I Gotcha Back, But You Best To Watch Yo Front!

Who the Cap Fit

Words of Wisdom!

Life

Enjoy. I will, maybe, be adding more posts later. 🙂

My New Ipod Nano 4g or wait….

Well its been a long time since I’ve actually posted anything so I decided to write something here to remind everyone that im still alive.

I recently purchased (lol yea this post was supposed to be posted like 8months ago haha) the iPod Nano 4g and have to say it really is amazing… I haven’t run into many problems with it though that the occasional soft reset can’t fix 😉 .. Specifically I tried listening to music while it was charging from AC Power and it froze my  ipod completely.  I ran to the Apple website and run the procedure to reset the device and all worked like new. The second problem I found was iTunes itself. This is possible the worst peace of bloatware I have ever used. This has been fixed with version 8.1 but its hard to not call it bloatware when foobar2000 is my media player of choice…  The only reason use it is to easliy sync audio and video with thumbnails with no hassle and also because they sell high quality music DRM free!!! Personaly I think I paid for what I got in quality since I have done so much with the nano and it still works great!  The only bad thing for the nano is it’s battery life. Using default settings I would get like 10-14 listening time (using aac audio encoded at q.40 or 128kbs) I tweaked it around and got about 16-24hours I think I may have charged it improperly the first time I got it… that may be why… but there is no way to replace it since battery is soldered on… (Bo00ooo0 on this APPLE!) so yea im stuck with it.  What tweaks did I use? Well I recommend turning down the backlight brightness all the way down and set the auto turn off screen function to 2 seconds. This dramatically improved battery life for me. You can dynamically change the brightness in movies which is a life saver since movies look dull when the screen brightness is turned all the way down….

Update: I just got the LG Incite, WinMO 6.1. which comes with a 3 1/2 mm jack and external speakers! I can now use my phone as  a music player 😀 no need for my Apple junk anymore 😀 hahaha jk its not junk but im  a windows junkie and the idea slightly being some apple fanboy keeps me awake at night! It is 10x easier to manage my music and apps on it as opposed to apple products since there is no need for an “app store” and using correct formats 😀 and specific apps… I can play aac, mp3, ogg (via nitrogen media player) and wma 😀 I encode my audio in mp3 format vbr setting 4 or 160 vbr encoding for nearly transparent audio encoding for me atleast.  I’m going to post something sepertly about my phone later on… so wait and see 🙂

Howto: Create AAC Audio for Second Generation Ipod Shuffle Without Itunes

I am here to describe how to create aac m4a’s for the ipoo second generation shuffle, without using Itunes, since there are no guides on the internet that explain how to do this properly.

Before we start we need several tools:

mp4creator.exe from the mpeg4iptools package
neroAacEnc_SSE.exe encoder from NeroDigitalAudio package (sse is about 4x faster on a P4)
Floola: Ipod Manager (or any other application that works as an app to put m4a’s on your ipod)
Ant Renamer (or any other batch renemer application)
Foobar2000 (for audio ripping (there are others that do this such as bonkenc, cdex, EAC make sure they support ripping and piping (to a aac encoder (neroaac preferably) as foobar2000 does)

Ripping the audio with foobar2000 is fairly easy just download the NeroDigitalAudio package from here http://www.nero.com/enu/nero-aac-codec.html, and either use the built in CD ripping function or convert existing songs using the convert option when right clicking on it and chose mp4 as the format and then save to location of choose. (I prefrebbly use audio stored in lossless formats such as flac since converting from lossy to lossy formats result in degraded qaulity). The problem (which I am asking the readers to try and solve for me) is that mp4creator does not accept wildcards… wtf… so I had to open up command prompt and (I used arrow keys to open up last typed command and changed to new track of course) used  mp4creator to switch the location of the mp4 metadata (to one that the ipod shuffle reconizes, using the -optimize switch manually… (ex. mp4creator -optimize blah.mp4)  manually (I dont know how to do it any other way sadly….)…

Well after you have “optimized” all you tracks (I personally made a special directory for the newly ripped mp4s. and placed mp4creator there and just operated within that directory to not make things more complicated then they already are), open up Ant Renamer and go to “actions” and then “change extension” and then type in “m4a” (no . or quotes). Now you go back to “files” and drag and drop all the songs that you fixed with mp4creator and are about to put on the ipod ,(it supports recursive directories) and hit “go”. Now that we are finished preparing the songs lets open up Floola. Begin by pressing “ctrl+alt+a”, which opens up the add file(s) function and drag all the songs onto that window and go 😉 (for some reason it doesn’t get metadata (specifically album and artist)…. who cares anyway its a shuffle lol). When you are finished, you can close floola and safely remove the ipod. Try listening to some new tunes… and voila 🙂 thats how to add nero encoded aac audio to your ipod.
*Please note I wrote “ipoo” on purpuse to show my feelings towards my ipod and not as a typo 😉

