1 Jan 2007 (updated 1 Jan 2007 at 17:59 UTC)
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My Frontier Labs "NEXBlack"
Ogg player finally arrived from
New York.
(This is the one
that runs 30+ hours (yes) on 2 NiMH AAs, and has no memory
built in, but
has a nice CF slot.) It's a substantial chunk of sturdy
black plastic.
I got a 2G CF card with it, now 87% full. The sound
quality (of my 250kbps Vorbis files) is good. The earbuds are
demonaically uncomfortable, and don't stay in, but they're loud.
As noted by others, it freezes up
(needs batteries popped just to turn it off) when it sees an
.m3u file
describing Ogg files. The UI is annoying, but I doubt other
players are any better.
The worst
omission is that it won't sort by file date; it insists on
alphabetizing, so I'll have to rename the files in album
order with
numeric prefixes. That, and when you turn it off and back
on it doesn't
remember where it was. I like it, but I'd like it better if
Rockbox was on it.
I finally got my brother's laptop working OK for him
under Ubuntu Edgy,
but it wasn't pretty. I had to delete (ok, rename) the
drivers for
his Marvell ethernet so that the ipw2200 would have a stable
interface
name across boots and ACPI suspends. (Iftab is now completely
useless,
as is "mapping".) Wpa_supplicant wasn't too hard to get
working:
the suggested four-line /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf did the
job. The
dpkg really should install it by default. To keep Flash
content from
crashing firefox
I had to add a line "export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1" to the
/usr/bin/firefox script. Other firefox stuff was fixed by
"dpkg --purge"-ing firefox and everything related, and
re-installing
them, but now it won't display PDFs in attachments from
squirrelmail
without an intermediate "save" step. The SD flash slot now
has a
driver, but still doesn't work.
To my complete surprise I have found myself obliged to design
a cryptographic algorithm. Not a cipher, heaven forfend, but a
feedback mode and envelope scheme. The idea is that when
sending
UDP-grams, without decent crypto anybody can disrupt your
session
from any cyber-cafe from here to Kamchatka. If you're
encrypting
anyway, it's wasteful to *also* compute a MAC, when you can
use a
chaining encryption mode to do both jobs at once at the cost
of only
an extra XOR.
By blacklisting ethernet, wireless, and audio driver
modules, and
also all the programs that hold them open (xmms, gamix, etc.),
I got swsuspend2 waking my Dell D620 laptop up without bollixing
audio and wireless networking. I also got the Dell driving
a Pioneer
plasma TV, but so far not without it cutting off half the
image. Still no success with the Broadcom wireless card
(which Dell calls a 1390), despite all lwfinger's efforts,
but my orinoco card works OK now.
Last weekend I made a real egg nog for the first time:
separate four
eggs, whip the yolks to within an inch of their lives, add a
half
cup each of brandy and cream and four tbsp sugar, and whip
some more.
Whip the whites until stiff, and fold them in, and add some
cinnamon and nutmeg. It makes a surprising amount of
something unlike anything you can find in cartons.
Congratulations to njs & crew on releasing Monotone 0.32.
So, Happy New Year, everybody. Time for another donation
to Darren Naish.