a feature that i personally find useful in modern versions of windows explorer is the option (in list view) to list additional mp3 info. there’s really only one column that interests me: bitrate. for my weird auditing purposes i like to make sure that my music collection is at least 128kps minimum, preferably 192kpbs. only 320kpbs or flac for music i truly love. my hearing can’t tell the difference, it’s just a peace of mind sort of thing.

so gnome’s nautilus (currently) doesn’t seem to have this feature. i hope it’s included in a future release. until then…someone has created a pretty cool script that add this functionality to nautilus. packages needed are: nautilus-python, mutagen, python-exiv2. the script is called bsc-v2.py. move/copy that script to ~/.nautilus/python-extensions.
got all that info from here: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/5211

this (of course) should function on any distro, not just ubuntu. also i could not find this functionality in kde’s dolphin either.

i stumbled upon another extension that i also find useful. it’s called “nautilus-image-converter”. which adds some basic image manipulation options to the right-click context in nautilus. i use it for batch resizing. it’s true that i could achieve the same thing via CLI or any of many GUI tools..but it’s just so convenient to do it from the file manager itself. this utility reminds me a lot of the windows xp power toy called “image resizer”.

and finally, the latest builds of kompozer 0.8 alleviate the crashing problems on systems that are using more recent releases of GTK+.

as of late i’ve been more focused on using $ for eating food rather than buying playthings. ahh i miss the days when i had surplus income to buy things to experiment with every few months. i suppose in a way it’s a good thing…because now i focus on getting items that i need (or think i need), instead of just accumulating a lot of stuff.

anyways, due to a christmas gift i was able to purchase a few items that i’d wanted for quite sometime. #1 a usb2.0 hi-speed hub (powered). i hooked this up to the slug and then connected two more drives to the hub. my slug now has 4 drives hooked to it :). this should make using rsync much quicker too. so now there’s a huge amount of my personal data available to me 24/7. that makes me very happy. sometime in 2010 or 2011 i’d like to get some larger external drives. something like 1 or 1.5TB. 500GB doesn’t seem to cut it anymore.

at the time of researching usb hubs that definitely work with linux i found that some people also hook usb audio adapters to their slugs. to play music of course. i looked into getting one because the idea intrigued me. there’s several on amazon for under $10. i got a $3 one and i figured if it doesn’t work big deal..it’s 3 bucks. it does indeed work. i’ve found out from this site – http://www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/playing-audio-on-the-nslu2, that you need to play files with madplay because the slug lacks floating-point hardware. the bad news is that i can hear noise in the playback. i’m not sure if that’s because the adapter is so cheap or because i have so many powered devices nearby. it’s acceptable though and does work.

the audio adapter is very cheap looking and has “3d sound” printed on it. model#: PUSBSCXXAD01 [J 82]
in debian it’s detected as: Bus 001 Device 009: ID 0c76:1607 JMTek, LLC.

the usb hub is a belkin 7-port mobile hub (F5U701-BLK)

the pc i run opensuse on is approx. 10 years old. i mostly use it as a file server and a few other functions. not so much as a desktop…but i decided to install nvidia drivers just to try out desktop effects. just because.

i installed nvidia drivers probably about 5 years ago and remember it as a painless process. at the time i think there was only one branch of linux drivers. now there are 4 driver branches. because of this pc’s age i need to use the oldest branch 71.86.xx for a geforce2 gts card. while looking into all this i found out that suse has nvidia repositories to make the installation foolproof. unfortunately, the repositories don’t have any packages for the driver branch i need. so that left the manual process of installing the nvidia driver. that process is fairly easy too. just let the nvidia package build the kernel module for you and reconfigure x.

i did all that, the module built successfully. starting x in a reconfigured state failed though. i did a limited amount of research on the problem and it seems that this particular driver currently doesn’t work with the recent x.org release. oh well. i don’t think i’ll spend any more time tinkering with it.

i don’t have much to do with netbooks. i think it’s a novel idea, just too expensive at the moment. currently..what are they like $300? throw on another $350 and you can get yourself a super laptop.

if they end up getting in the $100ish range i may get one someday. i’d like one with an ARM-based processor. but by the time i’m really interested in one i could probably get a phone like a nokia n900 that would basically be my netbook. i honestly think a high-powered smartphone would be the better route for me. 90% of the time i’m around computers either a desktop or a 15inch laptop. so i’m not mobile that much. and if i was i wouldn’t be thinking i better bring my netbook with me…. no, but i would have a phone with me.

so actually i don’t think the netbook market is much for me, but again, the idea is cool.

also…i just worked on one today. a dell inspiron mini 10v. for future reference it only takes 512MB and 1024MB SO-DIMMs..i really shouldn’t use plural since it only has one memory slot. a slot which takes removing the systemboard to access :(.

our sharepoint database logs were some crazy 80GB in size. which made no sense.
this article pointed us in the right direction: http://geekswithblogs.net/RogueCoder/archive/2008/06/03/122588.aspx

evidently this is what happens when the databases have “full recovery mode” enabled.