Between Linux and Anime

Kind of like Schrodinger's Cat

Author: Jason "moofang" (Page 3 of 20)

Applying Kwin Blur to Transparent Konsole/Yakuake Windows

If you use Konsole or Yakuake with transparency you might have noticed that Kwin’s blur effect, that has been around for awhile and that blurs the background of various transparent elements in the UI (eg panels and plasma popups), does not apply to transparent Konsole or Yakuake windows. This has always irked me a tiny bit, but when I discovered that you can blur transparent terminal windows on OSX, that got me itchy enough to do the token research.

The story is a familiar one: it’s not too hard just to GET WORKING, and patches to do it exist, however getting it to work in a sensible way is non-trivial, and so the patches are rejected and the feature itself is pending future structural changes. Basically, it’s not going to happen on it’s own anytime soon.

Fortunately, there are ways to get it working on your own – and they do not involve applying custom patches and rebuilding anything. Turns out there is a terminal command one can run to immediately apply blur on, for example, current active Konsole windows:

xprop -f _KDE_NET_WM_BLUR_BEHIND_REGION 32c -set _KDE_NET_WM_BLUR_BEHIND_REGION 0 -id `qdbus org.kde.konsole /konsole/MainWindow_1 winId`

And for a currently active Yakuake:

xprop -f _KDE_NET_WM_BLUR_BEHIND_REGION 32c -set _KDE_NET_WM_BLUR_BEHIND_REGION 0 -name Yakuake

Now to do this automatically so that your yakuake and konsole windows are ALWAYS blurred, you can simply add the following lines to your ~/.bashrc:

Spoilered: Old, not so good code Show

Edit: commenters have posted improved versions of the code, thanks commenters! See improved version below:

Spoilered: Code for non-KF5 and old yakuake Show

Edit2: KF5 Konsole and Yakuake 3 onwards requires updated code, as well as xdotool to be installed so we can fetch yakuake’s win id:

konsolex=$(qdbus | grep konsole | cut -f 2 -d\ )
if [ -n "$konsolex" ]; then
for konsole in `xdotool search --class konsole`; do
xprop -f _KDE_NET_WM_BLUR_BEHIND_REGION 32c -set _KDE_NET_WM_BLUR_BEHIND_REGION 0 -id $konsole;
done
fi
if [ `qdbus | grep yakuake` ]; then
xprop -f _KDE_NET_WM_BLUR_BEHIND_REGION 32c -set _KDE_NET_WM_BLUR_BEHIND_REGION 0 -id `xdotool search --class yakuake`;
fi

Of course, this often results in the command being run redundantly, but that doesn’t appear to bring any tangible ill-effects. It all works well enough for a quick hackaround. And the results are delicious indeed.


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Hana no Android Gakuen Specials 3 and 4 English Translated

And these are it: the last of the Android Gakuen manga strips freely available online. I originally planned to close the curtains on this whole translation endeavor with the release of these last strips, but it turns out that a friendly neighbourhood reader Elaine Nguygen has volunteered to send me the raw strips in the first Android Gakuen manga volume, and so I now plan to work on those too, which means more Android Gakuen translated strips to come! Of course, those may not stay up as the raws aren’t freely available, so I may have to take them down if the authors/copyright holders complain, but at least for now the plan is to go on with that for as long as I am able.

While I’m at it I’d also like to apologize a little to anyone who may be actively following my translations for being so incredibly slow at the whole thing. Unfortunately this isn’t something I am able to fix, since necessarily this pet project must take lower priority to a lot of the other stuff I’m responsible to. These strips really should have been out two or so weeks ago, but stuff came up and I ended up swamped for quite a while and only managed to put everything together now.

Anyway, I’ll continue to do my best. If I can’t work fast I’ll at least try to ensure my translated strips are as high quality as my inexperienced self can make them :) In the meantime, enjoy Specials 3 and 4! Shoutout to JX for his help with the translation.

Look for translations of previous chapters in the category archives.

Hit the jump for the translated strip. Like all Japanese manga, this should be read right to left, top to bottom.

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Getting the Maliit/Plasma Active Virtual Keyboard working for Gtk apps in PA3

I’ve had more frustration than I’m comfortable admitting to trying to get this to work – I actually gave up and compiled kvkbd at one point. Now that I have it down though it all looks infuriatingly obvious in hindsight. Anyway..

