Big Fat Ostrich

Maybe they’re not officially dead, but it’s starting to feel that way.

The guitar tab plugins that I’m talking about are the add ons that you would use in applications like Rhythmbox or Amarok (that piece of crap), Songbird, Banshee, or even Exaile (which is cool, but based on Amarok, so therefore it’s a piece of crap).

Or maybe it’s all Ubuntu 11.10′s fault.

I don’t know anymore. I once wrote about guitar tabs in Rhythmbox and how they no longer work in Ubuntu 11.10. Banshee doesn’t seem to have the extension, and Songbird is no longer maintained and is basically dead in the water. I tried Exaile which CLAIMED to have a guitar tablature plugin (in the search results), but when you go on their website, there’s absolutely no mention of it. Nada.

I think what this all points to is that developers are starting to care less and less about applications that you need to install. The focus is now leaning heavily on cloud based software, and music apps are no different with iCloud and Google Music. But what are your options if you want to play your music locally and display guitar tabs?

Maybe Canary has the answer. (Yes, another animal named software!) Canary.fm is so freaking new I don’t think anyone knows about them. And hell, they only have 4 Twitter followers. But, they’re doing something interesting which is cloud based guitar tabs. And the tabs look super slick. Now, if you can display guitar tabs WHILE I listen to my music (locally or in the cloud) I may be sold.

Here’s a vid:

Yep, it’s totally possible!

I found this article recently on Lookout which has a pretty big list of Android apps found to include RuFraud. This is one of those SMS fraud malware downloaders that so far has mainly affected European. The fake SMS code doesn’t affect users in Canada or the US thanks to the limitations of their North American SIM cards.

Note that the malware was found in supposed downloaders of popular games, not the games themselves.

Here’s the full list of apps which Google has removed from the Android Market.

Corazon LLC:

Horoscope (horoscope.android)
Horoscope (com.corazon.horoscope)

Corelly LLC:

Horoscope (com.corelly.horoscope)

Ranzy LLC:

Twilight (com.Twilight.wallpapers)
Puss in Boots (com.Puss.Boots.wallpapers)
Moneyball (com.Moneyball.wallpapers)

Astrolog LLC:

Sim City Deluxe FREE (com.astrolog.sim.city.deluxe.free)
Need for Speed Shift FREE (com.astrolog.need.forspeed.shift.free)
Great Little War Game FREE (com.astrolog.great.little.war.game.free)

Logastrod:

Cut the Rope (com.Cut.the.Rope)
Angry Birds (com.Angry.Birds)
Assassins Creed (com.Assassins.Creed)
Talking Tom Cat (com.Talking.Tom.Cat)
NEED FOR SPEED Shift (com.nsf.Shift)
Where is My Water? (com.swampy.Water)
Great Little War Game (com.Great.little.War.Game)
World of Goo (com.World.Goo)
Shoot The Birds (com.Shoot.The.Birds)
Riptide GP (com.Riptide.GP)
Talking Larry the Bird (com.Talking.larry.Bird)
Bag It! (com.Bag.It)
Talking Larry the Bird (com.Talking.Larry.Bird)
Angry Birds (com.Angry.Birds.free)

Allwing Concept:

TETRIS (com.tetris.free) (God! Even my beloved Tetris! Oh the humanity!)
Pool Master Pro (com.Pool.Master.free)
Reckless Racing (com.Reckless.Racing.free)
Paradise Island (com.Paradise.Island.free)

Hey all. The Non-Gamer is back with another non-review. This time we’ll be talking about Skyrim.  Dan, the actual gamer, was supposed to do the actual review. Unfortunately, since Skyrim was released on November 11, his vocabulary has gone to shit and this is all he ever says anymore:

“skyrim skyrim! skyrim skyrim skyrim? skyrim skyrim skyrim, skyrim. skyrim skyrim ‘skyrim’ skyrim! skyrim skyrim…skyrim skyrim! skyrim skyrim skyrim? skyrim skyrim; skyrim skyrim! skyrim skyrim (skyrim) skyrim skyrim skyrim skyrim!! skyrim!”

So you’re stuck with me. Let’s start.

Skyrim is the long awaited fifth installment in the Elder Scrolls series. This isn’t a sequel to The Elder Scrolls IV, but a chapter.  Like, you’re in the Elder Scrolls world, but you have a whole bunch of new shit to do. And by shit to do, I mean missions to complete. All with one goal in mind: defeat Alduin! That annoying Nordic dragon god! Seriously. Fuck that guy and the wings he flew in on.

As expected, Skyrim looks insane. In my last post about gaming, I actually talked about Adventure on the Atari 2600 where your dude was a square. They didn’t even bother putting arms on it or a smiley face. Nothing. You were a square! Well get your head out of your computer screen, 1980′s you (which was actually just a TV hooked up with a Game/TV switch) and have a look at the future…by looking into the past! It’s Skyrim and it’s still medieval all over the place:

So yeah, it’s beautiful and I’ll bet the movements are really fluid. But I’ll never know.

Cause I’ll never play it!

But here’s another screen shot!

Wow, by the looks of it, Skyrim is a huge success. 230,000 people were playing the game on Steam the day it was released. No doubt they were all rocking out to Jeremy Soule‘s original score (same dude who scored Morrowind). I’m not really a fan of his new stuff though. I liked him better when he was on vinyl.

