Good lord
It seems the tradition has become that I only update this when changing distro or operating system. Unfortunately this has not happened in a while (I’m still very happy with opensuse and the occasional boot into vista), so I’m just ranting.
Firstly, an amusement – my laptop, like many spangly new ones, has an accelerometer to save the harddisk if I drop it. Funky linux drivers allow harnessing this as a joystick for amusement. Mplayer, for some godforsaken reason decided to implement joystick controls (Admittedly probably quite good with a gamepad). The end result – knocking or tilting my laptop controls mplayer. This could be amazing if it worked well (Taps to change tracks and pause, etc.) but the end result is that if I give my laptop the slightest tap it randomly skips through the current track, and as mplayer uses the joystick controls as a modifier, it often completely ceases responding to keyboard commands (Yes, I use mplayer rather than gmplayer or vlc or whatever. Yes, I love the commandline. Etc.) At some point I will get around to somehow destroying/disabling the kernel driver that talks to the accelerometer (I can’t figure out how to turn off the joystick in mplayer, and kernel hacking is far less daunting than the mplayer man page), but until then I thought I would share this amusement with the rest of the world.
In other news, I am being made very happy by geeky references, tea and cooking, somewhat less happy by Cambridge exams, and far less poor by Sainsbury’s rather cheap easy-cook rice (Although I am still baffled by the fact that a one kilo bag costs *more* per mass of rice than a half-kilo bag. Is it only me who expects a discount for buying more?)
Tata! The Mysterious El Cilliano
Edit: sudo modprobe -r hp_accel