The problem: if you have the official Plasma Active 3 image installed and running on some device, and at some point or another installed/ran a gtk app on your system, you’ll quickly realize that the Maliit-based virtual keyboard does not trigger in your gtk app. That’s contrary to what was promised from the Maliit move! And in fact Maliit predates Plasma Active and should have perfect gtk support, so what gives? It turns out that Plasma Active only includes the Maliit input context plugin for Qt and not for gtk, and that’s basically the problem. (Presumably they decided to save it since the image does not include anything gtk)

The solution: You basically need to install that gtk input context plugin. What I did was I took the package from the recommended repos for openSUSE linked from the Maliit website (specifically this repo). The commands to run (as root!) are:

# zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/M17N:/Maliit/openSUSE_Factory/ maliitosfact
# zypper refresh
# zypper in maliit-inputcontext-gtk2

And then update the gtk immodules before rebooting:

# gtk-query-immodules-2.0 > /etc/gtk-2.0/gtk.immodules

Note: Zypper will complain about different maliit versions and prompt you to fix by pulling and replacing packages from the openSUSE repo – DON’T DO IT! Just tell it to break maliit-inputcontext-gtk2 by ignoring some dependencies so you install only one package!

You might also want to disable the openSUSE maliit repo after you’re done so you don’t inadvertently pull stuff from it in future:

zypper mr -d maliitosfact

I’m not 100% sure pulling and replacing those packages will actually cause bad things to happen, but I’ve learnt by being bitten – painfully – multiple times not to risk these things if at all possible :) Anyway, the plugin in fact does work perfectly with the Maliit stuff from Plasma Active despite the zypper warnings:

Plasma Active Maliit Keyboard working on an old Fennec build

Of course, this all only works assuming you’re on an i586/x86 device. It’ll probably be harder to find binary packages for the input plugin on arm for example, but this should hopefully at least point you in the right direction. Perhaps you could just build it from source or something.

I know it’s probably already near the end of PA3’s lifecycle now, but hopefully this will still help some frustrated soul out :)

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Hana no Android Gakuen Special 2 English Translated

It’s been a really long time I know. Unsurprisingly, I got busy, and the knowledge that Android Gakuen will no longer be available as online strips was basically fatal to my motivation for a long time. For those who are not aware: after 13 initial strips plus 4 ‘Specials’ that were made available at the Weekly Ascii website, the rest of Android Gakuen is basically print-only, which means that I can no longer translate and make them available here unless someone could provide scans.

I still however do get a lot of hits from people seeking Android Gakuen translated strips, so I’ve decided that I should at least finish translating everything that is available. So I went to work again, and here’s Special number 2! I’ll try to get Specials 3 and 4 done within the next month, and with that finally bring some deserved closure to this whole endeavor :)

Look for translations of previous chapters in the category archives.

Hit the jump for the translated strip. Like all Japanese manga, this should be read right to left, top to bottom.

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Ayase’s Farewell

Not cool :(

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Give the Time of Eve guys some Love at Kickstarter

So the indie filmmakers behind Time of Eve are apparently thinking about making an international blu-ray release of their excellent animated film, after fans apparently clamored for one. What’s interesting though, is the way they decided to go about this: via a Kickstarter campaign.

Why Kickstarter?

Yes, there are other ways to get a Blu-ray of the movie to fans outside of Japan. But, these involve surrendering rights to the movie for large swaths of the world, for lengthy expanses of time. We looked carefully at the options, and then looked back at the roots of this project. From the very beginning, we booted strapped Time of EVE, episode by episode; and the direct rapport with fans has fueled this project throughout. We decided to hold onto the rights, and see how new distribution technology, and now crowdsourcing, can enable us to stay true to the original vision behind Time of EVE, and reach out to fans directly. Is it the best way? That, we can’t answer. But, it the path we’ve taken from the start.

I think this is really quite cool. We’re living in an interesting period now where a lumbering juggernaut of traditional media creation/publishing/distribution practices is beginning crash violently against the open, increasingly available, and rapidly accelerating Internet. We could well be sitting on the verge of the radical changes it would take for the media industry to fully adapt to an Internet age. This change has to happen, because the most likely alternative is a terrible one: where media cash giants win their war against piracy, almost inevitably at the cost of Internet freedom. What Studio Rikka/Directions Inc is doing here is something I hope more media companies would do: refuse to submit to traditional distribution processes and instead seek new technology/crowdsourced-based methods of getting their work out to their fans. Kickstarter campaigns may not be the final answer, but it is a palatable enough start. One where creation studio and fans have more say and sway over the terms and methods of their trade.

So pop over and give them some love! Go over and read the excitement-suffused fan comments and the wonderstruck updates from the project owners. And if you can and are sufficiently interested – make a pledge and earn a nice reward! We who watch anime know how ineffectual the current ‘standard’ channels of anime distribution are especially for the international audience. This needs to change. The campaign has already doubled its initial goal amount in less than 2 out of its intended 30-day run, but we can make it an even bigger success story. One that other anime studios would hopefully watch and do some serious thinking about.

