After thinking it over for a very long time (1 minute and 13 seconds) we decided to add a donation button to the top of our website. Why? Well, it might have been suggested to us by others, it might have been because we wanted to be like twit, or maybe it’s because it just makes sense to add it. After all we are on a shoestring budget. Richard would like to update his Vic 20 and I would like a color monitor instead of the 9″ monochrome one that I’m using. Regardless of the reason, we are going to try it out for a while. Hopefully we’ll make a million dollars and be able to retire early. Although, I wouldn’t expect our videos to get any better. We’ll likely continue to make B quality screencasts no matter who much we have in our bank accounts. Make one good video and you guys and gals will expect it all of the time. No way. That’s too much pressure.

Please donate to show support but don’t feel like it’s a requirement. Our videos will remain free and always will be. It’s the least that we can do since we use free software to make them.

Good Grief! I cannot get that damn song by The Faming Lips (The W.A.N.D.) that’s used in the most recent Dell commercial out of my head today. Is that what it’s come to for me? Finding songs that I like by listening to TV commercials?  Perhaps my generation is behind all of this stuff. I heard a Smiths song in a commercial the other day too. The Smiths are my favorite band. Using that music to sell a car? That’s not right…is it? Hmm…

Who doesn’t like cool and nerdy things? I have to say that I am a very big fan of VirtualBox. I don’t even use VMWare anymore. Don’t get me wrong though. VMWare is very good but VirtualBox is much simpler and I swear it’s faster on my machines. Plus, VirtualBox leaves less of a visible footprint on one’s system.

Alright, I like VirtualBox. So what? Well…I was using VirtualBox to run Damn Small Linux (among other OS’s) on Windows XP but I found that it wasn’t necessary if one just downloads the “embedded” version of Damn Small Linux (DSL). The embedded version is rolled with QEMU, a generic virtualizer. So all that you have to do to run DSL on top of Windows is unzip the 50 MB archive file an double-click on the pendrive.bat file. Voila! Say hello to Linux without installing anything.

I have uploaded a new screencast, Episode 044. In it I discuss layers in Inkscape.

Warning: I recorded this rather late last night. Was a little tired. Maybe you can tell from my speech. I’m not sure how thorough I was explaining layers. I see that I forgot to mention sub-layers. It just wouldn’t be me if I made a perfect video anyway. Nevertheless, perhaps you’ll get something from it.

I love starting my days out like this…

Bat Out of Encoding Hell. That’s what Meatloaf wanted to call his album originally, I’m sure of it. What’s this all about? Well, for the last couple of weeks I was back in “Encoding Hell”. What put me there was the discovery that the majority of my screencasts were chipmunking (when the audio sounds like Alvin and The Chipmunks) on a freshly installed ubutnu Gutsy system with mplayer. They didn’t seem to be chipmunking in anything else. For instance VLC and Totem played the videos all the way through with no funky audio. I confirmed this behavior on all of my ubuntu based systems (ubuntu Dapper, xubuntu Dapper, and ubuntu Feisty). Why didn’t I notice this before? It’s because they played a-ok on my Windows XP and both of my openSUSE boxes with mplayer, the systems that I am on the majority of the time. I’m sure that is why I never noticed it.

What really got me frustrated was that I was trying to upload a few of our screencasts to ShowMeDo.com, a brilliant screencasting web site, and they were not working. After countless dead ends, almost abandoning mencoder for ffmpeg out of desperation, and many a thought wasted, it finally came to me after having a conversation with Richard last night. Something wasn’t right about the 15 second intro audio track when I looked at it in Audacity (thanks Richard for suggesting that I do that). It had 2 channels. My screencast only had 1. Hmm. So I removed the second channel and put all audio on one track and married it back up to the video. Voila! Fixed. No more chipmunking sound.