Oh, before I go, I wanted to talk about the Creation Engine which is what lies beneath Skyrim’s leathery complexion. It’s Bethsheda’s own and it’s highly complex. It’s goal is to give an ultra natural feel to the world that your character experiences. For instance, weight and other variables are assigned to the natural elements so that they’re affected by wind and other things, like, well, mainly wind. So trees will move more naturally, water will look like it should. Things like that.

Well, I’m out so happy gaming! Here’s a night shot:

Oh yeah, this week my Nexus S received an update from Android’s Gingerbread version 2.3.5 to 2.3.6.

Here’s the changelog:

1.Voice search bug fixed

That’s it.

Kind of anti-climactic and even more so since I haven’t used the voice search feature yet. Then again, up til now I haven’t run across any other bugs or functionality issues.

Guess we’ll have to wait until Honeycomb is released before we see some real changes to an otherwise rock solid OS.

Even better, I really cannot wait for Ice Cream Sandwich aka Android 4.0, the tastiest of all operating systems.

I don’t have a lot to say about Acidrip on Ubuntu except that I was messing around with DVD ripping to reduce my physical video collection. Also, I wanted to convert some VOB files to avi. Yes, those VOB files were just conspicuously lying around. I really have no idea where they came from!

Anyway, Acidrip is pretty straightforward. It’s really just a graphical interface for command line utilities mencoder in conjunction with mplayer. So instead of figuring out a bunch of crazy command line parameters, Acidrip gives you a nice interface to use. However:

There isn’t really an option available for merging multiple avi’s once they’ve been created from your VOBs. At least I didn’t find any. Basically, use your trusty mencoder command to merge your avi’s into one single file.

mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy -idx -o output.avi video1.avi video2.avi video3.avi

So in effect, the title of this post is kind of misleading since we’re going back to basics and really just using mencoder from the command line the way it was originally intended to be used.

Yep. Now that I can control my Samsung TV with my Nexus S, I can confirm that we are totally living in the future now.

All you need (If you have an android phone that is, so suck it iPhone people) is the Samsung Remote app. And that’s pretty much it. It’s like I spent my entire life up to now not buying a TV just so that I could finally buy a TV that I could control from my phone. And it all works via my LAN through my wireless router.

I won’t bore you with the features. You know what a regular TV remote looks like, right? Well it’s that. On a phone.

Technology!

Awhile back, I raved about MediaTomb and how great it was but there was one little issue that made me try Serviio: streaming subtitles support.

Being able to actually see the subtitles is sort of a big deal when you’re watching someone scream craziness in a Takashi Miike film, so I killed an evening learning how to install Serviio on my Debian LAMP server.

Here are a few preliminaries:

Download and install Serviio:

wget http://download.serviio.org/releases/serviio-0.5.2-linux.tar.gz

Unpack it. I did this from my home directory for the hell of it (but you can unpack it anywhere):

tar xvf serviio-0.5.2-linux.tar.gz

Install java and ffmpeg if you haven’t already

apt-get install default-jre
apt-get install ffmpeg

Now for the fun part and the major fail of Serviio. Serviio’s one major flaw is that it doesn’t have a web interface. This means that you have to configure it FROM the place that you installed it. Basically, if you’re serving movies or music with Serviio on your network, you have to configure it ON the machine where it’s installed. What is this, 1994? You can workaround this by using VNC or connecting a monitor to your server or whatever your setup is. Up to you.

First run Serviio from the bin directory (you should create an init script for this later)

/serviio-0.5.2/bin/serviio.sh

Now launch the serviio console:

/serviio-0.5.2/bin/serviio-console.sh

When the console launches, you can configure the paths to your media folders, i.e., video, music and photos. Pretty straightforward.

And that’s it! You don’t even need to configure Serviio’s profiles.xml, where you need to tweak mediaTomb’s config.xml to get it to work properly.

Now someone please tell me: How is it that mediaTomb hasn’t figured out how to stream subtitles AND have a kick ass web interface, yet, Serviio DOES support streaming subtitles but DOESN’T have a web interface? How is this possible? Please, someone introduce the mediaTomb people with the Serviio gang so that they can have sex and give birth to a fully functioning piece of software.

You know, I chose the Samsung Nexus S for the main reason that it runs Android 2.3.4. Yes, the promise of open source and having the “freedom” to do as I wish with it.

Of course, it comes ready with a slick Gmail app just waiting for you to plug in your Gmail credentials and access your mail and all that. But it doesn’t end there! You can create multiple Gmail profiles so that you can access all of your other Gmail accounts, if you have any.

So I configured the Gmail app with my test account first with the intention of removing it afterwards. But you know what? You can’t remove the first account. Ever.

Sure, you can create a second accounts and remove  it by going into Settings, Account and then choosing Remove Account. But the first one? Sorry but you’ll have to reset the phone to its factory defaults, which is total bullshit. Even if you re-associate all of your contacts with a different Gmail account, the first account remains the default account and can’t be deleted. It’s a small annoyance, but not very in line with Freedom as defined by the GNU Project.

The Samsung Nexus S is still a great phone, but Android has a few limitations.

Anyway, speaking of freedom, here’s the FSF‘s Richard Stallman taking the idea of freedom too far by being way too relaxed in public!