And with this I catch up with all the published strips at the source site. Notably the last published strip there is dated May 15th, so no new strip has been published in sometime. Not sure what’s the scoop on that.
Anyway, enjoy three new chapters of translated Android High School Girl antics.
Look for translations of previous chapters in the category archives.
Hit the jump for the three new chapters. Like all Japanese manga, this should be read right to left, top to bottom.
Some time ago I stumbled upon a cool little piece of code that Sebastian Trueg wrote, which sourced an online tv database (the TVDB) for meta information about video files of TV series you had on your disk, figuring out what the series, season and episode was from the filename, and storing that info in the Nepomuk semantic framework. That happened to coincide with some of the ideas I had on how a semantic desktop should work with regards to media consumption, and specifically for watching and dealing with Anime. Anyway I recently cleared myself some hobby-hacking time, rolled up my sleeve, set Trueg’s little program up on my box, and tinkered a little with the filename analyzer. Result of which is that the program now also recognizes common anime rip filename formats, and since the TVDB also contains a pretty comprehensive list of anime, we get the following:
Pretty sweet :) In fact, the way Trueg wrote it, you don’t even need to go through the context menu when you add a new file, Nepomuk/Strigi automatically attempts to fetch the metadata when it indexes your new file. So what is the point of this? Point number one of course is that it’s pretty cool! Point number two is that all these metadata are stored in Nepomuk, which in turn makes these data available to any other program running on the desktop that recognizes and queries it. What kind of programs would want to do so? In short, plenty. Some ideas off the top of my head would include a media player that knows what episode of what series it is playing, and can automatically offer to play the next episode, or list the other episodes of the series that you have. Or a series browser (plasmoid?) that let’s you browse your videos by series instead of by folder. Your imagination is the limit. I would myself like to try to make some of those happen, but that’ll be getting too far ahead for the time being.
This program in it’s current state has a glaring problem in the context of anime: the TVDB web api (through which the program searches for the series info) does not support aliases, and so you need to be searching for the precise name of the series as stored on TVDB or you’ll turn up blank. And with anime, series names can vary pretty wildly. For example, querying “Dantalian no Shoka” doesn’t work because the series is stored in TVDB as “The Mystic Archives of Dantalian”. It’s an annoyingly serious shortcoming – half of my files don’t work thanks to this.
So fixing this will be what I’ll work on next. TVDB says they’ll support aliases in their new site, but there’s no release date of that in sight. A simple solution would be to query a different site, like MAL, which appears to have a decent API. In fact, new web sources and APIs should be pluggable, so that’ll be task number one, separating the web-sourcing part into a plugin infrastructure.
I do have some vague plans on the future of this thing, but let’s not count our chickens too much. We’ll get there when we get there. In the meantime if you want to play, you can clone my git repo and grab the source code:
git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/nepomukoracle/code nepomukoracle-code
In order to build this you’ll also need Trueg’s libTVDb and Shared Desktop Ontologies 0.9.0 and onwards – look for that one in your repos.
And here’s some Android high school manga translations as I continue to, in between work, procrastinate on writing about the seasonal shows, and on Kara no Kyoukai 04. Ah well, post is better than no post right?
Actually it’s been some time since I did any of these anyway. The Japanese manga is up to like chapter 11 by now, so I needed to do some catchup anyway. As usual the quality isn’t the greatest, but I’m a one man team!
Look for translations of previous chapters in the category archives.
Hit the jump for the three new chapters. Like all Japanese manga, this should be read right to left, top to bottom.
More Android school-comedy goodness! And yes, this thing is still ongoing, so we can expect yet more in future. I’ll be monitoring this loosely and will most likely continue to translate future strips as well. After all it’s something I’ve never really done before and it’s somewhat fun, without being too much of a chore.
Episode 1 is here and episode 2 through 4 are here.
Hit the jump for translations for 05/06 and an omake. Like all Japanese manga, this should be read right to left, top to bottom.
This cost me a whole evening, especially nowadays when some manufacturers don’t actually ship a Windows CD with their hardware anymore – so you can’t even just thrash Windows and reinstall on a smaller partition. Just so much effort to beat Windows into letting me install Linux alongside it in a manner that I want. It’s deliberate I tell you. Geez.
So the Windows default disk management tool that is the standard (and, presumably, safest) way to shrink a Windows NTFS volume is basically shit, unless you’re satisfied with only freeing a very modest amount of your volume’s free space. I always knew that. What continues to surprise me is how difficult it can seem to work around this inadequacy (a glaring one, I might add, that has been around since Vista). People have created utilities to find the “immovable” system files that are blocking the shrinking and proceeded to remove them one by one by guesswork. Free Software partitioning swiss-army-knife extraordinaire GParted can also be used to shrink the partition, but this borks the installed Windows system in the process, requiring a Windows CD to fix in a separate, tedious procedure.
