Cool Linux tool...

Obviously, I'm enjoying gaming on my Linux box a whole lot these days, and one of the problems every gamer has with his set-up is that every game's sound effects are recorded at a different level. To combat this problem, I did two things: I install a "multimedia keyboard" (Microsoft brand-- they make decent hardware, as long as it's not DRM'd) and installed LinEAK, the Linux Easy Access Keyboard server. This nifty little utility allows you to use the keyboard's "extra" buttons across the top row as readily as you would under Windows-- and without the performance hit Windows imposes.

Even better, XMMS, the X Multimedia System for Unix, which is the premier MP3/OGG/AAC/FLAC/SPEEX/etc. player for those of us not living with Bill or Steve, has an interface for LinEAK that allows you to do all the usual things you expect to be able to do: start, stop, pause, next, and previous.

But it's mostly just nice in the middle of a game to be able to press Volume-Up and actually have it work.

Call your Senator NOW! WA folks, that's Senator Murry's office

The broadcast flag, which will give Hollywood the right to force you to upgrade to a television of their design or stop watching forever, which has repeatedly been shot down during regulatory moves in the past, is now being snuck into legislation today for a vote tomorrow. Call your senator right NOW or send her a fax letting her know that you don't want America's creative innovation to be crushed by regulation.

Today's video geek tip.

One of the problems I've had in recent years with non-anime video is that the audio and video are frequently out of sync. As the tools have improved, this has been less of a problem, but there is one cache of video out there (still accessible despite all the ill-will of Congress) that has always confounded me: the MST3K Digital Archive. Frequently, the audio would get so out of sync as to be several seconds ahead or behind the video, which is both annoying and disconcerting.

So, the solution: force the video and audio into sync by duplicating or dropping video frames as needed to guarantee a one-to-one mark of audio and video. Transcode and MkDVD don't do this, but MEncoder does, so before you pass the video to MkDVD, run it through MEncoder, thusly:

mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy -ofps 29.970 -o output.avi input.avi \
> /dev/null 2>&1

Viola'. You'll be ready to burn the results to your DVD.

The good, the bad, and the ugly

Well, I tried two things: I've upgrade to S2 and in the process lost all of my customizations; I'll have to read zonereyrie's S2 howto to get it all back, and none of the existing themes really please me. I guess I'll live in the meantime.

On the other hand, I also upgraded to the latest version of ljupdate, which is the Emacs interface to LJ. It supports tags, has done away with a lot of the old nonsense, doesn't store your passwords in the clear, and has auto-completion for the mood setting based upon past entries. Very, very nice.