Eee PC impressions
I got an ASUS Eee PC when my iBook finally died. I like the little thing a lot - the tiny form factor easily makes up for the limitations.
Where the 12-inch iBook had an adequate-sized 1024×768 screen, the Eee PC’s screen is 720×400, too narrow for a lot of web pages. Zooming out can help, but I find that just makes my eyes hurt after a while. I expect ASUS will add a version with a larger screen sometime this year.
The keyboard is probably my biggest gripe. The keys are all there, but they’re a little small. With my small hands and fingers it works okay, but the iBook certainly was more comfortable for extensive typing.
The installed OS is good and bad. Good because it’s a Linux distribution, so I didn’t pay for a Windows license that I wouldn’t be using anyway. Bad because it’s Xandros and defaults to a simplified user interface. I did live with the advanced desktop mode for a while. That does offer more flexibility, but I couldn’t figure out how to keep things properly updated - counting on ASUS to update Firefox seems foolish.
Luckily, I’m not the only one underwhelmed by Xandros on the Eee PC - the EeeUser Wiki has a long list of alternative operating systems people have installed on the Eee PC. Fedora usually works for me, so I decided to try Eeedora, a live cd version of Fedora with some customizations for the Eee PC. It seems to work well enough, but there are a few things I’ve done that I’ll post about later.
Xubuntu on an iBook (nope…)
Update: Well, I thought I had it working, but after several failed boots I gave up and installed Fedora 8 instead. It worked right out of the box, with the exception of the tap-click thing, right-click emulation, and the eject button. Not too bad.
I’ve got an old 12 inch dual-USB iBook that’s been running various flavors of Linux, most recently Fedora 7. That was working fine, but it seemed a little slow. Rather than upgrade to Fedora 8, I decided to try something allegedly better for older hardware. Xubuntu, a derivative of Ubuntu using the Xfce desktop environment, is supposed to be lighter-weight and faster. This is my little story about getting it running.
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Save a WMA stream and convert it to an MP3
A WMA stream is like an innocent person imprisoned in a gulag. It is our duty to free them! First, free the music from its streaming prison by capturing it to a WMA file:
mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile pop_tune.wma mms://gulag.com/pop_tune.wma
(From this page.) It’ll take a while, but you should end up with a file called ‘pop_tune.wma.’ A WMA is like an innocent person on work release from the gulag, wearing a lo-jack that prevents them from walking normally. So, let’s remove the lo-jack by converting the WMA to a WAV:
mplayer -vo null -vc dummy -ao pcm:file=pop_tune.wav pop_tune.wma
(From this page, refined by this reply.) If it worked, you should have a WAV file, which you can easily encode in your favorite non-evil format. You can also just use ffmpeg to turn the WMA file straight into an MP3 (or a ton of other things). This makes a 128kbps MP3:
ffmpeg -ab 128 -i pop_tune.wma pop_tune.mp3
crontab + wget = Tivo for internet radio
Let’s say your favorite radio station has an MP3 stream. Unfortunately, your favorite radio show on that station is on at some odd hour. Or you’re just scatterbrained and forget to tune in. You desperately need to record the show so you can listen to it whenever you’d like. Using cron, wget, and a little shell script it’s pretty easy.
Find the stream address
At my favorite station, KEXP, clicking an MP3 stream gives you a .pls file, which contains the stream address. Normally, you’d open this in an audio client such as xmms and listen away. Instead, download the .pls file so you can view the stream address.
Write a script
Here’s an example bash script that records a show with wget, using the date to make a unique name for the show. URL is the stream address you found earlier. LPath is the path where you want to put your recorded shows.
#!/bin/bash
Date=$(date +%F-%k-%M)
URL="http://internet-radio-station.net:8000/"
LPath="/home/joe/music/radio_shows/"
/usr/bin/wget $URL -O ${LPath}radio_show-${Date}.mp3
Save the script to your bin folder as something like “radioshowrec” and test it out - run it for a few seconds, stop it, then listen to the resulting mp3 file.
Setting up the cron jobs
First, make sure your user can use cron. I did this by switching to superuser mode and making an /etc/cron.allow file with my username in it.
Next edit your crontab file by typing “crontab -e” and add a pair of lines like this for each show you want to record:
00 12 * * 1 /home/joe/bin/radioshowrec
00 13 * * 1 /usr/bin/killall wget
The first line starts the recording at noon every Monday. The second line stops it at 1 pm. It will actually kill all of the wgets that might be running - if you plan on having more than one going at once you should figure out a smarter way to stop the recording.
Since the above script makes files with unique names, the files will pile up after a while. Personally, I just want to listen to the most recent show, so I leave the date part out of the script, overwriting the old file every week.
Abiword blues
Abiword is a nice, fast word processor. OpenOffice.org is better for importing and editing complex documents, but it can be painfully slow so I only use it if I have to. Abiword is also usually very stable, so I was surprised when it started crashing on startup. I tried upgrading, I tried downgrading, but it kept crashing. I finally found this bug report at Redhat’s Bugzilla. Comment 8 mentions starting Abiword like this:
$ abiword --geometry 800x600
Not sure why or how, but it worked!