This morning I re-encoded the sound tracks to all of my videos and uploaded all of them to our web site. Richard’s videos were not affected. If any viewers out there were experiencing the chipmunk effect, I am very sorry. I didn’t realize it was a problem before. Everything should play normally now. Of course I only have a limited amount of PC’s to test these on so if you are having problems please send us an email. Encoding audio/video is the worst part of a screencasters’ life. But that doesn’t mean that I take that important step lightly.

Here is a pretty interesting post by Martin Schlander (cb400f) regarding desktop environments in openSUSE.

Ah. Got a tip from a friend yesterday. The new Collective Soul album “Afterwords” has been released. I saw these guys in concert a couple of times (when Ross Childress was still with the band). I haven’t listened to the new album all of the way through yet but so far it’s pretty good. You can find it on iTunes or Target (not on Amazon yet).

I used to play guitar quite a bit. I own 4 guitars, a couple amps, and several effect pedals (my favorite being an Ibanez Tube Screamer…think Stevie Ray). I keep my Fender Strat in my bedroom closet and play it un-amplified every now and then. I even have a battery powered cigarette box amplifier that I’ll plug into if I want to make some noise. One of my friends and I used to fire up a copy of Acid Pro and make our own music ala Trent Reznor style. Of course we thought we sounded good but I’m sure it was shite. Actually, I know a fellow engineer that works at the factory beside mine and he made an entire album with Acid Pro. He played all the instruments himself and even sang. It sounded pretty good. He’s obviously more talented than I.

Anyway, the reason that I even brought up this personal side of me is because I was reading Matthew Helmke’s blog this morning regarding a custom guitar amplifier that he made. That definitely sounds like a fun project. I wish I had the time for that. At one time I buried myself in amplifier design with intentions of making a franken-amp. After learning the fundamentals of amp design, I never actually got around to making one. I chalked it up as another project that I started but never finished. Story of my life.

Recently, my father had the task of trying to figure out how to view a webcam in surveillance mode. By that I mean that he wanted to hook up a webcam to his laptop out in his workshop at home, point it to anything that he wanted to monitor (CNC machine, battery charging monitor), and then view it from inside of his house on his desktop PC. Seems simple, right?

Since I don’t know jack about webcams, only having owned one for a short time in ‘97, I had to use “theory” in explaining to him how it might work. I threw out MSN Messenger (or Live…whatever they call it these days), Skype, NetMeeting, TightVNC, and VLC as starting points. Since I don’t own a webcam, trying to help someone who does was rather difficult for me.

Anyway, my father stopped by last night (with my mother, sister and her children for Halloween) and he brought his webcam along. I had been curious as to how openSUSE would treat an older usb webcam (Intel). So I plugged it in and of course nothing happened. A quick ‘dmesg’ in the terminal yielded a working usb device so I had hope. A quick 45 seconds on Google with the make and model of my webcam and operating system turned up a driver that was sitting on my openSUSE 10.3 DVD. So I installed the package and rebooted my computer for good measure.

We fired up VLC, went to File>Open Capture Device>Video4Linux tab and selected the “SECAM” device. BAM! I was looking at live video from the webcam. It worked and I was surprised that it was that easy.

We needed a WinXP machine for the next step. I grabbed my wife’s laptop since it is set up to dual-boot between WinXP and ubuntu. I fired up WinXP and then installed TightVNC. I already had my openSUSE box set up for remote connections. Once I logged into my openSUSE user account from the WinXP box using TightVNC, I fired up VLC and went to File>Open Capture Device>Video4Linux tab and selected the “SECAM” device again. And…it worked again! I just proved to myself and my father that you could make a remote connection to another computer with a webcam plugged in and see the video…live and in full screen…all inside of my network.

So that was my fun project for last night. I was impressed with openSUSE. I now wonder if it would have been this easy in ubuntu. I have a feeling that it would be. I aim to try because now I am curious. Linux just keeps getting better and better doesn’t it? And remember…I don’t know jack about webcams.