Edit: “UPDATE: The Blu-ray will be region free” \o/

About Time of Eve
Time of Eve started as a 6-episode ONA that eventually got stitched together with connecting scenes into a single fluid film. If you’ve never seen it before, you really owe it to yourself to check this out, especially if you know ought about Asimov’s Laws of Robotics and some of the philosophical ideas Asimov explored in his robot novels. Time of Eve is this studio’s own vibrantly illustrated, liquidly animated, and vividly musical little twist on that universe, and while it doesn’t try very hard to take its ideas far, compared to Asimov, it nonetheless manages to come off as very immersive, thoughtful, and at many points even endearing. It is perhaps every bit the beautiful, lovingly crafted modern reimagining fans of Asimov’s universe could hope for. I remember being blown away a long time ago by the first ONA episode and subsequently being reduced to a bout of embarrassing incoherence. In short, this is good stuff. Recommended watching.

Have a trailer if you need one

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Kirino, Kyousuke, Kuroneko – the culmination at OreImo 2 ep 7

It’s been a quality spring season despite a somewhat rocky start, and there’s been a lot to think and talk about. Way too much in fact. Even talking generally about singular shows – like about OreImo 2 – seems like such an impossibly colossal task for a single post at this point – halfway across the season. I had to force myself to make a focus, and after reading some conflicting opinion on OreImo 2 ep 7 (and the nth Kirino-hating post), I’ve decided to bring out my own take on the Kirino-Kyousuke-Kuroneko dynamic leading up to, and in the wake of episode 7, and fling it out into the chaos out there.

Hey, it’s good to have opinion variety, no?

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Allowing res.nimg.jp to store information locally on NicoNico


It’s a dumb little problem: opening a video on NicoNico has a flash setting dialog pop up asking

res.nimg.jp is requesting permission to store information on your computer.

Requested up to 1MB
Currently used: 83 KB

With “Allow” and “Deny” buttons – neither of which are clickable!. And so this dialog sits in the middle of the video widget refusing to be dismissed and cockblocks the crap out of all your video watching efforts.

Reinstalling Flash as suggested somewhere didn’t help. In the end, I discovered a dumb little workaround: load the video on nicoviewer instead. That is, if your video url was http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm12345678 then the nicoviewer url would be http://www.nicoviewer.net/sm12345678. The same dialog should show up on the player there, but this time the buttons are clickable! So I clicked allow, Flash remembers the setting, and videos on NicoNico stopped showing the dialog from then on.

I later also read that an alternative method is to go here where you should be able to see your Flash player settings. Just scroll through the list of sites and look for res.nimg.jp and then adjust the slider up to ‘1mb’, and that should apparently fix it.

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Spring 2013 Brainmarks (Simplified)

The blog is alive again! Wahahahaha

So first of all a mostly unimportant logistic detail: I’m changing the original definition of Brainmarks posts a little to make it easier on myself. The essential difference: I’ll no longer sieve through _everything_ the season has to offer. I’m no longer doing this with my housemate, and while checking out everything was sort of fun while it lasted, it’s also extremely time consuming and more often than not even sort of thankless (watching clearly shit shows just to make doubly sure they really are shit is not the most fun thing in the world). So what I’ll list here are shows that I i) somehow decided to check out, either from recommendations, blogs, or general buzz and ii) have not swiftly chucked aside after one or two episodes because I clearly didn’t like it. I’ll still rank the brainmarks though, because that’s sort of fun.

Spoilered: What are brainmarks? (Revised) Show

Oh, and as a bonus, since I don’t actually check out everything anymore, you get to yell at me in the comments if you think I missed a good show. And with that out of the way, let’s dive in.

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Playing Multiple Subtitles Simultaneously with Mplayer

Well, with any player that plays ass subs really, but the procedure requires Mplayer :)

(I know I haven’t written a real post in a good while and this doesn’t quite count. I’ll post soon! I hope.. at least, I’m positively definitely trying to really write a proper post and push it out as soon as I’m positively capable of doing. No really!)

So I found myself needing to have both english and chinese subtitles on at once today and struggled with it briefly. I eventually found the solution in the form of a script called merge2ass (Source). What it does is it takes two different subtitle files and smushes it into a single ass file that basically shows the first subtitle file at the top of the screen and the second subtitle file at the bottom, something like this:

Yuki is sad all this is harder than she wanted

Usage of the script is simple enough. Make it executable, then supply the video file, the first subtitle file, then the second. You can also just run the script without arguments and it’ll show a nice help message.

chmod +x merge2ass.sh
./merge2ass.sh yourmoviefile.format sub1.srt sub2.srt

This will produce a file called yourmovilefile-bilingual.ass that you could then load with mplayer (or whatever other player you want) to get simultaneous dual subtitles.

Oh right, for this to work with chinese subtitles, you need to change line 125 and/or 128 of the script and supply -subcp enca:zh:BIG5 as an mplayer option, as per this post. Just add it immediately after ‘mplayer’, like so:

mplayer -subcp enca:zh:BIG5 -dumpsrtsub -noautosub -really-quiet -frames 0 -sub "${sub[1]}" "$movie" 2>>"$mplayer_err" && echo "Done"

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