Sharing is caring, it can be fun

The World of Stuff's first original video in almost three years is hardly original at all... but that's okay!

Here's the skinny: Copyright law gives you the exclusive rights to the works you create, as evidenced in the familiar phrase, "All rights reserved." Creative Commons is an organization that provides various licenses that you can apply to your works if you only want "some rights reserved." Some licenses allow commercial uses of the work, others allow creating derivative works, etc. The Attribution and Attribution-Share Alike licenses are the most permissive.

Jamendo, one of my favorite web sites, allows musicians to post their Creative Commons-licensed songs for people to download at no cost. And a lot of it is is good stuff. I've rolled a custom RSS feed that lists the latest albums uploaded to Jamendo under either the Creative Commons Attribution or Attribution-Share Alike license. It lets me stay on top of things.

Recently, an artist named Josh Woodward released an album called Breadcrumbs on Jamendo. He followed up by releasing an instrumental version with the vocal tracks removed. Both versions were released under the Creative Commons Attribution license. It wasn't long before another artist named Sean Wright added his own vocals to one of Woodward's songs, and released it on Jamendo under the Attribution-Share Alike license. This is the kind of stuff that gets me going!*

Both songs are really great,** so I wondered what it would sound like if I synchronized them. I spent much of Sunday working to share the result. Hence The World of Stuff's latest video, Creative Commons in Action: Josh Woodward and Sean Wright. Have a listen! They sound even better together. The best part is that I didn't need to seek anyone's permission to make the video; the Creative Commons licenses already granted it.

Here's a bit of a technical background for the curious. I haven't really worked with editing video since I was just starting out with Linux almost three years ago. The truth is that video editing software is the last frontier that Linux has yet to conquer. For this video, I used Pitivi, which is finally pretty stable and lacking only video effects (in my opinion). In the past, I might have used Kdenlive, the only other working video editing program for Linux that I've encountered, but it's a KDE application, and I use GNOME. Other Linux users will hopefully understand this.

Also, it's interesting to note that the video was produced entirely with free software and free formats. I started with Ogg Vorbis versions of the two songs (licensed as CC-BY and CC-BY-SA), combined them in Audacity, and saved the result as FLAC audio. The visuals were created using the similarly-licensed album artwork and Bitstream Vera Sans in the GIMP before being saved in PNG format. The video itself was produced in Pitivi and saved as Ogg Theora/Vorbis. I've licensed it as CC-BY-SA, and it's available on YouTube as... Flash. Yeah, I know. But I have the original file if you want.

Just today, Sean Wright released more songs based on Josh Woodward's instrumental tracks. If you enjoyed "From Your Lips," do check them out!

This post is already running long, but here are a few links:

An instructional video: How to Make Your Own Soda. (Via Lifehacker)

Here's a map showing the distance to the nearest McDonald's for every point in the contiguous United States. The "McFurthest Spot" is somewhere in South Dakota. It's a 233-kilometer drive from there to the nearest Golden Arches. (Via J-Walk Blog)

* Not the only stuff that gets me going
** I like the original better

Reboot

My Halloween was good; thanks for asking. I went to my friend Andrea's to watch the football game with her and some of her friends, and we hung out for a good while afterward. No one yelled at me for not wearing a costume! Now that's what I call a good time.

I upgraded to the new version of Ubuntu on Sunday. I'm always a little wary of upgrading because there's the possibility that something could go wrong and screw up your system. It never happens to me, though.

Well, it never did until this time.

To finish the installation, I rebooted. During the boot process, a certain daemon was being turned on and off in an infinite loop, and I had to kill the power to turn off the machine. I was able to get to a root terminal with networking in safe mode, and I made it to the login screen by booting with an older kernel, but I didn't want to go farther than that.

I used an old live CD to get on the Internet and ask the Ubuntu Forums people (and anyone who saw my status on Facebook) for help. Ultimately, I decided to reinstall Ubuntu; I didn't think I could diagnose the problem, and this would have been my fifth successful upgrade in a row, which any sensible person would tell you is too many.

