While I’m not an American citizen (and I’ve never even been to the US), my site is hosted on a server somewhere in Texas, so I’d be directly affected by these acts. Actually, everyone would be directly affected by these acts, as you’ll shortly see if you follow my links.

Depending on how much time you have, here are a bunch of options to educate yourself without having to wade through any legalese.

5 minutes:

The EFF’s one-page guide to SOPA

+ one real-life example (the most common argument for SOPA/PIPA that I’ve come across was “these extreme scenarios anti-SOPA/PIPA activists posit will never happen”… um, they are already happening, and these laws will only make them more likely to happen!)

15 minutes:

What Can You Do About SOPA and PIPA? from Ask Slashdot

20 minutes:

interesting video rant by a British gamer/lawyer – there is a bit of ageism in there re the US policymakers, but otherwise the video is informative and entertaining.

Once you’re finished, spend an additional 5 minutes telling others about this issue (if you’re an American citizen, be sure to email your representative).

I took down a comment spam filter a while ago – I had problems with it and I was frankly curious what would happen. It’s strange, most of the spam I get consists of lengthy, baroque, and sometimes downright bizarre compliments. I guess people are most likely to approve comments containing compliments? There was even one which said that my site increased the size of their testicles. Lolwut?

Along completely different lines, I also got spammed by a Chareidi website (I’d rather not say which, but it’s not one I normally visit). Spamming is asur, people!

I hate GIMP with a passion. (Yes, I do use it, I only have Linux on my laptop and I can’t live without a bitmap image editor – this is not a case of “I hate GIMP because it’s not Photoshop and I choose to ignore it”, I hate it as a regular user. ) I have to admit that for a long while I did not even try Inkscape because I’ve heard recommendations from people that went like “Inkscape is essentially GIMP with vectors”. It’s not, and thank G-d for that. (Here have a few more essentialist explanations!)

Anyway, so far I really enjoy Inkscape, which has to count for something given my dislike of vector art in general… I thought it’d be interesting to point out a few things that seem to be missing from the usual documentation. (There is a lot of useful documentation, be sure to check out the free Inkscape book!)

You can actually use it as a freehand drawing program. At this point I think it’s the best there is for line-art sketching (especially at the great price point of zero ): your sketches can scale up indefinitely and they do not take up a lot of space in your hard disk because of the vector format. The downside is that erasing is not as easy as with a bitmap program.

The built-in calligraphy tool looks completely useless for serious drawing at first glance, but if you play around with the settings, you can come up with something interesting.

Here are my current tool presets:

Width: 4-6
Pressure sensitivity varies width but not opacity
Thinning: 0.10
Angle: 30 degrees
No angle sensitivity (my portable device does not support this and I haven’t tried it on my desktop)
Fixation: 0
Caps: 2.50
Tremor: 0
Wiggle: 0
Mass: 0.02

Here is a nice tutorial that does a good job at explaining the options, but doesn’t really provide sample presets. I thought I had some of my presets from a different tutorial, but I can’t locate it anywhere (pointers would be appreciated, I’d like to offer some credit). Most of the presets people recommend – and indeed the defaults – I don’t really like and IMO they are not very well-suited to sketching. Give mine a spin if you are a predominantly bitmap artist like me

I have to thank WildGica whose enthusiasm for Inkscape proved sufficiently infectious

Yet another gigantic heap of articles in Hungarian… lately I’ve also been writing hardware reviews, it’s great fun as long as the device doesn’t want to explode in my hands Right now I even have a cool infobox listing my ebook reader reviews on the main page of nyest.hu, just below the Facebook app.

I should write more in English, I know, I know! I haven’t written anything in months and now it’s just the backlog. It’s time to send out a bunch of article queries! And there is also research to be done… *cue Portal theme song*

Fiction writing has taken a backseat, and that poor visual novel game has been at ~90% completion for ages now, untouched; I apologize and I’ll try to do something to make up for the delay once I have more time away from work (B”N because now I’m hesitant to promise anything).

I have to say upfront that Google Translate does not really work with Hungarian yet; sometimes you can get the gist, sometimes you get the exact opposite! (Sometimes you get nonsense, but nonsense is not as misleading as when a sentence gets translated to the opposite of its intended meaning.) I’m mentioning this because some enterprising friends of mine have already tried to read my Hungarian-language articles using Google Translate and were quite baffled by the results!

