Planet TLLTS

Well I was ecstatic to find out on Friday that the Netflix streaming service to the Wii was live and that I was getting my Wii disc on Saturday. As expected, it arrived in the mail mid-afternoon and we promptly popped the disc in. It was a simple matter of entering a code provided on the screen into a form on the Netflix website and we were browsing the instant queue, along with all the other stream-able movies. Eager to try this out we settled on the Never Ending Story.

The movie started just fine after a 15 second load and played great for about 15 minutes when it stopped. Hmmm… I thought, bandwidth issues? I hit play again via the Wii Mote and it continued on. About three minutes later, same thing only this time it would not accept my Wii-mote input. We waited, and waited and waited and then I figured, what the heck? Maybe it was the wireless router. So I checked all the inputs and kicked it. A few seconds later it started up again. Odd I thought, my phone connected phone. Then it did it again a third time and no amount of fiddling would fix it. Well, I thought for a second that maybe I needed to get the primary Wii-Mote as this one was coming up third. So I set for a frantic search for the primary Wii-mote and where do I found it? Between the couch cushions with Paige leaning on it activating it and pausing the movie. There was no problem with the streaming service at all!

We watched the Red Balloon Saturday night and throughout the day Sunday the kids were watching movies. So, of course, we give the Wii Netflix streaming service 2 thumbs up.

Paige has a science project due this week and she chose to do Mars and it’s two moon Phobos and Deimos. Well she is painting up some Styrofoam balls as models of the heavenly bodies and questioned me as to whether Mars was looking proper. So I figured, I could pull up pictures of Mars on a browser up on the MythTv box or better yet, I could pull down Celestia and have a nice OpenGL representation of the galaxy. I chose the later and man, not more than 3 minutes later we were golden. There was a beautiful rendering of Mars complete with craters and ice caps. The moons were fully detailed allowing for Paige to even shape the balls into more accurate representation. Once again, MythTV FTW!

If you have never checked out Celestia, I highly recommend you do so. The models are beautiful and you can do nifty things like follow planet or moon orbits, create journeys where you can fly around to the different planets and moons, see galaxies and constellations and watch comets zoom by. You can even drop down to any planet or moon and view the heavens from that vantage point. Really awesome stuff.

i just love cssh. This is the way updates should be run.

When I got home from work and finished my workout the daughters gave me wonderful cards for my birthday. On top of that, Paige did her first scratch project for me: Paige’s First Project. Now what more could a geek father want? Awesome stuff for her first go around. I am so proud of her.

On a different note, a warning to all Fathers out there, be careful on what you let your kids do or you will wind up like this. Now it will be even harder for me to go a running.

A while back I was talking about wireless problems with my wife’s Compaq laptop. That laptop’s wireless card has never worked well and I mentioned that I was now in the market for a USB wireless dongle for it as I couldn’t find a replacement mini pci-e wireless card that would work.

This weekend while laptop shopping I ran across a Belkin Wireless G USB Dongle at a Target store. I decided to bring it home and try it and it works perfectly. The only issue I had is I needed to remove the old wireless pci-e card because network manager kept switching between the two randomly.

If you are looking for a wireless USB dongle that works, at least, on Mint 8, this is it and it was only $30 at Target. Honestly, I should have just went this route long ago and forgone the hassle of trying different mini pci-e cards.

So you have some servers at home like I do. What do you put them on? Where do you put them? Well, for quite a while I had them sitting on a table, out in the open, right at ear level. Obviously this is not an optimum placement. In fact, it can get downright annoying with the noise and all. Servers really should be in a rack, but what if you dont have the space or can’t afford one? Enter the LackRack.

This website is a great resource for the LackRack, but essentially, it’s an Ikea “Lack” endtable, which just happens to be the correct size to fit rack-mountable equipment between the legs of the table.

