Oberwelt e.V., a German artists collective presents a nice device which can protect you from all the infrared security cameras installed on public roads. It sends out an invisible infrared light that will make your face show up as a white bulb.

I-R.A.S.C is a device giving every citizen a reliable protection from governmental security measures. I-R.A.S.C. is security against security and therefore a response to the dissymmetry of the forces between state and individual.

Instead of showing and interaction among human-beings, or between man and machine, I-R.A.S.C. demonstrates an interaction among machines. This is part of an absurd situation - while the time and effort invested into protection measures aims at the alleged safety of the citizens, the individual looses importance in this safety concept.

I-R.A.S.C is an infra-red device working as a protection shield from infra-red surveillance cameras. Everybody can rebuild this device without special technical skills.

Link via Boing Boing

Since it might concern some of you, I have switched away from Gentoo. Although it has been great fun, I don’t have the time anymore to build everything from scratch. I came to the point where I want a distribution that “just works”.

For what it is worth, the choice of today seems to be ubuntu and since I’m a KDE fan I went with the kubuntu distro.

This means that I will not be working on the Amarok ebuild anymore. I really feel sorry for that, but porting portage to kubuntu just is too much of a problem for me. I am still willing to host the files here, if needed and they will be around for the months to come. If anyone wants to step in, feel free to contact me.

Current version: katapult-0.3.1

This is a very simple ebuild for katapult. Katapult is an application for KDE, written in C++, designed to allow faster access to applications, bookmarks, and other items. It is plugin-based, so it can launch anything that has a plugin for. Its display is driven by plugins as well, so its appearance is completely customizable. It was inspired by Quicksilver for OS X.
You can find more info here.

To use it:

• Download the package
• Check your /etc/make.conf and see what the value of your PORTDIR_OVERLAY variable is
• Change to one of your ‘overlay’ directories and execute:
  tar zxvf /path/to/katapult.tar.gz
• emerge katapult

Filed as Gentoo bug nr: 121721, seems it is a duplicate, and the ebuild already maintained by someone else… You can still use my ebuild, but I will not update it.

This information is here for historic purposes. I am not maintaining the ebuilds anymore and they will very probably not work on your system anyway.

With the current amount of ebuilds on my blog it might be hard to find each one of them. So I decided it is a good idea to have them all together.

Here is a list of the ebuilds you can find on my site (if you have questions or comments, please leave a comment with the ebuild):

• Amarok-svn ebuild. This ebuild will build the latest Amarok (the music player for linux) version from subversion. You can�t be more up-to-date
• Exscalibar ebuild. This ebuild enables the moodbar extension for Amarok
• SmartDJ ebuilds. This set contains all the dependencies to install the SmartDJ plugin for Amarok

Here is a list of related ebuilds that are not hosted on my site and for which I don’t have any responsibility (so don’t mail me if they don’t work):

• libgpod-cvs-0.4.0 ebuild. A CVS ebuild for ipod support maintained by Nathan. If you have questions concerning this ebuild please contact Nathan under: nathan at toonetown dot com

Enjoy.

Current version: exscalibar-1.0.4.

Here you can find the latest ebuild for exscalibar. It will install support for the moodbar plugin used by amaroK.

To use it:

• Add the ‘moodbar’ use-flag to your /etc/make.conf
• Download the package
• Check your /etc/make.conf and see what the value of your PORTDIR_OVERLAY variable is
• Change to one of your ‘overlay’ directories and execute:
  tar zxvf /path/to/exscalibar.tar.gz
• download and install the latest amarok-svn ebuild (check here for information about the latest amaroK ebuild).

Filed as Gentoo bug nr: 121718

Update: exscalibar is now in portage. There is no need to download this ebuild anymore. The one in portage has a couple of additional features as well, so I encourage everyone to use that one.

As of today I will not maintain this ebuild anymore. Please have a look at this post for more details. I would like to take the chance to thank you all for the positive feedback you have always given me.

Current version: amarok-svn-1.4-r9

Here you can find the latest ebuild for amarok-svn. This ebuild will get the latest amaroK source code from subversion and build amaroK.

amaroK is a music player for Linux and Unix with an intuitive interface. amaroK makes playing the music you love easier than ever before - and looks good doing it.