*

Most magyarul is elmondom – csináltam egy oldalt a magyar nyelvű cikkeimnek (főleg tudományos-technikai ismeretterjesztő cikkek és kritikák), érdemes megnézni és olvasgatni. Mindenkinek különösen ajánlom a Beszédfelismerés a videojátékokban 2. részét, történeti áttekintéssel – van benne többek között beszélő hal Spock kapitány hangjával, sikítozós Pikachu-terelgetés és a világ talán legnagyobbat bukott játékkonzolja! (Nem, nem a Virtual Boy. )

This is mostly for my friends who asked for it, so feel free to disregard this post if you’re satisfied with your current hosting provider! But if you need a new host, click on the banner below and both of us will be happy I apologize to everyone else for the interruption.

Some of the buttons are quite surprising (there is one which advertises “American” hosting, with a flag… I guess there is a market for that!). I think this one looks nice, but I could do without the animation. Also, $4.95 does not get you the ability to have multiple domain names, you need the “Baby Croc” hosting plan if you require that, which is a bit more expensive (but not by much).

You can use the coupon code “TWITTER” to get 20% off your initial purchase and “hgc25″ to get $10 off.

Why Linux

When I bought an X60T, I thought I wouldn’t bother with Linux, everything was nicely preloaded with Windows XP and I saw no particular need to install Linux and suffer with the tablet features. However, I soon found that many of the drivers were really unstable and most of the extra features were really annoying. (Do you really want your screen to rotate based on motion sensor data?! I know I don’t!)

A few months later, I experienced a series of hardware malfunctions (strangely, beginning with the fingerprint reader). Among a bunch of other things, my hard drive also needed to be replaced.  I turned in the laptop for a warranty replacement… and waiting some more… and more… now since I used this computer for work, I found this annoying to say the least. I called the service center and it turned out the new hard disk had arrived, but they hadn’t preloaded it with the OS yet because the new version had to be shipped from the UK [?!]. I told them “just leave it blank, I’ll put Linux on it”. I don’t think they believed me, but I had my X60T back the next day and with nothing on the hard drive. Yay!

So, Debian Linux it was.

I originally intended to write a really long howto which amassed information from several other howtos and my own experimentation, but I was short on time, and the notes I made were sparse to say the least. So this post will only include small bits and pieces of unsorted information. I still use Debian on this tablet, so you can ask me about my current configuration…

Setup

Make sure the hardware actually functions. This is not trivial. I was told by the service center that they had lots of problems with this tablet, it was produced in small quantities, etc. When I set out to install Linux, there was a testing CD available from Lenovo… in theory. In practice the disk image was completely broken. If they fixed it since then, great. If not, just get any rescue boot CD and run the usual tests.

The laptop can boot via LAN, you have to set the BIOS to “Diagnostic mode” to get to the PXE interface (I did not find it at first). But I opted to install through USB using a memory stick so I did not actually test this. After you booted from the stick, net install is very easy, basically plug and play if your LAN uses DHCP.

Video card works out of the box, but make sure it uses the correct driver (i810). See /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Sound card also works right away. Don’t forget to install appropriate mp3 etc. codecs and the Gnome ALSA mixer.

Tablet stylus

If memory serves right, I used this howto adapted to Debian to set up the pressure sensitive stylus. I do have the same lines in my xorg.conf.

Pressure sensitivity worked right away. IIRC, in GIMP you need to enable it  manually.

ArtRage 2.5 is a great little piece of software for drawing on your tablet PC, the Windows version runs under Wine. (Pressure sensitivity works in Wine out of the box if you’ve done the above.) There is a free demo available, but I bought the full version for $20 after trying. Note that it has an MSI installer.

Xournal is a journal program for Linux, also recommended for your tablet.

I don’t use handwriting recognition so sorry, no info on that.

Screen rotation

Add the following line to /etc/X11/xorg.conf under Driver “i810″:
Option “RandRRotation”

Make sure xbase-clients and libxrandr2 are installed. I use Gnome, but I couldn’t get gnome-randr-applet to work, so you don’t need to install that. Also, none of the screen rotate scripts I found online worked for me (using the methods delineated there), so you’ll have to make your own, but it’s easy once you know the following:

These commands rotate the screen AND the cursor to vertical position:
xrandr –output LVDS –rotate right
xsetwacom set stylus rotate 1

These commands rotate to horizontal position:
xrandr –output LVDS –rotate normal
xsetwacom set stylus rotate 0

(Note that despite the “left, right”, etc. these are not relative rotations, ie. if you repeatedly –rotate right, nothing will change instead of the screen rotating around all the way.)

