Playing Wesnoth

I've been playing some Battle for Wesnoth the past couple of weeks. Today, I finally finished the "Heir to the Throne" campaign. It was on easy, but I finished it. This isn't the first time I've gotten to the end of Wesnoth, but it is the first time I've seen the ending. I first picked up on Battle for Wesnoth a couple of years ago, when version 0.4.0 was out. I played it on and off for a while and got to the end of the playable levels on several version. However, by the time I lost interest, they still hadn't written all the levels for the standard campaign.

I must say that Wesnoth has come a long way since I started playing it. The graphics are better and the game play has evened out, but it still retains that wonderful simplicity of game play that I so love in strategy games. It's the same reason I still enjoy playing my old copy of Bandit Kings of Ancient China under Dosbox. They both allow for a rich, enjoyable game without making you think too much about the minutia of running an army. I guess it's just a matter of finding the right level of abstraction for the game.

I did have one small problem with Wesnoth today. Apparently a key got stuck on my keyboard, or something, because I ran out of disk space while I was playing. What does that have to do with the keyboard, you ask? Well, after deleting some unused files so I had some space to work with, I started looking for the source of the problem. I thought I had several gigabytes left and I hadn't done anything big recently, so I was a bit confused. It turned out that my home directory, which normally runs a couple of gigs (what can I say - I'm a pack rat), had swollen to 9GB! A closer examination revealed that my ~/.wesnoth directory was up to 6GB. This is where the stuck key comes in, because that's the only explanation I could think of for why there would be 3800 images, at about 1.7MB a piece and all created today, in the Wesnoth screenshots directory. Weird....

Making HPLIP work

I finally got around to figuring out how to make HPLIP work under Kubuntu Breezy today. It turned out to be absurdly simple.

My problem was that the HPLIP toolbox refused to run because there were no HP printers set up in CUPS. Of course, that's not really correct, because I had set up my HP PhotoSmar 7760 in CUPS and it was working perfectly. However, because it wasn't setup using the hp:/ protocol, HPLIP couldn't access the advanced functionality, like the card reader, ink monitor, and so forth.

The solution was simply to remove and re-add the printer in the KDE print manager. Of course, this wasn't immediately obvious, as the choice for hp:/ protocol was lumped in under the "other printer" options on the printer type screen. I would have just used the CUPS web administration tool, but for some reason, the Ubuntu people saw fit to disable the administrative capabilities of the web front-end. Apparently it's for "security reasons," which doesn't make much sense to me because the default configuration limits access to the local host anyway. Oh well, I'm sure it seemed like a good idea to them.

Of course, if I hadn't hosed my system with a routine kernel upgrade last week, I woulnd't have had to go through this in the first place, but that's a story for another day.

Syaptic and GTK-Qt

I ran across this thread on Ubuntu forums the other day regarding the GTK-Qt theme engine and kdesu. As you may know, the GTK-Qt theme engine is a handy KDE/Qt theme that basically causes GTK+ to call Qt functions to create widgets instead of drawing them itself. The result is that your GTK+ applications look exactly like native Qt applications.

The only problem I've had while using this in Kubuntu is that it doesn't work correctly when you start an application using kdesu, KDE's graphical version of su or sudo. For instance, if I start Synaptic from the Kmenu, my KDE theme doesn't take effect. In fact, in some cases, Synaptic seems to revert to some phenomenally ugly theme that I don't think I've ever seen before. However, if I start it using sudo from a terminal, it behaves as it should.

It turns out you can fix this with a couple of simple symlinks
sudo ln -s ~/.qt/qt_plugins_3.3rc /root/.qt/qt_plugins_3.3rc
sudo ln -s ~/.qt/qtrc /root/.qt/qtrc

That's it. Now Synaptic works as it should and all is right with the world. My only remaining question is whether this problem is a bug or a feature.

Tape to MP3

I tried something new today: converting old audio tapes to MP3s. It turned out to be pretty easy. I don't claim to be an expert yet, I'll recount how I did it anyway.

I used the old "play it and record the output" method for converting tapes. In other words, I hooked the headphone jack of my stereo up to the input jack of my sound card using a spare speaker cable. I then played the tape and used KRec to record the stereo's output and KMix to control the input jack. I then used KRec's export feature to save the recording to a wave file. (Note: When exporting from KRec, make sure that you're at the start of the file, i.e. make sure to rewind first.)

After I had the wave file, the next step was playing with it in Audacity. I don't really know anything about audio engineering, but I managed to chop out extra empty space at the end of the recording, copy and paste two sides of an album together, and things like that. After that, I just exported the result to a wave file again and encoded it with LAME. I used an average bitrate of 64bps to keep the files small. Since most of the tapes I'm converting are comedy albums, sound quality isn't a big concern. I'd much rather be able to get 45 minutes of audio into 17MB than get that extra little bit of quality that I'm not going to notice anyway.