So, I downloaded and burned a CD from the command line and then reinstalled Ubuntu from that. Next, I spent six hours trying to restore from a backup I had made the day before (back up regularly, and always before upgrading!). For six hours, tar was dominating my CPU without extracting anything from the archive I had made. It turned out that I had an option wrong. The main argument that tar takes isn't the directory where you want the archive extracted; it's the file(s) you want from the archive. Doesn't explain why it would take so long to extract /, which wasn't even in there, though.

Since I had backed up my home folder, all of my personal files and most of my settings remained intact, so it was a relatively painless process getting back up to speed. Now it's almost like I had upgraded, except that I'm enjoying the benefits of a clean installation. This new version has some minor annoyances, but it's a lot quicker to boot up (and shut down), and the new default icon theme is pretty slick.

Overall, I am pretty pleased. I just don't want it to happen again. To that end, I created a separate /home partition during the installation. That means I'll be able to do a clean install in the future without having to restore my home folder.

From Wired: Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine.

Hot dogs come in packs of 10, while hot dog buns come in packs of 8. Some guy got fed up with that decided to take matters into his own hands. (Via J-Walk Blog)

License and registration

Last Wednesday, September 16, my roommates and I each got a notice from the management:

This letter is to inform you that as of Thursday, September 17, 2009 in the afternoon, Pavlov Media will be changing its network formatting. As a result, you will be required to register. Registration is a simple, one-time only process that takes anywhere from five to fifteen minutes. ...

The letter went on to give a URL for registering and a phone number in case there were any problems or questions. Naturally, I thought this sucked. I was looking forward to getting away from these shenanigans when I moved out of my dorm.

Pavlov, the company that provides cable and Internet service for my apartment, doesn't actually seem that bad. Prior to last week, I ran the Glasnost test to see if they were screwing around with BitTorrent traffic, and it seemed that they weren't. But still, having to register your hardware is a bad idea. Real ISPs don't make their users do it. (Oooooh!)

Nonetheless, I had to do it. It actually took longer than 15 minutes. Registration consists of identifying yourself and the devices you plan to use to connect to the Internet. And apparently, you can have only two devices authorized to connect at any given time. You have to provide their MAC addresses, which you're told how to find on Windows, Mac OS X, and every Internet-capable smartphone and video game console in existence. Yep, that covers it!

Despite this infantile infantility, I haven't noticed a degradation in service since handing over my information. I was going to repeat the Glasnost test right now for the purposes of journalistic integrity, but they've changed the test so it takes way longer. I'll do it later.

I write about a lot of stuff all the time, and sometimes I don't tie loose ends, so I'd like to do that here. Almost a year ago, I wrote a letter to a Marine in Iraq. The followup: well, there was none. I never got a reply, and that makes me sad.

Is the Internet making our kids dumb? Wired's Clive Thompson points out evidence that they're better writers than previous generations.

Is there anything shell scripts can't do? Linux Baby Rocker. (Via The Presurfer)

Hello September

Things have been going here in Gainesville. Over the summer, my friend Evan decided to get a band together with me, my former suitemate Cameron, and one of his other friends. We got together for a practice last Tuesday (except for Cameron, who was getting ready to go somewhere). We tried to decide on a song to play and picked "Hotel California."

I brought my Epiphone hollow-body guitar, a low-end version of a Gibson. The other guitarist, the guy I don't know too well, had an actual Gibson hollow-body. Now I think I know how a girl feels when another girl wears the same dress as her to a party. But this guy has mad guitar skillz, so it's all good.

I haven't been in anything that could be loosely termed a band since some of my junior-high buds and I played in public for the last time four years ago. I've been in some fruitless and abortive attempts to start or join bands since then, so I'd like to see things turn out differently this time.

By the way, this new group has a name: Rubber Band. Evan doesn't care if the name is already taken, which, given my past experiences, is an admirable quality.

For one of my classes, I have to use a program called MATLAB (I guess you're supposed to shout it). You may have heard of the program. Turns out it's proprietary and expensive. Actually, I don't have to use MATLAB!!! per se, but the code I write has to work with it. I know that free alternatives exist, but to be absolutely sure, I really should use Matlab. What to do?

