Posts

This is just a quick note to remind myself how I did this. Hypercam2 is a good, free, video recorder that can cope with recording game videos. It’s freely available from http://www.hyperionics.com/hc/downloads.asp - just make sure when you install it you don’t tick on the spyware toolbar installation options. My motherboard has a 5.1 digital soundcard built in. However the only way I can record off the soundcard is to plug in a standard audio cable from the speaker out (green) to the microphone in (orange). ...

I read this remarkable post on a public mailing list I subscribe to. I thought it was such a great insight into running a music label, that I just had to post it here. It discusses issues facing modern music, such as DRM, DMCA, and other ways of making (or losing) money. Fascinating. Here it is: I work for a (fairly small) indie label - from witnessing this model in action I feel I have to stick up for the label given that I see the model working (or sometimes not so well) on a daily basis! Where we’ve done deals with artists in the past, they’ve almost always been a 50/50 arrangement - the artist receives 50% of net royalties. Where a label fronts recording costs, these can easily become £6-10,000 for an album session. Even an EP session can be upwards of £1,500 although these figures are a little pessimistic (though not unrealistic). (We actually designed, built and owned studios for ten years until 2001 but the project haemorrhaged money.) ...

I installed Windows 7 after I had installed Ubuntu 10.4. Windows 7 overwrote the Linux bootloader “grub” on my master boot record. Therefore I had to restore it. I used the Ubuntu 10.4 LiveCD to start up a live version of Ubuntu. While under the LiveCD, I then restored the Grub bootloader by chrooting into my old install, using the linux command line. This is a fairly complex thing to do, and so I recommend you use this approach only if you’re are confident with the linux command line: ...

I have a 2006/2007 Core 2 Duo 2.6ghz white macbook, that I use regularly for internet, music, watching films, itunes and integration with my iPhone. I wanted to turn my desktop PC into a ‘work only’ Ubuntu Linux machine, so that I don’t get distracted when I’m supposed to be doing something else. But I still have a lot of PC games that I wanted to play on the Macbook, so I decided to try and setup a windows environment to play games on using Bootcamp 2.0 to create a dual-boot OSX/Windows 7 configuration. ...

I’m currently watching Persepolis, the 2008 animated film about a tomboy anarchist growing up in Iran. I’m watching this on my new iPhone 3GS, and the picture and audio quality is very good. Here’s what I used to convert my newly bought Persepolis DVD, for watching on the iPhone. 1x Macbook (but you can use any intel mac) 1x iTunes 1x RipIt - Commercial Mac DVD Ripper (rips up to 10 DVDs on the free trial, $20 after) 1x Handbrake 32 - Freely available transcoder 1x VLC 32 - Freely available media player 1x DVD ...

Lately I’ve been thinking about making a Flash game or application. Although I haven’t made one yet, my current understanding is that most projects of this type require a lot of artwork. I found this article, and was impressed at the quality and the resources mentioned: http://freelanceflashgames.com/news/2009/03/25/the-big-guide-to-hiring-an-artist/

This is something that was quite annoying today, as I was struggling to use Wordpress 2.9.2 to align some pictures in the HTML mode of editing a page, on a client’s website. It turns out that Wordpress was adding BR tags sometimes when I hit return.. and sometimes not. The annoying thing was, although the BRs were outputted in the resultant Wordpress site, the BRs were not visible in the Wordpress HTML edit mode itself.. meaning they were invisible and undetectable until I viewed the resultant website source and finally figured it out. ...

A forkbomb is a program or script that continually creates new copies of itself, that create new copies of themselves. It’s usually a function that calls itself, and each time that function is called, it creates a new process to run the same function. You end up with thousands of processes, all creating processes themselves, with an exponential growth. Soon it takes up all the resources of your server, and prevents anything else running on it. ...

Linux command-line editors such as nano and vim often, by default, create backup files with the prefix of “”. I.e, if I created a file called /home/david/myfile, then nano would create a backup in /home/david/myfile. Sometimes it doesn’t delete them either, so you’re left with a bunch of backup files all over the place, especially if you’re editing a lot on a directory tree full of source code. Those stray backup files make directory listings confusing, and also add unnecessary weight to the commits on source control systems such as svn, cvs, git.. etc. If you’re working on a programming team with other people, then it causes further problems and confusion, because person A’s editor can accidentally load person B’s backup file.. etc etc. Nightmare. ...

Forget the wonderful windows progress bar, and imagine I’m in the world of command-line Linux, and I want to copy a 484MB file, called VMware-server-2.0.2-203138.i386.tar.gz, from my home directory to a remote server. But I want to figure out how long it’s going to take. 1. First I can run a “du -m” command to get the total MB size of the original file: du -m /home/david/VMware-server-2.0.2-203138.i386.tar.gz I.e: david@believe:~$ du -m VMware-server-2.0.2-203138.i386.tar.gz 484 VMware-server-2.0.2-203138.i386.tar.gz ...