Yep yep.The tab-rhythmbox-plugin, my favorite plugin of all time, is back. I wrote about how it broke after upgrading to Ubuntu 11.04 way back, which means that until now, I’ve been living without integrated guitar tabs in my music player. Not a HUGE deal, but the convenience was nice if you wanted some tabs on the fly instead of having to open a browser and actually search for the tabs yourself (horrors!) It all comes down to instant gratification, and if you have to actually open two things to accomplish one thing…well no one wants any part of that.

Anyhow, we had nice comment the other day from one of the developers letting us know that the project is still alive and well. Not only that, but I can confirm that this plugin now works in Ubuntu 12.04. The plugin pulls tabs in seconds from sites like Ultimate-Guitar, AZchords and Lacuerda and when tabs for Godspeed! You Black Emperor pop up, you pretty much have a winner.

The latest version 0.5 was released around March 2012, which is about a year since the previous release back in March of 2011. Ubuntu 11.04 was released back in April of 2011, which is when it stopped working for me, which correlates with the release dates.

So, if this plugin is of any interest to you, please visit the project page for release information and installation instructions. Here’s a screenshot:

I couldn’t resist any longer because the Raspberry Pi project is just too interesting. The only thing that bites is that it’ll take a few months to actually deliver, which is kind of a drag. Yep. It’s all about instant gratification and waiting is going to feel just like back when I was 8 and I ordered that shitty robot from a cereal box, except hopefully my Raspberry Pi won’t break in 3 seconds like that cheap piece of plastic did.

You can read more about Raspberry Pi on their FAQ page. If you’re too lazy to go there, I’ll tell you in a nutshell:

Raspberry Pi is a tiny computer. How small? About the size of a credit card. How much? About 35$ for the expensive version (this one has 2 USB ports). You buy one or express interest in one here.

The unit uses an ARM11 (ARM1176JZFS) processor and will run Debian, so my initial plan is to replace my current energy hogging server with this little guy. The specs state that it can stream 1080p video which makes for an interesting media server possibility.

That’s enough from me. Have a look at this thing:

Well, Ubuntu 12.04 aka Precise Pangolin was released yesterday. This is a long term support (LTS) release that’s supported until April 2017.

So far I really have very little to say about this. Aside from the almost unassisted upgrade, it was pretty smooth and I haven’t seen any obvious issues yet. I don’t even have any wireless issues which seemed to be the calling card of Ubuntu upgrades. If your wireless doesn’t work after upgrading to Ubuntu 12.04, you might want to try this fix which I posted for Ubuntu 11.04/11.10. It’s helpful in at least pointing you in the right direction.

Anyway. Pretty boring upgrade, which I guess is a good thing. It takes much longer than it should, which is partly my fault for having x-amount of applications installed. The less you have installed, the shorter the upgrade will be, but not by much. I’ve said it before, but Ubuntu is bloated and becoming more sluggish with every update. After using it for a few days I’ll be back with another report.

Click OK to Continue
The only hitch during the upgrade was getting the upgrade to actually start. You click Upgrade to 12.04 LTS and it just sits there on configuring libc-bin forever. In fact, you need to expand the little terminal window where you’ll see the following:

Services to restart for GNU libc library upgrade

You need to press OK to initiate that, which is kind of silly considering you pressed OK and accepted the terms and conditions to get here, so why wouldn’t you want to just automate this step? Why!

Because life isn’t easy. That’s why.

Aside from that, not much to report. Oh, the menus are a little better organized now. They stuck the Update manager under Administration which is now under System Tools. I’m pretty sure that menu was juggled around.

Rhythmbox is also the default audio player. Again. It was replaced by Banshee for 11.10 until everyone re-discovered the truth about it: that it sucked.

There’s a slight change in the welcome screen with the huge word PASSWORD added to the password field. It’s quite hideous, but helps if you’re just not sure what a logon screen looks like and where the password actually goes. Seriously guys.

I’m still not using Unity and I’m thankful that this upgrade didn’t force me to re-install Unity. Having choices is what Linux is all about, so I respect the team for respecting the users.

It only takes 5 minutes so here’s what you can put into a giant salad:

Ingredients:
Bag of mixed lettuce greens
Fresh green beans
Carrot slices
2 whole endives
1 whole tomato
Handful of sliced radishes
1 can of tuna
2 heaping forkfulls of cottage cheese
Garnish with black pepper.

No salad dressing ’cause salad dressing is for pussies.

Now eat it like the animal that you are.

Ok ok. I promised myself that I wasn’t going to write about Ubuntu again, especially after that whole 11.10 wireless issues fiasco. However, I’m hearing some rumblings that might just make 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) a better release.