In my case, my servers were a little longer than would fit inside the endtable version. Luckily enough, Ikea makes a “Lack” coffeetable too! This is what the LackRack people refer to as a LackRack Enterprise Edition As you can see, the Enterprise Edition has a middle rack drawer board that comes in handy for your first couple U worth of servers. It’s surprisingly sturdy too! For the grand sum of $20, I purchased my LackRack and set it up in just a few minutes and I think the results speak for themselves. The look is stunning in comparison to what it was before (wish I had pictures of the ugly mess to show) and the new rack cuts down on the noise considerably. I think having the servers closer to the floor and having a surface above them to deflect the sound helps quite a bit.

All in all, this is a wonderful way to inexpensively rack some equipment. Do check it out and if you get a LackRack for your house, share some pics!

So I sold my Mac Mini and my old Linux desktop machine burns up (cpu temp over 100 celcius). I need a new computer right? Well, the Best Buy run didn’t work out so well, so I started looking at other local stores for somewhere that had a decent laptop / desktop replacement that appeared to be, or mostly to be Linux compatible.

What I found, while browsing through store ads online was that Staples had a Dell Inspiron 15 for sale for just over $500. This machine sports a dual core proc at 2.2ghz, 15.6 inch widescreen with the Intel GMA 4500, 350gb hdd, 4gb ram and a Dell wireless card (rebadged Broadcom). The best part was I actually knew a friend who ordered 3 of these and had Ubuntu on at least one of them. Viola! Instant Linux Laptop!

Of course, these things are never that easy…

I ran out and picked one of these up and *just* as I was about to press enter to start formatting the drive, I notice that there is 1 dead pix3el in the middle right-hand side of the screen. Back it goes and I grab another (this one sans dead pixel). Mint 8 looks beautiful on this machine as I install it. Everything is peaches until I go for configuring the wireless. Now I am intending on using this machine as a desktop replacement, hooked to ethernet, but hey, if I have wireless, it should work. Right?

Well, I had a dandy of a time getting things to go like they are supposed to. Wireless on this laptop seems to be added under the “Hardware Drivers” or “Restricted Drivers” modules. What popped up was an STA driver and another that I cannot seem to remember at the moment. I, unfortunately, did NOT chose the STA driver. This started the maddening process where I fiddled with things and cussed at my computer for HOURS and could not get the wireless to work. After obtaining a sore throat that way, I decided to try the STA drivers. Well, once you installed the other drivers, whether or not you KEEP them installed, you CANNOT get the STA drivers installed. Each install failed, frustrating me even further. Eventually, I just did a clean reinstall and picked the STA drivers. Wireless worked perfectly after that.

After all that, it was time to put my desk back together with the new laptop. I really like the clean look of the desk now. Not as much screen realestate, but it’s tidy looking and feeling. I also purchased a Logitech wireless kb/mouse combo and I absolutely love it. And did I mention that this new machine absolutely smokes the previous two combined?

I named this monster Yeti, which is a re-use of the name of my Mac Mini. This machine, however, is black, so I guess it really is a Yeti of a different color. Hey, who says Yeti have to be white anyhow right?

More like goodbye…

Friday night I go to Best Buy to check out their 17″ Gateway laptop. I bring my trusty Mint Live cd so I can check things out real quick like before I buy the thing.

When I get into the store, I am, greeted by one of the blueshirts who asks if he can help. I explain I am there for a laptop, I brought my Live cd there to do a hardware compatability check before I buy it. He says just don’t install anything on the demo machines and I say no problem, it should only take me a coupe mins to check things out.

A few minutes later (still booting the live cd) the “supervisor” whiteshirt guy comes storming over to me saying “you can’t do that!”. Do what? Install “stuff” on computers… (Mind you I already have permission) I am not installing anything, just checking hardware compat for Linux – I need to buy a laptop. Supervisor says “Linux will run fine on it”. I look at the screen and I X is trying to start so I say it’s almost done. Supervisor steps in between me and laptop, rips out cd, pushes it at me and says “you can’t do this and if you don’t like it I can get someone to escort you out of the store”.