My Experience With Arch Linux

Well I am here today describing my experience with the Arch Linux distribution and I must say it was a unique one.
Usually I can tell if a like a distro within 2mins of using it, call me judgmental but thats me. I feel in love with Slax within those two minutes and then feel in love with Slackware 12 within two minutes again (v11 was another story 😉 ). I tried Debian 4.0 Stable, and hated it. The installer required me choose a mirror, I choose a mirror close to me, as a good user should do, and then the installer decided to download ALL the packages from the mirror filling the 5gigs of space, that I made on my virtual hard drive for Debian. After filling those five gigs with packages I didntn’t even choose, the installer told me that I ran out of space and exited. This was really aggravating to me because the Slackware DVD doesn’t even use 5gigs (Full Install). (To anwser those who say 5gigs is not enough space still, unlike most Linux fanatics (fanboys cough cough) I dont have the hardware to spare on testing (Please feel free to send me some). I test all my OS’s on VM’s (VirtualBox and Qemu)).

Sorry for that small rant, well yea Debian didn’t go “well” with me, I tried Fedora, thinking a “simple, noob friendly distro”(yes im a noob since I say noob…) I might like it, I am lazy). First thing I noticed there was no console installer (just like *buntu)… it required 256megs of RAM to install… Windows XP doesnt even require that much… I havent even dared tried *Suse since its in bed with Microsoft, not that theres anything wrong with Microsoft (lol) but I use linux to use linux not M$… I even tried openBSD :), gave me nightmares for several weeks (j/k), it was wonderful I have been meaning to use it more often, but becuase of GPL vs BSD based licenses I have been having personal conflicts between using both OS’s that are based on these totally different philosophies.

Sorry again for another rant but here we go into Arch Linux.
I decided to test it out using the latest STABLE release which was 2007.08-2. I started off creating my partitions with fdisk and then went to formating and choosing mount points, I choose to install all packages it was during the installation of these packages then I ran into my first of many problems. But first I wanted to see how well the partitioner including in the installer was compared to doing it manually with fisk (it is recommended to do it manually but then why even include a partitioner?). It failed miserably, It gave me option to adjust size, I choose 48megs for my /boot, 128megs for swap and then came to the predicament of either having a / and no /home or having both. the partitioner didn’t tell me how much space I had left… so I ended up choosing to use rest for /. and everything seemingly worked fine from here. I choose to install all packages on the CD (CORE) installer (I learned my lesson from FTP based installers). The packages installed fairly quickly. After installing the packages it created the initrds and let me choose to configure system scripts afterwards. This was something very strange as a Slackware user, becuase mostly everything is already working out of the box if not I fix it after booting into the new box (or chrooting into it after install it done). I then went in and edited /etc/resolvs.conf (if that is correct name) to use the the host as a DNS Server (as I do in Slack). I choose the root password here and default mirror to download software, and then proceeded to install Grub over Lilo becuase it was first option 🙂 ) I looked at the grub config (as part of install) and everything “looked” fine, I exited out of nano (default text editor). It then gave me option to install to a particular device, I choose /dev/sda (only one drive anyway, it showed me nonexistent drives…). The Arch Linux install had finished and I rebooted the VM. I was relieved to see grub becuase with my luck the VM would’ve excecuted rm -rf / on my actual host. I choose the default Archlinux boot option and began boot process. While watching ArchLinux boot up it reminded me of gparted-liveCD’s startup (which had simliar startup to Gentoo (not that I have used Gentoo since I hear portage is all fuxed up)) which has BSD like startup scripts (which Arch suprisingly has).

Suddenly I see big “FAILED” red message flair up, I panic and try to glance at the upper corner to catch the error. I see something along the terms of “it failed to mount / read only” some more error messages fly by. I tense up and worry what had failed. I finally ended up at the login screen. I was really disappointed to see my install fail. I logged in as root to see if I could fix these issues. I issued df to see if anything mounted and I appeared to be the initrd environment, due to the fact that everything was readonly and nothing that would be of importance was mounted)… I tried mounting my partitions: /, /boot, but nothing was there… Arch Linux failed me. I told myself, I have never heard a bad review from anyone about Arch, I am just crazy?. I reinstalled this time around I got all the way to the booting screen (error free) then it gave me a kernel stop error, I check grub and /dev/sda6 was were it was reading my kernel from which I knew was wrong since /boot was at /dev/sda1 I edited grub and rebooted.. I get a different stop error. It was getting late I was getting tired. I decided to undue what I edited and halt the system.
Day 2: Next Morning I power up the VM, everything works? “What the World” I deiced to not investigate previous problems, becuase if it works DONT CHANGE IT.

