As to why I didn’t blog when I arrived: I couldn’t bear typing in my browser when it was running so slowly. As I’ve written, I’m running WordPress MU trunk, and there is currently a JavaScript bug that makes using the Write Post screen really painful.

Just reverted to revision 1259, and it’s all good.

Plane flight was unpleasant (should’ve bought ear plugs), but everything else so far has been great. I’m writing this from Salamanca — I managed to find an unsecured wireless access point which is a little flaky, but I’ve managed to check my email and update my WordPress MU site, etc.

The drive to Salamanca from Madrid reminded me a lot of the area around Goulburn, Yass, and Crookwell. They even had wind power generators on the tops of hills, which makes me feel good charging my batteries. There was lots of construction going on on the highway — looks like lots of bridges are being constructed.

Oh, also, diesel is 115.7 Euro cents per litre.

I should probably mention that we walked through the town of Segovia, which was pretty neat (saw a Roman aqueduct, and nearly got run over by an ambulance that drove through it), and the castle in the town. Awesome stuff.

Anyway, gotta catch up on sleep to get rid of my jet lag, which is currently causing my eyes to get sore.

Why? I’m travelling with the BlueScope Steel Youth Orchestra to Spain! This tour, we’ll be visiting places like Madrid, Salamanca, and Bilbao, and of course, performing in concerts.

If I have any internet access while I’m there, I’ll try and blog, and possibly upload photos, but that’s not necessarily going to happen.

Adiós, Australia!

I’ve been very happy with it — audio quality is clear, and the headset has very good battery life. Also, the headset has a detachable microphone, which allows me once again to use Skype and other VoIP stuff. (I’ve been trying to compile Mumble with not much success. I suspect they’re not properly supporting the amd64 architecture.)

The headset comes with an “audio streamer”, which is basically a small device that can stream audio from a cable to the Bluetooth headset. This means you can use the X5 headset with not just Bluetooth-enabled computers, but anything that has an audio cable coming out of it. The advantage of this is that you can use it with a computer without having to fiddle with configuration on the operating system. You just plug your speaker cable into the streamer. I haven’t tried it, but I suspect the audio streamer will be happy to stream audio to other headsets, not just the X5.

Today, Dad brought home a no-name USB Bluetooth dongle (lsusb reports it as 0e5e:6622) that works beautifully out-of-the-box in Ubuntu Hardy. I’ve been working on getting the headset communicating directly to the computer without the use of the audio streamer. I installed the bluetooth-alsa package, which contains some useful documentation at /usr/share/doc/bluetooth-alsa. It’s highly recommended you have a read of the documentation if you want to get A2DP working in Ubuntu. It basically involves a bit of copy-and-pasting into config files.

For getting PulseAudio working with A2DP, first you will want to get the a2dpd daemon running. Depending on how you’ve set up your ~/.asoundrc, you should have an ALSA device called a2dpd. To get PulseAudio to see this device, you’ll need to enter this into the terminal:

$ pactl load-module module-alsa-sink sink_name=a2dpd device=a2dpd

I tried to get this working automatically by putting it in /etc/pulse/default.pa, but PulseAudio segfaulted on startup. I tried asking on #pulseaudio, but they’re always asleep whenever I ask. That’s the trouble with living in Australia. My mistake. You have to make sure you load module-hal-detect before module-alsa-sink. Works beautifully now.

If anyone has any tips for Bluetooth in PulseAudio, I’d be glad to hear it.

I stumbled across his site when I was looking for Sarabande et Cortege (Henri Dutilleux) recordings, of which he had one on his site.