The professor suggested going to the university's computer labs because Matlab is installed on the computers there. But I don't have the time for that. I wondered if it might be installed on the so-called CPU servers, which I already had remote access to. (These things come with taking computery classes, of course.) It turns out that I can log in to one of those computers and use X11 forwarding over SSH to run Matlab. In English: I can run the program on a different computer and have its window show up on my computer as if it were any other program of mine.

Running Matlab this way is slow because the remote computer has to handle a bunch of other people's stuff at the same time, but it's definitely better than having to go to the labs whenever I want to do my homework. And it makes use of a cool feature that will make Windows users salivate even though it's been available on Unix-like operating systems for 20 years. To top it off, I made a launcher for Matlab in my Applications menu (the command is "ssh -CtX [my user name]@[server] matlab") so I can access it about as easily as program I actually have installed. I am clever.

Here's a mesmerizing video of the Milky Way rising over the Texas sky. (Via J-Walk Blog)

The New York Times has a graph showing sales of different music formats between 1973 and 2008. Looks like the music industry's sales are down. Yes! Maybe now they'll get some common sense. But probably not. (Via J-Walk Blog)

Do you like baseball or statistics? I like at least one of those, and I find these baseball-related graphs to be interesting. Example: How often have the Canadian MLB teams played a game with "O Canada" as the only national anthem? (Via waxy.org)

Following the green star

The Pasporta Servo (Passport Service) is a hospitality network for Esperanto speakers. Since my friend Andy and I are about to embark on a two-month trip to Europe, and because we're Esperantists, we thought we should take advantage of this great resource. There's just one problem: this year's edition of the address book hasn't been published yet. Normally it's published early in the year, but since they're making an online version of what was previously only a book, things got complicated, apparently.

Andy and I just posted a request for hosts on the lernu.net forums, and we've already gotten a response from a young guy near Paris who we can probably stay with for at least a few nights. Also, I decided to buy last year's edition of the Pasporta Servo, which Esperanto-USA was still offering for sale. I don't think using it will be a big problem; this year's version can't be very different. While I was buying Esperanto-related stuff, I also bought a little Esperanto flag and some buttons so other Esperantists can identify us. Seeing that flag just makes me so happy. I'm looking forward to staying with and befriending a lot of nice people.

To call friends and family at home or future friends in Europe at low, low rates, I set out to install the Internet telephony program Ekiga on our Eee PC. It wasn't as straightforward as I thought it would be, though. The EeeUser wiki has a whole big page about adding software repositories, but none of the ones listed on that page had Ekiga, so they were pretty useless. What to do, what to do?

I had read somewhere that the customized version of Xandros that runs on the Eee PC is based on Debian Etch, so I decided to add the Etch repositories to see what would happen. If my system got hosed, I could just reboot and restore everything to the factory configuration. So I added the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian etch main contrib

The EeeUser wiki page wasn't entirely useless. It taught me about the importance of pinning, which gives different priority levels to different repositories. I edited /etc/apt/preferences to give the standard Eee PC repositories a higher pin priority than the default 500:

Package: *
Pin: origin update.eeepc.asus.com
Pin-Priority: 950

Then I went to Synaptic to install Ekiga, but I kept getting an error message about being unable to parse /var/lib/dpkg/status. I tried some fixes as suggested on the wiki, but the problem persisted. I even restored the original settings, but to no avail. So I just tried using apt-get on the command line, and that worked. Apparently I also could have just scrolled down to Ekiga in Synaptic. The message apparently only comes up if I install a package after entering a search keyword.

Anyway, Ekiga seems to be working fine except for lag problems on my end and sound quality problems on other people's end. The latter, I hope, can be fixed by adjusting the equalization of the microphone, i.e., giving it more treble and less bass. But I can't seem to find a utility to do that. More research is needed. In the meantime, I have set Ekiga to start automatically, so friends and family who want to call me should be able to whenever the computer is on.

