suppose the storage space — I opted for 2Gb, because the price difference between 2Gb and 4Gb was a bit high for my taste — isn’t going to be enough for some people. (Insert shrugging gesture here.)

All that aside, in an age where everybody and their Mom has — and has to have — an iPod (yes, my Mom has one too), I’m rather proud to be swimming against the current. For a Linux-friendly, ogg-friendly low-cost music player, I am comfortable recommending this one. A gold smilie for the iRiver people:

A disturbance in the Force

After I downloaded an album from Jamendo this morning, I realized that my Awesome-based console system, which also doubles as the music machine for the house, lacks something appropriate for managing id3 tags in ogg files.

Ordinarily I rely on EasyTag, which is a great piece of software for renaming, clearing, arranging and polishing the tags in mp3 and ogg files. Jamendo has a habit of sometimes dumping unrelated strings into certain fields — putting the creative commons license into the “encoded by” field. I guess it could be the artist that does that though, so maybe Jamendo isn’t to blame.

Regardless, I make a habit of cleaning out the tags and adjusting the filenames when I download them, and realized I had no analogy for EasyTag at the console. I don’t see any kind of editing tools in MOC, but I don’t expect there to be either.

I’ll have to research this more in the future; I found a few options with a quick Scroogle search, but they all looked like backends. I want something … powerful, flexible, terse and efficient. Something … user-friendly.

A small achievement

It’s no world record, but I checked my rtorrent slave the other day, and the uptime is 41 days.

I know, I’ve seen the NetCraft (or whatever) pages with record-holder uptimes of five and six years (or whatever). I respect that, but I’m still a little proud of the beat-up laptop with the shattered screen that hasn’t been restarted since the end of January.

And since it’s been running rtorrent off and on for that entire time (occasionally I adjust the settings and have to restart it … that’s why I say “off and on”), plus fttps, and relaying a daily snapshot of the major Crux ports repositories, and serving as an in-house server and file transfer point … I consider that no small feat.

Especially for a machine that lived about five years of its life on top of a heap of garbage.

A zero-sum day

About a month after I wanted to try it, I finally broke out the K6-2 and installed Lowarch on it, with the goal of updating using proc‘s archlinux i586 project. Unfortunately, I don’t have much success to report, or at least not anything I hadn’t seen in the past.

I can install Lowarch in the same way I always have, and I can add the archlinux-i586 repositories. But updates fail because I’m missing groff, which is absent from there right now, and can’t build it because “the compiler cannot create executables.” And I can’t figure out why.

To compound that, I can install the xorg package and it falls into place fine, but won’t configure because of errors with libgcc.so.xx. And then I made the foolish guess that I might need to reboot to gain some ground. Boy, was that a mistake.

In any case, this is vaguely familiar to my previous efforts, which I would rate somewhere around 6 on a scale of 1 to 10 on the success-o-meter. All in all I seem to be turning around in circles without being able to find a solution, like a dog turning around before it can rest.

On the other hand, I did find the gr737-9×16-medieval.psfu console font, which made installing a little more interesting.

I have seen where other people have apparently had better luck, and there are even some who are joining the effort and contributing packages. So it might be that I have once again muddled things to a point of unusability, and their experiences are the norm. If I get any time in the near future I’ll give it another turn and keep an entirely default setup; maybe that will solve a few of these things. I just hope I don’t have to wait another month to try it.

A first time for everything

I prune the blogs on the right about once every month. I remove them if they get stale or fail to mention something Linux-related for a certain period of time. There’s no other criteria than that.

But I have removed one today — I won’t tell you what it is, or link to it in any way — because I have my doubts about the content. And when I say “doubts,” I mean doubts about its veracity.

I don’t think fudged content is ever much of an issue, unless you’re claiming to run Compiz on a Pentium. After all, who’s to say you didn’t?

But this is a prominent Linux proponent with a strong following, who writes a blog as part of a project I admire. But whose material, within the past few months, I find somehow incredible … in the dictionary sense of “not believable.”

It’s sometimes too easy as a blogger to spin a tale where you are the victim, surmounting ugliness and ignorance to become a kind of Linux hero … and in the process demonize a third party.

And offer nothing in the way of proof.

I’m not going to say anything after that. I’ve never un-linked to a site because I felt the material was somehow questionable, but there’s a first time for everything.

MOC: The cplay I always wanted

I am really scratching my head these days, trying to figure out how MOC escaped my attention for so long. I’ve tried more than my share of console music players, sometimes with success, and sometimes not. But I have absolutely no recollection, Your Honor, of ever seeing or trying MOC.

Which is a low down dirty shame. Just about every improvement to cplay I had ever hoped for — with absolutely no hope of ever seeing, really, since it has since fallen completely out of development (even the home page is gone) — is already in MOC.

I always thought cplay could do with a two-pane arrangement for jumping between file navigation and playlist. MOC has that.

I always thought cplay would benefit from more color than just white. MOC has a nice color scheme by default, and you can switch themes (themes?! In a console application?! ) at a keypress.

I always thought cplay could use a few more basic additions, like handling streaming audio, or some more complex readouts. And of course, MOC has a progress bar, timers, file type display and track time, plus a bitrate counter, track control display … too many to explain. Just look at it instead.

