Gyllenbuste's Blog

Canon HF-200 doesn’t work with Class 10 SD cards

gyllenbuste — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 15:57:13 +0000

I tried a Sandisk Class 10 8Gb card in my Canon HF-200 videocamera, but it didn’t allow me to record in the highest settings. a Class 6 card works fine. Seems to be a problem that Canon doesn’t want to fix it! See more info here.

No wonder I stick to Nikon when it comes to (D)SLRs!

zsh and vi mode — suboptimal defaults, but …

gyllenbuste — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 15:03:22 +0000

After some more zsh testing I have found out that the default vi mode is sub-optimal. However, there is a vi mode and one can modify the keybindings and add further functionality! So currently right hand is testing/editing setup and left hand is googling for tips and tricks.

I’ll post my setup when I’m content with it. Any hints much welcomed

bash is dead — long live zsh

gyllenbuste — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 14:11:25 +0000

Finally I did the switch from bash. I never bothered before to look at another shell than the default bash that I have used since 1995. An internet search lead me mysteriously to zsh and it’s advantages. The page was good enough for me to give zsh a try and now after some hours of testing it is the default shell for me.

As I’m still learning zsh I cannot recommend any special settings, but I’ll get back to that later. Only thing I can say is give it a try! The immidiate benifite is the completion improvements.

mpd — THE music player!

gyllenbuste — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 09:17:30 +0000

After using quodlibet for some time and lately exaile, I finally tried out the much talked about mpd – Music Player Daemon. It took only a short time to change the config slightly to fit my needs and mpd was working. Next was to get the mpc and ncmpcpp clients and test it out. There are of course GUI clients for mpd, but I wanted something lighweight, simple and doing the job.

o my huge surprise mpd only used 4-6% CPU when playing music. Exaile and quodlibet typically uses 50-60% CPU on my Asus Eee 1000H. That is a huge difference and should be very beneficial in terms of power saving.

Another huge bonus is the gapless playing! I’m a huge radioplay fan so I listen to it a lot. It has always been annoying having to suffer the 2-3 seconds pauses in the middle of conversations when tracks changes. Not anymore though!

mpd together with mpc and ncmpcpp (for the added features over ncmpc) are now my music player of choice.

Update: After using mpd for some time I understood why the CPU usage dropped from 50-60% to 5-6%. It is because the default setup of mpd does not use dmix so that other applictions can also play sounds at the same time as mpd. But I’d rather have the lower CPU usage than two programs playing music at the same time.

Useful programs

gyllenbuste — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 10:21:08 +0000

I’m trying to make a list over the programs I find useful and that I need to have installed on my PCs apart from obvious things like firefox, some xterminal etc..

List so far as i can remember.

vim & gvim — the text editor
dwm or xfce4 — window manager / desktop environment. Depending on computer I use both.
devtodo — todo list
mercurial — distributed version control system
python — programming language
dmenu — menu
apcalc — calculations
units — unit conversion
claws-mail or sylpheed — email
xdotool — interaction to X
pidgin or mcabber — IM
abcde — Put my CDs on my D2 and computer
easytag or exfalso — get the tags right
xchat or irssi – IRC
wyrd — calendar (looking for alternative though)
vlc — Video player
mpd and ncmpcpp (used to be exaile or quodlibet) — Music player
hatta — wiki

New gdm not suited for xfce4 and xubuntu

gyllenbuste — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:11:38 +0000

The new gdm used in Karmic (x)ubuntu is a nightmare. It uses extremely long time to load and as xfce4 uses it’s own wm there is no benefit from the extended load time. gdm is now gnome only, and should be replaced.

A replacement you can use is Slim. Slim is not bloatware like the new gdm and it is very fast. It lacks some of the functionality of the old gdm, but have a look and see if you like it.

I made a simple theme to use with xubuntu. You can download it from here if you like.

Wiki on the go

gyllenbuste — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 12:11:47 +0000

Do you ever find yourself wanting some info you wrote down at home, but cannot access?

Hatta Wiki may be the solution for you. It is a one file wiki written in Python and doesn’t need any configuration to run. It is really easy to take with you as it can be run out of any give directory. Just copy the directory on your usb stick and you have it with you. For more advanced usage you can sync the wiki between computers/usb stick using mercurial. So it is very nice for project work as well as for personal usage.

Hatta Wiki example

Highly recommend that you have a look at this software! If you want a wiki for a bigger website you should consider Moinmoin like Ubuntu uses