At some point over the coming weekend I will be migrating this blog over to the wordpress.com website:
patdavila.wordpress.com
Currently it’s just a place holder but eventually all the posts on this blog will be available over there. I’ll put up a place holder entry here once the migration is complete.
It’s been far too long since the last time I posted. I’ve been very busy but excuses are lame so I’ll just get on with things. I’ve had my G1 Android for almost a year now on T-mobile. I’ve really taken to Android and absolutely love the platform. The applications are great and I generally like the developer friendly approach Google has taken to help get applications into the marketplace. While I’ve enjoyed my time with the G1 it’s shortcomings are painfully obvious. First is the attrocious battery life. I’m lucky I can make it halfway through the day without having to recharge the battery. No standard 3.5mm audio jack is an annoyance. The biggest positive for the G1 is the slideout keyboard. It’s a decent “starter” Android phone but I’m ready to move on to one of the newer more powerful phones. A very nice TLLTS listener sent me a bricked white G1 that was basically brand new but would lockup when booting up. I tried every trick in the book to get into a terminal prompt or to boot into a recovery image. This thing was truely bricked. The only way to get it to work would be to replace the motherboard.So I decided to sell my old G1 along with this bricked G1. I found a guy down the Jersey shore who wanted a bricked white G1. He had a Mytouch3G that was in excellent condition and was willing to work out some sort of trade. So I traded the bricked G1 + $100 cash for the Mytouch3G. I then sold the Mytouch3G for $220 on Ebay. I did play with the Mytouch3G for a couple days and it’s generally a nice improvement over the G1. It definitely has better battery life than the G1 and not having a physical keyboard didn’t seem to bother me that much. Still the lack of a standard 3.5mm audio jack bothers me plus I want a newer phone that has a higher resolution screen and a beefier processor. My two main choices were the Motorola Droid or a Nexus One. I’ve played around with the Droid on several occassions and overall it’s very good device. The only negative would be switching over to Verizon on a more expensive plan than my current T-Mobile account which costs me $60 a month. Honestly I’m very happy with my current alotment of talk time. So I was seriously leaning towards the Nexus1 at this point. Anyone who’s used it seems to like it a lot. This past week Apple announced a lawsuit against HTC for 20 alleged patent violations. That basically sealed the deal for me and I placed my order for the Nexus1 shortly after selling the Mytouch3G on Ebay. I also plan to sell my G1 on Ebay next week. Expect to see a bunch of posts in the coming days as I put the Nexus1 through its paces. I can’t wait to get my hands on it.
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.
Here’s a good breakdown of the energy costs associated with HDTVs. Plasma eat more energy but it’s not as drastic as some make it out to be:
Cnet HDTV Energy Consumption breakdown
It’s definitely worth a read if you’re in the market for a new HDTV.
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.
During the last MythTVCast one of our listeners asked about getting updated MythTV packages post installation on his Mythbuntu system. I commented that “if it works for you don’t fix it”. Robert McNamara (one of the Myth devs) immediately commented that I should enable the nightly autobuilds as described here. You download a package that enables the repos. It will ask you if you want stable and/or testing. Select stable (0.22) and then select your local mirror. I then did an ’sudo apt-get update’ which immediately triggered the update manager. I then upgraded 33 packages (majority of them MythTV related). I rebooted and everything seems to functioning fine. I then did the same for my Ion based frontend and haven’t had any problems. So Rob, thanks for the information. I’ll mention this during the next MythTVCast recording. Robert pointed out that Mythbutnu 9.10 shipped with a pre-release version of MythTV 0.22 and these autobuilds contain many important fixes that are now considered ’stable’. If that’s the case shouldn’t these packages be included in the Ubuntu repositories of 9.10 by default? Maybe I’m missing something here. Regardless I can recommend this method to getting the fixes in your Mythbuntu 9.10 system.
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!
