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.

Here in the USA it is tax time once again, and once again, the federal government owes me money. It’s funny how they don’t have to pay me interest on monies they owe me, but the reverse is not true, but I digress.

I have, on occasion, mentioned that my current desktop machine is a piece of junk. I have been using it for about 5 years now and I believe it is in dire need of a replacement. Since I am due a little scratch soon, I have given a little thought to replacing it. The real question, though, is whether to buy another desktop machine, or get a laptop that I can use as a desktop replacement. I am just not sure where to go on this one.

Generally speaking, desktop machines are or were faster and better equipped. They had better processors, more ram and bigger hard drives. Recently, though, I have been noticing that this is no longer the case except maybe in the case of multiple processors. I have seen some very reasonably priced multi-core laptops with 4gb of ram and very large hard drives for the same price as their comparably equipped desktop counterparts.

So, what are the pros and cons? Laptops as a desktop replacement can still be mobile if need be. Laptops as a desktop replacement really need a dock or stand and a separate kb/mouse imho and this is already the standard for desktops. Desktops can be not only multi-core, but multi-processor as well, so you can get access to more computing power. Desktops have separate components that are more easily replaceable/urgradable should the need arise, however, these days laptops are a rock-solid technology. Laptops do not need a separate display although they benefit as a desktop replacement from a secondary display as much as a regular desktop system does.

What is the answer? I really don’t know and would love to hear your opinions on this one. I am actually leaning towards a laptop as I spend most of my time on one already. My work desktop is actually a laptop in a dock with dual 22″ lcd screens. It’s a fantastic machine and has no problems even though I have left it running for well over a year now Do I really need another laptop though? I have 4 already, but none of them are beefy enough to really be my desktop machine, with the exception of my macbook, which does not like Linux so that doesn’t count.

Since I bought my droid, I have been either asked over and over what apps I am using/installing or have been offered someone elses list. I figured it was time to make it official here and provide my own, with the note that this is still evolving since I just got the phone a couple days ago. Without further ado:

Mobile Defense
This app is the cellphone equivalent to Prey on your laptop. It’ll help you find and retrieve a lost or stolen cellphone.

Pandora
Internet radio stations just for you! Seriously, if you don’t know what Pandora is by now, just go home.

Barcode Scanner
More than just a toy, it’s a way for you to check prices and get info on merchandise and even install apps! This is a must have app.

ConnectBot
This is your ssh app. Works well and a must for you Linux guys like me!

AIM
Aol Instant Messenger for Android.

The Weather Channel
Always need to know what the weather is going to be like when I get into Philly and now I can get that info quickly on my cellphone anytime I need it. It also lets you add multiple sites/cities.

HandyCards
This is a great application that you can use to scan in your store discount and rewards cards to keep them in your phone, where they are handy. Slick program and works great!

Flashlight
Yes, there are a ton of these and some even use the built in camera flash for light, but I chose the simple white screen version. Works great!

ColorNote
This is a quick and convenient way to take some notes when I have to.

Jewels
Hey, even I play games occasionally. This is one of those fun little jewel games. Match 3. Fun and addicting. I would have put frozen bubble on there but then I would never get *anything* done.

Droid

Finally, after carrying around cellphones for over 10 years, *I* got a decent one.

It was time for me to re-up my contract with Verizon and high time I got a good cellphone, so I picked the Droid, at the behest and recommendation of several of my friends. To be honest, this thing kicks butt and takes names.
The best comparison I can give is that of it to an iPhone. I use an iPhone at work on my on-call rotation. Up until this point, I thought it was *very* cool and fast. Now I know different. The Droid whoops it without batting an eye. The Droid has a huge, bright lcd touch screen, it’s ultra thin and hides a full querty keyboard. It plays all your non DRM encumbered media – and beautifully I might add. It browses, it emails, it texts, it takes notes, it plays games, it has HUNDREDS of other apps and, hell, it even makes and takes phone calls if you can imagine. This thing is even better than the other android phones I have seen, being faster by an order of magnitude with a bigger screen and more storage (16Gb by default). The best praise I could give it it what I told Dann about it earlier, and that is this is what the Nokia N series Linux handhelds could have and should have been if Nokia had pulled their heads out of the sand. And did I mention that it’s fast, because it is. Stop reading this and just go buy one! You’ll thank me later – from the gmail account on your Droid.

