As VoIP calls are a bit cheaper as well I thought it would be worth taking a shot at. So I registered my first number, one that doesn’t cost me a single dime (I can only get called on that number). Of course, running linux and shit, one has always have to be careful choosing because it could sure as hell be that some thing ain’t supported because vendors don’t produce shit for the sake of the produce, but for the sake of keeping on selling it. But I digress — only slightly.

Now — being able to call out and in would of course be cool.. But it would be even cooler if I set up a little PBX-kind of thing so I can have phone extensions throughout my house (it’s not that big though, mind you). It would be cool if I was able to dial the upstairs desktop by dialing 666, some something.

Having worked in the phone-communications business I knew about Asterisk, the open source PBX software (actually the same that Kevin Mitnick used at one point to spoof his caller-ID), but only a few days ago I read that it could do SIP — the protocol VoIP phones ‘do’ — as well.

So — a couple of days ago I downloaded it and setting it up — without the actual dialing in and out — was actually a breeze.

It took some research — and some patience to finally set it all up though.

Luckily, I could find ‘working’ examples of sip.conf and extensions.conf which ought to do the trick, but I shouldn’t have tinkered with my modems’ port forwarding settings at the same time. I could spoonfeed you and dump my configurations here, but a google search using the queries “xs4all +asterisk +voip” should put you on the right path, my grasshopper.

Decent VoIP/SIP clients for Linux
Well — there aren’t any. There are plenty of applications that claim they are though.

My ISP links to a program called X-Lite; available for Linux as well. It works, but its kinda bloaty and it looks more fancy than it has features.

The X-Lite thing is, well, close, but it’s too much of a Windows program; it makes me feel like I’m back behind Windows 95 with some software whose idiot author just found out that windows don’t have to be rectangular. Also, anything that displays something that seem like pointer addressess, well, I rest my case….

Speaker, Microphone and Ringing device show very weird device names.

Note that there are other programs, some of which look pretty good, but they are simply too big a pain to install. I don’t mind the odd dependency, but dependency upon dependency upon dependency upon dependency upon dependency … Let’s just say I have my limits…

Just at the moment I almost came to the conclusion that there is no source-libre version of a decent SIP client — I discovered another program, written by another Dutch guy, it seems. *cheers*

The program’s called Twinkle and although it looks pretty basic; it does all that I require. It even has a decent sound configuration screen:

Twinkle’s audio configuration screen.

Concluding; it seems that Twinkle‘l be the thing I’ll use for VoIP communications, at least for the time being.

Asterisk, VoIP, XS4ALL, Netherlands

Amarok’s main screen while playing media; the right panel showing the playlist and the left
panel, on the Context-tab, showing track information and any related albums, tracks or artists.

Anyways, I installed it and was, like, amazed at what it does. It delivers all that it promises and gives one a real new experience listening to music (and getting to know about the artists, etcetera).

Music Selection
After specifying where your MP3 collection resides, you can easily browse through your whole collection. Because the artists and albums are grouped, any errors in the MP3 tags stand-out and thus are easily modified. There’s a major typo in a whole subdirectory of songs? No problem, this program supports changing the tags of multiple MP3 tags in one go.

One of the nice features is the ability to search through your collection to find files that contain a specific word, for instance ‘free‘:

With a few clicks of a button the results can then be added to your playlist.

Lyrics
In the Context-tab there are a couple of tabs which by default shows the Music tab. On this tab you can see the rating for currently played songs and other contextual information. There’s a couple of other tabs as well.

For instance, the Lyrics-tab. After specifying what script to use (Lyrc is just fine), you can quickly look up the lyrics for currently played song. Pretty nice if you mis-hear stuff and want to know what’s said.

Artist
The Artist tab will load the Wikipedia article if it is present. Of course, if it isn’t, you could use your Wikipedia account to update it.

Remote Music Collections
It is possible to connect ‘Media Players’ to Amarok which it can then play music of. The nice thing is, that this doesn’t necessary have to be a real device.

For instance, on my home-network I have got a NAS that contains all our media. If you have a similar set-up, you can add the remote resource as a Media Player, like so:

Note that I specify it as aGeneric Audio Player this device. After having added this, you can specify a Post-Connect and a Pre-Disconnect command:

When you close the Amarok settings dialog, a new button will have appeared on the left panel, ‘Media Devices‘. If you click it, you can select on of the configured media players and can press the Connect-button. Having specified the mount and umount commands, pressing Connect and Disconnect should automagically mount it.

The moment it has been mounted, you can browse the collection, play music from it and copy it to your local filesystem.

iPod Integration
I was already accustomed to using the utility ‘retune.py‘ to update my girlfriends’ iPod Nano. That utility converts the database on the iPod to a ‘human-readable’ directory structure which one can easily manage. If one is done managing the music on the iPod, the utility simply has to be run again and it will convert the information back to the format that the iPod’s software understand.

So that was already possible, but I really lacked a decent user-interface to perform copy, move and renaming operations in.

Looking around Amarok, I discovered that this too can easily be integrated by specifying the mount and retune.py as Post-Connect, and retune.py umount as the Pre-Disconnect command. Take into account that retune.py might take up quite a lot of time depending on your USB speed. As the Pre-Disconnect commands don’t show any progress on screen, this might be a little irritating.

