My music collection surpasses 10000 songs

Following the “report” series started with my first summary of info about the music collection I listen to, I will update that info in this post.

The data (in parentheses the difference with respect to last report, 8 months ago).


Files

Total files        10039 (+527)
  - Commercial     6533 (+372)
  - Jamendo        3381 (+155)
  - Other CC       71 (+0)
  - Other          54 (+0)
Total playtime     634h (+34h)
Disk usage         48GB (+3GB)
MP3 count          0 (+0)
OGG count          100039 (+527)

Last.fm

Playcount           56191 (+14657)

Most played artists Joaquín Sabina - 3233 (+522)
                    Ismael Serrano - 1820 (+1342)
                    The Beatles - 1632 (+286)
                    Extremoduro - 1611 (+917)
                    Silvio Rodríguez - 930 (+148)
                    David TMX - 891 (+38)
                    Siniestro Total - 847 (+197)
                    Bad Religion - 774 (+142)
                    Fito & Fitipaldis - 749 (+74)
                    La Polla Records - 710 (+145)
                    El Reno Renardo - 660
                    Joan Manuel Serrat - 635
                    La Fuga - 570
                    Platero y Tú - 554
                    Ska-P - 554 (+114)

Most played songs   Km. 0 (I. Serrano) - 82
                    Cuando aparezca el petróleo (E. Sánchez) - 74 (+8)
                    Salir (Extremoduro) - 68
                    Golfa (Extremoduro) - 66
                    Caperucita (I. Serrano) - 65
                    La extraña pareja (I. Serrano) - 61
                    Vértigo (I. Serrano) - 61
                    La del pirata cojo (J. Sabina) - 60 (+5)
                    Tirado en la calle (E. Sánchez) - 59 (+6)
                    Un muerto encierras (I. Serrano) - 58
                    Conductores suicidas (J. Sabina) - 57 (+6)
                    Medias Negras (J. Sabina) - 56
                    Y sin embargo (J. Sabina) - 55 (+6)
                    Tierna y dulce historia de amor (I. Serrano) - 53
                    You shook me all night long (AC/DC) - 52
                    So payaso (Extremoduro) - 52
                    Laztana (Latzen) - 50
                    Esperar (E. Sánchez) - 50
                    Pacto entre caballeros (J. Sabina) - 50 (+3)

Comments

My Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope upgrade plan

Well, not much of a “plan”, but bear with me.

Ever since using [[Debian]] and [[Ubuntu]], I have installed the OS just once per computer. All software upgrades, including full releases, have been done through upgrades, not re-installations. This means that I have never actually had the need to download any ISO besides the first one used when I bought the computer.

This is fine, but I always felt the compulsion to share my bandwidth with fellow Linux users, and relieve some load from the [[Canonical Ltd.]] servers. So for every new Ubuntu release, I have downloaded one or more (amd64, i386, desktop, alternate…) Ubuntu CD ISOs via BitTorrent, and kept them uploading for some time. However, the full BT download of the ISO is a waste of bandwidth, and unless my later upload share is greater than 1.0, I will have been overloading the servers, not relieving them.

Now, with Jaunty Jackalope, I have a way to fix this. I could have done similarly with previous releases, but I didn’t. Here’s the deal: download the ISO and share it with BitTorrent, but don’t upgrade from the Internet as well. Upgrade from the ISO I just downloaded! In the past I would be reluctant to do this, among other things because I don’t want to waste a physical CD for that. However, the Ubuntu upgrade instructions say how to mount the ISO (yes, mounting ISOs is not new. I’ve done it in the past), then upgrade from the mounted image. Once the upgrade is done, I can keep seeding the ISO with BitTorrent.

With this procedure I can use bandwidth more efficiently (I download the required software just once), and I can still share the ISO with other people. Moreover, there is another plus: the ISO is just 699 MB, whereas the upgrade manager in Ubuntu tells me that for the upgrade I will need to download more than 1 GB! The difference is due to the ISO being somehow compressed, I think. I will report on the size of the file system mounted from the ISO (which should be much more than 1 GB).

