2007-12-31

New Host

Posted in Site Updates at 22:26

Having discovered that my old host STILL hasn’t fixed their DNS problems, I’ve moved this blog to NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. Let me know if you find any problems.

However, keep in mind that the contact form is still on my old host (I need to make some changes before it will work with NearlyFreeSpeech.NET’s mailer) so it may exhibit the same intermittent 404 errors that forced me to move the blog. If you have trouble with it, try again later and it will work. I’ll have it moved over as soon as I’ve got the script updated.

UPDATE: The mail form is now hosted on the same server as the blog, so there should be no more intermittent 404 errors.

Adbox

Posted in Site Updates at 18:41

Yes, I have added an adbox to my blog. For those who are wondering, no, I haven’t become a hypocrite. I still don’t like big banner and skyscraper ads all over, but I don’t mind a few small buttons… especially when the advertiser pays per day, rather than per impression or per click.

Pay-per-day ads like the ones I’m using allow people who aren’t interested (in most cases, that means me) to use tools like AdBlock Plus without hurting anyone (the only effect is a few less views on the graphs shown to potential advertisers) and, since it’s Project Wonderful ads, even I don’t block them. (The Project Wonderful guys run their ad service the way I would) It also helps that I’ve set my profile to refuse animated GIFs.

Anyway, I’ve set a minimum price per adbox of 1¢ per day and I’m providing two boxes. Hopefully, there will be enough interest that I won’t have to switch to one box at 2¢. My goal is to make this blog pay for itself when hosted on NearlyFreeSpeech.NET.

2007-12-05

How to get Timidity to work (more or less) as a software synth with OSS 4

Posted in Geek Stuff at 7:00

Note: This is still fragile, so I can’t help you if it doesn’t work on your system.

I finally got around to trying OSS 4 and I just can’t go back to ALSA. Not only is it less cantankerous, the mixer curve I get by leaving my soundcard on defaults and adjusting the vmix in-kernel mixer is much nicer.

Unfortunately, there was one problem. MIDI support for OSS 4 is still in development and I have old Windows games which use MIDI for their background music. With ALSA, I had been using Timidity as a software synth that Wine could hook into, but I couldn’t get that to work with libsalsa (the OSS 4 ALSA compatibility layer) so I decided to look for an alternative.

It’s a jerry-rig, but I figured out how to strap the ALSA userland onto OSS 4 so that Wine has a way to get MIDI events to Timidity. Details below…

Step 1: Install OSS

(Remember to symlink /dev/dsp to your preferred /dev/dspN if it forgets.)

Make sure alsa-lib (or your equivalent) stays installed and that the lines in /usr/sbin/soundon
for setting up libsalsa are commented out. (The ebuild on bugs.gentoo.org which I used comes with a patch to
do this)

If you want to do this yourself, find the line which says “# Use library based ALSA compatibility”
and comment out the block which follows it. If you don’t know how to do this, I suggest grabbing
the patch from bugs.gentoo.org.

If you want to use the ebuild, it’s at Bug 184123.

Step 2: Create an /etc/asound.conf

It should contain only the following:


pcm.!default {
        type oss
        device /dev/dsp
}

Step 3: Set up your ALSA kernel modules

Set up the following ALSA config in your kernel:


Device Drivers --> Sound -->
	<M> Sound card support
	Advanced Linux Sound Architecture  --->
		<M> Advanced Linux Sound Architecture
		<M>   Sequencer support
		[*]   Support old ALSA API

The following were something I tested but didn’t see any difference to. Your mileage may vary.


		<M>   RTC Timer support
		[*]     Use RTC as default sequencer timer

Everything else should be disabled.

Step 4: Adjust your init scripts

Make sure your init scripts successfully load OSS 4 and then adjust them to run “modprobe snd-seq” after it has checked and found no ALSA.

Step 5: Set up Timidity

This part took the the longest to figure out. Timidity is VERY fickle in this setup, so your mileage may vary. Here’s what I had to do:

  • Timidity had to be run from inside my KDE session. (not from an initscript)
  • I had to use artsdsp and set Timidity to use ALSA output

The command I used was “artsdsp timidity -iA -Os” but the -Os was just to make sure. (It was default on my system)

The second-best I found was “timidity -iA -Op” (Portaudio output without artsdsp) and it could be run from an initscript, but it would go silent after the first song or two.

Plain ordinary ALSA output had a similar problem, but also had timing glitches. Ironically, when Timidity is just playing a midi file directly as opposed to receiving MIDI events via ALSA, the timing glitches are absent.

2007-12-01

CineMassacre’s Monster Madness

Posted in Geek Stuff, Otaku Stuff, Web Wandering & Opinion at 23:04

Monster Madness, Part 1 @ YouTube

Yeah, I know most horror fans have probably already seen this, but whether or not you like Horror films, you should watch it. I’m not a Horror fan, but this provides a great way for fans to check if they’ve missed any classics, and non-fans to learn a little more about the history of this aspect of popular culture without having to actually watch the films.

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