Last week my oldest, Paige (11), somehow tanked her Koala system to the point that it would not even boot into stage1 GRUB. I was perplexed at what she had done but figured, all right, let’s wipe and re-install. I fired up my System76, dropped in a flash card and wrote Koala netbook remix to the flash and off I went; for about 30 minutes. After repeated reboots and two more unetbootin creations, nothing I would do allowed me to boot the install.

I had a copy of the latest Mint iso on the system having ventured the idea of installing that on Paige’s eeePC last time and figured this time I would give it a go. A few minutes later I was in installing Mint and boy was she happy afterwards. She claimed this was the best distro she has used yet.

The wife’ gnome desktop borked somehow, I suspect Avery’s little fingers somehow did something; but maybe not. This is the second time something went squirrely after she was started using the system pretty heavily. I don’t think it was the configuration or anything because even a new profile would not work. Thus, I settled for installing Mint there.

The wife seems pretty happy so far. While Mint is not light years different from Ubuntu standard, it is a very polished interface and comes with a fantastic set of default packages requiring almost no additional work on my part: And that is a great thing.

Me, I am going to stick with Debian on the Meso, Arch on the Desktop, and Ubuntu on my laptop and work workstation with slackware and centos on the servers. But it is nice to have a varied collection of distros in constant use.

In today's podcast, dave talks with Google's Leslie Hawthorn and Carol Smith about the 2010 Google Summer of Code.

Links:

lottalinuxlinks.com linux user podcast 122 ogg vorbis format;

Google Summer of Code 2010;

Google Summer of Code;

Google and Open Source; and

SouthEast LinuxFest.

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.

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.

I decided that on my vacation I would do some catch-up work. I have many times mentioned that I am a consummate procrastinator, and if you combine that with me being just generally whooped tired after 12 hours away from home on any average day, you understand why my computers seem to go uncared for. I think it’s the same as the whole “the mechanics car is never fixed” thing.

I mentioned a couple days ago that I installed ESXi on one of my home servers (redundant servers) to fix a strange problem I had been having with VMware Server 2.x. That was the first job I needed to so, or at least the most important, and so far it has been doing beautifully.

Next on the list was Mint 8 on the old laptop. It has been running Mint 7 since the distro was released and it was time for an upgrade. Everything was working just fine on 7, I just wanted to catch up the latest/greatest. As expected, the upgrade was a no-brainer and it’s running gorgeously, as Mint does.

Today, so far, I decided to upgrade my desktop machine to Mint 8. This machine, a P4 3Ghz with 3Gb of ram runs like absolute crap. I don’t exactly know why, but it always has. Now I have replaced the cpu fan a couple times and also the power supply at least twice. The computer is noisy, whiny, but not physically broken that I can tell. It just seems to run slower than hell and always has. The installation of Mint 8 on it did make it prettier, but sure didn’t make it seem to run any faster. I think it just dogs over the dual display and craptasticly old Nvidia card. Perhaps if I bought it a new quiet power supply, a better working and quieter cpu fan, a new better video card and a new dvdrom drive (yeah that’s pretty broken too), I could resuscitate this thing so that I could stand using it again. But then again, I could probably buy a whole new desktop computer for what I would spend on repairs to this one. Dang.

So, what’s next? Well, I should install ESXi on my redundant server now that I am satisfied with how the other one is running. I should also upgrade to Mint 8 on my Acer Aspire All In One netbook (notice a pattern here). Other than that, I am not sure.. Maybe work on some code projects I have been stringing along for months and months.

So what kinds of great computery projects are you all up to? Or what SHOULD you be up to

WHEW!

