Is it Friday yet?
{ Category Archives }
When upgrading the kernel to a newer or different version, be sure to also get the appropriate version of the ivtv kernel modules, otherwise MythTV will cheerfully start up and pretend nothing is wrong, but meanwhile it’ll be running with 0 capture cards and no recordings will be scheduled!
I’m glad ABC will repeat tonight’s Lost episode, otherwise I would’ve missed that and would have had to resort to bittorrents or something, and that’s just a PITA. 
Is a Thunderbird extension called Nostalgy which gives me back a couple of things that I’d been missing ever since I switched away from Mutt, a host of keyboard shortcuts:
And there is more, like user definable rulesets depending on what sub-folder is in focus and what text matches the sender, recipient or subject of the current message(s).
If you used to use pine or mutt then you will probably appreciate these features.
How to build your own Sputnik:
“I wouldn’t be surprised if you could build one in a container smaller than a matchbox, weighing about as much as a wristwatch. The components, including a transmitter, battery and the sensors you’d need would probably cost less than £50,” he says.
That’s progress.
Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. It is being used in planetarium projectors. Just set your coordinates and go.
Looks pretty cool!
Comcast traffic blocking: even more apps, groupware clients affected:
So far, Comcast has been extremely tight-lipped about what’s going on here. The only thing Comcast will admit to is using “the latest technologies to manage our network to provide a quality experience for all Comcast subscribers.” From the look of things, that quality experience doesn’t extend to BitTorrent, Gnutella, and Lotus Notes—and we wouldn’t be surprised to see more applications added to that list.
What was that about net neutrality again? Ugh.
On Yahoo!’s Q3 Earnings call today, it was announced that we intend to transition Yahoo! 360 to a more integrated Yahoo! experience in early 2008. I want to provide additional information on this news and assure you that we will minimize any disruption to you and our valued Yahoo! 360 community. I also want to assure you that you can still use all the features of Yahoo! 360 until this transition takes place in early 2008.
Translation: We’re shutting down Y!360. This was posted there a week ago and only today I hear about it through TechCrunch. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there, did it really happen? Or something like that. 
Yesterday morning I came across an article in The Register about Apple preparing some sort of webapp portal for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Since this seemed relevant, I passed that on to the iPhoneWebDev group, to which I’ve been subscribed almost as long as I’ve had an iPhone. Within minutes Erica Sadun, also on the list, followed up, and I thought that that was the end of it.
Then in the evening I got an email, out of the blue, from a former colleague (we worked at the same company about 8 years ago), saying he had come across my name in a TUAW article, where Erica mentioned the rumour and thanked me for passing it on.
Oh, and that portal is actually live now, by the way.
His silence mistaken, deaf man attacked:
The cashier tried to speak to him but got angry when Goodnight didn’t respond, Goodnight told police. The cashier threw Goodnight’s change at him, scattering it on the floor.
As Goodnight picked it up, the cashier hit him in the side of the head with the crowbar, Goodnight said.
The Inflation Calculator may seem useful but mostly to fuel bogus arguments, I think. After all, your $200 CD player from 1990 didn’t cost $313 in 2006, did it?
Duty Cycle Calculator is a slightly different calculator, one that makes it easier to estimate how much it costs you to leave the television on, leave light bulbs on over night.
The downside of the Facebook Applications and the desperate wish of almost all of their developers to have them go viral and make a fortune is this:
And I assure you that if I didn’t regularly clean out the list it would look a lot worse. What Facebook desperately needs is one or two checkboxes alongside each invitation with which you can indicate that you don’t want to be bothered with future invites from the same application, whether that’s for a month, or forever.
When your computer tells you that the CMOS checksum was incorrect and it’s reset to defaults, it may be a good idea to go in and at least set the time and date to something vaguely correct, to avoid having the filesystem checks kick in twice: First when it’s confused about going back in time a few years, and again after you’ve corrected the time and it goes forward in time a few years, both times saying “Well, it’s been too long since the last time, I better check”, even though of course the system was rebooted without crashes or anything.
Gah. And with that 1TB that I have here now, it takes a while!
