Getting your songs from grooveshark!

Grooveshark is an search engine, and streaming service for music. Users can stream and upload music that can be played immediately or added to a playlist. I 'm using grooveshark quite offen during my working hours. However, one day i decided to find a way to download music to my laptop for playing music offline or transfer them to my phone. After Googling a bit, i came up with the Groovedown. It is a java application and it is well mantainated. In linux you can run the application using this command:

java -jar GrooveDown.jar

Everything worked fine without a problem, and in a few minutes i had my entire playlist downloaded.

Skype 4

Last days i had some serious problems with the Skype. Either was not working, either the applicaiton was crashing. The version i was using was 2.2, quite old. So i though it was time to update to the latest version. So i did it:

What i like: fixed the issue with the v4l1compat.so library, now works out of the box; new icons, they look much more fresh. Of course the stability of the application improved as expected.  What i don't like: the new conversation window, although i believe i will get used it; and the longer load time, although the disk usage is lower than before (at least i think so).

Bottom line: give it a try, it is worth it. Even for the stability reasons or because you want to change the view!

Back to Barcelona... and ready for vacations!

Back home! After spending two and half months in Toronto working like crazy i 'm back. For some reason i feel much more relaxed. Maybe its the climate, maybe the people, maybe that the vacations are near. Yes, i 'm leaving for vacations next week. Due to a small health problem (acid reflux), this time i will avoid travelling  around Greece and exploring new places. I will just enjoy the sun and the sea doing nothing in my island! Well, of course i will check emails, but for sure i will not answer them. Funny, i reach again my limits.

Less than one week left and i really continue to work like crazy. But, whatever... i will soon leave everything behind for 12 days :)

TextLint: A tool for detecting common scientific writing style errors

TextLint Logo.

Poorly written scientific text fails to deliver clear ideas and its usually a good reason to get a paper rejection. During the paper writing i usually consult different sources about the writing style and avoiding common bugs in  writing. Initially, i was thinking to create a shell script for detecting the common mistakes on my papers.  Then, i came up to this TextLint project. They provide a download package for Win/Mac/Linux and they also provide an online form to test the results. However, some of the proposed changes on the text are subjective, others are "must": you must decide by yourself what is the best style for your text. I definitely suggest to all to test it  and especially for newcomers (i belong to this category :)). 

First NOAA 17 reception

I used the "cheap" solution of RTL2832 as SDR receiver for trying to receive the images from the NOAA weather satellites. The setup was far from ideal: very bad antenna and with very limited receiving angle (<10s of data ?). I was not expecting to receive anything but i got something:

Image received from NOAA with RTL Dongle and SDR using APT.

Not very promising heh? Well not but this was the first try. There are two images with different wavelength of light, however the reception was so bad  that you can't see any difference. You can see the grid of the map in red color, the Greenland, and the Iceland in the center with green color. There are also a green shape in the bottom right, however i 'm not sure what island is this (UK? Ireland ? The distance is not so far ). The image is from NOAA 17, and i used the HDSDR for recording the satellite transmitted sound and WXtoImg to reconstruct the final image.

Hopping for a better and stronger signal reception in the future. The weather now is rainy (Canada...) and it is not good idea to have all equipment outside.


Update: I was able to receive NOAA 19 with a external TV antenna, SDR# and WXtoImg. For more information you can find here.

A very lightweight pdf viewer!

Last days i was testing the speed and the quality of the pdf viewers on Linux. Xpdf was out of question. Acrobat reader a good quality but really heavy solution for viewing the files. Another option is the default evince but sometimes the pdf is bit blurry (if for example is scanned). Another new good alternative is the MuPDF. So i did a small test: i used this pdf to test the quality of the pictures:

A better zoom in at the equation shows more details about these three programs:

For me, the MuPDF is the winner, not only because it has the best quality between the other, but for its speed. Its really fast, and it has the same keyboard shortcuts with VIM: ideal solution for me. The mos serious drawback of the viewer is the absence of "copy" from the pdf file. 

Linux mint 12 finally

Finally, after almost four years i decided to upgrade my old Ubuntu 9.04 to something newer. I wanted to avoid installing "short lived" distributions in terms of repositories support and the same time avoid experiments with distributions that require compiling everything. I even thought to put FreeBSD. Nice operating system, you have both options to compile the packages or download the binaries. But, most of all i liked the gnome2 they are using. Unfortunately, i test on the VM showed me that not everything is working ok with the source packages (ports was not working well for gnome2 - clean install..), but it was extremely fast!

So, i have either to go for Fedora (too unstable for my taste), Ubuntu (where is gnome???), or something else. So i selected to go with Mint 12 64bit. It has long term support, includes gnome 2/3, has the same repositories with Ubuntu and includes some nice meta-packages for automatic installation of video/audio codecs. The installer recognized my old Ubuntu installation and moved my home directory without problems.

Then, in started installing the 32bit libraries. A mess, after installing manually some debian packages the whole packaging system broken and i had to remove critical parts of the system. So, i had to install it again and with more caution. This time i had to edit the deb packages to remove manually the dependencies with other packages. And it worked well. What were the packages that i had problem: Lotus Notes  and Lotus Sametime (you need them if you want to read mail from IBM). I had to follow a set of instructions for installing them:  i had even to download and compile a file to make it work properly.  Installation was much easier in 10.04 LTS versions of Ubuntu. I can't imagine how the installation will be with Ubuntu 14.04!

After spending a Sunday evening,  everything works fine now. I still had to use some old tricks for making skype to work with video (use with LD_PRELOAD to 32bit version of v4l1compat.so), but everything works fine now. Well, i still missing the old gnome setting and support.. but i guess i just have to move on.