Entries from November 2007 ↓

When I first bought a digital camera I took a LOT of just general pictures, snapshots, of whatever caught my eye. For awhile I did a ‘pic of the day’ page on my site.

I don’t seem to take as many images these days, but I still enjoy just capturing stuff I see that I think is just visually interesting. My first serious camera was an HP, 2MP. Now I have a Kodak 8MP. I think I should start sharing images at least once in awhile again. Oh, I also grab stuff on the fly with the 1.3MP camera in my Centro. It is because of camera phones I don’t carry the main camera around as much as I used to.

Anyways, here’s one for today…

This is in a fountain in front of a condo building on one of our projects.

Ok, I’ve slowly been working on getting more stuff working with Ubuntu on my main system. Tonight, it’s the LG lightscribe DVD burner.

Just before dumping WinXP, I found the LightScribe official site, and had noticed they had Linux versions of a few things. So tonight I got back and end up on the Linux download page and find they have a Debian version of the system software package. I click to download… open it… and the package just kicks in.

When it’s done, I go back and grab the Simple Labeler, The -deb file again. I used the template labeler on WinXP, so we’ll see how different this is. Nothing was installed to my Applications menu. I browse to the opt folder, there’s a new lightscribeApplications folder, and in there SimpleLabeler. Start it up, and grab a CD to test it out with.

Simple Labeler does.. simple labels. A graphical ring around the hub area with a top and/or bottom area of text. After typing some jibberish in, selecting the paw prints graphic, it does a preview and I click the print button. Then after a couple minutes of media detecting… the tray pops out and it asks me to insert a compatible disk, label side down. Hmmm? ok. I pull the disk out, put it back in, close the tray and click OK. It starts chugging along… two minutes later it pops it out again… and whoa, it worked!

Next step, a quick Google search finds this page on the Ubuntu Forums - it explains a lot of what I just did, but has the added bonus of a link to a program called LaCiE LightScribe Labeler for Linux, or 4L - someone made a Deb package you can grab. It installed to my /usr folder. I haven’t tested it yet, but the look is very similar to the Template Labeler off the LightScribe site… except after looking at it for a few minutes, you can not add text to the label.

Basically, 4L seems to take an image and print that image only, as either a title band (narrow, a bit inside from the center hub), a content band (from hub out to the same layer as the title band), or full disk. If you want text, you have to put it in your image first. So… the search for something else will continue, but this will do for now.

Actually, the LightScribe site has some great graphics you can download (here and here), and I had already figured I could use them as templates for my own images if needed. So maybe for what little work I actually do with the labeling, this could work for now.

Ok, I have been looking and looking for a movie database program to help me keep track of my DVD collection. I have.. 250 or so. I know, a bit on the small side. Ideally, I have wanted one that is web based, but haven’t found one I really like yet. Originally I used a spreadsheet, then started using a windows based program that was ok - imported from IMDB and moodb.com - it has some quirks I don’t care for.

With the switch to Ubuntu, I looked at a few of the available options and decided to give Griffith a shot. So far… well, back up. First impression was good. You click the Add button, enter a title, search online if you want (default is IMDB, but there seems to be a couple dozen others to try), it brings up possible matches, you pick one and it fills in the blanks including downloading cover art. You can still tweek it from there checking a “seen it” box for example, choose medium, condition, and probably lots of other stuff I will probably never use.

It was going great for the first 40 or so entries.. then suddenly the add button stopped working.

Checked the forums and it seems to be a known - the application repository has 0.9.4 - the latest version is 0.9.5 - installed that and I’m back in business.

It also has a feature where you can enter in friends and such to keep track of who you borrow movies too… (and email them reminders when they forget to bring it back). You can view your movies by all, those lent out, those you haven’t seen, ask the program to suggest a movie you haven’t seen, and the standard backup and restore your data.

One thing I may check in to eventually is switching form SQLite it mySQL, maybe putting the DB online, and if I get around to learning enough create a simple list of my movies online. (This is so when I’m out shopping I can check to make sure I’m not buying a movie I already have a copy of… of course.)