Serial consoles are older tech than most people reading this blog, I suspect, but with USB being thrown in the mix you can do some interesting things, like connecting the serial port of several servers via an equal amount of USB-to-serial adapters to a single USB hub which then hooks up to the poor man’s version of a remote serial console server, using /dev/ttyUSB0, /dev/ttyUSB1, etc instead of /dev/ttyS0, /dev/ttyS1, etc to connect to the various consoles.
I have to admit I hadn’t worked with serial consoles before. That is to say I’d used them when someone else had already set them up, at a previous job, but I hadn’t set up a Linux boot loader or kernel to make use of one, so I had some fun with that yesterday.
Notes to self:
prompt timeout=100 delay=100 serial=0,9600n8 append="console=tty0 console=ttyS0,9600"
The first three lines make sure I get a “boot:” prompt but proceed with regular boot after 10 seconds. The last two lines cause the LILO and kernel output to be visible on both serial and regular console.
The other thing I played with recently was some USB-ethernet adapters. For future reference, out of the box the TRENDnet TU2-ET100 worked with Linux 2.6.18 (using the “asix” module), while the D-Link DUB-E100 and Startech USB2105S did not! For those last two I had gotten the impression that they could work, but no luck. There’s a good chance that the D-Link changed chipsets without changing its name, an unfortunately not unusual behaviour in the business. I suspect that with some custom kernel compiling I could’ve gotten the Startech device to work, but I am trying to avoid that at the moment, not wanting extra work when it is time to upgrade to a more recent kernel.
It’s for M’s birthday, but of course something that’ll be used for the entire family. We got her a Panasonic GS80, a handy camcorder. It’s a bit of a starter model, as we’ve never owned one before and I didn’t want to buy something entirely too complex or overpriced.
So far she’s done some recording with it, had some fun feedback loops while recording straight through firewire into her MacBook, etc. Once it’s been on the initial 24 hour of charging for the internal battery she’ll no doubt test to see how long the rechargeable detachable one will last, and do some recording around the house and such.
The kids are of course enthusiastically planning videos of the rats to be posted on YouTube, but I hope to stop them from that for a little while longer.
Update: I almost forgot to list that I also, while I was ordering from Amazon anyway, picked up the Snakes on a Plane album. Ladies and gentleman, snakes are slithering… carry on!
So what’s happened in the last few weeks, around here?
I upgraded our MythTV setup from 0.18.<aging> to 0.20.2. This was required in order to still get any TV guide information. See, MythTV was getting its information from labs.zap2it.com, which provided that service for free, where free meant answering some survey questions every 3 months. The last few times the number of questions had been 0, which was amusing, but apparently a sign of things to come because a few months ago the fine folks there announced that they were going to discontinue this service. Some open source folks cooperated to work out a solution, now known as schedulesdirect.org, where we can continue to get this data. Initially at $15 per 3 months, but if enough users get on board that price should drop quite a bit. The amusing part is where they get their data from TMS (Tribune Media Services), the people that run zap2it.com, so I guess their biggest deal was that they didn’t want the hassle of dealing with payments and now only have to deal with one contact. Good for them, and now that we are paying real money for this data, there is also a better chance of complaints about missing or faulty data being dealt with, which is definitely a bonus.
My MacBook Pro was sent to Texas for the second time, 2 months after the first repair. This time they replaced the hard disk, which took a little convincing because it doesn’t show any errors when you merely verify using Disk Utility. The TechTools Deluxe software that Apple provides to AppleCare customers has a Surface Scan option which did, however, so I used that as leverage.
Unfortunately my timing was less ideal than last time. I called AppleCare on Wednesday, got a box to ship the laptop on Thursday, had it out the door within 5 minutes because the DHL delivery guy was kind enough to stick around so that he wouldn’t have to make an extra 2 hour trip just to pick up that same box again, and after it arrived on Friday it was marked as done and shipping out again within hours. But then “2nd day shipping” or whatever it was called turned into something slightly slower because the weekend got in the way, plus the extra holiday on Monday (Labor Day for non-US-ians reading along), so I got it around noon on Tuesday.
First thing I did was verify that I had a different hard disk, which I did, and run that Surface Scan on it. Thankfully there were no problems, so I moved on to restoring my home-directories and give M back her MacBook which I’d claimed for the past week.
I will cross my fingers that I don’t need to talk to anybody at AppleCare for a while!
