Tag Archives: ubuntu

All things Ubuntu here.

Snow, Panorama Apps, and other Irritations

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We might just have a white Christmas here – bleh. The white stuff started falling on Saturday, has started up again today, and temps that refuse to rise above 1šC look set to keep the snow around for a while yet.

Victoria Int'l Under Snow

The above was created in GIMP with the Pandora panorama plugin, which works after a fashion but is a very basic way of munging together panoramas from multiple photographs.

The theoretically more elegant, complete & automated way of creating panoramas, Hugin, freezes, crashes or throws errors nearly every time I try it. I can get the two-image tutorial to work some of the time, but anything else screws up … This is Hugin 0.7.0 in Ubuntu 8.10 — does anyone know if this thing actually works at all, or is it just hard-drive clutter at this stage in it’s development?

Error Screen in Hugin

Jamendo-flavoured Awesome

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So J. Random Blogowner (that’d be me) posts a blogrant about Jamendo’s lack of OGG torrents and fires it into the void – and lo and behold, the first two of three comments I get on that post are both (both!) from people who work for Jamendo, who collectively say (allow me to paraphrase here):

  1. Yes, they know torrents are down; it’s not just OGG torrents but the MP3 ones too.
  2. Apparently their main hosting provider shut down the torrent traffic with little to no notice. WTF?
  3. A fix (moving the torrents to another server run by (hopefully) saner providers is in progress.
  4. I’m welcome to contact either of them anytime for an update on this.

All of this within eight or ten hours of my original post – not bad considering the time zone difference between here and Europe and the general obscurity of my little blog. As the third comment on my original post put it, “Yay Jamendo power response!”

So thank you and major kudos to the Jamendo people for running a project that’s both awesome and awesomely responsive!

Has Jamendo Stopped Seeding Torrents?

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Jamendo, everyone’s favourite source of excellent free music, has become slightly less excellent. With their update a while back, they introduced direct downloads, but only of MP3 formats – if you want OGG, you’ll have to use the old torrent files.

Not a problem, you’d think – Jamendo used to be seeding ALL of their own stuff all the time, so even if it wasn’t fast, you’d get your download eventually. At some point around the big update of the site, the torrent seeding stopped, though, and it’s never restarted… so unless another Jamendo user is peering the OGG-format of the album you want, you’re stuck with the MP3 version…

I’ve tried a couple of different torrent clients, I’ve re-downloaded the .torrent files in question, I’ve checked my router’s settings… the problem isn’t at my end. Jamendo torrents with peers work; Ubuntu ISOs work; other torrents work. If Jamendo went back to their old practice of seeding everything they offer a .torrent for, they’d work too. It’s hardly a bandwidth issue – a torrent not being requested uses miniscule amounts of bandwidth – especially compared to the bandwidth that must be sucked up by offering the new direct downloads of MP3-format music.

Anyone know who to poke at Jamendo to get proper OGG torrent service restored?

Dear Lazyweb: gweather icons?

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Like most pilots, I’m a weather junkie. I need a regular weather fix even if I’m stuck indoors and not flying. GNOME’s Weather Report panel applet (gweather-applet, technically) is a great fast fix if all I need to know is “Is it raining at the airport right now?”

GNOME Weather Report

Aside from fantastic customisability, gweather has really cool icons for seemingly every combination of weather conditions. I’d love to use some of these icons in my own work (as per whatever license they’re under, of course!) but I can’t seem to find them on my /system files. There must be some way to coax this information out of my system (Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron) but my commandline-fu is weak in this.

So, anyone know where gweather tucks it’s icons away?