Most recent posts

First motorcycle driving lesson!

Sander Knopper — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 18:19:13 +0100

Hi all!

I'm very aware that it's been quite some time since my last post, but I just don't feel like blogging about every day stuff all the time. Sorry for that... ;)

Anyway, today has been quite interesting since I took my first motorcycle lesson and I very much liked it! So I'm definitely going to continue with it and hopefully have my license soon. For those interested, I've driven a Honda CBF 500, but obviously I can't really put up an opinion about it since I've nothing to compare it with... :P

On the more computer side of things, there are some nice things too. Mostly related to QtMPC though. Roeland has been working on integrating last.fm support (context information and scrobbling) into QtMPC and I've been working to get KDE support in. KDE 4 support that is... ;) I must say, everything is turning out quite nicely. If you want to see what it looks like, grab the latest svn checkout, since the screenshots on the website are heavily outdated.

I could talk about Qt being available under LGPL and all that stuff, but other people have already done that, so I'll leave it at this ;)

QtMPC 0.4.0 released!

Sander Knopper — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 15:00:51 +0100

Hi all, just a quick promotion for QtMPC since it's been quite a while since there was something new to tell about it and besides, this blog has some advantages (planet... ahum)... ;)

Anyway, last weekend version 0.4.0 has been released with some rather nice improvements leading to better performance. Just as a reminder, QtMPC is a front-end for MPD.

For further information, have a look here: http://lowblog.nl/2008/10/26/qtmpc-040-released/

QtMPC

Sander Knopper — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 15:25:06 +0100

Hi all,

Just wanted to let you all know about a little project I've been working on. After using my media pc for a couple of days I figured the webinterface was way too demanding because it's creating a new connection every second. Not that the media pc is too slow to handle it, but if it's not really necessary than why not use something better right?So I started looking for non-webbased gui clients and found some nice ones. But neither of them really made me want to use it on the long term. So I decided to write my own client since I hadn't been programming in Qt for a while and I really enjoy doing that. QtMPC was born...

A friend of mine and myself decided we could also set up a website containing all (future) projects of ourselves, though currently it only contains QtMPC.

You can get the source by using subversion, for more details read: http://lowblog.nl/category/qtmpc/

Media PC

Sander Knopper — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 18:42:53 +0100

Hi all!

First of all, I want to wish everyone reading this a Merry Christmas!

So what's happened? Nothing special really, just busy working on projects for university, preparing for tests and so on...

There's one thing I don't want to keep from you though, especially since I finally have time to set this thing up. A couple of weeks ago I ordered the parts for my media pc. It's a via epia based system, with an optical audio out. More specific:

Procase Noah case (black)
VIA EPIA EX10000EG
1GB memory
Fujitsu MHV2160BT 160 GB, 4200 Rpm, 8 MB, 2.5"

The hard drive is basically for a notebook, but serves its purpose well in this system since it retrieves the actual music files from the server.

I'm currently installing Gentoo on this system and just finished adding another network cable to my room... ;) Hopefully I can at least finish bootstrapping and emerge -e system before the end of the evening and start playing around with mpd tomorrow. I'll keep you posted and I'll try to make some pictures tomorrow.

New laptop

Sander Knopper — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 13:42:25 +0100

Hi all,

Yesterday I became the proud owner of a new Dell Vostro 1500 and what's the best way to celebrate this? Right, install Gentoo... ;)

So after some thinking I decided to go for the no-multilib amd64 install, since if I'm desperate to see, for instance, a flash movie, I can still use my old laptop. Anyway, it seems that open source flash alternatives are getting better each day, so that might solve the problem eventually. Yesterday I did the stage 1 + 2 part and installed a kernel so it could boot properly without the livecd. (yes, I still like to bootstrap... :D) Today I installed xorg and I'm now busy compiling all the KDE packages I want. So that pretty much leaves me waiting for it to finish.

To end this post, here are the specs:

Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 (2.2GHz, 4MB)
2GB RAM
160GB 5400rpm hd
Nvidia 8600GT 256MB
15.4" TrueLife screen (1280x800)
Some other stuff, NIC, Wi-fi etc. which is less important

So far I'm very happy with it!

My first real guitar lesson

Sander Knopper — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 19:58:52 +0200

For some time now I'm starting to ask myself whether there is any purpose in learning to play guitar using an online course and thus mostly by myself. So last week I looked up some teachers who live in the neighbourhood and made an appointment with one of them. I can only say that I should have done this way earlier. I mean, the guy could tell that I've been practicing by myself for some time but when you follow a lesson from someone face to face you'll learn in half an hour what takes you 2 weeks to figure out by yourself...

