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SCII

I’ve played 5 online games so far, and I must admit that this games rocks. Battle.net makes finding games very easy. Statistics about a finished game are very detailed, so I can analyze what have I done wrong and learn from the mistakes. Every game’s replay is automatically saved, so then I can analyze even deeper.

Battle.net seems like a social network, although I have not used all the features yet, it’s a thing I look forward to. I can form a party with my friends outside a match chat and then play together with them later. I can also use microphone to talk to them. The most interesting feature I look forward to is communicating with people who are not in Starcraft.

Too bad that I havent managed to run it under Linux, at least not yet.

Terran (Me) vs Protoss

Since I didn’t want to buy anything off the internet and waste any money on shipping, because I live far away from the United States. I needed to look for alternatives, so I searched local markets and shops for similar parts I could use. Most of the materials I found were produced in Soviet Union, so I used different stuff than in schematics. Like EL84 tube was replaced by 6P14P. The biggest problem was to find the transformers, especially the output transformer. At the end I  had to wind the output transformer myself. Yet alterations did not stop there. I also wanted to add a feature that would let me switch between the clean and distorted sound (known as channels). Later on I added spring reverb too.

In the end, I have an amplifier that suits me just fine – sounds wonderful and is versatile (tone wise).

Front panel

Front panel with an On, Standby and a reverb control at the top. 2 pairs of gain and volume controls. Tone – bass, middle, high – pots.

Back panel

Holes on the top for ventilation. Back panel with reverb in/out. Pedal switch. Loudspeaker connector for output. And fuses below.

Next article will be about tubes, what did I use, a little comparison between, other alternatives.

Recording quality isn’t the best. There are clipping in some places because of the cheap microphone I used.

Clean

Clean with heavy reverb

Half-way distorted (Bluesy tone)

Distorted, scooped tone (middle frequencies cut out)

Next up, some pictures !

awesome is a highly configurable, next generation framework window manager for X. It is very fast, extensible and licensed under the GNU GPLv2 license.

It is primarly targeted at power users, developers and any people dealing with every day computing tasks and who want to have fine-grained control on theirs graphical environment.

To begin the Awesome journey I went to Awesome Wiki that has everything for beginners, like myself. The setup itself was very fast and just by copying the sample configuration file, I was up and running Awesome window manager. Without making any changes to configuration, I must say that Awesome is pretty good out-of-box. It has nice pop-up menu which reminds me of Openbox, a panel/taskbar, a system tray and space for widgets – everything that a window manager needs.

If we look at the configuration file, we see that it is pretty straightforward. The Lua syntax is simple and understandable. Making adjustments and adding new features is pretty easy. Thanks to the well documented Awesome API documentation.

Since I have a dual-head setup, it is important for me to know how a window manager handles two screens. By default configuration Awesome creates two screens, each with own workspaces, which are called tags in Awesome.

Without any customization to the default configuration file Awesome handles things quite good. For example, I can watch videos (from vlc, mplayer or flash) in full screen no matter what the layout is, which I couldn’t do in Xmonad. Of course this could be set in Xmonad, but Lua syntax is understandable than Haskell’s. Although it doesn’t have a debugger like Xmonad, you can check the syntax for errors with awesome –check.

Awesome - January 2010

I must say that Awesome is very user-friendly, it is fast, customizable, visually appealing, works very well with default configuration, seems stable and even can be fun. It is great for beginners.

Ever since I bought a guitar I wanted it to sound good too. After buying a cheap Marshall MG30dfx, which sounded quite bad, I decided that it would be easier to build a tube (tubes > transistors) amplifier myself, instead of buying one, cause they expensive. What I wanted was a standard tube amplifier with gain, tone and volume settings. So I searched the internet, and found that the best option for this would be Ax84 Hi-Octane project.

The Hi-Octane is like a juiced up rock and roll amp from the 80′s… only smaller. Like a P1 but with an extra preamp tube, this is a good choice for someone who wants more distortion and has built an amp or two before. Tone goes from cleanish to semi-saturated distortion, depending on gain settings and guitar volume setup. Responds well to pedals and retains your guitars tone.

AX84 Hi-Octane amp with spring Reverb

This amp is small and good for home use, since it’s output power is only 5 watts, and still that is a lot, especially when distorted. As far as sound goes, it has nice “warm” clean tone, more distortion gives a nice Blues tone, and, distorting the sound further, I can get nice crunch for metal like music.

So after doing some research, I discovered that there is another way to do what I want. That is to load/unload responsible module with modprobe.

I made a simple bash script that does this, and mapped a keyboard shortcut. Also I needed to change the sudoers file, so that I can use modprobe -r psmouse and modprobe psmouse without giving the root password. Works like a charm.

#!/bin/sh

if lsmod | grep -q psmouse
    then sudo modprobe -r psmouse & echo 'Touchpad turned OFF'
    else sudo modprobe psmouse & echo 'Touchpad turned ON'
fi

Bluetile is a tiling window manager for X based on xmonad. Windows are arranged automatically to tile the screen without gaps or overlap, maximizing screen use. Bluetile’s focus lies on making the tiling paradigm easily accessible to users coming from traditional window managers by drawing on known conventions and providing both mouse and keyboard access for all features. It also tries to be usable ‘out of the box’, requiring minimal to no configuration in most cases.

