Bacon Weaving

My wife has been a busy bee blogging all of our exciting meals, my favorite of which has been our sexy bacon-wrapped food ball. In the process of making this meaty abomination, we employed a bacon-weaving technique that was popularized online through the 'bacon explosion.' For the benefit of the uninitiated, I thought I'd explain a little about the weaving technique in this quick post.

First off, we made our bacon easier to work with by freezing it. Just open the pack of bacon and lay the strips out on wax paper, then throw them in the freezer. This is the way restaurants often order their bacon, but us civilians are supposed to deal with it the hard way.

Once it's frozen, just lay the strips out and weave them together, over/under-style. Here are some pics of my manly hands working their magic.


And this is what you're left with. I want a shirt made out of it...

Once that's all done, pop it in the oven on an oiled baking sheet, but don't use too much oil because this bacon fabric is going to make plenty of grease on its own; you just want to keep it from sticking before it gets started.

When it's half-cooked, you can wrap it around other foods, or you can lay it over a mold--such as a metal bowl--to finish cooking and end up with an awesome all-bacon bowl.

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HandBrake Qt4-native GUI Updated

Update (5/15/09): the code has improved a lot lately and you can download updated binaries from my PPA repository. Directions for adding the repo to your package manager are available here.

Gonza, a developer from the HandBrake forums, added some updates to his native Qt4 HandBrake GUI, known as qtHB, to bring it a little closer to the current code state. I haven't had a chance to do any extensive testing with it, but I wanted to go ahead and post some deb binaries so any KDE/Kubuntu users can give it a shot.

32-bit qtHB (built on a Core2Quad Kentsfield)

These binaries are more up-to-date, but wouldn't package properly, so you'll have to download the qt4-core dependency (and maybe others) manually (sudo aptitude install qt4-core). Run it by double-clicking or by navigating to its directory and typing ./qtHB into a terminal.
32-bit qtHB binary
64-bit qtHB still to come

Leave me a comment if you run into any issues with any of it, or if you have any requests (rpm packages, etc).

If you're looking for CLI or GTK GUI builds of the latest code, check out my post here.

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Fujifilm s1000 fd Camera Doesn't Work Right on Mac

Short version: my wife's camera didn't work right with her Mac using the bundled software, but it worked fine with iPhoto.

Long version: My wife just bought a Fujifilm s1000 fd superzoom camera so she can start working on her food blog, eatlikeapig.blogspot.com, and she ran into an issue getting it to communicate with her Macbook. She followed the directions outlined in the manual, which included installing the company's lackluster FinePix software. The instructions say to hook up the USB cable and to hold the 'play' button for a few seconds until the computer recognizes the camera and opens the software automatically. This did not work.

Instead, open Apple's own iPhoto software and then hold the 'play' button while connected via USB. iPhoto should import the pictures automatically, unlike Fujifilm's own crummy software.

Since we figured this out, we've been taking all sorts of pictures, which look absolutely stunning. You can check them out at her blog.

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List of Known Cheaters on Mario Kart Wii Online

Here is a list of users that have been reported as using the infinite item cheat on Mario Kart Wii Online. I made this page so people could report more brazen offenders and others could know to avoid them, since the only recourse for us non-cheaters is to simply not play with them anymore.

*To the cheaters themselves: care to let us know how you do it? Is the USB Gecko still the way to go, or can you do it through a softmod/homebrew channel these days? Update 6/21/09: It looks like you can use the Ocarina homebrew program to load cheats on a softmodded console (i.e., one with the homebrew channel installed; some directions are available here).

Mario Kart Wii Online Cheaters Wall of Shame

Update 6/21/09: From an anonymous comment on my other Mario Kart page:

"I would just like to say, none of your hacker stories compare to mine. I got stuck playing in a race with 5 hackers who could change their points from 1 to 35001. During the race they ALL ganged up on me by throwing non-stop green turtle shells at me, bombing me repeatedly, then all cornering me and using big mushrooms and stars simultaneously to hit me, and run me over for about 5 minutes straight. It was officially a Mario Kart gang rape. They are:
[J]Hacker.
System(star)King
Potatohead
InanenBaby"

1. ihack@u - this guy deserves at least a little cred since he actually figured the whole infinite items thing out (to my knowledge, at least). I don't know anything else about him, e.g. his Mii.

2. Speedy - no other information.

3. Alwin - no other information.

4. Kenny - Mii looks like Kenny from South Park, probably something like this:

5. Upsidedown - Mii's face is upside down.

6. SoSerious? - His Mii looks like the Joker from The Dark Knight, but its hair is black instead of green or whatever...

7. Death - no description of the Mii, but this one is especially troubling because of the claim that he/she actually *disconnected* another user after pelting them continuously with green shells. Hopefully the disconnection was just a coincidence and not another hacking capability...

8. AIM:Voth24 - s/he seems pretty proud of his cheatiness, based on his/her youtube videos. S/he also seems to target players with high VRs, so watch out if you care a lot about your score.

9 Alien - doesn't use his hacking to win, apparently and always loses on purpose. That in mind, you don't have to disconnect from this guy just to protect your precious points--assuming the cheating itself doesn't piss you off enough anyway.

