I've been using MC (Midnight Commander) for years on *nix systems, and was happy to get it running in the Terminal on the Mac.
But where the heck is the Insert key on a Macbook Air [macbookair, macbookair, usingthemacbookair]? You need the Insert key to select files in MC!
Thankfully, a helpful blogger pointed out that MC also uses the command "Ctrl-T" to "tag" files. Nice tip!
More tips for MC can be found here: http://linuxgazette.net/issue23/wkndmech_dec97/mc_article.html
I've been running this blog semi-anonymously for the past few years. But some minor Googling would get you going on whatever you wanted to know about me, so I figured it was about time to add a proper "About Me" page.
Hi, I'm Mike Perry. I create video games for a living. I've been making games for around 20 years, and I'm currently a Creative Director at Electronic Arts. You've probably played some games that I produced, designed, programmed, or otherwise contributed to in some way, like The Godfather, The Sims, SimCity, and others. I've been lucky enough to have Will Wright as my game design mentor, and was fortunate to learn from the Japanese game masters at Hudson Soft back in the heyday of the NES.
I've given a few talks at the Game Developers Conference, and I have a semi-accurate Wikipedia entry here ![[WikiPedia]](http://www.mikeyp.com/css/external.gif)
.
For fun, I play games (duh), travel, fiddle with computers and gadgets, hike, DIY home repair, read books and alternative comics, and calibrate my home theater. I occasionally study jazz guitar at the Jazz School in Berkeley, and I own way too many guitars for someone who plays as poorly as I do.
This blog at MikeyP.com has no meaningful purpose. I just started it in order to write down things that I would likely forget, and would possibly be interesting to other folks.
Absolutely nothing I write here is approved of or endorsed by my employer. All opinions are solely my own.
Obviously, you can't have a good whole-house music system [musicstorage4, musicstorage6, musicstorage1, musicstorage2, musicstorage-solved3, musicstorage3, musicstorage-solved1, musicstorage8, musicstorage-solved2, musicstorage5, musicstorage7] without some dedicated music-playing hardware. In choosing a music player, I gave myself the following requirements:
The only music player that hit the sweet spot of these requirements was the Roku SoundBridge. The SoundBridge is a wonderful little music player that can exist in a number of network, OS, and server configurations. It is quite future-proof.
Natively, the SoundBridge can decode MP3, WMA, AAC, and Apple Lossless audio formats. However, it also supports uncompressed .WAV files, which allows for real-time server-side transcoding of any other audio format, such as WMA Lossless or FLAC.
The SoundBridge also supports two widely used server protocols: UPnP/DLNA, and iTunes, both of which are widely available on almost all platforms. It works perfectly with Windows Media Player 11 sharing as well as Apple's iTunes sharing.
The latest firmware for the SoundBridge adds a feature that I never expected to want, but I use all of the time: Internet Radio. Roku maintains a large database of various audio streaming sites, and presents them in an easy-to-navigate format on the SoundBridge. This setup beats the pants off the local radio stations and cable TV music channels.
And finally, the sound quality is outstanding. I rip all of my music from CDs in lossless audio formats, and playback on the SoundBridge is absolutely perfect.
The only downside I've noticed is that once every few months, the SoundBridge will stop connecting to the server. I suspect this is related to my network's wireless configuration. To fix the problem, I simply restart the SoundBridge using the "restart" option on the menu. It only takes a few seconds, so this is more of an annoyance than a major issue.
I have 3 SoundBridges on my network at home, an M1000 and two M500's. Roku sells the latest SoundBridge M1001 on their site, but you can find M500's and M1000's pretty easily on eBay. And if you can get the large-screened M2000, all the better. Audiophiles might actually prefer the older units, as they pass bitstreams in their native resolution, whereas the M1001 upconverts all audio to 48Khz. Most users, however, probably won't notice the difference.
In summary, I highly recommend the Roku Soundbridge as a dedicated music player for a whole-house music system.