Update: Well, actually the internet upgrade involves more packages. If you upgrade from the CD, you are still required to download 800 more MB to complete the upgrade, so no magic there.

Comments

Brief MoinMoin howto

I recently started looking for some system/format to dump personal stuff on. I checked my own comparison of wiki software, and chose [[MoinMoin]].

I have already installed some [[MediaWiki]] wikis for personal use, and I consider it a really nice wiki system. However, one of its strengths is also a drawback for me: the backend is a database. I want to be able to migrate the wiki painlessly, and with MediaWiki this is not possible. There is no end to the files and database dumps one has to move around, and then it is never clear if there is still something missing (like edit history or some setting). I want to have a single dir with all the data required to replicate the wiki, and I want to [[rsync]] just this dir to another computer to have an instant clone of the wiki elsewhere. MoinMoin provides just that (I think, I might have to change my mind when I use it more).

So here you are the steps I took to have MM up and running in my Ubuntu 8.10 PC.

Installation

Ubuntu has packages for MM, so you can just install them:

% aptitude install python-moinmoin moinmoin-common

Configuration

Create a dir to put your wiki. For example, if you want to build a wiki called wikiname:

% mkdir -p ~/MoinMoin/wikiname

We made it a subdir of a global dir “MoinMoin”, so we can create a wiki farm in the future.

Next you have to copy some files over:

% cd ~/MoinMoin/wikiname
% cp -vr /usr/share/moin/data .
% cp -vr /usr/share/moin/underlay .
% cp /usr/share/moin/config/wikiconfig.py .
% cp /usr/share/moin/server/wikiserver.py .

If installing a wiki farm, you could be interested in the contents of /usr/share/moin/config/wikifarm/, but this is out of the scope of this post.

The next step is to edit wikiconfig.py to our liking. The following lines could be of interest:

sitename = u’Untitled Wiki’
logo_string = u’MoinMoin Logo
page_front_page = u”MyStartingPage”
data_dir = ‘./data/’
data_underlay_dir = ‘./underlay/’
superuser = [u”yourusername“, ]
acl_rights_before = u”iyourusername:read,write,delete,revert,admin”

Using

You just need to run wikiserver.py, there is no need to have [[Apache HTTP Server|Apache]] running or anything (like with, e.g., MediaWiki):

% cd ~/MoinMoin/wikiname/
% python wikiserver.py &

Then open your favourite browser and go to http://localhost:8080, and you will be greeted by the starting page.

Comments (4)

Pay for online radio? Don’t think so.

Apparently the online radio service my (formerly?) beloved [[last.fm]] was providing will no longer be free in the future, according to a recent official blog entry. Due to marketing/commercial/licensing decisions, the service will remain free of charge in the UK, Germany and the USA. Subscribers in the rest of the world will have to pay 3 euros per month.

In principle, I couldn’t care less for online music. I exclusively listen to my private collection, and only use last.fm to publish the list of tracks I listen to. However, I have a couple of thoughts about it.

The first one is that I think that charging web users according to location should be made obsolete. In Internet each person is just that: a person, an individual, a user. A site could ask me what my preferred language is, to interact better with me (and I could answer whatever, true or false), but my nationality, religion or race should be irrelevant. So much talk about “globalization”, and they only use it when it suits them. For example the work market is “globalizable”, but Internet is not.

My second thought is that they have been forced to charge money to their users because they have to pay for the right of broadcasting licensed music. My position? Fuck them. Yes, seriously, screw paying for the broadcasting rights! I am seriously fed up with the morons in the music (and film) industry, trying to control the uncontrollable. If I were Last.fm, or a radio station in general, I would broadcast just [[Creative Commons]] music, such as that at [[Jamendo]]. If you are an artist and want me to broadcast your music, then you should pay me, not the other way around. However, if you provide me with your music for free, I might broadcast it for free, too. Quid pro quo.

