Lands End to John O’Groats (LEJOG) – Equipment List
// May 19th, 2010 // 2 Comments » // Events, Fitness
As usual cycling has been my biggest interest of late as the Summer weather begins to come into play. This year I’ve decided (after writing it off at first) to try and cycle 1,000 miles from Lands End to John O’Groats (LEJOG) on my Boardman Pro Carbon road racing bike.
I was initially put off, as my bike, being a carbon fibre competition bike, doesn’t have any pannier mount points and typically isn’t really built for long distance in terms of riding position etc… The lure of such a ride was too much though, and I pushed ahead with figuring out how I could achieve it.
Change the default sound card in Ubuntu Karmic
// April 20th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Linux
I’ve got a pc with two sound cards, the onboard sound, and a Sound Blaster Live Value I’ve had for a while. I use the Sound Blaster as I’ve never been able to get the onboard sound working in Ubuntu. For some reason or other, I managed to mess up the default sound card on my install of Ubuntu Karmic. Sound would work for most apps, but wouldn’t work for Flash (such as Youtube). Most of the apps were going through PulseAudio, and working fine. Flash however was still using Alsa directly and was using the wrong sound card by default, hence no sound.
So, I set about trying to fix the issue, but it quickly became apparent that it wasn’t an easy fix. There used to be an app called “asound” which would let you configure this sort of thing. But since Karmic it has been dropped from the repo’s! So I found a different way of fixing the issue.
Mounting an EXT3 removable drive for the first time
// April 17th, 2010 // No Comments » // Linux
Since recently using a lot more HD .mkv files, I’ve decided to switch away from FAT32 (and it’s 4GB file limit) to EXT3 (which is a far better choice generally). I took my 320GB USB powered Toshiba drive, plugged it into my pc and using GParted formatted it to EXT3. Great that was easy.
Using that same machine I then mounted the drive, and copied a load of files onto it. All seemed well, until…
Installing Ruby in Ubuntu 9.10 (and OpenSSL)
// March 20th, 2010 // 2 Comments » // Linux
In the package manager for Ubuntu (Synaptic) we already have a “ruby” package. It wasn’t until recently though that I realised the “rubygems” part just didn’t work. Now that I’m depending on libraries such as “mocha” this is a blocking factor. There seems to be an ongoing argument between the ruby community and Ubuntu developers as to how it should all be managed (via gem or synaptic, or both). As far as I was concerned, I just want it all working so didn’t step into the debate. Instead by going on various forums and blogs, I’ve composed an all-in-one script that will install ruby v1.9.1 in Ubuntu.
Here it is, just paste the whole lot into a terminal window, and run it:
sudo apt-get remove -y ruby ruby1.8 ruby1.9 ruby1.9.1 rubygems rubygems1.8 rubygems1.9 rubygems1.9.1 &&
sudo apt-get autoremove -y &&
sudo apt-get install -y build-essential zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libopenssl-ruby &&
wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.1-p376.tar.gz &&
tar zxvf ruby-1.9.1-p376.tar.gz &&
cd ruby-1.9.1-p376 &&
./configure &&
make &&
sudo make install & &cd ext/openssl &&
ruby extconf.rb &&
sudo make install &&wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/60718/rubygems-1.3.5.tgz &&
tar zxvf rubygems-1.3.5.tgz &&
cd rubygems-1.3.5 &&
sudo ruby setup.rb;
You should be all setup. When installing gems, just make sure you use “sudo”, ie sudo gem install rspec
sudo gem install rspec mocha net-ssh
--with-openssl-dir=/usr/local/ssl
Banshee crashing? Rebuild the database
// March 19th, 2010 // No Comments » // Linux
In recent months I’ve become a dedicated Banshee user, and finally decided to drop Rhythmbox (bit dated / behind with the times) and Songbird (too slow for the size of collection I have). As of around v1.5.2 in Banshee they had fixed the slow load-up, and added a filesystem watcher. With those two things fixed, I made the switch.
I currently run the latest version of Banshee via the PPA, but recently had the problem of Banshee crashing a lot. I gather it’s from incompatible data between an older version I was running and the latest version. It was upon using v1.5.4 that if I tried to access certain tracks it would just crash.
I ran Banshee via terminal and checked the logs, but couldn’t get much info back. After reading around I found rebuilding the Banshee database fixed the issue, and allowed me to keep my library intact. This can be done by running:
sudo apt-get install -y sqllite3 &&
sqlite3 ~/.config/banshee-1/banshee.db “.dump” > dump &&
mv ~/.config/banshee-1/banshee.db banshee.db.backup &&
cat dump | sqlite3 ~/.config/banshee-1/banshee.db;
It basically dumps out your old database and recreates it. Thanks to gabaug for the fix.
