5.20.2010

MSWord Reference Range

I had some trouble figuring out how to use MS Words simple footnote/endnote reference tool with regard to adding a range of references. I found help here: http://word.tips.net

In summary, I found it relatively easy to create the macro (below) and then I could highlight the numbers in the middle of the range and format them to be hidden with a hyphen in their place.

Macro:

Sub RefListToRange()
Selection.Font.Hidden = True
Selection.Collapse (wdCollapseEnd)
Selection.TypeText Text:="–" 
End Sub


5.13.2010

Ubuntu 10.04 media trouble

Random (20 min to 1 hour of play) video errors:

vlc loses audio and movie player loses audio and video stream.

error from movie player: pa_stream_writable_size() failed: Connection terminated

5.10.2010

Refurbing a Toshiba A45-S150

My friend asked me to fix his laptop as it seemed to have a virus on it. Well after a boot I found not only virus trouble, but lots of out-dated, useless software (mostly AOL crap that I know is painful to get rid of). He said I could do whatever was needed, so I decided the easiest path would be to reformat with Puppy using gparted and then perform a reinstallation. I decided to partition the HD to allow installation of XP (ntfs) and linux (ext3) so after doing this with gparted, I proceeded to install an old copy of XP I obtained. It had a license key with it that was supposed to work :) but alas I have had to find a workaround.

A bigger problem with this job was losing all the toshiba drivers including those that run the network adapter. I spent a few minutes searching and finally came across this forum thread:


http://laptopforums.toshiba.com/


Which pointed me here:

http://www.csd.toshiba.com/

This was critical as I was S.O.L. with most of the hardware on this machine without these!

So now I just need to get any other drivers deemed useful, deal with the activation, SP2 and SP3 upgrades, WGA issues and all that jazz. (yes windoze is a pain).

After the couple hours needed for all that, I'll take 30 min. to do a Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (lucid lynx) install just in case the other system goes to shit!

p.s. I figd out activation (FFX Madman), however it may have interfered with installation of MSOffice 2007.

5.05.2010

Soft Studio Solved?

Whilst the misses was away (Vegas Wedding - 4 days) I made it a goal to upgrade my system: 1. Upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on new HD 2. Reconfigure my software studio. I had just purchased a WD Caviar Blue 160 GB HD (ultra quiet!) and installed Ubuntu 9.10. Eventually I will get smart and make a remaster of my system so I don't have to reconfigure everything when doing something like this, but it is rare that I have to move to a new HD. Still, I had to start rebuilding my software suite. I can manage this to 95% completion in about 2 hours which I banged out early one morning.

I accomplished a network upgrade to 10.04 (lucid) in about an hour, however I had to troubleshoot a few bugs, two of which were related. The login screen lagged a very long time and my USB drive would not automount on boot like it used to. Searching the web, I found a fix and after deactivating the floppy drive (I don't even have one) in the BIOS settings this was corrected.

After installing my standard (and more) suite of software, I made my "Studio" menu and fired up JACK, Qsynth, and Qtractor to test things out. Unfortunately, I was unable to record midi from my keyboard! After racking my brain a bit, I decided to uninstall Qtractor and build it from source. Although this is always a non-trivial task (although getting easier), it fixed the problem. I also installed LinuxSampler, and the front-end GUIs Qsampler, and Jsampler (see earlier post 3.10) from the CVS repos.

I had hoped that the LinuxSampler engine would eventually be my "go-to" for running multiple samples on different channels simultaneously. However, I cannot figure out why the GIG files (or any samples for that matter) sound lousy, bad, terrible, fuzzy, etc (keywords!). Really annoyed after having built Gigedit, LinuxSampler, and Qsampler from source. I decided to play with Qsynth (.sf2 soundfont sample handler GUI for FluidSynth).

After some digging and tinkering I believe I have a solution. Use Qsynth with Qtractor and Hydrogen (on top of JACK of course) to build all my MIDI files in real-time with a MIDI keyboard and then record into Ardour. The breakthrough was figuring out how to play multiple samples (.sf2) from Qsynth simultaneously. Here is how:

Qsynth loads audio "engines" and you can set up several at once. However, you only need one!
In setup I select alsa_seq as the midi driver, and jack as the audio driver. Then under "Soundfonts" tab select each of the soundfonts (.sf2) files you want to have available for your Qtractor piece. Then edit each entries "offset" so they are different (0, 1, 2, etc). This sets the "stack" with different banks. Save and leave "setup." Then select "Channels" from the main Qsynth interface. Right-click the channel of interest and select "edit." Then you can select different "banks" and assign different soundfont samples to different channels! Now give your neglected 2 year-old a high five!

5.01.2010

Sony Vaio MotionEye Drivers

Somehow I managed to get the "motioneye" webcam working in windows 7 pro. I originally recieved this laptop with Vista installed and upon upgrading the webcam was not working. Basically I installed all the updates and then went to Sony's "esupport" page and searched for the model printed on the bottom (PCG-5K1L) which returned a different list of models. I chose the one with "EN" at the end and then installed the "Cam" driver for Vista (but I'm running 7? Right!) and it worked after that.

Now I am curious if I can make the webcam run in Ubuntu Linux (while I'm waiting around for a network upgrade to 10.04 LTS). I ran lsusb and found the driver info:

Ricoh Co., Ltd Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC6 [R5U870]

Now I think I may be able to get some headway according to this site:

http://www.arakhne.org/ricoh/

back for an update...

Update:

Installation of 10.04 took ~2 hours over a wireless connection (a bit slow, but I had other things to do anyway). It will take some time to see what kinds of advantages, upgrades, etc it really adds, but I expect to be fully satisfied.

After that I installed the following files from the above URL.:

ricoh-webcam-r5u870_0.11.4-0arakhne1_i386.deb
ricoh-webcam-r5u870-firmware_0.11.4-0arakhne1_i386.deb

Then I tried "cheese webcam booth" software and verified the motioneye webcam works!