As it turns out though, there is a program, freeware for personal use (not, unfortunately, free software), that.. just does the job for you. The program is MiniTool Partition Wizard, and it’s inexplicably pretty hidden on Google when I was searching, not even being mentioned in this otherwise informative and comprehensive article on the subject.
This thing works, I tried – I managed to shrink my volume by 200GB or so more than the default Windows tool would let me. There is another surprise though: you’d think you’ll need the “bootable CD” version to get this done since you can’t have windows mounted and running while the process takes place. Don’t waste your time – I spent a good chunk of time trying to hack the thing onto a flash drive (not having nor willing to sacrifice a blank CD), only to find out that the bootable image runs off some super-ancient version of Fedora Core (Surprise surprise, Linux!) that just wouldn’t boot on my modern hardware.
Just get the Home Edition: it will actually prompt you to reboot your box, and will proceed to complete the shrinking before letting Windows start. I wished this was clearer on the website.
Oh, of course, the standard precaution applies: back up anything important before doing this. Apparently complaints do exist that the tool wrecked their drive. Still, a solution that works most of the time is better than no solution.
Mplayer and Kaffeine and such work perfectly fine (which means codecs are properly installed)? Getting irritating and inexplicable errors like these?
main decoder error: no suitable decoder module for fourcc `mpga’.
VLC probably does not support this sound or video format.
and/or
main decoder error: no suitable decoder module for fourcc `mpgv’.
VLC probably does not support this sound or video format.
I have absolutely no idea why this happens, but apparently the VLC that comes with some common repos for OpenSUSE (I think I got this having installed from Packman!) is somewhat borked. Want a working VLC? Grab it from the Videolan repo. I installed that in desperation and all was suddenly right with the world.
(I half didn’t want to make this post since I can’t actually explain what the problem is and am too lazy to find out, but this solution needs some Google love, so here)
Unable to play that 1080p video without lagging? Wanna watch that 720p video file on dated hardware? Well here’s something you can try. Basically the default behavior of most video players is such that they only hog a single core while doing video decoding. If we also commit all the other available cores to the task, well, we’ll of course expect to get better performance. You won’t get double or triple the performance of course – things don’t work out that simply. The difference is noticeable though.
This isn’t a new method. However, the old instructions don’t seem to work anymore – the ffmpeg-mt branch no longer seems to build with mplayer without non-trivial modifications. Fortunately, all the improvements in the ffmpeg-mt branch have recently been merged into the main release. So we can now use the main release instead.
svn co svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer
cd mplayer
./configure
nice make -j 4
sudo install -m 755 mplayer /usr/bin/mplayer-mt
Now you can use mplayer-mt to play more performance-intensive videos and should perceive a noticeable improvement, assuming you have a multi-core processor. If you use a GUI frontend like smplayer, look for an option that lets you specify the mplayer executable, and replace it with mplayer-mt.
Unfortunately I have no idea if anything similar is possible with VLC. If you do, kindly let me know at the comments.
Yeap it’s done! Man this is quite a bit of work @_@ I even put more effort into the cleaning and presentation this time, so hopefully it looks decent. Anyway, translated strips below, enjoy :) Episode 01 was here btw.
Oh, anyone knows if there is/will be more, and where to camp for them? These four are all I have seen.
Like all Japanese manga, this should be read right to left, top to bottom.
This is something of a “challenge accepted” thing when my friend idyllic asked me to translate some strips. Yes, after Ubunchu kind of faded into the backdrop, it turns out that Android also has a high-school manga!!. So far at least four strips have been released, and this is the first. I’m relatively free now so I would probably eventually translate the other three as well (and more if I can find them). That’ll be after I finish my super-procrastinated Kara no Kyoukai post though. Anyway, here it is, my apologies for the shoddy overlays (I’ve never done this before), and enjoy your Android high school comedy.
| Spoilered | Show |
|---|---|
Like all Japanese manga, this should be read right to left, top to bottom.
Btw, in case it wasn’t clear, the “big 5” are Motorola, Sony-Ericsson, HTC, LG and Samsung. The two random guys on the right-most strip, second row are Casio and Huawei.
Original (raw) strip taken from here.
Other (raw) strips can be found here and here.
This translation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Try this before pulling the plug on Nepomuk!
As stalwart as I am a fan of the dolphin file manager and the nepomuk technologies it integrates, I was recently forced to admit that the thing was really slowing down, close to the point of unbearability, on my system. I assumed that the most direct solution was to disable nepomuk, but I like nepomuk. As it turned out though, fortunately, the solution didn’t involve toggling nepomuk stuff at all.
Try it: simply remove/hide your trash and DVD/CD ROM folder from the places panel.
The difference is bafflingly, inexplicably fantastic, my dolphin’s on steroids now. So, friends, if your dolphin ain’t playin nice with ya, try this out first before you pull the plug on nepomuk.
Source: This magnificent man’s post.
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