Change list:

• 1.4-r9 I haven’t had a lot of time to work on anything except for my paid job lateley… But thanks to radfoj there is now a version that supports the updated build process.
• 1.4-r7 thanks to captain obvious and all the others who provided me with feedback (mainly during my holidays) I can now present you a new version with the following new features and or changes:
  - in sync (again) with the official amarok ebuild
  - rename of the moodbar use flag, it is now called exscalibar
  - as with the original release this build depends on xine
  - removed use flags for arts and gstreamer
  - included a use flag for gstreamer010, let me know if you have problems with it
  - included a use flag for ifp, which adds iriver support
  - included a use flag for aac
  - tunepimp now correctly depends on the musicbrainz use flag (minor bug)
• 1.4-r6 now depends on ruby, since the lyric scripts need it
• 1.4-r5 now fixes the checkout bug in portage. This bug caused a full checkout of subversion every time you emerged amaroK. For others (see the comments) it caused a complete non-working ebuild. Thanks go out to Anli for pointing it out and helping with the bug fixing with the Gentoo developers.
  For this to work you will need a very recent version of portage and probably a testing Gentoo environment as well (ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=”~????” in your /etc/make.conf).
• Works with the latest changes in the amaroK subversion repository. Versions before 1.4-r2 will not work with the current structure in subversion.
• Supports libgpod (ipod library) with the ‘ipod’ use-flag. You will need to have libgpod as well. Please check here to find out how to get this library.
• Supports exscalibar (or moodbar) with the ‘moodbar’ use-flag. You will need the exscalibar ebuild as well
• Now makes sure you can’t install it together with the ‘normal’ amaroK
• It now comes as a package you have to unpack into your portage overlay directory (no more ebuild amarok-svn-1.4-rx.ebuild digest).

To use:

• Download the package
• Check your /etc/make.conf and see what the value of your PORTDIR_OVERLAY variable is
• Change to one of your ‘overlay’ directories and execute:
  tar zxvf /path/to/amarok-svn.tar.gz
• Execute:
  emerge amarok-svn

Filed as Gentoo bug nr: 121717. This ebuild will never be in portage.

Current version: smartdj-1.0.

Here you can find the dependencies for Smart DJ, an amaroK script. With all these dependencies installed you can go ahead and install Smart DJ.

Smart DJ lets you find tracks based on how similar they sound to each other. It can also automatically add new tracks to your playlist based on how similar they are to what you’ve been listening to.

To use it:

• Download the package
• Check your /etc/make.conf and see what the value of your PORTDIR_OVERLAY variable is
• Change to one of your ‘overlay’ directories and execute:
  tar zxvf /path/to/smartdj.tar.gz
• Emerge all the ebuilds that are part of the package (there are no dependencies yet between the packages)
• You can now download and install the Smart DJ script with amaroK

It seems that I have become the maintainer of the amarok-svn.ebuild. Might as well take the responsibility for the moment, since I need the ebuild for my own good use anyways

Well a lot has changed with KDE, everyone and everything seems to prepare for KDE 4.0, which means that the 3.5 branch has become its own branch and 4.0 seems to be developed in the main branch.

Result was that the default admin directory, checked out in the ebuild, suddenly depended on unsermake and QT4.0. Not directly what you would want. I did a little bit of rewriting of the ebuild, so it will use the 3.5 branch for the admin files (with automake and autoconf).

Works for me.

Update 08/09/2005: had a small error in the ebuild. Fixed that.

Here it is.

I regularly check the SVN builds of Amarok my favorite music program (if you are using linux, go check it out). Since I also use Gentoo, I just needed to have a good ebuild for it. I found a very good file on the Amarok forums, but had some small problems with it (it did too much), so I made a small update.

If you are interested, here it is.

03/06 small update: on the Amarok forums someone pointed out that the same result could be achieved in a more elegant way. The download now points to the more elegant file.

06/08 update: Andrew pointed out that you need to update the ebuild with a couple of things. Please read the comments for the information. Personally I didn’t have any luck lately since the process now seems to need unsermake and QT4. I am working on that.