OSSPACK

Caution: Pokemon seizures may occur.

Source: Reuters from Gerard Wynn and Gabriela Baczynska POZNAN, Poland, 1° December (Reuters) - the climate talks of the U.N the monday darkened from a total economic slowing down but with praise of the U.N is opened in Poland for “…

Just imagine that. Google taking the smartphone war directly into Apple territory. Sure, most people would not care about this, but if Google does this—and most probably not even Google directly, but someone else using Android's codebase—it would really make things interesting.

If, like me, the default black background of the GRUB menu looks boring to you or if you would like to change the default backdrop to something of your choice, like your girlfriend’s photo for example, then follow along!

Hey you, hot-shot movie cutter! Now that we've got your attention, have a look at this. Adobe's research laboratory has been toiling away with a sophisticated interactive video-object manipulation system, which gives video editors all sorts of creative windows with next to no rendering lag.

I recently edited together a video for a friend and tried to bring it into Avidemux using the process I outlined earlier, but to no avail — a new build of Avidemux for Ubuntu refused to read the JPEG Photo codec files I outputted from Cinelerra. Not wanting to have to mess with export formats from Cinelerra again, I decided instead to join all of the AVI files using ffmpeg and named pipes and make one big high quality MPEG-2 file that I would then convert into a DVD ready MPEG-2 file using Avidemux. The bash script I used was (be sure to convert HTML entities as needed if you copy and paste):

# clean up any leftover ffmpeg processes that may be using the fifos
pkill ffmpeg
for final_file in final-*.avi; do fifo_file="fifo-${final_file}.mpg" rm $fifo_file mkfifo $fifo_file ffmpeg -i "$final_file" -f dvd -sameq \ -b 10000000 -ab 256000 -vcodec mpeg2video \ -acodec mp2 -y "$fifo_file" < /dev/null &
done

cat fifo-*.mpg |\
ffmpeg -i - -i final-audio.wav \ -f dvd \ -vcodec mpeg2video \ -acodec mp2 \ -sameq \ -aspect 16:9 -y \ -b 10000000 -ab 256000 \ -map 0:0 -map 1:0 \ -r 23.976 \ final_video.mpg

Since the organic churns of hobby outside what seem as the Revoltech dozen calculates a month, have calculated that double quantity-dives in the always increasing line would not have been inadequate.

I've just joined Planet Sugar Labs, so for those of you who haven't read my posts before, I write in an uncensored stream-of-consciousness style. What you're about to read are literally the thoughts that are going through my mind as I wander through a problem.Using the XO to monitor bees? ...

(Below for an appeal on how to disable tapping for the touchpad in Fedora 10, which is now different than previous.)

Upgraded to Fedora 10 on the Thinkpad T60, overall everything is pretty sweet. I tried to upgrade from F8 using Anaconda, the result wasn’t that pretty and left me nervous — I was still cleaning up from the last upgrade done that way, so I decided a fresh start was going to be OK. I have my full package list from before, now I’m just sorting through getting all the same software installed. The long road.

Why is that list 1000 packages long? During install, I got to the package selection screen and had a touchpad FAIL. The screen loaded the “Office and Productivity” default, where I would then normally go through the package groups and lists and add a whole bunch of fun stuff. But when Anaconda advanced to that screen, the mouse arrow was over the ”Next” button, and a click initiated by the touchpad tapping made it advance. Perhaps it was a coincidence that the arrow was over the button, but once you click ”Next” on that screen, there is no going back … even though there is a ”Back” button visible in the next screen.

Faced with abandoning and restarting the install, I figured I’d install and add packages later. Which is turning out to be hours of effort, partially because working with PackageKit and the stupid tap-is-a-click touchpad is such a PITA. I haven’t used the tap-click stuff in so many years and my rough touchpad style is causing lots of mis-clicks.

Since there is no longer an ‘xorg.conf’ file to add the details to make ‘gsynaptics’ work, I haven’t yet found how I am supposed to control touchpad details. I appeal to the wise Web and Fedora planet — any good ideas?

I suppose that if I were to make an ‘xorg.conf’, such as with `system-config-display`, it would work, but that defeats the otherwise stellar Xorg working method. If we get a better solution, I’ll be sure to post on fedoraforum.org about it.

Those of you've been around desktop computers for a while know the calming effect of a simple desktop. One of the things I've missed is the ability to have a basic tiled pattern with user defined colours. So since I wanted to learn a bit more about Plasma wallpapers for another project, I rolled up my sleeves, had a look at the old kdesktop sources, and reimplemented it using the latest technologies. The result is in playground. Everything old is new again:

Watch out, panel. You're next.