A few weeks ago I screwed up some things and had to format my main computer at home (which acts as my desktop and server) and reload Ubuntu 8.10. In the end it was probably a good thing since I had done an upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04. For some unknown reason I never really trust upgrades. I normally backup and format before installing a new version of any distro and that goes for openSUSE and Ubuntu.

I’m not sure when it happened but at some point in the last day or two (or three or four…) I lost the capability of scrubbing my audio strips in Blender 2.48a. I have been using Blender about 100% of the time for all of my video projects for the last few months. It’s super stable and I get excellent results. However, not being able to hear my audio tracks while I am editing is a real pain in the rear. What good is a video editor that does that, right? I am not really sure who to blame – Ubuntu, PulseAudio, Alsa, Blender, or me. I tried various things to rectify the situation to no avail. That included installing the official Blender 2.46 (which is not very good for video work if FFMpeg isn’t up to snuff on your system) from the Ubuntu repo. Also, it included me killing PulseAudio (which I hate but won’t get into now). I even tried changing my sound configuration from Alsa to OSS and PulseAudio and none of that worked. Rebooting and logging in and out were failures too.

After a few swear words and giving what I saw on my lcd the finger, I decided to take a trip to Google and see what I could dig up. Surely other people were having the same problem. What I found was a lot of info. Most of it was blaming Ubuntu’s PulseAudio. I didn’t really care who’s fault it was I just wanted a workaround so that I could get back to editing my home videos again. A “workaround” is definitely what I ended up locating. So for all of you people in the situation that I was in, try this:

# Open Rhythmbox and play a song
# While the song is playing open Blender
# Add an audio track to the Sequence Editor. Should be able to hear sound now.
# You can close Rhythmbox now but if you close Blender too then repeat the steps above

The above worked like a charm for me…but…it seems silly doesn’t it? Wonder what would happen if I uninstall PulseAudio…Hmm…

My Machinery’s Handbook (“The Bible”) is getting quite dated. Suppose I’ll have to get a new one soon. Only bad thing is that I have highlighted and added notes to a gazillion pages. Hanging onto it a little longer only postpones the inevitable.

New ones are so expensive.

How to Create a Vector Light Bulb Icon with Inkscape from Vectortuts.

Episode 083 is now up! In this screencast I demonstrate one way of achieving a torn paper edge effect using Inkscape 0.46. In addition you finally get to see our true likenesses in the intro.

The Inkscape Sport School is now open. If any of you enjoyed our last episode (082) on the vector tennis ball then you will surely love the new baseball tutorial that Chris has completed. I love the clever way that Chris came up with the “leather” effect. Brilliant!

Episode 082 is up.

I had the opportunity to colaborate with Christian of Chrisdesign blog, a super-duper Inkscape artist,  on this one. He taught me some new techniques that I hope I can share with you. I hope you enjoy it. Thanks a bunch, Chris.