Random Renegade Bits » linux

CherryPad America

epb — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 04:26:37 +0000

I got my CherryPad America toward the end of October. It’s a low-end tablet, comparable to the ones you can now find at WalMart and KMart. I bought mine primarily to function as an e-reader, and quickly found that it had impressive video codec support and could do more than I was expecting out of such a cheap device. (When I bought it, it was one of the cheapest on the market.)

I was order number 58, so some things are probably different now. I believe the factory language is now English instead of Chinese for instance.

Some initial thoughts:

Good codec support (Too bad the Android video player doesn’t support internal mkv subtitles. You need third party software from the market for that.)
Root access!
Android Market is a pain to get (and keep) working.
Resistive Screen takes some getting used to
Speakers are less than impressive, but sounds pretty decent with headphones or externally attached speakers.
Fits in one hand, good for reading.
Gah, why is JavaScript not on by default?
I like the aluminum case.
Uses my iPod’s docking cable.
A little slow sometimes, depends on the task.

Getting the Android Marketplace to function well has been an uphill battle, and honestly, the biggest problem I’ve run into. It will work for a bit and then stop working entirely. Actually, hasn’t worked for a week for me now. *sigh* I think I’ll email and ask about that.

If you’re looking for a simple music-playing, video-playing tablet, that you can use for reading and browsing the Internet. It’s perfectly capable of all that. I even use it to order parts off NewEgg and such. Once you get it set up to your liking and get used to the resistive screen, it’s nice, if a little slow. Verdict is that I like it, but am hesitant to recommend buying it because of the issues I’ve had with the Android Market.

Rythmbox Sync to USB Device

epb — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 20:10:35 +0000

I have a sizable collection of music, so sizable in fact that I can’t store the full collection on any portal media. Since I only use Windows to play video games, I use Rhythmbox to manage my music and found myself in need of a way to sync to a USB thumbdrive. Now, the issue with this is that, by default, Rhythmbox doesn’t treat just any USB mass-storage device as an audio player, so I stumbled upon a post titled “Rhythmbox and USB mass storage sync” dealing with a similar problem.

All you need to do is create a file called “.is_audio_player” and add some content to it that’s something like this:

audio_folders=music/
folder_depth=1

…and then scan removable media. (Should be in the file menu) One caveat you should be aware of is that I’m not sure if Rhythmbox will do any audio file conversion for you during the sync to your device. But for moving a play list from one computer to another, this is plenty fine for me.

SVG to online coloring-sheet SWF

epb — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 02:11:07 +0000

You can do quite a bit of unorthodox stuff with PHP. If you head over to epbsoft.com, you’ll find several flash coloring sheets I made with PHP, not Flash. (Sort of anyway.) I make them by first creating specially formatted SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) files and feeding them to a PHP script that writes ActionScript files that are then compiled by MotionTwin ActionScript compiler. As far as capabilities, it’s not all that capable. I have to jump through a couple of hoops to make an SVG that my ActionScript generator can actually parse properly, but when it works, I like the results.

svg-to-coloring.php.zip <– The source code is available if you want to take a look at how it works.

MongoDB looks Interesting

epb — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:12:02 +0000

I might take a look at installing MongoDB on my server. I like the idea of a document-driven, NoSQL database, especially after working with relational SQL databases for years, and MongoDB looks interesting. You can read more about it in Developing scalable PHP Applications using Mongo DB. What caught my interest is how flexible using it appears to be from the linked article. Plus, using something other than a SQL database could be a nice change of pace. I HATE adding fields to a SQL database table, and it looks nearly painless in these examples.

Another thing that seemed as though it were worth looking into is it’s apparently designed with storing whole files in mind. I’ve stored files in MySQL databases before, but MySQL really isn’t designed with that in mind, but at the same time, if I’m going to be making a lot of small binary files, I don’t like them cluttering up my directories.

Mounting a VHD in Linux

epb — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 23:52:12 +0000

Let’s say you have a VHD file you’d like to access while in Linux without attaching it to a Virtual Machine. There are many reasons you might like to do this, but it’s not immediately obvious how to do so with Linux.

There are two ways I know of:

You can use vmware-mount provided by VMWare Server. I don’t actually like this method because VMWare Server is huge and I don’t use VMWare. However, if you do, take a gander at this: http://www.vmware.com/support/reference/linux/loopback_linux.html

The method I ultimately went with was vdfuse since I use VirtualBox. It allows you to mount any disk image supported by VirtualBox. Basically, if you follow the instructions at that the vdfuse forum link I just provided, you can mount the VHD to a mount point in your filesystem. Now, this alone doesn’t yet give you access to your files yet. It provides the partitions as standard files (and a file for the entire disk as well). The partitions are named Partition1, Partition2, etc. You can then mount the partition you want as a loopback device.