Happy Thanksgiving to all my fellow Americans. It’s time to count our blessings and enjoy a great meal with friends and family. I’ve been running Mythbuntu 9.10 for several weeks now and overall I’ve been pretty happy with it. One of my initial gripes with the shutoff menu option not appearing in my main MythTV system was easily addressed. You can go into the setup in the running frontend and check off that you want the shutoff menu option to appear. I guess the assumption is that that a backend system will always be on. Fair enough. One item I am going to investigate for setup is Mirobridge. This plugin will enable any videocasts subscribed via Miro to appear in the recorded shows menu. You assign an unused channel (999 by default) to it. After watching the show it then gets migrated to Mythvideo. Very cool. You then setup a cron entry to run mirobridge automatically every night. I’ll try setting it up this weekend and report back next week. One plugin that I’ve never actually used in the past is MythFlix. This plugin lets you view your Netflix video queue and rental history. The only requirement is that you have an active Netflix account. The setup is not 100% automatic but fairly straightforward. It works as advertised. Another thing I may want to play around with is the new Storage Groups setup for Mythvideo. This will supposedly make pulling in metadata for your videos much easier to pull down via JAMU and sharing out the data to other frontend systems. Previously you had to manually pull down the metadata on every frontend.
I’ve been running Mythbuntu 9.04 (MythTV 0.21) using the Avenard repo’s to get the VDPAU goodness for some time now and have been very happy. Yesterday the system updater ran and decided to pull down the 0.22 RC1 packages in the Avenard repository. During the upgrade I got a message stating “your DBSchema is 20 versions old. Do you want to upgrade?”. I click yes and the database update craps out along the way. On subsequent attempts I get the same message. I posted this message on the mythtv-users mailing list and a short time later I was presented with a workaround that fixed the issue (thanks to Michael Dean). I then reran mythtv-setup and my system was now functioning with 0.22! The new Terra theme is very nice but is very different than the existing themes. The side scrolling menus take a little bit getting use to. VDPAU is turned on by default now and continues to deliver with HD playback goodness (with minimal CPU load). I did notice a bug in Mythmusic where the frontend crashes when deleting existing playlists. I was able to reproduce the same bug two more times with the same result. Yes, I have filed a bug ticket in the MythTV bug tracking system. Another odd thing I noticed was while playing the sample h264 HD recordings made with the PVR-1212. For some reason when the playback starts it’s in 3x speed. Simply clicking the right arrow (as to skip ahead) resets the playback to the beginning of the file at normal speed. Mind you 0.22 is not final and there are some bugs being addressed by the developers. I hear they’re planning to get this completed prior to the release of Karmic Koala at the end of next week. I also upgraded my Ion frontend box to 0.22 as frontend and backends have have to all be on the same version. I’ll post any other odd things that pop up as I use it. While I was originally planning on not upgrading until 0.22 was officially released I have to say it’s pretty sweet to finally have it running on my machines.
I know OLF was a couple weeks back but I never got around to talking about it. As usual it was an absolute blast. Lots of cool people and good conversations all around. I led both the Android and MythTV birds of a feather sessions. Me and Dan Frey recorded the MythTV BOF and released it as an episode of the MythTVCast. Unfortunately I did not get to see Dann Washko’s talk on the Linux boot process. I hear he did an excellent job. This shouldn’t be surprising as Dann used to always give very presentations at Lehigh Valley LUG meetings. This was my fourth year in a row going to OLF. Honestly if I come back for the 5th I think I want to do a presentation. Otherwise I might pass on it. I definitely want to got to the Southeast Linux Fest next June in S.Carolina. I can only go to so many Linux conferences. My job won’t send me to Linux conference so I have to use up my vacation time. We streamed live again this year from OLF and I was able to get 3 episodes completed with all the material we had. So far the feedback on these episodes has been very positive. People have complemented me on the content as well as the audio quality of the shows. It’s very satisfying getting positive feedback from listeners regarding these episodes since I handled the production duties. I think everyone was most shocked at how well Dann behaved this year. He was under some major pressure to be on his best behavior once he was selected as a speaker. OLF is a great conference. So many great talks and just a great general atmosphere from being around other Linux geeks. The Linux community does not disappoint.