So…. for now, this one does get a good recommendation. I’ll post again if I run in to any issues.

Griffith - A Film Collection Manager [berliOS.de]

I just joined the Ubuntu forums - I hope it becomes a great source of help in figuring some things out.

Some folks may read this (if anyone actually does) and wonder why I am needing so much help figuring this out when in general with Windows you just plug stuff in and it ‘works’. Well, one thing to keep in mind; plug-n-play on Windows is fairly new, and even then it is not perfect. And another, while there has been a lot of work going in to the various GUIs for Linux to make it easy to transition from Windows, it’s still different. I never used Win3.1, I went from using Geos as my GUI to Win95 - and at the time there was a bit of a learning curve. Even now I prefer the Win95 look/feel when using XP. Going to Ubuntu is going to have a learning curve as well. Not because it’s Ubuntu/Linux, but because it is different than what I am used to, different than what I’ve been using. In short, I am not yet familiar enough with it for it to be second nature like Windows become over the last 10+ years.

Ubuntu has done a good job at detecting most of what I’ve been throwing at it, but there are some areas I am going to have to spend some time on to get to do what I hope to do. I did a quick intro post on Ubuntu forums and included a few things there, and then decided I should log that stuff here so I can help myself keep track of things I want to accomplish. Thus, my Ubuntu To-Do;

Dual video card/monitors setup is not working. I have gone back and forth with a few different suggestions I’ve read about online, but not having much luck yet. One possible solution - I’m looking at a new computer that has HDMI and VGA outputs built in - I happen to have one VGA and one HDMI monitor.
I had a WinTV card that I think died on me… I’m not entirely sure tho. So rather than really figure it out, I did what any self-respecting geek would do, I used it as an excuse to buy a new one. I bought an ATI, dual input, HD ready card. It sucked on Windows. I didn’t like the interface, with only 512K ram, doing ANYTHING else at the same time just chocked it. And in the couple weeks I had it before jumping to Ubuntu, I never did figure out how to record anything. So far my search has turned up ideas on using my old card in Ubuntu, nothing on the new one.

I started using Ubuntu because I put it on an older box I want to put out in my living room, hopefully with a new video card that I can run to my TV and use it to watch recorded TV, maybe movies and other stuff on my TV, and also stream my MP3s to the stereo, etc. I also have an old touch-screen monitor recycled from an old Kodak photo kiosk. The ideal setup would be have a card that will close the display to monitor and TV, and allow me to use the touch screen to do all the navigation. Ultimate goal would then be have the monitor act as a digital photo frame when not in use.

Ok, so that’s the start of my to-do list… let’s see how it goes.

Ok, next on the list of porting of my stuff to Ubuntu - I have a fair number of recipes, and have stored them in a variety of ways over the years. Most of them are in a MasterCook file at this point. With a bit of digging around I found Gourmet - it had good reviews, so I decided to check it out.

Entering info is pretty easy, you type things in fairly naturally, and it recognizes quantity, unit and ingredient… and on many things it even knows what category to put the ingredient for your shopping list. If there’s special notes, put a semi-colon after the item and add this.

It’s supposed to be able to import a MasterCook file, but I’m wondering if my Version 5 isn’t too old, cause it choked on it. You’re supposed to be able to import from a website too. I tried one from foodtv.com and it choked on it, not recognizing where the recipe is. I tried my site at food.upmykilt.net - and it captures the text fine, then asks you to highlight portions from the page and assign them to title, ingredients, etc… but then it choked again.

So… I’m not sure on this one yet. There any alternatives out there yet? I’ll keep looking.

Gourmet Recipe Manager [SourceForge.net]

Ok, I never understood the concept of ’spare change’. But, what I tend to do is dump the pennies, nickels, dimes and sometimes quarters from my pocket in to a jar on a bookshelf at the end of each day. It’s about a half-gallon in size. It was full. I last emptied it two years ago (I had a note in there) just before I moved in to where I am now. This time it held a tad over $95.00 - that’s what? about a buck a week. Paid for an evening out and present for the friend we had dinner with last night.