Conclusion
All in all this media player is very, very nice. The integration of Wikipedia for artist and albums lookups; and Lyrc for lyric searches really sets this media player apart from the others I’ve found.

I’m giving this thing a well-deserved 8 / 10.

Amarok, Media Players, KDE, Linux

“Simply point the gadget at a freshly baked cookie, for example, and it will analyse its odour and reproduce it for you using a host of non-toxic chemicals. The device could be used to improve online shopping by allowing you to sniff foods or fragrances before you buy, to add an extra dimension to virtual reality environments and even to assist military doctors treating soldiers remotely by recreating bile, blood or urine odours that might help a diagnosis.”

Yeh yeh — the usual ‘wet-dream’ stories pop up — just like they do when they’re discussing anything data-retention or RFID.

Nah — it really is inconceivable that this isn’t going to be used to repress people. (That’s sarcasm.) I don’t see Smell-O-Vision becoming a standard — I rather see sniffer-dogs loosing their jobs as they’re replaced with mechanics, keeping the costs of operating an air-port and stuff even lower…

I smell a new world odor…

Progress, Inventions, Smell, Rant

The adapter with 2 pads plugged in. If you’re wondering about the semi-transparent white plastic wrapping around the
controllers’ wirings: that’s to rabbit-proof them. Rabbits and loose wires don’t mix.

What’s in the package?
Apart from the adapter itself, the package contains a (Windows/Mac) driver diskette and a brief explanation how to set it all up. Well, if you use Windows or OS X anyways.. As a reference I googled around to see how other USB joysticks are being set up.

Set-up
The actual set-up was a breeze. Before ordering, as with any other device a Linux-user buys, I had to make sure it was supported. I found out it is a HID-compliant device — so this should not pose any problem.

The supplied driver allows you to map buttons and probably do other stuff but obviously I can’t use that on my operating system. Possibly, additionally force feedback may be a problem — but that’s the first thing I disable in games anyways to save my wrists — so, at least for me, that is a non-issue.

In order for the device to be properly picked up by the Linux (2.6.17) kernel, I figured I had to modify its configuration.

First, obviously, joystick support has to be enabled (Kernel configuration / Device Drivers / Input device support). Additionally, I also enabled the ‘Multisystem gamepads’ under Kernel configuration / Device drivers / Input device support / Joysticks. In retrospect I don’t think these are necessary as the thing works, without any additional module loaded apart from ‘joydev‘.

Although I already had USB and HID support compiled-in (Kernel configuration / Device drivers / USB support), I also enabled

• Force feedback support
• /dev/hiddev’ raw HID device support

After my kernel was re-compiled and I loaded the modules (depending on your kernel configuration you might need to reboot though), I could insert the adapter to see it nicely being picked up as a:

input: WiseGroup.,Ltd SmartJoy Dual PLUS Adapter as /class/input/input5
input: USB HID v1.00 Joystick [WiseGroup.,Ltd SmartJoy Dual PLUS Adapter] on usb-0000:00:02.1-1

Usage
To test the device I quickly did a ‘cat /dev/input/js0′ to see some garbage being spit out, which was an indication for me that the device was actually sending data to my PC.

I opened the KDE’s Control Panel and lo and behold, in the Joystick screen, it could see the joystick — and all its buttons and axis:

I noticed, when configuring some programs that a slight drawback is the fact that the adapter presents itself as one device: one joystick with a ‘double’ amount of axis and buttons. This may be a configuration issue or a driver bug. This hasn’t bothered me yet, as most games allow one to assign different mappings. I can imagine that some games might not understand that, though. This is something I’m going to look into.

If you have ever played two player games on one keyboard — you know, like playing Twister while your fingers get intertwined with the other persons’ — you can imagine how it feels to now use gamepads: bliss. It was an extensive — err — ‘testing’ session.

Update: After fiddling and looking around, I found out that what was causing the device to export only one joystick in stead of two. It was a driver issue all along: it simply didn’t know this devices’ vendor and product IDs. I cooked up this simple patch against linux/drivers/usb/input/hid-core.c to make two joysticks appear in stead of only one with all the buttons crammed into it:

Force Feedback
I tried to test force feedback today using the fftest utility but that didn’t do anything apart from barfing an error at me that the upload of effects failed due to a ‘function not implemented’. Oh well, at least I tried — I don’t miss it. I knew what I was getting into when I ordered it.

Conclusion
For a mere €15,95, the SmartJoy Dual Plus PS2 to USB adapter is a cheap, yet very functional solution to get to use your PS2 controllers on your Linux PC.

Given the fact that, ‘out of the box’ when 2 controllers are plugged in, it presents itself as one joystick device rather than two, and the force-feedback seems not to function, I give this piece of hardware a solid 8/10.

SmartJoy, USB, PS2, Joystick, Gaming, Linux

Lack of proper documentation?

Ever compared Windows API documentation to UNIX manual pages? Even seen the plethora of sites that make these documents available on-line?

I think the writer of that article made a big mistake saying that (oh well, what else to expect from someone that uses ‘DirectX’ as a ‘nym). He really should’ve said that, the lack of recognition for the Linux OS makes companies hire the wrong, inferiour people (read: they let their Windows-guy do it) to maintain it.

Sure it gets downtime then. That’s like having your local butcher having fix your plumbing.

I really don’t see how the inability to understand a complex OS, renders the OS inreliable…

OS, Linux, Windows, Rant