A couple days ago I relayed the story about how my VMware Server 2 infrastructure was suffering some issues. Basically it would randomly just shut down my VMs. I don’t know why. I absolutely poured over the logs for days on end while simultaneously searching google for *any* inkling or hint of an idea on how to remedy the situation or even why it was happening. Nothing….

Frustrated, I was searching around for a different solution and after passing on Virtualbox, Parallels, KVM and others for various reasons, not the least of which was the learning curve on some, I settled on ESXi. I run a lot of ESX and some ESXi at work, so the familiarity is there and it’s been my experience that it’s a rock solid and stable platform, not to mention that it’s bare metal and wickedly fast.

There were some drawbacks. ESX(i) requires a Windows management interface (or Virtual Infrastructure Controller – VIC) and I wasn’t even sure my hardware would accomidate. You see, ESXi has only a certain set of hardware that it will work with.

Well, after a bit of research, I was mostly convinced that my hardware would work, albeit with a little tweak to get the IDE drive recognised. I registered for, and downloaded the free ESXi 4.x release from http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi/, burned it to a cd and I was off to the races.

The installation was completely a no-brainer. Just put the cd in, boot it up and go. It really is an almost no-touch install. I was also pleasantly surprised that it recognised my IDE drive automatically with no tweaking whatsoever. When the install was done, there were only a couple settings to adjust like configuring the IP address and root password, and they are all accessed and changed in a very plain and simple text interface. All in all, in less than a half an hour and with 1 reboot I had an ESXi server just begging me for some VMs.

Once it was up and running I decided I would try everything possible NOT to have to resort to running Windows at home for a management interface. Luckily, other people have decided the same and there is good information available on the web on using the built in command line tools to do what you need to. And they aren’t difficult at all.

First, I needed to be able to access the command line tools on ESXi, and that required turning on SSH access. I followed the instructions here:
http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/ESXi_enable_SSH.php

After that, I needed to get my VMware Server 2.x VMs on the ESXi box. I turned to VMware Converter for that. Downloaded it (again free) from VMware and installed it on my VMware Server 2.x host machine so that the converter would have access to the local VM files.

I shut down the VMs and used vmware converter to convert them to the ESXi box. Each conversion of a 12GB VM took approximately 40 minutes (give or take). Since the converter is a GUI app, I did a “ssh -Y vmwareserver2host vmware-converter.pl” to run the converter console on my local machine because my vmwareserver2 machine is a headless server.

When the VMs were converted to the ESXi box, I took a cue from this page:
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/833003030931/m/150009304931
to add vncserver to each VM, which allowed me to connect to the VMs and make 1 integral change to each virtual machine when they were running.

To get the machines running I used ESXi’s “vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms” command on the ESXi box, which listed all the VMs I copied there with their assigned vm number. “Then, I ran vim-cmd vmsvc/power.on #” where number is the vm number listed from the getallvms command.
Once they were started, I used vncviewer to connect to the VMs, log in and fix their networking. You see when you move a vm to a different host machine, the mac address gets reassigned and hoses up your VMs network config. Once that was quickly fixed, I rebooted the VMs and they were good to go!

There are a couple other things that I need to get tweaked, like adding my registration number to ESXi, which I found directions for at http://www.vm-help.com/esx40i/manage_without_VI_client_2.php. I also noticed that vmware adds some filesystem into the VMs /etc/hosts file which errors out on boot. Just comment that out and it’s fine. Lastly, since I migrated the VMs from Server 2.x, they already had the vmware tools from that loaded in and I noticed a little barking about those tools while the VMs were booting, so I disabled them by doing a “service vmware-tools stop ; chkconfig vmware-tools off” on my VMs which are CentOS, so your method of disabling those tools may vary.

My impressions so far: Although this all sounded hard, long and technical, nothing could be farther from the truth. It was extremely easy – much more than I had initially hoped. And, if my VMs *stay running* now, it will be well worth it. I also believe that these VMs ABSOLUTELY SCREAM compared to how they ran before. They are much more responsive now in every way. The change was well worth it!