Needless to say I didn’t buy a laptop from Best Buy that night – or any other. What I *DID* do, when I got back home was to send nastymails to everyone at Best Buy I could find an email address for. I simply cannot deal with mean and nasty customer service people anymore and I do not have a problem writing emails to complain about it. Honestly, if this guy would have pulled his attitude with my wife while I was watching, someone would have had to bail me out of jail. You all know the type – I have even had the misfortune to have to work with the Joe Powertrip people like this before. Further, I did a little research on the Laptop I was unable to complete looking at in the store and found that there are some Linux issues with the i3 procs and perhaps even the Atheros wlan and Intel HD video too. This means that the “supervisor” guy was not only a butthead but was giving bad technical advice too. As a technical guy myself, that is not cool. If you don’t know the answer and do not understand the technology, at least be man enough to cop to it and go find the correct answer.

It’s unfortunate that this all went down like it did because I have a best buy store credit card and have previously been quite happy with my purchase experience there. It is, however, difficult to want to go shopping at a store that the manager threatened to throw you out of though.

Update: I was called on monday evening by the store manager who apologized profusely. He asked if I felt my experience had negatively impacted my decision to shop there in the future. No kidding, he really asked that.. DUH. Anyhow, I told the store manager there that I thought this guy should be, at least, retrained, that he was intentionally mean and that the technical people there should indeed be technical people. He asked if there was anything he could do to make my experience better. There isn’t, just make sure this crap doesn’t happen again. This morning I started getting emails from Best Buy Corporate. Who says the pen is not mightier than the sword?

I will probably not shop there, at least for a while, but maybe this whole debacle can turn out to be a win for Linux users who want to check hardware compatibility? Maybe…

Wow. Where do I even begin….

A little while back I was talking about getting a new desktop machine, or buying a laptop for a desktop replacement perhaps. Well, I procrastinated and, sure enough, my old desktop machine burned itself up on friday evening and would no longer stay running for more than a few seconds at a time. To top that off, I thought that I could use a little extra cash for my new machine so friday afternoon I decided to sell my mac mini, the only other desktop machine I had, and it sold almost immediately. Therefor, I had, in essence, no desktop machine by friday night. I had to reformat, reinstall OSX on the mini to get it shipped out on saturday morning.

I decided to go to best buy to check out this 17″ Gateway Laptop they had, for a desktop replacement. That turned out the be a debacle and giant time suck. More on this in a later post.

I ended up getting a new laptop (or should I say two) at Staples the next day (again, more in a later post), mailing off the Mac Mini, preping for a house warming party I was going to (made some of my yummie macaroni salad). Did some config of the new laptop and cleaning/reorg of my desk.

This is the good part. I went to friends house warming party and had a good time there for a few hours. Found out I really like home brewed Maple Mead. Mmmmmm Delicious!

Sunday is when I found out that the mechanic was going to rip me off. Took the car to the shop for a little rip in the sidewall of a tire and figured might as well do oil change, inspection (due next month), etc. at the same time. Well, the car’s tire was fine but needed a new brake hose and new shocks and parts not available until monday.

Monday had to mail my Nokia n800 I sold over the weekend and then wait around all day to pay for and pick up my car. I kept calling the garage to get updates on my car, as it was talking them en exceedingly long time, and had to deal with the snippy counter guy there. Finally put my Lackrack together to clean up my livingroom a bit too.

Whew, I am glad it’s tuesday

Well, I wish I had problems to report, but I don’t. The upgrade went off without a hitch. I’m back in business with what, 2 minutes of down time that I had to reboot and all. And that includes the obligatory log into gnome and back out again into Fluxbox.

I listen to my fellow co-workers bemoan the problems they are having with their workstations having to constantly reboot, loss of work time, increasing problems and such and I have to just sit back and smirk. I did a major OS upgrade in the background while continuing to work, not skipping a beat. And only when it came time to reboot after that major upgrade did I have 2 minutes of unproductive time. Two minutes I say! Damn, I just love GNU/Linux.

Oh, I did find a problem. For some reason my configurations disappeared in choqok. Odd…