Category Archives: Administrative

Administrative, Technology and Society

OS Follies

6 Comments

Sound works fine in Fedora. Sounds works fine in Virtual Windows machine running in Fedora. Boot native into Windows 8.1, and no sound. Windows troubleshooter says there’s no problem. I’ve updated the Realtek drivers. Everything looks great on Windows, except no sound out of the speakers. And of course, Fedora running virtual on Windows doesn’t have sound, either, because it only sees what Windows sees.

She wasn’t happy running Windows as virtual in Fedora, but that seems to be the only way to get sound.

[Friday-afternoon update]

Well, I’ve sort of solved the problem, but it’s still not right. I unplugged from the rear, and re-plugged into the front jack, and RealTek sees it now. For some reason, it’s not seeing line out in the rear, even though it works fine in Linux. So we have sound, but it’s sort of a PITA to have to use the front jack, and keep the door open.

[Bumped]

[Update a while later]

Well, this is apparently not an uncommon problem.

Went to the MSI web site to download the latest RealTek driver, and it doesn’t recognize the hardware. So current MS driver may be the best I can do until they update.

Administrative, Business, Technology and Society

Video Issues

13 Comments

OK, Linux people. Blender will let me make to edit and export a video as an AVI JPEG, but it refuses to export the synched audio to it. However, it will export the audio by itself as a .flac.

Does anyone know any separate tools that would allow me to synch that audio file with the video?

[Update a while later]

OK, VLC sort of works. Problem is that for some reason it really messes up the title when I add audio. If I were to post the MP4 and .flac files, could someone else try to synch them?

[Update late afternoon]

OK, I tried this:ffmpeg -i RoadToMars.wav -i 0001-9000.avi RoadToMarsAudio.avi
Continue reading Video Issues →

Administrative, Business, Law, Weird

Non-Military Affidavit

7 Comments

This law seems absurd.

We’re living in a Carl Hiaasen novel, with a crazy tenant who is destroying the property, and we want to evict her ASAP. Why is it incumbent on the landlord to prove a negative?

It seems like the first condition could be satisfied simply by pointing out that she’s been renting a home in Boca Raton, Florida, and there are no commutable military bases nearby.

Administrative, Business, Economics, Space, Technology and Society

Improving Space Operations

4 Comments

There’s a workshop at JPL today and tomorrow (I’m doing a presentation there tomorrow morning), so blogging will probably be light or non-existent.

[Update a few minutes before I leave]

The Humans2Mars conference starts today in DC. There is so much stuff going on in space that it’s hard to cover it all in person, even if I had the travel resources. Follow @jeff_foust and Pat Host (@Pat_DefDaily). It’s also live streaming.

[Update before I’m out the door to Pasadena]

Humans2Mars has issued its first annual report. That’s the first I’d heard that Mike Raftery had left Boeing.

Administrative, Technology and Society, Weird

Ubuntu

2 Comments

Partly out of interest, and partly because there don’t seem to be any yum packages for Kerbal, I decided to load it on a spare SSD (not using grub, I just go into the BIOS and decide which drive I want to boot). I set up an account. It didn’t ask me to create a password for root, just a personal account. I try to ‘su -i’ and it asks me for a password. I use the one I created for my personal account. Nope.

Way to go, guys.

Administrative, Mathematics, Technology and Society

VirtualBox Problem

10 Comments

OK, I took previous advice and installed VirtualBox. It seems to work, but I want to mount a physical drive to it. It’s NTFS, and when I try to load the vmdk file for it, I get a permissions problem.

Failed to open the hard disk file /home/pat/VirtualBox VMs/Windows 8.1/VirtualBox\ VMs\ Windows\ 8.1.vmdk.

Permission problem accessing the file for the medium ‘/home/pat/VirtualBox VMs/Windows 8.1/VirtualBox\ VMs\ Windows\ 8.1.vmdk’ (VERR_ACCESS_DENIED).

Result Code: VBOX_E_FILE_ERROR (0x80BB0004)
Component: Medium
Interface: IMedium {05f2bbb6-a3a6-4fb9-9b49-6d0dda7142ac}
Callee: IVirtualBox {fafa4e17-1ee2-4905-a10e-fe7c18bf5554}
Callee RC: VBOX_E_OBJECT_NOT_FOUND (0x80BB0001)

I’m running VB as a user, but a user doesn’t have permission to do a disk mount (also, the drive itself, when I mount it as admin, shows it owned and grouped as root, probably because it’s NTFS). The file itself is owned and grouped by the user. Any suggestions?