GeekScribes

There is one annoying thing with MP3 files. They are stereo, and not surround compatible. Notice that when you have a 5.1 speaker system (or more), only the 2 front speakers are used to play the music.

I’ve got a Sound Blaster Audigy sound card running on my PC, and luckily it offers CMSS (Creative MultiSpeaker Surround) which allows me to duplicate my front channels music to all other speakers, creating a fake surround effect. It’s not really Dolby-like effects, but hey, it’s still better than having only 2 speakers playing my music.

What I really wanted was to have the same effect, but under Linux Mint, since I’m an avid fan of this distro. I thought it was already included somewhere, but alas no. I found that after browsing around in the control panel. The option could not be found.

My only solution was Google, and the answer came quite rapidly, although not from Linux Mint’s site or wiki or forum, but from Gentoo’s. At least it works, and it was very easy to implement. Read on…

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Finally, the issues about FUP have hit the local newspapers! Guru just sent me a scan of the article, and here it is, for you to feast on!

This article brought me out of my temporary blogging hibernation (due to exam), but had to blog on it! I couldn’t resist! I must thank News On Sunday for publishing the article and Yannick Rivet for reading Mauritian blogs, and considering our opinions. At least, we now know that Mauritian bloggers are being taken seriously!

Btw… Congrats CarrotMadMan! Your title (Stab in the back) goes to print!

Here is Mr. Avinash Meetoo’s heavily commented and discussed post about FUP. I’m really sorry since I forgot mentioning this great article.

For once I’ll be posting something completely unrelated to technology, but which according to me, you readers need to see.

It’s a video, from MercyForAnimals website, that was shot undercover. It depicts the inhuman and monstrous treatment that laying hens get when eggs are mass-produced.

I’m posting this article, after I saw the video in one of my feeds, and thought I might help propagate the message.

I warn you. Faint of heart and stomach, refrain from going to the link below.

Here’s the link: http://www.mercyforanimals.org/caeggs/

And the follow-up by the company, which is not very convincing

(Original Article)

This article is now out-dated. Rapidshare is back online in Mauritius, discarding the concept of orange applying Internet Censorship. It was probably a problem with their servers, or a broken thing somewhere.

It’s back to normal now. I can access it and download normally.

I don’t know since when, but it’s impossible for me, an Orange ADSL user, to access rapidshare.com. I can access rapidshare.de though.

Rapidshare.com can be pinged, can be trace-routed, albeit very slowly, but when loading rapidshare.com in a browser, you get a “page loading” thing (progress bar starts filling) then it freezes.

I managed to get 1 download going, but it failed after 7KB downloaded, with a miserable speed of 1.5KBps, which is lame.

This can mean 2 things:

- There are issues with the Rapidshare servers and they are doing some kind of maintenance.

- Access to rapidshare.com has been blocked by the local ISPs, or Orange.

I had a friend using Nomad’s network to try to access rapidshare.com and launch the same download I’ve been trying to get. No result. It was blocked too.

This is not a local DNS issue since I’m using OpenDNS. Trace-route to rapidshare.com works. If there was a blocking, the request would have stopped at the ISP, or maybe they are letting requests go through but block HTTP requests or something similar?

For now, I don’t know. I’m writing this article without having every fact, so take what you read with a pinch of salt. It might be censorship. Or it could be a simple server problem. Still, Rapidshare is unusable on Orange’s network.

Another weird issue. If you try accessing rapidshare.com via a proxy, it works fine. This is making me seriously consider censorship. Nothing confirmed yet. It might be that Orange started blocking access to Rapidshare to prevent heavy downloading or some kind of weird reason. If you want to check, go to YouHide and use it to access rapidshare.com.

However, if there is censorship in place, there will be an all-out war between Orange and Internet users. They are violating the basic philosophy of the Internet, which is the free and unrestricted flow of information. We can accept capping, but we can’t accept being censored and restricted like that.

I agree that Rapidshare has loads of illegal content, but also, loads of totally legal content. That doesn’t mean that it should be totally blocked. This is plain unfair. If there is indeed censorship, we could send an email to rapidshare, telling them that their premium users are being denied service in Mauritius, and we demand a refund? That should get their attention!

The Media Guru also wrote about this problem, so you might give his article a check.

More on this as I get updates… Nothing confirmed yet, remember this!

Ps. Sorry for the lack of articles on GeekScribes. Both Guru and myself are in exam period and will finish by end of May. So, if there are no frequent updates, you now know why.

In today’s article I will be talking on how to read feeds (your favourite ones). Brief and Sage are Firefox’s two most popular feed reader. Hanging out with one is a wise decision, that’s another chance to take your browser one level up. Before going any further, we must not forget, there are also web based feed readers like Google Reader, Bloglines, alongside we also have specialised applications meant just for reading feeds.

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Have you ever come up with a situation where you have a batch of files, which you need to rename according to a pattern, or according to file names from a list. I do. And I do often.

Consider this scenario. You downloaded a bunch of video files or episodes off the Internet, and you want to rename them to something meaningful. Like from “S01E08_Episode_Released By_XYZ” to “1×08 – Episode by XYZ”.

Now, doing this rename operation on one file manually is alright. Doing it for 100′s of episodes? I guess no one is ready for this. Anyways, for this situation, a very useful and friendly application is needed. It’s called ReNamer by Denis Kozlov.

There are tons of freeware batch-renamers out there, but I found ReNamer to be the friendliest of them till now, and my personal favourite. I thought that it would be nice to share it with you.

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Happy birthday to you SPAM! :/

Yes folks. SPAM will be 30 years old tomorrow (3rd May), as reported by The Register!

Junk mail has been littering our email boxes and all of the Internets for 30 long years now, annoying you with the infamous buy XYZ products, specially viagra, and the enlargement of a certain organ in the male body among many other things. In the past, cleaning the clutter was a whole new level of pain and boredom, where you thought of all particularly painful and abusive torture you could inflict on the spammers, while cleaning your inbox. Today, that task is mostly handled by spam filters.

So… to commemorate the 30 years of that monstrosity called spam, let’s see some ways to fight it, so it doesn’t make it to its 40th birthday! :/

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