I think that radio broadcast of music, or internet sharing, or the CD market, should be completely free of charge (or, in the case of physical formats like CDs, charge just for the price of the physical medium). The musicians should see this forms of broadcast as advertising. The distribution of their music should be as wide as possible, to make them as famous as possible, so that the revenue they get by doing actual work (like performing live) is maximized.

But, hey, that’s just my view. What can I do with an industry that asks me to either comply or fuck off? Well, I guess that we, the clients/users should be asking that to the industry, not the other way around. I certainly try to.

Comments

Temperature and fan speed control on the Asus Eee PC

I noticed that after my second eeebuntu install (see a previous post for a why to this reinstall), my Eee PC was a wee bit more noisy. Most probably it has always been like that, but I just noticed after the reinstall.

I put some sensor output in my [[Xfce]] panel, and noticed that the CPU temperature hovered around 55 degrees C, and the fan would continuously spin at around 1200 rpm. I searched the web about it, and found out that usually fans are stopped at computer boot, then start spinning when temperature goes up. This is logic. The small catch is that when the temperature in the Eee PC goes down, the fan does not stop automatically. This means that the fans are almost always spinning in the long run.

I searched for methods to fix that, and I read this post at hartvig.de. From there I took the idea of taking over the control of the fans, and making them spin according to the current temperature. For that, I wrote the following script:

#!/bin/bash

TEMFILE=/proc/eee/temperature
FANFILE=/proc/eee/fan_speed
MANFILE=/proc/eee/fan_manual

# Get temperature:
TEMP=`cat $TEMFILE`

# Choose fan speed:
if [ $TEMP -gt 65 ]
then
  SPEED=90
elif [ $TEMP -gt 60 ]
then
  SPEED=60
elif [ $TEMP -gt 55 ]
then
  SPEED=30
else
  SPEED=0
fi

# Impose fan speed:
echo 1 > $MANFILE
echo $SPEED > $FANFILE

The file /proc/eee/fan_manual controls whether fans are under manual (file contains a “1”) or automatic (file contains a “0”) control. File /proc/eee/fan_speed must contain an integer number from 0 to 100 (a percent of max fan speed).

I am running this script every minute with cron, and thus far it works OK.

Comments (5)

LWD – March 2009

Did I say “bimonthly” in my last report? Mmm, that was 3 months ago… You can read an intro for my Linux World Domination project in this May 2008 post.

As usual D2D means “days to domination” (the expected time for Windows/Linux shares to cross, counting from the present date), and DD2D means difference (increase/decrease) in D2D, with respect to last report. CLP means “current Linux Percent”, as given by last logged data, and DD means domination day (in YYYY-MM-DD format).

Project D2D DD2D DD CLP Confidence %
Einstein 107 -144 2009-06-26 42.09 (+4.61) 17.3
MalariaControl >10k 12.55 (+0.10)
POEM 5345 +325 2023-10-30 10.47 (+0.42) 2.5
Rosetta >10k 8.09 (+0.10)
QMC >10k 7.87 (-0.04)
SETI >10k 7.94 (+0.06)
Spinhenge >10k 3.59 (+0.24)

As promised, today I’m showing the plots for POEM@home, in next issue Prime@home.

Number of hosts percent evolution for POEM@home (click to enlarge)

Accumulated credit percent evolution for POEM@home (click to enlarge)

Comments

My eeePC at the EGEE UF4

I just posted about the abundance of laptops in the conference I am attending this week. Now I feel like comenting about my experience with the Asus eeePC 901 I acquired some weeks ago.

