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I recently got a HTC Tattoo and had problems scanning QR and bar codes on my monitor. If you have a Tattoo then you probably know how crappy the camera is. It has no autofocus which makes close-ups really blurry and small codes near impossible to scan.

Try it out with these examples:

I cannot scan the small one on my 21″ 1920×1080 screen, the bigger one scans great. Luckily they resize very well.

I’m using Firefox with the Image Zoom extension installed. When you come across a QR code that won’t scan, right-click it and hold the button, then zoom in using mouse wheel. Scan again, and bingo.

Recorded during the (in)famous The Rolling Stones American Tour 1972. It was the encore on some of the nights performed jointly by the Stones and Stevie Wonder and his band. The clip is taken from the unreleased documentary Cocksucker Blues.

Balloon Bass is the brainchild of Addi Somekh (above with Henry Bermúdez on guitar). He has been playing balloon bass since he was first introduced to the balloon guitar by its inventor Sean Rooney in 2000. Since then he’s made several modifications and turned it into more of a bass. The instrument consists of an inflated and a twisted skinny balloon to make up a resonator connected to the string, which is another twisted uninflated skinny balloon. Check out this video on how to make your own.

You can download their album Air, Rubber and Soul from their website. It’s a bit of a mix of jazz, latin, hip-hop and plenty of funky improv.

I just finished upgrading my blog through the Automatic Upgrade plugin and only then noticed that I couldn’t ssh or telnet into my webserver. I always do this to set the correct permissions from the cli or there’s stuff that doesn’t work properly after the upgrade.I just went through everything using an FTP app. Please let me know if you come across anything that does not work as it should.

After installing the latest version of Skype (2.1.0.47) on Karmic I tried to configure it to work with my USB handset but the options didn’t give me a device selection any more. The only option available was PulseAudio with the sound going through my speakers, and my handset mic was not recognised at all.

To rectify this so you can use Skype without the other sounds on your system getting mixed in we need to do the following:

Install PulseAudio Device Chooser – this will install a number of extra packages, including PulseAudio Volume Control

sudo apt-get install padevchooser

Restart your system.

Launch Applications > Sound & Video > PulseAudio Device Chooser – you’ll see its new icon in the notification area. Click it, open Preferences… and select Start applet on session login.

Close the window.

Plug in your handset and start Skype if you haven’t done so already.

Right-click the volume control in the notification area and open Sound Preferences (or open it through System > Preferences).

Click on Input and your handset will be listed there – select it. You probably will have to crank up the Input volume, mine was very low to start with. Close the window.

Click on the PulseAudio Device Chooser icon (the jack) in the notification area and select Volume Control.

You can see that I only have Amarok showing up in the control at the moment as Skype is not in a call.

Start a test call and set your USB handset as the output device.

One problem I have with this is that whenever I unplug my handset the settings are lost and I need to reconfigure each time I reconnect it.

The latest versions of Conky can be used to not just display text but also images, amongst other cool stuff like drawing gauges and use Lua scripts.  I’d been using it for quite some time to display track information from Amarok. Now I finally have a way to display cover art as well.

If you’re already running Karmic then you can install the latest version from the repositories. Install the conky-all package which has most compile options enabled to get the latest features. You’ll also need imagemagick installed.

First we need a script to fetch the cover and convert it into an album stack. The angle of the covers changes slightly with each track. It also resizes each stack to 150×150. Click here and save it as ~/bin/getcover. As you can see I had some help with it – thanks to eightmillion from the Ubuntu forums for completely rewriting it to something useable

Next get the script to pull the rest of the track info from Amarok – click here and save as ~/bin/askamarok. Try it from the command line whilst Amarok is playing, e.g. to get the artist name enter

askamarok artist

Other available info is title, album, year, genre, bitrate, track playing time, total track playing time… You can also get collection info and stats. For the stats Amarok needs to store the collection in a MySQL database.