Self-explanatory: japanesebirdcookingspaghetti.com.

Dork Yearbook is a collection of dorky photos of dorks when they were dorky children. I'm glad I wasn't that dorky as a little kid. (Via waxy.org)

I should be working

I've been to the movies a few times lately. I saw Star Trek with my friends the Friday before last and again just this Sunday night. I'm proud to say I'd never watched any of the shows or the other movies because otherwise I'd be someone who watches Star Trek. Anyway, from the perspective of a complete outsider, the movie was good enough for me to see twice without getting bored. My friends and I also went to the midnight showing of Angels and Demons on Thursday night/Friday morning. It was pretty fast-paced, and I liked it. I didn't read the book.

In my last post, I talked about getting a new memory card for my digital camera. Well, I've discovered another benefit of having a large memory card. If you've seen my videos, you've seen the handiwork of my digital camera. The quality is pretty good, but it only records at something like 16 frames per second, so any motion looks pretty jerky. (Mmm... jerky.) I recently remembered that my camera has a higher-quality video setting that I couldn't use with my old memory card because it didn't have enough space. My 1 GB card can hold over 12 minutes of high quality video at 30 frames per second. It looks like it's from an actual camcorder. I could reach 8 GB sooner than I think.

For my upcoming trip, I've got a computer, but the keyboard is pretty small. This would be a problem for picture-taking because I name all my digital photos and videos to include the date, the number in the sequence for that day, and a brief description. After years of doing this manually, I wrote a Bash script to help me automate the task. It prompts me for a description for each photo or video and then moves it to the proper folder. Here's the script if you're interested.

11 Extinct Animals That Have Been Photographed Alive. (Via The Presurfer)

Ah, Area 51, a favorite subject of conspiracy theorists everywhere. Some goings-on at the base have recently been declassified, so several people have gone on the record to talk about what it was like to work at Area 51 and what some of those "UFOs" actually were. (Via waxy.org)

Welcome back, Conky

For a relatively long time, I used Conky as a system monitor on my desktop. It's pretty popular among Ubuntu users and other Linux types. Eventually, I switched to Screenlets, mainly because they look snazzy. But since my Screenlets have been acting up lately (spontaneously losing their configurations when I log in), I decided I'd have enough of that. I've gone back to Conky and all its powerful features. To that end, I've spent hours on what I believe is a pretty sexy Conky setup. Click the thumbnail for the full-size version.

The wallpaper is from InterfaceLIFT. The semi-transparent background for Conky is actually part of the wallpaper. I made a transparent image with a black stripe down the side in the GIMP and overlaid it on the original wallpaper with ImageMagick, which will make things easier when I want to change the wallpaper later. As for the Conky configuration itself, it's pretty self-explanatory. Here's my .conkyrc, and here's a Bash script I wrote to make audio metadata from Rhythmbox look pretty whether you're playing a song, a podcast, an Internet radio stream, or nothing at all.

And now, the not-so-boring links:

The difference between Pixar's and DreamWorks' animated films explained.

Wrong Tomorrow documents predictions made by public figures and keeps track of whether they become wrong or right. (Via waxy.org)

NPR did an interesting story recently on how ants know when their fellow ants are dead. As with many such things, it has to do with a chemical, which you can use to really confuse them.

The 5th semiannual Ubuntu upgrade post

Ah, the thrill of the upgrade. The excitement of downloading all-new versions of your favorite software, and the very real possibility that your entire system could get hosed. After a series of relatively uneventful upgrades, I wondered when my luck would run out.

So Ubuntu 9.04 (insert codename that no one likes here) came out on Thursday. As I've been doing for the past few upgrades, I downloaded the alternate install CD (although I used BitTorrent this time).