I have seen a couple other eeePCs, a black 9xx one, and a 7xx one. Apart from these, most other computers are laptops, not [[netbooks]]. I actually expected to find more, and for a plethora or reasons. There are some pretty small Vaios around, but only they compete in terms of size and weight with the eeePC. Not even the Macs. Not even the MacBook Airs that I have seen. Yes, the screen of the eeePC is tiny, but I would hate carrying around those monsters just to have a big screen on the road.

Secondly, my battery can last for 6h of work. Since I only use it during the breaks, and intermittently during the talks (closing the lid to suspend it when not in use), I can easily use it the whole day without plugging it at all. Other people can’t live w/o plugs. In 3.5h this morning, I spent less than 30% of the battery.

Thirdly, there is the price. I would expect that the Vaios I mention above cost easily 5-6 times more than my sub-300-euro jewel. The other laptops are probably cheaper, but still in the range 2-3x the price of my laptop. This is not negligible! I have no functionality missing, I can do everything the others do, but at a fraction of the price, a fraction of the space in my bag, and at a fraction of the weight on my back when transporting, and knees on using.

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Save HD space by using compressed files directly

Maybe the constant increases in hard disk capacity provide us with more space we can waste with our files, but there is always a situation in which we would like to squeeze as much data in as little space as possible. Besides, it is always a good practice to keep disk usage as low as possible, just for tidiness.

The first and most important advice for saving space: for $GOD’s sake, delete the stuff you don’t need!

Now, assuming you want to keep all you presently have, the second tool is [[data compression]]. Linux users have long time friends in the [[gzip]] and [[bzip2]] commands. One would use the former for fast (and reasonably good) compression, and the latter for when saving space is really vital (although bzip2 is really slow). A more recent entry in the “perfect compression tool” contest would be [[Lempel-Ziv-Markov chain algorithm]] (LZMA). This one can compress even more than bzip2, being usually faster (although never as fast as gzip).

One problem with compression is that it is a good way of storing files, but they usually have to be uncompressed to modify, and then re-compressed, and this is very slow. However, we have some tools to interact with the compressed files directly (internally decompressing “on the fly” only the part that we need to edit). I would like to just mention them here:

Shell commands

We can use zcat, zgrep and zdiff as replacements for cat, grep and diff, but for gzipped files. These account for a huge fraction of all the interaction I do with text files from the command line. If you are like me, they can save you tons of time.

Vim

[[Vim (text editor)|Vim]] can be instructed to open some files making use of some decompression tool, to show the contents of the file and work on them transparently. Once we :wq out of the file, we will get the original compressed file. The speed to do this cycle is incredibly fast: almost as fast as opening the uncompressed file, and nowhere near as slow as gunzipping, viming and gzipping sequentially.

You can add the following to your .vimrc config file for the above:

" Only do this part when compiled with support for autocommands.
if has("autocmd")

 augroup gzip
  " Remove all gzip autocommands
  au!

  " Enable editing of gzipped files
  " set binary mode before reading the file
  autocmd BufReadPre,FileReadPre	*.gz,*.bz2,*.lz set bin

  autocmd BufReadPost,FileReadPost	*.gz call GZIP_read("gunzip")
  autocmd BufReadPost,FileReadPost	*.bz2 call GZIP_read("bunzip2")
  autocmd BufReadPost,FileReadPost	*.lz call GZIP_read("unlzma -S .lz")

  autocmd BufWritePost,FileWritePost	*.gz call GZIP_write("gzip")
  autocmd BufWritePost,FileWritePost	*.bz2 call GZIP_write("bzip2")
  autocmd BufWritePost,FileWritePost	*.lz call GZIP_write("lzma -S .lz")

  autocmd FileAppendPre			*.gz call GZIP_appre("gunzip")
  autocmd FileAppendPre			*.bz2 call GZIP_appre("bunzip2")
  autocmd FileAppendPre			*.lz call GZIP_appre("unlzma -S .lz")

  autocmd FileAppendPost		*.gz call GZIP_write("gzip")
  autocmd FileAppendPost		*.bz2 call GZIP_write("bzip2")
  autocmd FileAppendPost		*.lz call GZIP_write("lzma -S .lz")