I then proceeded to get audio working, alsa-utils (and deps werent installed) I had to download them, I installed them via pacman, which did its job gracefully. I then issued lspci to see if arch saw my card. It was a soundblaster16 (I added this to qemu) and arch didnt see it… second abrupt failure. I began to get aggravated. Qemu has never failed me before… I blamed arch, I was patient, I tried another card and it worked… it was detected. I then decided to install XFCE as my default (lightweight) DM, I had to issue several commands with pacman to upgrade my sytem, else before it downloads the packages and fails with some cryptic message about “/.CHANGELOG” inconsistencies… (I already issued the command to upgrade the system the night before) but it seems to fail since it began to install the same packages all ever again (these little things tick off people like me who dont use these forms of package management). I then have to manually edit the packager manager configuration file to use my mirror of choose, at first it kind’ve aggravated me but then I thought to myself “stop b1ching this is Unix you were going to have to fireup vi(vim wasnt installed :,( ) and do some (heavy) editing sooner or later”. I finished editing the configuration file and issued to the command to install xfce4 and it seemed to work, WHAT A MIRACLE, after 30different tries I finally got it to work. XFCE successfully installed but X wasn’t installed along side as a DEP.

I noticed later on in the wiki article “Setting up a DM” and this must be were/how to setup X since all norm DMs depend on X. I had already halted system when I realized this…

Day 3. Now into my third day of trying/testing Arch out I booted up the VM, boot process started as usuall. I turn around for a sec and then turned back to notice my screen pitch black, as if loading uDEV initiates the startup of some mysterious screensaver. I have now decieded to pause my adventures of arch for several weeks ;). so Remember Folks PATIENCE IS A VIRTURE.

Conclusion:
Great ideology behind the distro, The package management system was supperb when working (it even reminded me of openBSD’s). I had to say I encountered one too many problems. I tried the docs and no help I decieded to proceed to its official IRC channel; #archlinux@irc.freenode.net (the following I say obviously does not apply to the WHOLE channel only to those who represented arch, that responded to me at that time). My first question about the detection of my seemingly nonexistent (virtual) soundblaster16 card, They kept on telling to modprobe the drivers which is (call me egotistic here) stupid if lspci/hwd does not even detect the device (they seemed to ignore me whenever I asked why isnt lspci even detecting it, asking if I added the switch proper switch to qemu for a soundcard… ). Then they started to ignore my question and laughed at the idea of someone using a sb16 card in 08) They even went on to blame qemu, something that I took to heart becuase Qemu has NEVER failed me (although crappy compiled versions have such as current 9.1 win32 release it does not properly detect windows pathways and the images must be in the same directory), even the idea of qemu being my problem sent shivers down my spine. I decieded to choose another card (asking input from the channel on which since I had several options and hardware isn’t my strong point). They told me to use the ENSONIQ card, it worked that problem was solved or avoided depends on how you look at it).

My second question there was dealing with installing xfce and the error I was gettiing cryptic error about conflicting changelogs. No one on the channel (at the time) had seen the error before. I pastebined the whole output of pacman using tee+links. I was told to issue several different switches, (flushing the pacman cashe, synchronize with server, and several more) to fix the problem. After about 20different tries, I got it to work (using all the different combinations I was told to use, I was told to issue several different switches, (flushing the pacman cashe, synchronize with server, and several more) Its official freenode irc channel was not unhelpful, but questionable at times, telling me to stop using the stable and jump to the latest RC to fix my problems, stating that it was more stable then the actual 2007 release. This (to me atleast) sounded ridiculous; how is a distro going to have a release candidate that is more stable then its latest release? Overall Arch acted “funny” (from grub working from wrong devices, my screen saver during startup, pacman upgrading itself, pacman reinstalling system updates that where already installed) it got aggravating.

This distro just brings backs (bad) memories of actually trying Linux distros such as with Debian and Fedora, only reinstating my idea that all Linux distros have problems that make them imperfect, just not Slackware (j/k 🙂 ).

Posting from Slackware 12.1, this is nycjv321 please feel free to leave comments.
[my grammer isn’t the best, just ignore those simple/stupid mistakes]
This doc was created/edited from vi(m)
Have a Wonderful Day!

***UPDATE

I recentely tried the RC and installed X (lol…) and everything worked perfectly 😀 (I Highly recommend this distro if you have to patience)

Slackware 12.1 Released :D

From the homepage

” Well folks, it’s that time to announce a new stable Slackware release again. So, without further ado, announcing Slackware version 12.1! Since we’ve moved to supporting the 2.6 kernel series exclusively (and fine-tuned the system to get the most out of it), we feel that Slackware 12.1 has many improvements over our last release (Slackware 12.0) and is a must-have upgrade for any Slackware user.”