I do not recommend using other rotations. You should be very careful with –rotate left, because that way if you put the laptop in your lap in slate mode, the ventilation ducts are covered and your machine can overheat. I made this mistake under Windows and I was careful to set up Linux so that it doesn’t even try rotating that way. It doesn’t cause any serious problems – when it happened to me, the laptop simply shut down upon detecting excessive temperature after a while – but it definitely doesn’t improve your computer’s health.

A very easy solution is to make two executables out of these, put them in /usr/local/bin (or wherever you desire as long as it’s in your path) and link them on the Gnome toolbar as a ‘horizontal’ and a ‘vertical’ button. You can also combine the two scripts so that the resultant script detects the current rotation and always rotates to the other position. And you can map it to your favorite keypress or the ‘rotate’ button.

The motion sensor can also be used to detect rotation and rotate the screen accordingly, I don’t like that feature so I haven’t set it up for myself. Just make sure it never rotates to the ‘left’ position (see above).

There is also a possibility to rotate the screen when you close the lid. It is detected as a keypress, so you just need to detect the keypress and make your script execute upon that. I haven’t set it up yet and I probably won’t because I prefer the manual rotate. I think it’s also possible to detect stylus ejection??

CPU speedstepping and/or throttling

I haven’t tried CPU throttling, and I don’t think you should, either, unless you are feeling adventurous and/or have some money to burn I think Windows does some throttling in addition to speedstepping, but the settings aren’t public. Experiment at your own risk.

As for speedstepping – the default settings by cpufreqd are that it should always run at max speed, which is bad because that’s really overkill. Be sure to enable “ondemand” everywhere and uncomment its lines in cpufreqd.conf!! Yeah, I know, my bad… but it took me an hour to notice they were still commented. Also, I think there is a typo in the howto, what you add to /etc/modules should be “cpufreq_ondemand” instead of “cpufreqd_ondemand”. For some obscure reason, cpufreqd.conf didn’t work for me with percentages (which is the default so I’m puzzled)… so you might wish to change those to actual speeds and also say echo 1000000 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_min_freq.

[note: I think the link to the howto is broken. I wrote this paragraph two years ago or so.]

Hard disk shock protection

I had a lot of trouble getting hdapsd to work, unfortunately I did not make detailed notes, so all I have is this:

You’ll need hdapsd and you’ll also need to compile thinkpad-source. To test if the laptop detects movement, install and run hdaps-gl (it’s in hdaps-utils). To check if it really suspends the HDD, simply run dmesg.

Finally my brother came upon a solution, I’ll have to ask him if he still remembers it if anyone else has the same problem.

Trust me, you need the shock protection. I’ve seen howtos where it was treated like an unnecessary feature. That’s NOT true, the HDD is vulnerable, and if you boot under XP (Vista, whatever), you can see that the HDD is very often suspended by the protection system. Because you’ll use this laptop in slate mode a lot, it will run for prolonged times at odd orientations, you’ll often turn it around to turn the lid to slate mode, etc. My first HDD died in months even when I used Windows with the factory settings, so there is a lot of wear and tear… (now that it’s working under Debian, I haven’t had any problems in years B”H).

Missing

A lot, I will try to add more as I chance upon it (if that happens…), feel free to ask questions… I think the only thing I did not set up on it myself was hdapsd (I admit I gave up in utter exasperation after three days… then it took about the same amount of time for my brother to get it to work but he actually succeeded).

If you are a grad student, you probably have Here is a very easy solution that beats putting your average pdf reader on screen and suffering around with the scrollbars! (Scrollbars on an unfamiliar laptop can annoy the heck out of even the most patient presenter. Trust me on that.)

I talked about making complicated zooming presentations with Impress!ve in the previous entry, but this versatile little piece of open-source software can be used for this purpose too, and you don’t need to do anything taxing.

Just install Impress!ve (it should run on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, but I only tried the first two) and run it on the article pdf! Absolutely no configuration necessary, though you might want to launch it with the -e parameter if zoomed-in pages are low resolution (depending on your video card and drivers).

That’s it! You immediately have the article on your screen and converted into a nice presentation. Useful commands:

* Left/right arrow to move forward/backward

* Tab to create an overview (choose between pages)

* Enter to create a spotlight (really spiffy! You don’t need that laser pointer)

* Z to zoom in on the page (it zooms where the cursor is placed)

Have fun!