  " After reading compressed file: Uncompress text in buffer with "cmd"
  fun! GZIP_read(cmd)
    let ch_save = &ch
    set ch=2
    execute "'[,']!" . a:cmd
    set nobin
    let &ch = ch_save
    execute ":doautocmd BufReadPost " . expand("%:r")
  endfun

  " After writing compressed file: Compress written file with "cmd"
  fun! GZIP_write(cmd)
    if rename(expand(""), expand(":r")) == 0
      execute "!" . a:cmd . " :r"
    endif
  endfun

  " Before appending to compressed file: Uncompress file with "cmd"
  fun! GZIP_appre(cmd)
    execute "!" . a:cmd . " "
    call rename(expand(":r"), expand(""))
  endfun

 augroup END
endif " has("autocmd")

I first found the above in my (default) .vimrc file, allowing gzipped and bzipped files to be edited. I added the “support” for LZMAed files quite trivially, as can be seen in the lines containign “lz” in the code above (I use .lz as termination for LZMAed files, instead of the default .lzma. See man lzma for more info).

Non-plaintext files

Other files that I have been able to successfully use in compressed form are [[PostScript]] and [[Portable Document Format|PDF]]. Granted, PDFs are already quite compact, but sometimes gzipping them saves space. In general, PS and EPS files save a lot of space by gzipping.

As far as I have tried, the [[Evince]] document viewer can read gzipped PS, EPS and PDF files with no problem (probably [[Device_independent_file_format|DVI]] files as well).

Comments (3)

First impressions on a Neo FreeRunner

Yes, as the title implies, I am the fortunate owner of a [[Neo FreeRunner]]. For those not on the know, the NFR is a kind of mobile phone/[[Personal digital assistant|PDA]] running [[free software]], and aimed at being open, both from software and hardware perspective.

I bought it last week, and I already have things that I love, and others that I don’t love that much. First thing that sucks: my 128kB [[Movistar]] [[Subscriber Identity Module|SIM card]] is not supported, so I can’t use the NFR to make calls! Apparently older versions of the SIM card are supported, so I will try to get hold of one (by the way, the [[simyo]] card I posted about some time ago works perfectly).

Another thing that is not so good is the stability of the software. However, I expected that, and I have no problem with it. Being open source, the software will evolve day by day, and I will love to see the evolution.

On the bright side: it is really great to be able to install different [[Linux distribution|distros]] in your phone! I tried OpenMoko, FDOM, QtExtended (formerly Qtopia) and SHR, and all of them have good and bad things. It is like going back to when I tried different distros for my computers (now I mostly stick to [[Ubuntu]] or [[Debian]]). By the way, you can install Debian in the NFR (haven’t tried it yet, because you have to install it in the [[Secure Digital card|microSD card]], not in the main memory (it’s too big for it). You can even try Google’s [[Android (operating system)|Android]], if you so wish.

But the really nice thing about it is that you can create your own apps for it. You can install [[Perl]] or [[Python (programming language)|Python]] interpreters, and then use the [[Command-line interface]] (yes, it does have command line) to run scripts. Or create icons on the desktop and link them to an action. For example, I created an icon that switches from portrait to landscape orientation when pressing it, and then back when pressing it again. I created another icon that launches mplayer when pressed, so I can watch a video in it by just pressing the icon.

I expect to blog more about the gadget, so stay tuned.

Comments (4)

4 GB SD cards properly read under Linux

Remember how MacOS X ate my pics? In that post I explained that Linux had problems with >1 GB [[Secure Digital card|Secure Digital cards]].

Well, apparently the problem was in the card reader, not in Linux (or the card itself). I recently acquired a SD card reader on [[eBay]] (actually, one like this one), and with it I can mount and read 2 and 4 GB SD cards without problem.

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