Bluetile is perfect used together with Gnome desktop environment. This surely is the tiling window manager to start with.

To use Bluetile you don’t have to configure anything. It works ‘out-of-box’. In one way this is great, since you don’t have to waste any time, but on the other hand – it’s bad, because you cannot customize anything. Of course there is a way – compiling Bluetile yourself – and as developer says, user-friendly configuration is on the way.

In comparison to Xmonad, you can use mouse to manipulate with windows – resize, move. Also I have to say that the floating window management is really nice in comparison to Xmonad.

I think that Bluetile is perfect for people who use Gnome, but want to explore the tiling window manager world without losing too much time. I will definitely follow this project.

Screencast – Bluetile from Jan Vornberger on Vimeo.

But only today Google officially launched the beta version of extension channel.

For over a month now I have used Chrome (Chromium-browser in my case). To me it seems a lot faster than Firefox, which I used before. Switching was not easy, since Firefox had some features that no other browsers had – extensions and vastly customizable. But that was some time ago. Chrome is developing very fast. And now that it has extensions, it will be a huge competitor to Firefox.

About extensions themselves. I think they are better – they install fast, they start to work without restarting browser, they go very well with the user interface – keep it minimal, and they auto-update silently while you are browsing the web. Another thing I that surprized me was how quickly I can install and start using an extension, such as Chromed Bird (a twitter extension). I took me about 5 clicks – install, install, accept twitter API, done.

It doesn’t seem that extensions are in beta. I haven’t had any crashes and everything is working beautiful.

With extensions Google Chrome is certainly become a strong rival for Firefox. While there are not so much extensions as there is for Firefox, the concept for them in Chrome is certainly better in my opinion.

Anyway, Python was the language I choose. To me it seems very simple and can do powerful things.

It’s been over a year now that I have slowly explored it.  There are multiple books to start with, and surprisingly they do not cost anything, at least the .pdf version. One of those that I used to introduce myself with Python, was Byte of Python. It covers almost all the essential things and has nice comparisons with other languages, so everyone can learn something new. Then comes the Python documentation, which is a really good resource working on a projects.

After learning the basics, there are lots of places to fulfill your knowledge – like solving problems with Python in Project Euler and The Python Challenge. The last one is really great, because it specifically designed for Python. Each challenge has taught me something new.

Recently I decided that I would like to start a project of my own. The idea is to create application for audio file organization – Awesome Music Organizer (AMO). This would serve many purposes. Learning Python, collaborating with other people (if there will be any) and I haven’t found a nice music organizer in Linux that could do everything I want. So I have added more information on the AMO page.

xmonad

For over a year now I have used Openbox as my only window manager in Linux. It is lightweight, stable, easily customizable and fast, yet somehow I was interested in something new.

Xmonad is the first tiling manager that I installed. I chose Xmonad because it seems to be the most popular out of them all. It has great documentation and community.

Switching to something new almost always takes a lot of time. This was no exception. At first Xmonad seemed very complicated if I compare it to Openbox, because to do anything you must have a configuration file, which is pretty heavy. Yet this configuration files is what makes this window manager so good.

After following the guided tour I realised that Xmonad is very simple and straightforward. The key to work efficiently in a tiling window manager is to know the keyboard shortcuts to move around. Mouse is not needed. Also the default key bindings are easily memorable and comfortable.

There are two types of windows – tiling and floating.

• Tiling windows are the ones that tile on a single workspace. They are put and maximized together with each other and no free desktop space is wasted.
• Floating are the ones that ‘float’ or in other words – are on top of everything. They can be freely moved and resized, just like in other standard window managers.

This means that all windows are close together and on the same level in the workspace, they can’t overlap each other. Although this seems great, sometimes it becomes irritating, if you need a fixed-size window. However, nothing that configuration file can’t fix.

Another thing I like about Xmonad is the behavior with multiple monitors. Instead of a large workspace covering two monitors, I have two separate workspaces – each on every monitor. This idea seemed to me fresh and something new. Although weird at first, but later I realized that it is better.

Since Xmonad is only a window manager it means that there are no status bars/panels and trays, so if you want them they need to be installed additionally. Coming from Openbox, this wasn’t new to me and didn’t cause any problems. Xmobar seems a great for a status bar and stalonetray – for  system tray.

So if I summarize all the pro’s and con’s:

Pro’s

• fast
• efficient for managing many open windows, especially terminals
• minimal – no wasted space, no window decorations, no buttons
• massive configuration possibilities – layouts for workspaces, concrete application behavior
• large module libraries for configuration
• everything is keyboard oriented - no need of a mouse
• growing community

Con’s

• A learning curve
• Takes time to get used to, if you are not familiar with tiling window managers
• Configuration is not so easy and straightforward for advanced usage