However, I was faced with an obstacle. None of the major zooming presentation editors like Prezi (no relation to me despite the name! Though I worked together with one of their founders on a research project, Hungary is a small place…) or Ahead offer easy printing. Maybe there’s one which does, but I was in a hurry and didn’t find anything. Also, my laptop only has Linux, so Windows and (especially) Mac solutions like Keynote were also out.

I came up with a solution that worked quite well for my purposes, though it probably wouldn’t work for you if you expect full Prezi-like functionality like the rotating virtual camera, etc., and it only offers three levels of zoom, so I don’t claim it’s perfect. But since several people have been asking about it, here is the howto beyond the cut! Note that it assumes that you can make a regular presentation, and you have some computer proficiency. (If you have specific questions, comment away and I’ll do my best to answer!)

1. Make a slide background that is easily tiled

Since I needed to talk about four areas of interest in my presentation, I drew a petal-like shape and flipped it horizontally and vertically until I ended up with a “flower” composed of four separate slides fitting together. I filled the background with a uniform color.

2. Create your slides with OpenOffice Impress

Alternately, you can use any editor which outputs a PDF file with slides on separate pages. (LaTeX Beamer, etc.) Maybe you can even use Powerpoint – I confess have no idea whether Powerpoint can export to PDF (if you buy me a copy I can check, but it would be quite pointless to buy me a copy just for that, since I prefer Impress).

3. Download and set up Impress!ve (includes editing the source)

Impress!ve (formerly known as KeyJnote) is a  ~150kb Python script created by Martin J. Fiedler, we will be using this script to create the presentation. Its website explains how to download it and get it to run. I had some minor trouble with it – I ran into a bug where files exported from OpenOffice (but not from LaTeX) would crash it upon drawing the slide titles, I solved it simply by removing the reference to slide titles from the source code. Since the error message told me exactly which line was the culprit, it took just a few seconds to fix it. (If anyone is interested, I can try to replicate the bug, but it’s not too relevant here and strangely it only occurred on my laptop and nowhere else. I just mention it here for historical accuracy )

Now you will need to edit the source code (impressive.py). Don’t run away! It will not hurt!

…Seriously. You just need a text editor, any text editor will do, because the settings you will have to change are right at the top of the file. Open impressive.py. Right under the title and license information, there are a bunch of variables prefaced by this comment: # You may change the following lines to modify the default settings

Let OverviewBorder = 0 and OverviewLogoBorder = 0. (Maybe it is possible to change these settings using a command line parameter, but I didn’t find it in the documentation and just changing the Python script seemed easier.) Save, quit.

4. Configure your presentation

Configuration is very straightforward, but first you need to understand how the two zoom levels are set up. What we just did above means that the Impress!ve overview page (which is a feature that the script offers, it shows thumbnail images of each slide) does not have black borders any longer. So you can make a reasonably seamless image out of four (or more!) slides which fit together (which you made in sections 1-2 above). In my case I had four “petals” of a strange flowerlike thing for the four areas I intended to cover in my presentation. (If I end up having a lot of time at some unspecified point in the future, I might make a video and upload it to Youtube to make this explanation clearer.)

Of course there are slides you don’t want to see on the top-level zoom result, breaking your carefully crafted layout! You probably have a title slide, a bunch of extra slides and whatnot. To solve this, launch Impress!ve, go through your stack of slides, and use the “o” button on your keyboard to toggle “visible on overview”. In my case, each petal had several slides explaining the topic, and only the first slide of each topic was set to display on the overview. When you’re finished, press “s” to save your configuration! It will be loaded automatically when you start the presentation (unless you moved it to another directory).

So by now you should have the top-level zoom set up. You can trigger it with the Tab key during your presentation. Your medium-level zoom is the default, it just displays one slide on the screen.

What to do about the bottom-level zoom? This is also very straightforward. Impress!ve offers a zooming tool by pressing the “z” key. It zooms to where the cursor is positioned on the slide that is currently displayed. Also, if you press Tab while zoomed in, you will be moved to the top level in two steps, automatically and very smoothly. A further charming feature is triggered with Enter, “this is left as an exercise to the reader”

Make sure you don’t make the text overly small (resist the temptation of the zoom!), because after all, the whole purpose of this is to have slides which can be easily printed!

5. Print out the PDF

See, that was easy!

***

To be honest, when I first tried this, I thought I would mix up Tab, Z, Enter and all that during my live presentation and it would go horribly wrong. But I did not do more test runs than with my usual plain vanilla OpenOffice presentations, and everything went without hitches.

***

Ein großes Dankeschön to Martin J. Fiedler who made Impress!ve. Keep up the great work!