So as the version 12 release wasn’t enough 12.1 is now here. Currently, I am torrenting (using Halite under Win32 environment) it right now. I am going to install under a VM and post about my experience about it here maybe even write a cheesy review for it, and then possibly switch back to *nix after these past several months with XP. I am excited that it includes that latest kernel which has MUCH better support for my cr@ppy HP Chipset, my fingers are crossed for much improvement. As for the latest KDE (3.x.x) release I really could care less becuase I found that 3.5.7 was stable beyond relief :). If any of you want to know how to make packages for Slackware I would first check out http://slackbuilds.org/

and If you are a lazy bum like myself I would recommend you check out http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/amigolinux/download/src2pkg/,

This is an application that can convert source archives with custom switches and all (usually gunzipped tarballs) to Slackware packages (gunnzipped tarrballs 😉 just different extension )
Remember Folks: Slackware is the most UNIX-like Linux distro, and no its not UNIX, no where near it! but it keeps the KISS principle to heart; something that almost no other mainstream distro (of importance at least 🙂 ) does. As a user you should expect stability as well as speed and last but not least, simplicity, something that all us slackers enjoy.

If you are looking for UNIX I would check out the openBSD project or FreeBSD (which is what is considered the modern day UNIX)

(EXCUSE MY SPELLING AND GRAMMER)

Windows and Malware…

Linux Fanboys everywhere always boast that “Windozes” is infested with malware or can get infested just by being connected to the internet while Linux and Mac OSX do not and can not get infected with malware. In this post I would like to put out some obvious facts about this issue. (if you are a computer tech this post is really redundant to read so don’t unless you feel obliged to)

If we actually look at the amount of users on Windows, Linux, and Macs, we all agree that Windows OS’s own at least 90%percent of the desktop market, sorry tux and finder! This is where we as users need to think as writers of malicious code, if 9 out of every ten (normal) people use a computer running a Windows OS and you as an programmer with the intent to infect someones computer with malicous code, who would you go for? We have two choices (get notepad open) we can either go for the common Linux Maverick (like myself) who actually knows a thing or two about computers or we have the average Windows user who only wants to browse the web check email maybe web chat with family friends. Its really obvious who to aim for this is the sole reason for Windows having more malware on it. Lets not forget we also can write malicious code for that Mac Hippie but he may not notice since he will be to blazed from that bong so there is no point in even bothering. 🙂

I know for a fact that are Linux-fanboys that think that linux is some almighty invinsible OS that is “incapable” to get infected with Malware, these people need to get poisoned for thinking such thoughts. Linux is a kernel it runs software (in a fashion that is somewhat similar to the fashion that the Windows NT kernel runs applications) A malicious program is simply code that is executed under this kernel, and is almost always written in the same fashion as a non-malicious program only (most of the time) with different intent. So speaking in a solemnly technical aspect it is possible to write malicious code for Linux. Who would’ve thought! There are Viruses out in the real world for Linux but there are to few to write about in this post 🙂 We can just look at the way applications are executed under Windows vs Linux, under Linux a file isnt executable (able to be ran) by default the user would have to give it that permission, under Windows anything can be ran, even from email software such as Outlook, (im not even going to discuss the problems with that system) Going back to the idea of number of targets applies here as well. Linux and Mac OS both give some distinction between the administrator of the computer and normal user, (for Linux the administrator is known as root, while from what I understand Mac OSX’s administrator account is disabled by default) Windows on the other hand has not for several years, Vista now alleviates this problem. We can see under Windows XP how most users run as administrator every day and don’t even realize it. Imagine any piece of software ran under XP is give full access to your machine! Sounds scary right? The best thing to do is run as a restricted user or run as a careful user 🙂 Linux is by default more secure out of the box and it has been for several years, while Window OS’s on the other hand have not. Remember windows 98? if you ever forgot the password to the machine all you had to do was press cancel and you got full access! The only thing needed to infiltrate a machine is access, if there is a chance it will be taken.

Some final thoughts, this article become more of a comparison of Linux and Windows, please forgive me for that. I will probably go more in depth with this article on a later date but this is just some thought I thought I would put out there for now peace out

Mac or PC you decide :)

This is a very funny video, I found on youtube several months back. So go get some popcorn and enjoy :), (btw just to kill the suspense PC wins at the end)
Thank my friend MegaMasterX9087 for this link

Hello world!

Welcome to nycjv321.WordPress.com. This is my first post I hope you enjoy it there will be many more to come (hopefully) 🙂