FuseSMB is a handy network automounting tool for Linux. It basically works like the Network Neighborhood in Windows, allowing you to browse directories shared by other computers on the network. It uses the Samba (CIFS/SMB) protocol, so it picks up shares from Windows, Mac, or Linux machines… provided those machines are configured correctly.
I've been using FuseSMB to access shared directories on my Linux server. Those directories are shared via Samba, and I can usually access them fine from Windows or Mac computers, though every once in a while, they seem to "disappear" from the network. However, when accessing them from a Linux box using FuseSMB, I had more serious issues: every 2 out of 3 times I tried to access the shares, I would get a "connection timed out" error. I naturally blamed FuseSMB for this problem until I decided to take a peek at the network using smbtree, a Samba tool for listing all Samba network connections.
2 out of 3 times using smbtree, I saw an error that my server could not be found at address 127.0.0.1. Localhost? Why was Samba looking for my server on Localhost?
I logged into my server, looked at /etc/hosts, and saw the problem. Address 127.0.0.1 was pointing at three names:
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 myserver.mikeyp.com myserver
These settings were just below a very detailed comment in the /etc/hosts file:
# By the way, Arnt Gulbrandsen <agulbra@nvg.unit.no> says that 127.0.0.1
# should NEVER be named with the name of the machine. It causes problems
# for some (stupid) programs, irc and reputedly talk. :^)
Oh. I commented out the second 127.0.0.1 line, restarted the network, and my FuseSMB and Samba issues were gone.
By the way, here's something spooky about Samba. One day I fired up the VPN software on my Windows laptop to access my corporate network from home. While the laptop was connected to the VPN, I went over to my Linux box and started FuseSMB. Incredibly, on my Linux box, I could see all of the shared folders on the corporate network!
For the past few months, I've been looking for a nice-sounding concert-sized acoustic guitar. I have a fine Takamine Dreadnought, but the size is uncomfortably large for me to have in my lap while I practice on the sofa.
I played a lot of guitars, but was stunned to discover the value and quality of the Breedlove Atlas series. In particular, I couldn't resist the beautiful sound and easy playability of the Breedlove AC25/SM.
Solid Sitka Spruce top, Solid Mahogany back and neck, Rosewood fretboard, perfectly finished frets, a smooth cutaway, a compensated saddle, and basic Fishman Electronics. It even included an impressive gig bag.
There are two unique features to Breedlove guitars:
If you haven't played a Breedlove, I highly recommend getting your hands on one. I love mine.
If you use Opera Mini, be sure to update to the latest Opera Mini 4.1. And if you are using it on a Treo [operamini41, operaminiusage, operamini4], make sure you have the latest "silent update", opera-mini-4.1.11355-advanced-int.prc. Also check the IBM Java VM Prefs for optimal Opera performance:
[x] Use Double Buffering
[x] Use high resolution coordinates
Set Memory Maximum: 1Mb
Set Maximum Java Thread Stack Size; 32Kb
And if you aren't using Opera Mini, get it now!
The Opera Mini 4.1 update makes the already fast mobile browser even faster and more responsive. Connections are faster, page rendering is faster, and page scrolling is faster. And as I've found after testing tons of mobile browsers, outside of accurate-enough content, the only thing that really matters on a mobile browser is speed.
This week, I received my new company-issued laptop.
My company was wise enough to see that the price/performance/reliability debate is won handily by Apple these days, so after years of using ThinkPads [thinkpadx40issues, thinkpadlenovoupdates, thinkpadreference, thinkpadx40], I'm now using the hard drive version of the MacBook Air.
I haven't used a Mac since the System 7 days, so I'm still getting familiar with the machine and system. I'm trying to "go native" with OS/X, and not dual-boot Windows. However, we're a Windows shop at work (see notes about Linux on the ThinkPad [thinkpadx40issues, thinkpadx40], so I'm using Remote Desktop a lot. I also plan to install Parallels VM. We'll see how it goes.
So far, I'm really impressed.
