Posts Tagged Unabashedly Nerdtastic

Synaesthesia, also known as “Piano Hero” [Linux FTW]

Last year, a friend of mine showed me this cool program he found called “Synaesthesia.” It is, as the title reads, “Piano Hero.” Notes fall from the top to the bottom of the screen and when they collide with the bottom, you must hit the appropriate  key on your piano / keyboard / MIDI controller. It is a VERY cool tool for training, practicing, and learning new songs. As someone that is not particularly skilled at sight-reading music (I do better learning aurally), any way to get new songs loaded into my brain is welcome.

We inherited a Yamaha Clavinova 350 last year as well, which has been really terrific for practicing; I was previously using a 2/3 size electric piano that was showing its age. I picked up an M-Audio Fast Track Pro interface off of eBay for about  $50, and so I can now use the Clavinova as a MIDI controller!

My big Win last week, though, which happens to be what this post is about, is getting it to not only work in Linux (not so hard) but getting the Clavinova to function as the MIDI controller for it (somewhat challenging). Read the rest of this entry »

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Satan, Cantor & Infinity [Book Review]

book imageI picked this book up at Carroll & Carroll in Stroudsburg, PA; a bookstore I frequented in highschool.

I’ve always been a fan of logic puzzles although I would hardly call myself a logician — I actually find them somewhat challenging; but perhaps that’s the point of puzzles, after all.

In Satan, Cantor & Infinity, Smullyan weaves a lengthy fictional narrative into a series of many varieties of logic puzzles — from basic Goodman (always lie / always tell the truth) to very elaborate symbolic logic.

The title and the last chapter of the book share the same name, and it refers to a logic puzzle posed by Georg Cantor (famed mathematician). In this puzzle, Satan allows his denizens to attempt to escape damnation by guessing which number he has pre-selected, chosen from 1 to Infinity. It, among with many others, are imaginatory ways of grasping really elaborate abstract concepts such as “are some infinities bigger than others?” Read the rest of this entry »

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Making the Switch [Linux FTW]

Since January of this year, I have helped 3 separate people make the switch over to Linux from Windows. Last year I helped two people do it, and I am currently in the process of converting our desktop (used primarily by the wifey) over to Ubuntu as well.

To date, only one of them went back, but to be fair, I wasn’t able to help him in person, only over the Internet (and being able to play World of Warcraft was a dealbreaker for him — WoW does work, you just have to hoop-jump a bit to do it).

The distro of choice, of course, is Ubuntu. The latest release, Karmic Koala, offers many really awesome features, some of which aren’t even offered on Windows.

The key factor for conversion is quite simple: most people only need some really basic features to be satisfied. If anyone has ever asked you for advice about what computer to buy, if you ask them what they plan on doing it, the answer is often “Oh, you know… email, Internet, pictures, word processing; nothing fancy, I don’t need a gaming computer.”

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Using Virtualbox with an Existing Windows Partition [Linux FTW]

The recursion might blow your mind.

Last week, a friend of mine needed me to do an audio file conversion, but the app that I use is installed on my windows partition. I really don’t ever boot into Windows unless I have a good reason for it — I’m much happier tooling around in Linux — there’s just something satisfying and comfortable about being able to pop open a shell at any time.

Anyways – it got me thinking: I’ve booted into a Windows XP image,  why can’t I use VirtualBox to boot from a whole partition? Surely that is possible…

Tonight I finally got to play with it. And as you can see from the image here, I got success. :)

It’s a little challenging, but it’s doable. I had to spend some time to iron out the kinks, but you can reap the benefits!

UPDATE: Sandeep has submitted screenshots with instructions on getting this to work with Windows 7, see below, at the very end.

UPDATE: If you are getting the error message: Offset must be a number: rce
I have found the fix for it. See the instructions below.

UPDATE: Bogdan (see comments) was able to get Windows Vista working under Virtualbox OSE, using the method below. See his comments for specifics on Windows Vista.

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Quake-style terminal window [Linux FTW]

Long ago (mid-90′s), there was a revolutionary 3-d first-person-shooter game called “Quake”, made by id Software, the same people that made DooM a few years before.

Quake had this really cool feature where you could press the ~ key at anytime during the game and a terminal window would drop down from the top of the screen. This terminal screen could be used for anything from chatting to changing maps and more. It was sweet.

Since then, there have been many attempts at replicating the functionality in both Mac and Linux environments, where it is still common to use a terminal window with some regularity.

One such software package, Guake, has become a personal favorite of mine. It’s very simple; no bells or whistles other than the ability to adjust the Opacity. My only beef with it was simply that the terminal would just pop up on the screen rather than drop down from the top. Totally superficial — but what’s the point of using an open-source OS if you can’t customize it to do exactly what you want?

Last night, I figured out how to do it. And it’s glorious (video demo after the jump). Read the rest of this entry »

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