Finally get my Conky script and save as ~/conkycover. To run it:

conky -c conkycover

If it’s the only Conky script you’re running then save it as ~/.conkyrc and start Conky without any options.

Last thing missing is the cover when Amarok is not actually running. Save the following image as ~/conky/cover/noplay.png:

The whole thing is a bit rough. For example, not all the info updates at the same time on track changes. And although I set the update interval for the playing times to 1 second it leaves 3 seconds in between. It also does not look the best when no track is playing, or Amarok is not running. Feel free to post any improvements/ideas in the comments as my Conky layout skills leave a lot to be desired

Using the Hanso theme (from the community-themes package), Breathe icons, and a simple conky script which needs some more work. The wallpaper came as part of the Karmic install.

The next one shows the nice transparency in Terminal with Metacity compositing enabled. VLC is playing in window-less mode to easily clone the video to s-video.

You can download the new wallpapers if you’re not using Karmic.

Using a VPN gives you some extra protection/privacy when browsing the net from your laptop on a public or work network. If you haven’t done so yet, then head over to itshidden.com and sign up for a free account. Keep in mind that this is really only meant to be used for browsing, the free account is not an option for P2P or similar heavy usage. A paid account will give you a static IP with port fowarding and better speeds.

The following instructions should work on any Linux distro with GNOME.

First add PPTP support to the Network Manager:

sudo apt-get install network-manager-pptp

Click the Network Manager icon and open VPN Connections > Configure VPN… Click Add… Select the Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol and click Create…

Enter a connection name, add vpn.itshidden.com as the Gateway, and enter your login credentials.

Click Advanced… and select Use Point-to-Point encryption (MPPE). Set security to 128-bit.

Click OK, then Apply. Close the Network Connections window.

You can now connect to the VPN by clicking on the Network Manager icon and selecting the connection under VPN Connections. You will have to restart your PC if the connection fails. Once the connection is established you should see a padlock on the network manager icon. You can also head over to WhatIsMyIPAddress.com to check if it worked.

I’ve been having issues with sound in VLC since I installed the latest Karmic beta. Sound works fine in all other media players, but VLC would just skip/stutter through every media file I played. Turns out it’s easy to fix – switch the audio output to ALSA and select the correct device. I had to do this through the advanced settings window and in the same sequence as below, or VLC would freeze every time I made changes.

Open Tools > Preferences and select All under Show settings.

Then select your device under Audio > Output modules > ALSA. Click Refresh list if it only gives you the Default option.

Go to Audio > Output modules and select ALSA audio output and save.

Your sound should now work perfectly.

Get ready for a great rock’n'roll/blues extravaganza at the end of this month! Beatnik Soul are organising the Savage Kick Fest which will be held (mainly) in Sandinos‘ back bar. Dan and Conal managed to get together an excellent line up with both local and international artists.

It actually starts on Wednesday 23rd September with a free party in Sandinos featuring Casa De Chihuahua from New York.

The official opening on the Thursday night will be in St Columb’s Hall. Kicking off celebrations are Here Comes the Landed Gentry (Derry), The Jim Jones Revue (London), Joe Gideon & the Shark (London), and a DJ set by Andy McGibbon (The Bonnevilles/Motor Sounds Records).

Friday night we’re in Sandinos’ back bar with Bob Log III (Tucson, AZ), Hillstomp (Portland, OR), Teknopeasant (Donegal), and the Beatnik Soul DJs.

On Saturday we’ll see Balkan Alien Sound (Derry), Paul-Ronney Angel (The Urban Voodoo Machine) (London), and The Mighty Stef (Dublin).

And finishing off on Sunday night we get to see the brilliant T-Model Ford (Forest, MS), The Bonnevilles (Lurgan), Jonny Black’s new bluegrass outfit Skip Moses (Belfast), and more rocking tunes spun by the Beatnik Soul DJs.

Check below the fold for some videos.

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