gnurou.org Just your average bearded geek

Finally, a way to annotate PDF files under Linux (provided you can run Wine)

I have been looking for years for a solution to annotate PDF files from my Linux box. I usually do a lot of proof-reading, and these highlight and post-it features are just gold when you have to transmit your comments using the internet.

My 250Gb external hard drive (a Seagate Barraccuda, which I was expecting to last at least for many years) just died a couple of days ago after less than two years of service. No matter the reputation of the manufacturer, hard drive failures can happen any time, so it's better to be prepared and not rely on only one storage for your important data. Fortunately, that was my case and nothing critical has been lost in the process.

Well anyway, now I just bought a new, 500Gb Western Digital Caviar drive, and the first thing I want to be sure about is that it is safe to store things on it. So, before even creating a new partition, let's make a complete surface check with badblocks!

L'entrée de caractères asiatiques a toujours été une galère sous Linux. Heureusement la situation tend à s'améliorer un peu, bien que l'on soit encore loin du tout fonctionnel. Voici comment je suis parvenu à avoir le support pour l'écriture en japonais sous Kubuntu Dapper (6.06), Edgy (6.10) et maintenant Feisty (7.04), avec SCIM et Anthy.

Update: There are now official packages for Edgy . Therefore, this post and its content are now obsolete.

Picard is a great tool that automagically tags music files (be them mp3 or oggs) using an acoustic fingerprint and the big Musicbrainz database. It's as easy to use as dropping music files and letting it do the work. And it's especially great if you are a Last.fm user and want your files correctly tagged.

This page links to free ressources for people studying Japanese, including online courses, online tools, software and browser extensions. There are many books and kinds of courses available in exchange of your money - however, I've got better results using the following online courses combined with the tools presented below. And it's much more fun, too.

This program allows you to communicate with the Rome UP-301 MP3 player under (probably) any *nix OS. It has been tested and is known to work under GNU/Linux.

Please note that this program ONLY supports the UP-301 model. It's the first released of the rome players that plugs into your parallel port. Further models (USB ones) are NOT supported, and will probably never be by this program, as I don't own any of them.

I used to contribute lot of code (most related to low-level graphics and map engine) to this free graphical RPG similar in feeling to good old console games. Unfortunately I don't have free time for now, so I had to take my distances with the project.

Adonthell not only needs coders, but also graphic artists, musicians, writers, in short every person that might bring something to this kind of game. Don't hesitate to have a look at the site or contact us on the mailing lists if you want to contribute!