Once I got that going, the actual upgrade went pretty smoothly... until the end, when Ubuntu said that the installation failed due to a broken package. It was Bonager, an old program I installed from a third-party .deb package and used for a while but wasn't using anymore. I went to Synaptic and it told me to try sudo apt-get -f install, but that didn't work. After some Googling, I found this, which got rid of the program.

sudo update-rc.d -f bonager remove
sudo rm /etc/init.d/bonager
sudo dpkg -P --force-all bonager

Thinking that was over with, I went to the Update Manager to see if there were any new updates since the release. The Upgrade Manager told me I had to do a partial upgrade, presumably because of the broken package mess. I started that, and it asked me to insert a CD. I hit cancel, and it continued for a bit but then stopped without explanation. I tried again, and the partial upgrade would start but then the window would disappear. I tried it on the command line (sudo apt-get dist-upgrade) and the reason was that there were more broken packages, presumably caused by the breakage of the first one. sudo apt-get -f install actually fixed the problem, and I ran the upgrade again on the command line without any problems.

The ordeal caused me a lot of grief, but at least there weren't sharks involved.

I like the new version of Ubuntu. There haven't been too many funky changes to trip me up, and there have been some little improvements here and there. You can now change gedit's syntax highlighting from the status bar; Rhythmbox's gapless playback allows songs to finish; Transmission allows bandwidth limit scheduling. As usual, Ubuntu has thrown in some new fonts, but I actually like them. They're the Liberation fonts, which are apparently metric-compatible with certain popular fonts. They also look pretty slick, like you'd find them in a book or magazine that was trying to look cool. And the new pop-up notifications aren't that bad. I just wish I could customize them. The little preferences app does nothing.

Some reviews I've read assert that subtle improvements have made the Ubuntu experience better overall, and I find myself agreeing. Maybe it's just my imagination, but OpenOffice.org and Firefox even seem a bit zippier. It's almost as if Firefox is saying, "Yes, Jordon, install as many extensions as you want!!"

Probably my favorite improvement is the inclusion of Ekiga 3.2, which has buddy list capabilities so you can actually see whether other people are online. At this juncture I'd like to renew my perennial plea for Ekiga contacts. You know, just say hi or something. I'm sip:jordon@ekiga.net. Pretty easy to remember. (It's also available for Windows!) I really wish there were something like a "Skype Me" forum for SIP users. I've even thought of creating something like that myself. Seriously, there must be some people who use SIP for fun, right? How are they supposed to contact each other?

Clerkdogs provides movie recommendations from former video store clerks. The recommendations are supposed to be all the better for it. (Via The Presurfer)

Here's a USA Sitcom Map showing the settings of sitcoms across the country. There's a whole map for New York City as well. (Via waxy.org)

E-E-E

Oh, honey, he's teasing you. Nobody has two television sets.

I haven't talked much here about my upcoming trip to Europe with my friends, but believe me, it is still going to happen. I've been making arrangements bit by bit. I've bought a plane ticket and a train ticket already. But since I'm going to be gone for over two months, I felt that there should be something more.

I've decided to keep my job while I'm on vacation. I'm a webmaster here at school. I also happen to blog as a hobby. ("Really?") I also like to take pictures with my digital camera... do you see where this is going?

I need a laptop.

I do have a laptop. I've been using my Dell Inspiron E1505N since I got it almost two years ago. But it's big and heavy. It has all personal information on it, so I'd hate for it to get lost in a foreign country. It was kind of expensive, so I wouldn't want to have to replace it. It's also fragile; I've come close to breaking it while carrying it around.

So, for my trip, I'd need a laptop that's the opposite of all that—one that's small, light, ad hoc, cheap, and sturdy. Fortunately, the market has answered. I am speaking, of course, of that newly popular class of PCs, the netbook.

Since Andy and I will be traveling as a duo for much of the time, we talked about the possibility of buying a netbook together, sharing it during the trip, and selling it after we get back. I did a bit of research and found a barely used one in my immediate area for $250. It had basically everything I wanted: a low-capacity solid-state drive, a Linux-based operating system, good battery life, and of course, small size. It's an ASUS Eee PC 4G, and today, it is mine ours. Craigslist does it again!

Apparently, the woman selling it got it as a gift and didn't want it because she already has a laptop. I can sympathize. I had a hard time convincing myself that I should buy a second laptop, even a cheap one that I would only have for a short time. I figured it would be tantamount to declaring my two-year-old laptop obsolete, and that computer cost too much for me to take it out of service so early.