If you have more to add, leave a comment with their name, a brief description of their Mii, and anything else that could be helpful in identifying them and I'll them to the list.

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Aspire One's Synaptics Trackpad Suspend Issue in Intrepid

I just corrected a really strange and infuriating issue with the trackpad on my Acer Aspire One running Ubuntu Intrepid. I'm going to write the whole story in case someone finds it useful, but here is the short version: trackpad quit working and didn't come back with a reboot. The solution was to hit Fn+F7 a couple of times (didn't work on first press, but did after a few presses...).

Now for the long version:

My fancy new Aspire One went to sleep (suspend) on accident--I know there are some unresolved issues with devices after suspending, so I've tried to avoid it--and I couldn't make it wake up, so I did a hard reset by holding the power button down for ~5 seconds. However, upon reboot, I was horrified to find that my trackpad no longer worked. It still showed up in the hardware profiler and in the kernel boot log, but it was totally unresponsive. No cursor movement, no clicks, no nothing. I rebooted. Still nothing!

I scoured the intarwebs looking for a software solution, including purging/reinstalling the xorg drivers, reloading modules, etc. to no avail. However, I did find a forum post where another Acer user had reported a nonfunctional trackpad that followed him across several Live CDs, suggesting a hardware issue. I was horrified by this prospect, as I love my little machine and I've finally gotten it configured to my satisfaction. Luckily, this user was kind enough to post his deceivingly simple solution: re-enable the trackpad using a key combination of Fn+F7.

I don't remember ever pressing this key combo to disable it in the first place, so I'm forced to assume that it happened on its own. Now I know how to fix it, should it happen again.

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HandBrake with Live Video Previews

The HandBrake team has released version 0.9.3, which includes official, sanctioned builds of the GTK GUI in both 32- and 64-bit formats. This new version also brings a number of improvements that have been enjoyed by those of us using the SVN builds for some time to the rest of the HB users. However, new features are constantly being added, and the codec pool is always being updated, so I will continue to post the latest bleeding-edge builds here on my site, starting with svn1952, which includes live video previews (!), as well as a more recent version of the x264 and ffmpeg codecs.

Update (5/15/09): I have working binaries of the latest code available in my PPA repository. Directions for adding it to your package manager are available here.

Here's how the live preview looks. You can really get in there and see the direct impact of your changes. This leads to better cropping and a better sense for your end product. (this is my Mac x-forwarding GHB from my Ubuntu box. As you can see, the live previews even work through that):

For those of you who wish to compile on your own hardware (recommended for those with newer Core 2 Duo CPUs), the process is exactly the same as my previous SVN instructions, except for the addition of 2 new dependencies: libgstreamer0.10-dev and libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev. I've updated the instructions there to reflect the change.

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How to run ZSNES Super Nintendo Emulator on 64-bit Ubuntu Linux

ZSNES is my favorite SNES emulator in the Windows world, but it can be a real pain to get going in 64-bit Linux. Most tutorials will suggest you set up a chroot jail and maintain a parallel set of 32-bit libs so that you can run the 32-bit version, but this is both a hassle and overly complex for many users.

I tried to compile my own binaries from source to avoid this, but I kept running into architecture errors and ended up throwing in the towel after a few hours of fiddling. Luckily, a ZSNES developer known as Nach has provided specialized precompiled binaries for a variety of architectures that worked a treat for me.

Just follow this link, scroll down a bit, and then download the binary that matches your architecture. I have an Athlon 64 X-2 4000+, so I selected the Athlon64-SSE3 binary.

Next, install libsdl-dev either through Synaptic or by typing sudo aptitude install libsdl-dev into a terminal.

Once downloaded and decompressed, you should find your binary inside, which you can run by double-clicking it or typing ./zsnes into a terminal. If you double-click and nothing happens, try running it through the terminal to spot any errors. I personally encountered this error:

Unable to poll /dev/input/event8. Make sure you have read permissions to it

repeated 9 times (1 for each /dev/input/event* 0-8).

I was able to get around this by running ZSNES as root (i.e., sudo ./zsnes), which is certainly not ideal, but I haven't found a way around it yet.

If you take this route, be aware that the default location for saved games will not be ~/.zsnes as it normally would be. Instead, it will be located in /root/.zsnes (since you're running as root). This in mind, you may have to copy your .srm files into this directory for them to be recognized. When I first got my copy to run, I couldn't get it to recognize any of my saved files, even though I tried changing the path for saved files under the preferences. However, once I copied the files into the /root/.zsnes directory, everything showed up just dandy.

Using the native 64-bit binary referenced above also had another unexpected (perhaps coincidental) positive effect of making my gamepad's d-pad work correctly. Using dfreer's zsnes32 binary worked well for me in most respects, but it just wouldn't recognize my Logitech Precision gamepad's d-pad. The buttons worked fine, but when it came time to assign the directions, it would just sit there dumbly, even though jscalibrator and cat /dev/input/js0 both showed plenty of action. This problem remained no matter how many kernel modules I loaded (usbhid, analog, etc.), until I tried Nach's binary. Now it works just fine. Go figure...

This information was written for Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, but it should be applicable to other distros as well.

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