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Antec Fusion with SoundGraph VFD under Ubuntu

After deciding to upgrade my Ubuntu Intrepid to Jaunty a million things broke – most of which were flimsy solutions at best – making me spend hours to figure out how to fix them.

One of those little gems is the LCD on my Antec Fusion case, or rather it is not an LCD but a VFD. Even better, SoundGraph is the original producer of these gems but seems to think that the entire IT industry is only using Windows as they don’t support linux. At all. Nice.

Of course, most of these devices work alike so if you figure out the guts of one you pretty much have the recipe for all of them. I had installed my HTPC over 6 months ago and after trying a million patches I finally ended up with a Lirc 0.8.3 installation with a patched lirc_imon driver which managed to drive the display as well as work with all the buttons, knobs and the remote.

Sure, I had to tweak the patch a little to get the right payload and replace semaphores with errrr…. something else, but who can complain when it finally works?

So after finding all the previously ‘helpful’ sites again, and people sending each other around in loops for instructions, I figured out what to do. Ignore all the guides out there. There you have it.

So, the instructions? Easy, LIRC 0.8.5 will have native support for the iMon devices and it already works better than any patch out there. Go to the LIRC website and follow the instructions to compile LIRC from CVS. As a hint, if you are running Ubuntu: as soon as you pulled in the CVS tree, run ‘./autogen.sh’ followed by ‘./configure –prefix=/usr –with-driver=imon’ and finally ‘make’ followed by ‘make install’.

Thats all there is to it, now load the lirc_imon driver and to test, configure LCDd to connect to ‘/dev/lcd0’ and behold, your GraphMon VFD works! Lets hope the fine folks at LIRC decide to push the next release out the door soon so everyone can just get the vanilla package from their distribution vendor.

Last week I finished watching Ergo Proxy, an series of 23 episodes and I just can’t resist to put up a small review about it.

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The story begins in a futuristic domed city called Romdo, built to protect its citizens after a global ecological disaster. In this utopia, humans and androids coexist with each other peacefully under a total management system. For some reason, some androids go on a killing spree. Re-l Mayer (see image) is assigned to investigate some of the murders with her android partner Iggy.

Ergo Proxy has it all: dark, sinister surroundings, animation which is far above standard – I dare say most of the time on par with Ghost in the Shell 2 (which I consider the ultimate anime style, a mix of computer generated and good old hand work). The main character has a gothic like appearance and she is just plain hot. During the series we get a few shots of the female lead in her undies, even a short flash of some under-boob but nothing more than that: kiddy-save and not even close to the ecchi category.

So far, its all the ingredients far a kick ass show… But wait, it gets even better. During the series we get some awesome action scenes and all of the eye candy is accompanied by a truly awesome soundtrack. Actually the production team of Manglobe did pretty much everything right to create a truly fantastic series.

So here comes the ‘but’. The animation, sound, characters – all great, but the story just blows… Its horrible: the first half of the series everything slowly becomes clear and everything is peachy – no even better than peachy as I was sitting on the edge of my seat. But after 14 or so episodes you get this uneasy feeling that something is off.

I still can’t pinpoint it but by the time it goes really off the rails you have been watching for some time while having this suspicion that its all wrong – just plain wrong. I still had high hopes right up until the end – I mean, a show which has such outstanding looks can’t just suck, right?

Unfortunately the ending does not safe this sinking ship. I have to applaud the creator of this masterpiece of an ending: it was certainly nowhere near what I would expect. I’m still pondering if I think it makes sense – so far I concluded the beginning and the end must be the product of different writers while a 3rd attempted to link the 2 together.

To be honest, this show is one of my biggest disappointments: I randomly ended up with Ergo Proxy and after 2 episodes I was hooked and expected a treat like GITS was (which one? Pretty much all GITS series/movies) but was seriously let down. I’m giving the show a 5 out of 10 rating for the simple fact that it was cool to watch (most of it anyway), but for the shear lack of a decent story it doesn’t get a single point more…

Rating:

Animation: 9 / 10
Sound: 8 / 10
Characters 7 / 10
Story: 3 / 10
Overall: 5 / 10

Tags van Technorati: Ergo Proxy,anime