That’s it on the right in the center, in blue. Two-pane display, more counters and indicators than you can shake a stick at, and a pretty color scheme to boot. Streaming audio, multiple file type support, easy playlist management, fine and coarse volume controls. Everything.

I think I’m in love.

P.S.: Yes, I tried cmus, but I’m afraid MOC won out quite easily.

I have not been idle

I know you’re thinking a bigshot like me can afford to sit back and do nothing, and watch the links roll in on his/her blog. And you think that’s why I’ve been silent for the past day or so, with nothing except one accidental misposting to speak of in the last 24-plus hours.

Well, you’re mistaken. I’ve been hard at work, updating and adding to that pesky Software page. I decided that an overhaul was overdue, and overtook the project with a new perspective. I was overwhelmed at first, but now I’m overjoyed to be finished.

Enough of that!

A couple of things have been deleted from that now-ginormous page — XPad is probably the most notable omission — but a slew of terminal applications have been added. Most of them I have either mentioned before or given spotlight posts of their own, but there are one or two newcomers in that list.

That page will most likely get a few more updates in the days to come. Not that I have something up my sleeve, but I generally find mistakes or omissions in first 24 hours after I post something. And when a page of that size gets a healthy rewrite … well, there are lots of mistakes, just waiting to be corrected.

Windowmaker takes the back seat … again

I mentioned dvtm a day ago, extolling its amazing wonderfulness as a sort of tiling window manager for the console. At the same time I installed dvtm I also installed Windowmaker because I found a cool tutorial about making Windowmaker into something usable, and not quite so … gecch.

Windowmaker has always been the redheaded step-child of my Linux desktop experience. I’ve dabbled in a lot of other WMs — Openbox will always be my favorite; Fluxbox is okay, but somehow too over-the-top; FVWM held my interest for a while, when I found the Crystal version; and so forth — but Windowmaker has the ignominous label of being the one that was just too … unusual to grab my interest long enough to figure out how to make it look good.

Which is a shame, I guess. Some of the screenshots in the tutorial seem to transplant it out of 1995 and fast-forward it about 15 years and make it fairly attractive, especially to someone like me, who seems somehow obsessed with the obscure, lightweight side of the fence. And considering my personal experiences with old Sun machines and early desktop systems, 20-plus years ago, I should really pursue that one a little harder.

But the sad fact is, dvtm has captured my imagination now, and that means once again, Windowmaker seems to be sidelined. I spent an hour or so last night scraping the Intarnets for the kernel boot line code for a 16-bit, 1600×1200 framebuffer (it’s 0×346, if you’re wondering) just so I could get a screenshot with fbgrab. It’s sad, but the prospect of building a clean and attractive Windowmaker desktop isn’t as exciting as slimming down my Arch system to duck under 20Mb with dvtm.

And this is what it looks like, although I didn’t quite tuck under that 20Mb number I wanted. 23Mb is sufficient.

Thanks, Dawn.

Anyways, I suppose if I ever lose my enthusiasm for dvtm, I might start delving into Windowmaker properly. But the problem with back-burner projects like that is, their orbits are so far off center and so long in returning, that saying “maybe next time” unfortunately — usually — turns into “never.”

dvtm rocks my fscks

dvtm is something I’ve been wanting to try for a while now, but didn’t, mostly because I hadn’t built framebuffer support into my kernels in Crux. What a lousy reason. …

Anyway, I put Arch Linux on my Inspiron this evening, so I could tamper with a few new things without waiting for them to compile. (Yes, call me lazy, I know.) Point being, the first one I tried was dvtm with the smattering of console programs that I use on the Thinkpad.

What can I say? I’d show a screenshot, but everything is on the framebuffer. It looks a lot like a tiling window manager with a bunch of console programs running.

But that’s also the best part: It’s kind of like a tiling window manager with a bunch of console programs running. Except X is not, which means it’s faster, cleaner and doesn’t need a barrel full of doo-dads just to get the job done.

Memorywise it’s doing quite well: A default installation of Arch with dvtm shows a meager 20Mb of use with htop and elinks running, and the usual array of Arch stuff (like six virtual terminals). No doubt that could be trimmed if necessary.

I’d love to use this on one of my older machines, but they’re mostly 800×600 with framebuffer dimensions that are not much better. This works well on the Inspiron because the screen resolution is 1600×1200 native, so I can push Arch to run at 1280×1024, and get lots of space for junk.

I might give it a go on the K6-2, since it has a huge 1024×768 screen at its disposal. Yes, that and proc’s i586 Arch project should go nicely together. …

P.S.: If you give it a shot, check the key bindings in the config.h source file so you know what you’re doing when you start it. And yes, the magic happens with CTRL+g and then C. It took me a while to figure that out.

The Burial of the Dead

February is the cruellest month, sifting blogs out of the dead land. … Considering how many blogs have disappeared from the list at the right, February was a very cruel month.

Everybody must have gone to sleep or something, because a lot of those pages hadn’t been updated in months. I found some that hadn’t seen any love since December.

Shame on you.

How are you going to win the war against corporate monopolies and perceived obsolesence if you don’t yammer viciously into the Internet once in a while about your favorite free software?

What in the world could you have been doing during the dull, short month of February that kept you from chanting your love for Linux into the keyboard?

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. …

Drama aside, if you have a place you call home and want a link to it, you need only ask. Provided its updated with fair frequency, I’ll keep it in the list.

However, if you grow lazy … chop! chop! chop!