Arie’s Blog

LEEEEROOOOOY JEEEENKIIIINSSS remake

October28

I’m a paleontologist

September28

Speedup the HTC Hero

September4

A week ago I got a new phone, the HTC Hero.

HTC Hero
It’s an Android based phone so it’s easy to customize and there are a lot of great apps available for it.

However, HTC’s default firmware is a bit sluggish. Luckily there’s a solution. It takes 5 minutes and besides speeding it up, it also ‘roots’ it. ‘Rooting’ an Android phone allows a user to do basically anything he wants with the phone.

Here are the steps (by Paul of MoDaCo)

- Download the custom ROM, and copy it to your SD card (modaco 2.2 core)
- download this file (http://content.modaco.net…copatchedrecovery-1.0.zip) and extract it to your PC or mac
- open a command prompt to the directory containing the extracted files
- type the following commands (prefix each command with ./ if you’re on a mac)
- adb shell reboot bootloader (wait for device to reboot into bootloader)
- fastboot boot cm-hero-recovery.img
- Select ‘nandroid backup’ from the menu to do a backup
- If you copied the custom rom as update.zip, select ‘apply sdcard:update.zip’, else select the option below.
- all done

Microsoft about the future

August15

Smooth 1080p h264 playback on Linux

July29

I’ve been struggling for quite some time trying to get 1080p content to play smoothly on my MythTV pc. I managed to get good playback of 720p files by compiling mplayer myself and using a recent version of the closed source nvidia driver.

Playing back 1080p content however, was still a problem. I was never able to get smooth playback with mplayer. Only the xbmc videoplayer could play 1080p smoothly on my system. XBMC is not an option due to the WAF, it has to be something that runs from MythTV.

Fooling around with coreavc-for-linux (I love CoreAVC on Windows) got me nowhere. Recompiling, tweaking and updating mplayer/nvidia/xorg, nothing seemed to work.

Until I tried a new version of mplayer from the Debian Multimedia repositories. The mplayer version in that repository has support for a new feature in the linux nvidia drivers that (finally) allows video decoding on the GPU.

The easy steps to get this to work:

  • Download and install the new nvidia linux drivers (180+)
  • Add the Debian Multimedia repository to your sources.list
  • Install mplayer from the new Debian Multimedia repository
  • Start mplayer with ‘-vo vdpau -vc ffh264vdpau’

More than a year of tweaking and tinkering made redundant by these easy steps, excellent!

Homeopathy to the rescue!

July24

It’s funny, because it’s true :/

Happy towel day!

May25

Douglas Adams

Happy towel day!

Other ‘news’:

Rails on OS X: no such file to load — mysql

March11

Just a quick post to maybe help someone who has a similar problem:

I had the following error whenever I tried to use ‘script/console’ (script/server and rake worked fine)

require ‘mysql’

MissingSourceFile: no such file to load — mysql
from /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27:in `gem_original_require’
from /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27:in `require’

Turns out I had multiple versions of RubyGems installed on my Macbook. The error message already spoils it by saying rubygems in /System/Library/Framework/ is being called, while I actually installed rubygems manually in a different folder.

To prevent these kind of problems in the future I simply deleted the entire Ruby.framework directory and use the manually installed versions instead.

Switching from Ubuntu/Windows to Mac OS X

January22

apple-logo

I’ve been using my new Macbook for a whopping two days now, so I think it’s time to share some of my early impressions.

First of all, I’m not a typical computer user. I’m picky, opinionated and totally unreasonable when it comes to my requirements for an Operating System. Before my Macbook my setup consisted of:

  • Desktop PC, Windows XP: Used for gaming mainly, also editting photo’s and as a ‘fat client‘ for Putty
  • Laptop, Ubuntu: Used for work and midnight-coding. Purely a development tool for developing Ruby on Rails webapplications, accessing icanhazcheeseburger.com and other important work stuff.

Read the rest of this entry »

Getting a Macbook

January19

I’ve decided to join the evil empire and buy an Apple Macbook. Expect to see some posts describing why it fails during the coming weeks.

Macbook Pro

posted under Hardware | 4 Comments »
« Older EntriesNewer Entries »