Archive for September, 2003
iRiver
I broke down and bought an MP3 player. It was a little expensive, but I thought I would thoroughly enjoy it with all of the added perks. It has a line in jack, fm tuner, mp3 player, and voice recorder. I suppose the only downside is that it was quite difficult to get it working with Linux. But after a day of messing around, deciding what was okay, and eventually settling on an opensource “ifp” browser… I am happy. I want to use it to record messages at Church also. I took it in, and tested it out. Now I just have to teach the audio dudes how to get it to work.
Yeah, BestBuy wanted me to buy “insurance” for around $20.00. For two years I could bring it in and just get it replaced if it messed up. Well, I hope this baby lasts at least 2 years. It’s only 128mb, but I suppose that will be enough for a few songs, some voice recordings, and maybe even some FM recordings. The 256mb model was too expensive.
Oh… it’s an iRiver ifp-380t. Check it out!
My state of audio on Linux
I finally got the nerve to install Redhat 9 again. I have in the past found it impossible to get my AC’97 soundcard to work. Therefore I have never used the -only- version of Linux I have ever paid for.
First I discovered recently that this soundcard is backwards from most soundcards, and only Windows at the time has drivers to map this, or so I thought… So, plug the speakers in the pink jack (normally reserved for microphone use… because that’s what the pink jack is for). IT WORKS!!! SOUND!
Okay, but this was undesirable, because when I plugged my mic into the speaker jack (green), it would create some sort of digital reverberation… ??? When I turned the microphone volume up (which oddly enough the mic didn’t work) it would scream digital maddness out of the speakers.
Back to ALSA, and lo and behold… it now REALLY supports my soundcard. Like it was supposed to (as it said) months ago. I guess I shouldn’t complaint though seeing how it is free software. Yeah, my sound works, and I am happy to report that I am typing this on Redhat 9.
Linux voice chatting
I had decided it is almost impossible to do voice chatting easily with Linux, until I was chatting with the creator of GAIM via Yahoo Chat (I think), and he said in the future GAIM would probably support it, but in the meantime I should try out NetMeeting on the Windows side, and GnomeMeeting on the Linux side.
I have to say I am impressed. Though, not with upgrading my Redhat 8.0 default GnomeMeeting. I hate dependency blah blah blah blahs. So I just downloaded like 6 different rpms, and hope I can satisfy them all. Is there a better way to do this? Be sure to leave a comment if you have nifty tips on this problem.
Oh… and I finally found out if you want to run NetMeeting on Windows XP… click on Start > Run, and then type in conf.exe. This will allow you to run it on Windows. I probably will never know how anyone figured that one out…
Yeah, so I expect to talk with Venezuela soon via free Linux. Hopefully the 56k modem will withstand the heat of zipping off 1’s and 0’s down to South America. I chatted with a dude from Texas tonight. It was okay, but quite a bit of interruptions… and that after he turned off his webcam. Before he shut the video down, it was like a slow motion video, and a little bit of broken audio every 30 seconds.
It’s definitely time for cheaper and more widespread broadband…
Oh, don’t really look for voice chatting anywhere else on Linux… unless you want to play around with Gyach Enhanced and the programmer’s attitude. By the way, be prepared to learn Python if you are serious about trying this out. Maybe I just couldn’t get it set up because I am not a programmer… I don’t know. And there’s another one out there developed for Windows but says it will work with WINE. I can’t… and don’t want to remember the name. Unfortunately it only displays with Wingdings on my WINE setup. I could either figure out the font thing, which I played with until nearly 3am lastnight, or learn to read in Wingdings…
Hence the reason I fell back on GnomeMeeting.