Planet TLLTS

So this wonderful listener sends me this G1 he no longer uses which is hands down friggin awesome. Thanks JC. I popped my sim card in and I’m smart phoning away. This thing is great. So I see a lot of people posting their favorite apps and figured I would drop some of mine and also what did not work too well for me.

For starters, MythMote is friggin awesome. Not only to be able to control my mythbox from anywhere in the house; but to mess with the kids. Hearing them shout “Daddy! Something is wrong with the tv again!” Is priceless. Worth every penny of free I spent. Setup on the mythtv end was a snap. Thanks for the hints Pat!

Sipdroid, a softphone, connected without a problem to the Asterisk box allowing me to make calls both to the meetme room and out through Broadvoice. Setup again was pretty straight forward and the first call I made to the wife great.

I wanted a running/walking tracker so I pulled two down. GPS Walk/Run Tracker and Run GPS Trainer lite. I took the GPS Walk/Run Tracker for a spin today on a run. It showed an analog speedometer indicating whether you were walking, running or cheating and a number for how fast you were going. When finished it told me the stats but I don’t think they were accurate. For starters it told me I walked for 20 minutes when I know it was over 25. It also said I did 0.803 miles when I know for a fact a quarter of that was a .5 mile walk. So I question the accuracy. Next time I will try the Run GPS Trainer lite. I fired that up just to take a look and I really liked what I saw. It had a google map at the top and a lot of information on the screen for tracking.

Game-wise I have found Robo Defense and Dungeon Wonder very fun. I recommend trying out both.

Finally I will make mention of Phone Flix. Now I am not interested in watching movies from the phone but I am excited that I can manage my netflix queue whenever I want. This way I don’t have to worry about trying to remember this awesome movie I just have to see.

There are many more apps tickling my fancy but that is enough for now.

So I’ve been wanting to upgrade the tv in the family room to an HDTV for some time now.I was ecstatic a couple weeks back when my wife gave me the green light to start seriously shopping for a new tv. The family room is right next to our kitchen and is only separated by a half wall. It’s also the room where we tend to do most of our tv viewing. Previously I had a 32″ inch SD CRT Panasonic that served us well for the last 10 years. Now the room isn’t terribly huge and the couch is about 8 feet from the tv. Based on the that a 40-42 inch tv was in the size range I was shopping for. The price range I was looking to hit was around $700-$750. After taking a look at a lot of online reviews and talking to several people I narrowed the choices down to the Samsung LN40B550 LCD and the Panasonic TC-P42S1 plasma. Both are really nice TVs. While some people are really opposed to plasma tvs because the they consume slightly more power than their LCD counterparts. Honestly the power consumption difference is pretty negligible. The plasma would of consumed about $15 more electricity in the course of the year than a similarly sized LCD. I showed my wife both tvs and she liked the LCD a little bit more. The picture on the LCDs tend to look better in bright rooms than plasmas. The color tones on the plasmas look a bit more natural to me, less washed out. The family room is a fairly bright room so the LCD was more of an appropriate choice. The thing that sealed the deal for me was the Samsung had more input connections. Definitely a nice thing to have considering I have 3 devices that use HDMI (cable box, Zotac Ion MythTV frontend, HD-DVD player). Oh I also paid $682 at 6th Avenue Electronics. So far I love this tv. It looks great with any HD content I’ve thrown at it. The blacks especially look very good for an LCD. I had zero issues with my Zotac Ion box connected via HDMI. No overscan whatsover and the default Mythbuntu theme looks absolutely killer on it. The handful of HD-DVDs I own simply look amazing (Transformers, 300, Bladerunner). The upscaled standard definition DVDs look pretty good too. I highly recommend the Samsung line of LCDs.

This past week I have gravitated to using Google-Chrome and Chromium more and more and I have to say I am loving it. Everything just works, and works rather snappy. The biggest contention I have with web browsing would be the results of Flash being a friggin hog and tending to crash the browser. I have not noticed as many problems with Flash under Chrom(e|ium). No slow downs, mouse interactions work, and multiple flash elements on a page do not destroy the performance.

I installed Chrome on my wife’s eeePC and she is just loving it. That is where she spends all her time now. “Amazing” she says! She confessed the other night to absolutely loving Google-Chrome.

What can I say? Google has done a bang up job with this browser. I am even using it more and more at work! My only gripe, originally, was with newly created tabs spawning next to the current tab I was in. I had been accustomed to the tabs spawning at the end of the tab row. There is a plugin to alter this behavior called tabby. What tabby does is move the newly created tab to the end of the tab row after it is created. The effect is noticeable as you see a bit of “jumpiness” in the tab bar. Not that distracting and you eventually begin to ignore. But, I must admit that I can see the benefit of tabs spawning next to the current one and I am tempted to go back to this behavior.

The latest builds of Firefox 3.6 seem to default to this behavior. To fix it you have to go into about:config and set browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent to false. Chances are you will get warnings that this may violate your warranty. I never knew there was a warranty for Firefox. Anyway, be aware that this warning has a checkbox that says don’t show me this warning anymore. If you don’t click it you will get that message every time you start Firefox.

Happy browsing!

Won’t you join Klaatu in his multimedia quest? I noticed that the other day I failed to post some pertinent information regarding the multimedia sprint. Once again I failed Klaatu. I hope he can forgive me:

When: January 26th from 14:00-0600 Eastern Standard Time

Where: irc.binrev.net #media

What: Linux Multimedia “extra content” Sprint

Why: Linux multimedia users want raw materials, but there’s no reason every single Linux user should have to go out and do the same leg work as every other Linux user; let’s band together, find the free content, and share it in just a few easy-to-find and easy-to-download packages.

