:P

“Freelook allows you to use movements of your head to accurately control your mouse cursor. This translates to hands-free viewpoint control in games such as IL2 Sturmovik and Lock On: Modern Air Combat, as well as providing a mouse alternative for handicapped users. Freelook is similar in execution to the excellent cam2pan and TrackIR systems, although unlike the latter, Freelook only requires a cheap off-the-shelf webcam.”

It requires a marker (piece of paper or LED) for proper detection still, but I can’t complain.

Nouse tracks the nose without requiring a marker, but it seems tied up as they figure out how to commercialize it.

Cam2Pan is only $10 and seems to be a bit better than Freelook.

Has anyone found the perfect cheap webcam for this solution?

Has anyone tried Freelook yet?

Eurogamer writes about the recent release.

Interesting Excerpts:

“Quest markers are provided in a clear form which means you’ll rarely, if ever, get confused about where you’re meant to be. This may be the first MMOG we’ve considered playing without a web browser open on a second screen to look up the quests we’re doing.”

“.. but by far the best of them is the Conjunctions system. Now, we confess that we’re still getting our heads around the potential of this system to some extent, but in effect it’s a timer-based system which allows you to fire off hugely powerful combo moves. When a Conjunction is available, a set of “gems” appear on your screen; click one and you’ll perform a Conjunction move, which may in turn open up further moves in the chain to other players.”

“Annoyingly, that also means we can’t talk about PvP today; the game is purely PvE (player versus enemy, meaning no inter-player combat) up until about level 40, at which point players can take part in a unique type of PvP battle in one large zone, the Ettenmoors. This works by allowing other players to temporarily don the form of famous monsters from the Lord of the Rings universe - which you can do from level 10, although of course, that’s not much use if there’s nobody to fight against yet.”

http://youtube.com/watch?v=qC1UYnJuFsY
http://youtube.com/watch?v=yZmLKCoWe3A

Sounds interesting. Anyone try it yet?

If you find yourself in Windows land from time-to-time and need a PDF reader that isn’t 40 megabytes and made by Adobe, try Foxit Reader.

A couple of quick scripts for easily burning all ISO files:

~/bin/burn:

#!/bin/bash
SPEED=8
echo ----------------
ls -l "$1"
echo Burning $1 at $SPEED x
say Insert new disc now!
hdiutil burn -speed $SPEED -forceclose -noaddpmap "$1"
echo Complete.
say Disc burning complete!
say Label. $1
ls -l "$1"
echo ----------------

~/bin/burnall:

#!/bin/bash
find -P . -mindepth 1 -type f -iregex '.*.ISO' -exec burn {} ;

Run burnall to quickly burn all ISO (case-insensitive) files in a directory and any subdirectories. When a disc is done, it will be ejected and you will be alerted with the ’say’ command to retrieve your disc and replace it with a new one, which will continue the burning process. No hunting ISO files down.

If you use MythTV, you could use easily use mythosd to alert your myth frontends that burning is complete.

I’m through with jfs. A year in and I’ve found files with 100,000+ extents. Back to ext3 for me, as I await the stability of our shiny new ext4.

What happens when you build a multi-terabyte RAID server? You fill it to the brim with steam(y?)ing crap.

Every file and piece of media I download ends up in a single directory on my server. Programs, music, movies–let’s not be coy–all dumped into /spacepants/media/Now_Playing/ and shared with NFS and CIFS/SMB over your gigabit ethernet. You likely know your server or share as something else, but if you’re reading this, you’re going to become intimate with spacepants. Here, let me introduce you.

$ uname -a
Linux spacepants 2.6.18-jen35-default #1 SMP Tue Oct 3 01:27:41 CEST 2006 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux

$ more /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1] [raid0] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [linear]
md0 : active raid5 sdd4[0] sdc4[5] sda4[4] sdb4[3] sde4[2] sdf4[1]
1535411840 blocks level 5, 128k chunk, algorithm 2 [6/6] [UUUUUU]

md4 : active raid0 sdd2[0] sde2[2] sdf2[1]
4409472 blocks 64k chunks

md5 : active raid5 sdd3[0] sde3[2] sdf3[1]
7823360 blocks level 5, 128k chunk, algorithm 2 [3/3] [UUU]

md1 : active raid1 sdb1[0] sde1[2](S) sdf1[3](S) sdd1[4](S) sdc1[1]
104320 blocks [2/2] [UU]

md3 : active raid1 sdb3[0]
3911744 blocks [2/1] [U_]

md2 : active raid1 sdb2[0]
1469824 blocks [2/1] [U_]

unused devices:

I’m retarded. Let me fix that.

