LIPS Paintball Shop provide a fantastic service. I sent off my air bottle on Monday, they fixed it on Tuesday and sent it courier back to me today (Wednesday). I’d broken the fill valve O-ring but it’s all fixed and ready to go when I next play paintball.

When I next play paintball depends on how fast I finish off my first M366 (Artificial Intelligence) assignment. It’s due on the 11th December and I’m hoping to paintball for the final time this year on the 8th.

I got round to studying today and have got 1/4 done so far so it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

Great day paintballing just south of Manchester on the 17th.

It was a three man noob tournament on a sup’air field and, while it was really cold, it didn’t rain so that was really good.

We (Team Ignis) played 7 games and won 3 of them, coming in 5th out of about 9 teams overall.

Only Rehum and myself made it as Ben and Sam were down with a cold so we had to have a sub player to help out.

Also the valve on my air bottle went halfway through the game so I had to use somebody else’s gun for the rest of the day.

Best moment for me was bunkering a guy in the snake with a run from the back centre, fantastic day overall.

EDIT: Some pictures here

Just got the results in from a Mensa test I took two weeks ago…

Cattell B Scale 146 (Top 3%)

Culture Fair Scale 137 (Top 1%)

I’m now a Mensa Member, , YAY!

Finished Bladestorm last week.

It starts off well (a particularly amazing opening movie) and the rpg element is ok but it drags on and is reeeaaallly repetitive. The ending scene is disappointing as well.

6.5/10

Artwork for Team Ignis (Me, Ben, Sam and Rehum):

If you plug the D2 into ubuntu it gets recognised as a standard usb memory stick and won’t come up as a mp3 player in Banshee.

If you go to Settings -> System there is a USB Connection setting. MTP (Music Transfer Protocol) support doesn’t work yet in Banshee, however there is a simple hack if you make sure this is set to MSC (Mass Storage Device Class).

Mount the D2 and create an empty file called .is_audio_player

That’s it! Believe it or not next time you start ubuntu with the D2 plugged in it will come up as a music device. Yay!

Any music you add to the device will now be added as /media/COWON/artist_name/artist_album/song_name

If you want finer control over where files go on the D2 when it is sync’d you need to edit the .is_audio_player file and paste the following into it:
audio_folders=MUSIC/,RECORD/
folder_depth=2
output_formats=audio/ogg,audio/x-ms-wma,audio/mpeg,audio/wav,audio/flac,audio/mp3
That makes all the transferred music go nicely into the MUSIC/ folder and also makes sure that Banshee doesn’t transcode any flac, wav or wma files into mp3 format files.

The D2 resizes displays as album art any file called cover.jpg. Banshee won’t do this automatically but there is a tool that will do this for you.

Go to http://unrealvoodoo.org/hiteck/projects/albumart/ and download and install the debian file.

The version I used was

http://muksuluuri.ath.cx/~skyostil/projects/albumart/dist/albumart_1.6.0-1_all.deb

I worked out that after copying your music to your D2 and installing albumart you need to run the following command:

albumart-qt

You may get this error if you do just follow the instructions in the link and everything will work fine.

After the program is running do:

File -> Open then /media/COWON/MUSIC/

Settings -> configure -> targets -> generic

Tick enable and put the file name as:

cover.jpg

Then select all your albums and press the blue download arrow and you’re done!
It doesn’t look like it supports banshee playlists but more on that when I have a closer look…

Just got a new Cowon iAudio D2 to replace my old ipod and have been seeing how I can get it working on ubuntu linux.

On Ubuntu when the D2 is plugged in it acts like a normal usb memory stick.

Upgrading your firmware wipes the files on your D2 so you need to do this first if your firmware is not up to date
When the D2 starts up it shows the current version number on the splash screen

Firmware and Manual

You can get the firmware from here:

http://www.cowonglobal.com/zeroboard/zboard.php?id=C08&bmenu=download

and a pdf of the manual from here:

http://www.cowonglobal.com/zeroboard/zboard.php?id=C09&page=1&sn1=&divpage=1&bmenu=download&sn=off&ss=on&sc=on&select_arrange=headnum&bmenu=download&desc=asc&no=34&bmenu=download

Applications

A quick search for applications reveals the following flash app links (put them in the FLASH folder)

Nice game list here

http://iaudiophile.net/forums/showthread.php?t=15110

apps here

http://iaudiophile.net/forums/showthread.php?t=15780

more games

http://iaudiophile.net/forums/showthread.php?t=15120

and yet more games

http://iaudiophile.net/forums/showthread.php?t=16397

Transcoder for D2

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=404589

Follow instructions on the forums for transcoding tips

Next is investigating how to get music on easily…