Hopefully that will vindicate me once more in his eyes. Klaatu is a harsh task master, that he is.

Back on January 8, 2010 Klaatu sent me a great email about a project he is kicking off on January 26, 2010 and I was remiss in playing the announcement on the show. Well, I am trying to get the word out now. So without further wordiness from me and in his own words:

It’s been too long since I posted last. I got the approval from the boss (aka the wife) to start shopping for a new HDTV for the family room. I’ve checked out some HDTVs yesterday at one of the electronics stores near my office. Honestly I was most blown away by the Plasmas from Panasonic. I know they consume more power than LCDs but the difference in picture quality compared to 60 & 120 Hz LCDs were very noticeable. I was impressed by the latest 240 Hz LCDs but they tend to be a couple hundred dollars more in price than their 60 & 120 Hz brethren. Speaking to several people I hear that if you go with an LCD Samsung and Sony are currently the way to go. Plasma TVs seem to be only pushed by Panasonic and have some sort of stigma attached to them by the tree huggers because they’re “less green”. Honestly I’m not opposed to Plasmas. I want the best bang for the buck and I’m open to all options. Right now I’m leaning towards getting a plasma tv. I was very impressed with the OLED TVs they had. Ultra thin and with an excellent picture. Unfortunately they’re still relatively expensive as any newer technology tends to be in it’s infancy. I can see OLEDs becoming the norm in the near future. They didn’t have any 3D tvs on display yet. Honestly I can’t see myself sitting in my living room watching the big game sporting 3D glasses. It just seems too gimicky. But hell, I’m all for it if it drives down the prices of 2D televisions. More to come.

Running the server without the fans is probably not a good idea since I could cook an egg on the box. Well. that has prompted me to only run the workstation when needed and rely more on the other systems I have. The biggest detriment was to my email filtering as I was relying on Thunderbird to shuffle my emails into their proper folders. It was finally time to get off my lazy butt and learn procmail. This was pretty darn easy to do and now my email gets filtered properly without the need of a client.

What am I going to do with my workstation now?

Say goodbye to my faithful workstation that has served me for a good 5 or so years. About a year ago it started giving me boot issues, would lock up with some regularity and was just ornary. Well, today was the final straw. I ripped it out of my rack and removed the hard drive. Slapped that in my the spare rack server I had over here for backup purposes and went at it.

Arch did not want to boot because it could not find the hard drive. Luckily there was a failsafe image on there. I suspect the regular arch image was tailored to the old hardware so the initrd system did not have the proper modules. Couple this with some knowledge of grub and I was golden.

This system has an ATI Rage XL and getting that configured and using something other than 800×600 was a chore. It made me realize I have no desire to use ati cards in the near future. While people may complain about nvidia, and I used the open nv driver, they work a hell of a lot better than any ATI card I have ever tried.

The biggest problem, though, were the four fans in this thing. The old Compaq server I had sounded like a jet taking off. This damn box sounds like a whole squadron. Did they have to make the fans so loud?

The horror, the horror.

Well Arch is running and I am back into my fluxbox. Hooray!

Happy New Year’s everyone! I hope 2010 is better than 2009 for you and your loved ones. Now that’s out of way I’d like to post some things that I’d like to see happen in the Linux world in the coming year. First I want to see Android to continue to challenge in the cell phone market. Make more people aware and sell lots of new Android based phones. Continue to challenge the iPhone. Competition is a good thing. It drives prices down and forces innovation. Verizon has done very well marketing the Droid in a very short amount of time. It’s pretty amazing what you can do with millions of dollars to advertise your products and generate buzz. Imagine what a similar campaign from someone like Dell would do for the Linux desktop? I’d like to see Netflix release a native Linux client for their streaming movie service. I know plenty of Linux users who are Netflix subscribers and can’t watch streaming movies like their Windows and Mac counterparts. Netflix could leverage what the Mono project is doing with their Moonlight implementation of Silverlight. A little good will goes a long way. I’d also like to see more Linux adoption in schools and in government. F/OSS is such a perfect solution for public institutions. It really is a no brainer. Finally I’d like to see Pulse Audio replaced by JACK as the default sound daemon in Linux (see my previous post). Cheers!

It has not been a good month in the Washko home for technology. First I slammed my new Sansa Clip in the car door. I bought a Fuze and lo while it works great, the hard case is on back order. Needless to say the screen is getting all scratched up. I purchased some Novus polish to get rid of as many scratches as possbile. That is some real arm busting work to buff out the nicks. I figure I will do this over time, especially when the case comes. For now I am very careful with it.

Over the weekend the server hard drive started crapping out. Monday morning I woke up and the server was down, but not the centos server hosting the virtual machines. Weird, I thought and started everything up and went to work. Prior to coming home the server went down again. I noticed smartd was throwing errors on the drive. This was not good. Over the next 24 hours it went down 3 more times and that was it. I had to order a new drive and throw in the spare that I had and hope for the best. Only the spare would not fit. The interface was about an 1/8 inch off and there was no wiggle room. Damn!

On the bright side I did notice that the server was full of dirt and dust bunnies. I did a thorough cleaning, put it all back together and crossed my fingers. Thus far it has not given me any more problems. Perhaps it was just over heating. Regardless, the new drive came today and I am going to put that in over the weekend.

Last night getting the audio setup off the ground for the show was hellish. I don’t know why things seemed to changed. While I managed to pull it off, we were 10 minutes late.

Today I came home to find the myth box down. There was no display on the screen. I had to drag out a monitor and hook everything up. Well, long story short, the s-video out on the card no longer works. Luckily the card in my workstation had an s-video out so I swapped them and ordered a newer video card.

I just hope this is the last of the dying equipment.

Lesson learned: Make sure you take care of cleaning your equipment to avoid heat and other related damages.