First of all Ubuntu 12.04 will be released on April 26, so we’ve got a month to go and not much will change in the release between now and then. Also, Canonical will release 12.04 ready or not as they always do, so I fully expect a few bugs. Seriously, with the last few releases, the bugs have almost seemed like features. Anyway, some new things are:

1. Banshee will be replaced by Rhythmbox: Yep, I complained about this a few releases ago. Banshee is just awful, so good riddance. I’ve been using Rhythmbox instead, but that cool guitar tab plugin STILL doesn’t work on 64-bit. Maybe it will this time around.

2. Availability of Gnome Classic: Yes, Unity is still alive and sucking hard, but Gnome Classic will be available to use. I mean, it always was if you installed it, just that in 12.04 Unity 5.8 won’t be forced down your throat like it was in 11.10.

That’s it. We’ll see how this turns out in a month.

My quest for the best Android game ever might be over since I discovered Space Cat 3D by Pill Tree. Yep. You’re a cat in space (not completely unlike Nyan Cat) and your mission is to rid this spaceship of its mouse infestation. The playability is actually great and the game uses the gyroscopic features of my Nexus S to the max. And when I say to the max, I totally mean to the max.

Space Cat has lots of amusing sound effects which actually attracts my real life cat, so whenever I play Space Cat 3d, my cat attacks my phone and ends up scratching me. And since my cat is such an asshole who won’t let me review this game properly because he thinks everything is about him, I’ll just attach this here YouTube video which is actually a decent and concise review of the game, which I’ll never play again.

Fucking cats.

Or just watch the Space Cat 3d promo video. It’s got drum and bass and over dramatizes the game:

I couldn’t stand waiting for the Android 4.0 OTA update for my Nexus S any longer so I updated manually. It’s a fairly easy process and honestly, I can’t see what the delay is at this point. I get that the December roll-out was stopped because it was problematic. I get that. But still waiting for my phone to be updated  “some time in March” just isn’t accurate enough for me.

So. If you want to manually update your Nexus S, first download it by getting it directly from google.

(Before you update, remember that you may need the correct Nexus S variant. This worked on Baseband version I9020XXKI1, so update at your own risk. However, the update will simply not work if your phone is not the correct variant. It simply will not follow through, without doing any harm. Make a backup just in case.)

Next, follow these steps to update your phone:

1) First I renamed the downloaded file VQ8PQk.zip to ICS.zip for the sake of clarity.
2) Copy ICS.zip to your memory card/internal storage. Then turn off your phone.
3) Power it on while holding the volume button up. This will bring you to the bootloader.
4)  Navigate with the power button and select recovery by pressing the power button.<
5) At the warning page (triangle), hold the power button and press up volume.
6) Select apply update from /sdcard and choose ICS.zip (or whatever you called the file).
7) The update process will take 5-10 minutes. When it’s done (you’ll know when). Reboot the phone.

And that’s it!

First off, ICS is slick. They put a lot of thought into this redesign. The main thing I noticed is that a lot of redundant steps have been removed, so it takes less clicks to get where you want to go. Obviously, this means less time touching the screen and more time actually interacting with your phone (in a totally non-obsessive way of course).

Battery life seems to have improved, but so far it seems that it mostly depends on which apps are more battery intensive. Overall, battery life is good, but not stellar and considering my phone is already over 8 months old, I don’t suspect that the battery is in its rime anymore.

With any new OS it’ll take you some time to get familiar with it, but it’s truly a much more intuitive interface. Like I said, it’s faster, more efficient and very snappy. Makes me very curious about the rumored summer release of Android 5.0 aka Jelly Bean, although I can’t see such a major version jump happening so fast. At least for the Nexus S.

Now for the bad thing

USB connectivity no longer works in the car!

This is a very bad thing unless you love local radio. What I used to do, was plug my Nexus S into the car’s (Nissan Sentra) usb jack, mount the device, and then listen to music through the car’s stereo. Bonus was that I could skip tracks by using the controls on the steering wheel. This was an awesome convenience which simply doesn’t work anymore.

I’m lying. It worked once and doesn’t work anymore. The device is recognized, but the car stereo’s software fails when trying to read the contents of the USB device (aka Nexus S). I thought maybe that the phone had remained mounted, so I rebooted the phone and yes, I even “rebooted” the car. No luck and I still have no idea what the problem is.

I’ll do some research and try to find a solution because no longer being able to use my phone as an automotive mp3 player is a major failure.

UPDATE: I figured out how to get USB connectivity to work in the car. It’s a timing issue, so you need to plug in your Nexus S into the car’s USB jack, an press Turn on USB storage. You basically need to do this a whle bunch of times until the timing is right. On the Sentra’s on screen display, it’s going to say “Reading media files” or something like that. If the timing is right, it’ll read them. If not, it’ll error out and fail. This is all more a flaw with how the two systems talk to each other and I don’t know if this post will actually help anyone. It’s really an interoperability failure.