So basically I'm quite happy I went there and it's even better considering the teacher is a very nice person. From now on, Thursday is guitar lesson day. ;)

Samba 3.0.25 and kernel 2.6.23

Sander Knopper — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 15:36:34 +0200

Hi people, here's just a quick reminder for something that caused me some trouble. I just switched to the fresh 2.6.23 linux kernel and already had samba 3.0.25 running on my server for a while. Certainly I couldn't mount any samba shared folders on my clients anymore and dmesg gave some weird error messages. Finally I found a topic on the gentoo forums which stated that you have to emerge mount-cifs if you're running this software combination.

So, just to let you all know and maybe save some trouble... ;)

Dream Theater

Sander Knopper — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 16:18:29 +0200

Last Tuesday I went to the Dream Theater concert in Ahoy (Rotterdam). Unfortunately cameras weren't allowed and I had to leave my camera behind at the entrance, but I still took some pictures with my phone. They're not quite good though... Apart from that, the concert was absolutely great! :P They made practically no mistakes, at least as far as I can tell and they simply rocked big time. They mostly played songs from their 3 latest albums but also some older songs from the "Scenes From A Memory" album for instance. Jordan Rudess also had a portable mini keyboard which he used for some solos, which is good because usually only John Petrucci shows off big time... ;) Anyway, I guess I don't have to tell you all that I enjoyed it very much. Let's hope they come again soon.

As for Octave, I've been able to compile it but the dependencies it has really are impossible to figure out. They have their own buildsystem which really doesn't make sense to me and quite frankly I don't feel the need to spend that much time on it. Especially now I have the linux version of matlab... :P

Octave

Sander Knopper — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 10:22:19 +0200

Hi all,

Since I need a matlab or at least matlab-compatible environment for a course at university I figured it wouldn't really be a problem since there is Octave. Unfortunately, the version in the main portage tree is heavily outdated and thus not really usable since I need it to be as compatible with matlab as possible and this seems to have improved in the latest releases.

I can hear you say: so, make your own ebuilds! Yes, that's what I'm (trying) to do right now. After recompiling gcc with fortran support I modified the latest ebuild in the tree to work with the latest and greatest release of Octave but soon found out that it has some dependencies on libraries which are outdated as well and actually didn't even compile on my system. So basically I'm currently trying to get things to work from bottom to top. I'm currently testing the (updated) ebuilds for the libraries (blas-atlas, lapack) and later on I'm going to try to compile Octave again.

If there's anyone interested in an overlay, let me know. I'll see if I can make one. Or if you just want to test/try the ebuilds, let me know too, I'll just mail them to you.

New server trouble...

Sander Knopper — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 14:12:31 +0200

My old homeserver was getting a bit slow, especially when you consider that it's a Via Epia system that runs at 600Mhz and has 256MB of memory. This particular feeling got even stronger when I uploaded my pictures of my last holiday (about 500) and it had to create thumbnails for every picture and everything.

Since the server is in my room and I look my room to be quiet when I sleep I immediately started looking for a more modern Epia system and eventually the Epia LN with a Eden CPU at 1Ghz got my attention. I ordered it together with 1GB of memory and a 320GB HD (the old one was 80GB). Everything fine until then.

The new parts were delivered at my house and of course I wanted to try it out right away. So I unpacked it, assembled it and put it into the case. I connected the power supply and even could see the leds of the network card burning... But, that's about the only thing it would do. When I switched the whole thing on the power led burned for an instant and after that the whole board was dead. Even the network card didn't produce any light anymore... I tried a whole lot of things until I realized the power supply possibly couldn't produce enough power and thus I used the power supply of my used-to-be desktop system. Guess what, everything worked fine! Since the power supply was as big as the whole system this wasn't an ideal situation and therefore I ordered a PicoPSU from the same shop which can deliver more power than the old one. It arrived today and now everything works smoothly.

So I almost spent a whole week figuring out the problem and waiting for new parts. Why can't things just work straight away? Well, at least I'm happy with the improved performance... ;)

Most recent posts

First motorcycle driving lesson!

QtMPC 0.4.0 released!

QtMPC

Media PC

New laptop

My first *real* guitar lesson

Samba 3.0.25 and kernel 2.6.23

Dream Theater

Octave

New server trouble...

My first real guitar lesson