After using the Eee PC, I've set aside those concerns. The netbook is for casual use only. The 800x480 screen is almost too small for web browsing, and the keyboard is almost too small for typing. (In fact, I haven't switched the layout to Dvorak because I need my fingers to move around more!) It's not the most pleasant experience, but you can manage in a pinch. And dang if it isn't convenient.

So, during our 68-day pinch, it should get the job done just fine. It'll be much better than not blogging, not being able to take lots of photos, and not making money. Now, I'll just have to show it to Andy and see what he thinks. I'm pretty sure he'll like it. Also, he owes me $125.

Here's a fun mashup for your listening and viewing pleasure: Mother of All Funk Chords. (Via Lessig Blog)

Recently, an old portrait that might be of Shakespeare has come to light. If it's actually of him, it would change the little that we know about his life. But those of you who like a little mystery in your Elizabethan poet-playwrights need not be concerned because we'll probably never know one way or the other.

Look around you

No posts in six days. That must mean I'm having fun, right? The answer is yes!

Actually, I got sick this week, and that was annoying... you know, because I was at home on spring break and all. But I passed the time with... panoramic photography.

See, I'd long missed putting together panoramas easily with a certain program that I no longer find ethical to use because it's not free as in freedom. I was wondering what was free but also very easy to use. There's Hugin, which runs on Linux, but from what I had seen, it couldn't stitch panoramas automatically. You had to choose a lot of corresponding points between images for it to put them together.

Actually, it turns out that Hugin can work with programs that pick points automatically, which makes the task of stitching panoramas much easier. It's not quite as easy as giving a program some images and telling it to go ahead, but it's close. I just downloaded Hugin and Autopano-SIFT (both available from Ubuntu's software repositories) and made sure that they would work together, and then everything was ready.

All you have to do is follow the instructions in Hugin's Assistant tab. It will guess the focal length of your camera based on the EXIF data in the images or something like that. All I know is that it didn't like photos I took with the camera sideways unless I stripped the images of their EXIF data and entered the focal length manually as three-quarters of the camera's actual focal length as calculated by Hugin (due to the aspect ratio being the opposite and aw, you don't really need to know this, do you).

Anyway, you load the images, then you and Hugin decide what the camera's focal length is. Next, Autopano-SIFT picks points common to different images so Hugin knows how to stitch them. You're then presented with a rough idea of how the panorama will look, and there you can set some parameters like the projection. That's one thing that I don't remember [non-free automatic panorama stitching program] being able to do.

It turns out that one projection is not suitable for all kinds of panoramas. For example, it's common to see buildings looking very bendy, like in some of my previous panoramas, but they look much better if you can keep straight lines straight, as in this example. But that sort of projection isn't always the best because the edges of the image get more distorted as the field of view gets wider. It's a trade-off.

Finally, Hugin generates an image. I like that it's an uncompressed TIFF with transparency around the panorama, as opposed to the aforementioned program which generated a (compressed) JPEG with black around the panorama.

Taking panoramic photos can be tricky, but with the right software, stitching images together doesn't have to be a problem. As long as you do a good job of taking the pictures, you can get a pretty flawless panorama like this one I took of my backyard. It consists of 17 photos.

(Also: I finally upgraded WordPress today, so let me know if you notice anything funky with the blog. 2.7 is sexxay.)

I have lots of gift cards that I rarely get a chance to use, so this site might be handy: you can buy and sell gift cards at Plastic Jungle. (Via mcgees.org)

Fun project: a Scrabble Keyboard. And it's for a Mac. Go figure. (Via The Presurfer)

You may have heard of Songsmith, Microsoft's new program that generates backing music for melodies. (See a recent post where I link to Songsmith's treatment of "Roxanne.") But it turns out that the program can do more than that. Here, Songsmith plays melodies based on recent stock charts... descending melodies, of course. Funny in a seemingly inappropriate way. (Via waxy.org)