Entries Tagged 'General' ↓

So I upgraded to Ubuntu karmic a few weeks back. To my horror, I found that the PC Speaker has been disabled. I like the use of the PC Speaker, for irssi and my email. It’s very handy. I seem to be one of the few people that feel like this. Anyway… After a few weeks, I’ve finally worked out how to enable it again Yay!

1. Open up /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

   gksudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

   (Use kdesu rather than gksudo, in KDE)

2. Comment out the following lines, by placing a # at the start:

   blacklist snd_pcsp
   blacklist pcspkr

3. Save and exit.
4. Load the modules manually, rather than restarting

   sudo modprobe snd_pcsp
   sudo modprobe pcspkr

It could work now. Have a try. If not, you may have to change a gconf setting. To do this:

1. Load the gconf editor:

   gconf-editor

2. Navigate to /desktop/gnome/peripherals/keyboard
3. Adjust bell_mode to on

Edit: Now this did originally work for me, but it stopped after I rebooted and snd_pcsp was making the pc speaker make strange noises. So I’ve tweaked it a bit.

1. Blacklist the two modules again in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
2. Open up /etc/rc.local

   gksudo gedit /etc/rc.local

3. Before the exit line add these two lines:

   modprobe pcspkr
   modprobe snd_pcsp

The end. It REALLY should be working now. Good luck!

Yes that’s right. Snow!

Woke up this morning. Snow outside. Listened to local radio station for school closures. Practically every school read out, apart from mine. Head to school at 8. Get sent home. As getting back, the school finally is read out on the radio :p

At about 9AM, I decided to set up my Nokia N95 propped up pointing out of my window looking at the drive and road. I used the time lapse function of the camera application, to capture a picture every 30 seconds (later changed to 10 seconds). This ran from 9AM til it got dark, so you can see the snow melt away, and then slightly come back towards the evening.

Once I downloaded all the pictures, I made a quick batch script to re size the images to 640×480 and rename them into a nice sequential set of file names. I then fed all of these into a ffmpeg command I carefully constructed:

ffmpeg -f image2 -i ./snow_%04d.jpg -s vga ../snow_normalfr.mp4

Yay. One nice mpeg4 file. Done.

Now it looks as though I’ll probably be going into school tomorrow, even though I’m supposed to be going to a University Interview at Southampton. Probably not the best idea to drive there!

Coming Up

So I haven’t blogged for a while. I have some stuff I can blog about though, which I’ll get around to. First, I made a package for Ubuntu and it’s been approved! It’s a GTK widget that lets developers embed openstreetmap in applications – With Python Bindings!

Another thing to blog about is the application I’m creating with the packaged GTK widget, which lets users analyse GPX traces.

Fingers crossed for more snow! Bye!

Edit: Made the Echo website!! http://www.bournemouthecho.co.uk/news/4096055.FRESH_SNOW_AND_ICE_THIS_MORNING_ACROSS_DORSET/

It’s taken me a few days to blog about this, but here it is… I haven’t blogged in a while now. I’ve finally got around to it.

So Wednesday. An average sort of day, you’d guess. Well, not quite.

Arriving at school, we noticed a large group of people walking around with the head teacher. Entering tutor time we were told that “someone important” was visiting our school today, and there would be camera crews around. Went to the first lesson of double maths. Room change. Fine…

Got to the new room and were told by our maths teacher that there were going to be three people coming to our maths lesson. These three people, announced in this order, were:

• Minister for women Harriet Harman
• Education secretary Ed Balls
• And finally, the Prime Minister

Ok then. Sounds like fun! So we continued on with our maths lesson. Quadratics in simultaneous equations. What fun! We even got a presentation on the computer (that’s my maths teacher trying to show off, I expect). During our lesson camera crews and photographers slowly trickled in to the maths room standing at the back. They were even taking pictures, though no one had turned up yet. What’s all that about?

5 minutes later the door opened and out popped Gordon Brown (followed by the other two of course!). Everyone stared at him amazed that it was actually him. He asked a few questions, such as “Is maths your favourite subject?” and “What do you want to do, when you’re older?”. That must’ve been the quietest my class has ever been. After a while, they began to start talking to him, although it was still quiet. He went to go and talk to people individually while the other two came around too. Harriet Harman came and had a look at my maths book, looked confused, and said she was “crap at maths”.

About 15 minutes passed and they were all pulled out again to move on. Once they left, we discussed what we thought of our prime minister. I thought he looked different to how we see him on the TV. He was older and larger (my maths teacher used the term “cuddlier”) than how he seems on Television.

Ok that’s over… Back to maths! What a lot of homework we get…

Well. I have myself a blog. How’d you like it? I’ve been wanting to get a blog up and running for months. Finally got around to it.

As you can see, I’m using wordpress, which I found terribly easy to set up. Puts my old WebspotBlogging to shame really.

Ah well