$ sudo /sbin/mdadm --add /dev/md3 /dev/sda3
mdadm: added /dev/sda3
$ sudo /sbin/mdadm --add /dev/md2 /dev/sda2 /dev/sdc2
mdadm: added /dev/sda2
mdadm: added /dev/sdc2

.. :P

$ df -H
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md3 4.1G 3.7G 379M 91% /
udev 265M 291k 264M 1% /dev
/dev/md1 104M 25M 74M 26% /boot
/dev/md5 8.0G 5.5G 2.6G 69% /home
/dev/mapper/spacepants-misc2
2.2G 787M 1.4G 37% /tmp
/dev/mapper/spacepants-usr
6.5G 4.2G 2.4G 65% /usr
/dev/mapper/spacepants-misc1
2.2G 2.0G 181M 92% /var
/dev/mapper/spacepants-sunita
6.5G 297M 6.2G 5% /spacepants/sunita
/dev/mapper/spacepants-home
6.5G 2.5G 4.0G 39% /spacepants/unknown
/dev/mapper/spacepants-work
13G 3.3G 9.7G 26% /spacepants/work
/dev/mapper/spacepants-media
1.6T 1.6T 20G 99% /spacepants/media
/dev/md4 4.5G 1.7G 2.9G 37% /spacepants/speedy
//192.168.1.12/mythtv
3.3G 3.2G 90M 98% /home/media/mythtv-remote

Right. It’s a work in progress, but that’s spacepants. Seven 320GB drives in a big jfs/reiserfs/LVM/RAID0/RAID1/RAID5 cacophony. But back to organizing–which, if you haven’t gathered already, is an everyday struggle for me.

We’re going to start from end. Because this is my latest addition and because I feel like it. This is a quick script that I smashed together earlier today and placed lovingly in my cron.hourly. It scans your Incoming/ folder (/spacepants/media/MythVideo/_Now Playing_/ in this case) and links recent folders and files for easy browsing–easy browsing is a big WAF bonus, which is what this is really all about. Isn’t it?

#!/bin/bash

# Move into our _Today_ folder because we want our links to be relative.
cd /spacepants/media/MythVideo/_Today_/
# Clear out the existing links.
rm /spacepants/media/MythVideo/_Today_/*

# Find all top-level folders that were created in the last 48 hours,
# ignoring any folder that starts with _* and links to here (_Today_).
find -P ../_Now Playing_/ -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -wholename '../_Now Playing_/_*' -prune -o -type d -mtime -2 -exec ln -s '{}' . ;

# Does the same as above, but only for top-level files 5k or larger
# -- and ignore .* this time around.
find -P ../_Now Playing_/ -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -wholename '../_Now Playing_/.*' -prune -o -type f -mtime -2 -size +5k -exec ln -s '{}' . ;

# Rename all links, replacing underscores (_) with spaces.
# (.. again with the WAF.)
for file in * ; do mv "$file" "`echo $file | sed 's/_/ /g'`" ; done

# Move on to the weekly archive -- note -mtime -8.
cd /spacepants/media/MythVideo/_This Week_/
rm /spacepants/media/MythVideo/_This Week_/*
find -P ../_Now Playing_/ -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -wholename '../_Now Playing_/_*' -prune -o -type d -mtime -8 -exec ln -s '{}' . ;
find -P ../_Now Playing_/ -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -wholename '../_Now Playing_/.*' -prune -o -type f -mtime -8 -size +5k -exec ln -s '{}' . ;
for file in * ; do mv "$file" "`echo $file | sed 's/_/ /g'`" ; done

# The monthly archive -- -mtime -32
cd /spacepants/media/MythVideo/_This Month_/
rm /spacepants/media/MythVideo/_This Month_/*
find -P ../_Now Playing_/ -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -wholename '../_Now Playing_/_*' -prune -o -type d -mtime -32 -exec ln -s '{}' . ;
find -P ../_Now Playing_/ -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -wholename '../_Now Playing_/.*' -prune -o -type f -mtime -32 -size +5k -exec ln -s '{}' . ;
for file in * ; do mv "$file" "`echo $file | sed 's/_/ /g'`" ; done

I saved mine as /etc/cron.hourly/updatemedia.sh — but do with it what you will. Tell the boss and procrastinate the process of actually organizing that media one more day. :P