Archive for April, 2008

Microdia (0c45:624f) webcam on Linux

Sunday, April 27th, 2008

(Re: Proprietary Webcam driver wonders).

I recently discovered a free driver for my GF’s builtin Microdia webcam. It works very nicely (better than the crappy proprietary one did when I tested the “trial”). So if you’ve got a Microdia webcam, at least the 0c45:624f one, now you can have it working properly, with good quality without paying a load of money for a one-time one-kernel one-arch license for a proprietary one.

git clone http://repo.or.cz/r/microdia.git
cd microdia
make
sudo insmod ./microdia.ko

Then just launch Cheese or your favourite webcam program and off you go.

Thanks a lot to those that took the time to develop a proper driver. If you’ve got a paypal account, I’ll donate some money for your hard work.

Update: the module is now named sn9c20x.ko, so the last line becomes sudo insmod ./sn9c20x.ko

Update 2: According to brandon in the comments, the kernel module is in the upstream kernel as of 2.6.31.6

Posted in Debian, GNOME, GNU/Linux, Mandriva, Ubuntu | 24 Comments »

Automated Day Planner development snapshots

Friday, April 25th, 2008

I’ve added automatic development snapshots of Day Planner to the Day Planner homepage. There are currently three different branches (trunk, next stable, current stable) being built, in two flavours (tarball and installer). The snapshots are updated twice each day and are available at http://www.day-planner.org/index.php/download/snapshot. Feel free to take them for a spin.

Posted in Day Planner, GNOME, GNU/Linux, gtk2, perl, php | No Comments »

MP3Tunes and EMI

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

An e-mail dumped into my inbox today, from the CEO of the MP3Tunes service, that I use for backing up my music collection. It stated that EMI claimed that this use was illegal and had sued MP3Tunes (this happened a while ago, I know). This isn’t even a case of so-called “piracy” that you claim is so evil, it’s me backing up my music. You’ve screwed up with all of your RIAA blunders already, one might think that you would realize that suing customers (or in this case, a company providing a useful service to your customers) is generally a bad idea.

Oh well, add me to the growing list of people boycotting you (and don’t think for a second that this is an empty statement).

Some articles on the subject: http://michaelrobertson.com/archive.php?minute_id=251, http://michaelrobertson.com/archive.php?minute_id=259, http://consumerist.com/382824/emi-says-you-cant-store-your-music-files-online and http://www.exchangemagazine.com/morningpost/2008/week13/Tuesday/032501.html. (note that I do not agree with, nor endorse all of the statements on these websites, they are provided as a source of information on the subject only).

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Music, Personal, Politics | No Comments »

Day Planner’s second anniversary (and a development snapshot)

Saturday, April 19th, 2008

Today is the second anniversary of the Day Planner project. So hurray for Day Planner, and here’s to all the great releases to come.

In other related news, I’ve just released a development snapshot of Day Planner 0.9.
It is available at http://www.day-planner.org/index.php/download/devsnapshot. It contains all of the developed features for 0.9 (including the unfinished maemo port), but is not yet stable enough to be labelled stable, so If you’ve got time and feel like it, give it a spin and report any bugs you find. The whole iCalendar back-end has been almost completely re-written for this version, which is why I want some additional testing before I release a stable version.

Please do not package this release or submit it to news sites, it’s just a svn snapshot.

Posted in Day Planner, GNOME, GNU/Linux, Maemo, perl | No Comments »

History meme

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

Everyone else is doing it!

[0 zerodogg@firefly ~]$ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
279 cd
185 vim
117 ssh
75 screen
74 svn
66 wget
64 ls
60 perldoc
59 rm
58 cget

Posted in GNU/Linux, Random | No Comments »

Best gift certificates ever

Sunday, April 6th, 2008

Today (6th of April) is my birthday, and my GF, being rather artistic, decided to go a different route when it came to the gift certificates she gave me.

This one is for TuxGames (well, this was /really/ from the cat (Junior) and the hamster (Tuxine)):
TuxGames gift certificate

This one was for Aetolian credits (Aetolia being a MUD):
Aetolia gift certificate

And the final one was for Wii points in the wii shop channel:
lhs_wiipoints.png

Got plenty of great presents (not going to list them all here, just wanted to note the cool gift certificates), its been a good day.

Posted in GNU/Linux, Games, Personal | No Comments »