Category Archives: cool gadgets

Positive response on “Practical MythTV” from somebody who actually has the book

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My trusty google alerts alerted me to: Yeraze’s Domain 2.0 – Practical MythTV (and about 15 seconds after mailing off to Mikal going all awww over it, I saw he’s blogged this already.

Not only is the review positive on the book (“5 out of 5” is a good rating), it looks as though the book will be of value to the reviewer as they expand their MythTV system (precisely one of the aims we had with the book). In fact even I am looking forward to my hard copy to use as a reference when doing some things to my MythTV system….. oh, and likely when I finally give into my mum’s requests and build her one too (yes, the same mother of mine who finds keyborad shortcuts confusing but has been using Linux on the desktop for years and now even installs her own security updates).

I feel good.

WRT54GL client mode OpenWRT fun!

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the wireless USB dongle I had running on my MythTV box had drivers that weren’t always reliable. I have recently totally decided that if I haven’t had time to debug them and fix the problems by now, I won’t in the near future.

Today a courier arrived with two of the Linksys WRT54GL for me. yay! My aim is to put OpenWRT on them and use them in client mode (one for me, one for mum) to get around unstable wireless drivers.

I just set mine up and it works! MythTV box now much more reliably on the network!

Although, I did hit one snag – the MAC address on the sticker on my unit was NOT the actual MAC address of the router. Really annoying when setting up MAC filtering. Grr….

(i really should set up better wireless security here)

Twinhan USB DTV dongle not working :(

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so after doing some researching (read: using search engines with linux + product name), I came to the conclusion that a Twinhan USB2.0 DVB dongle would be the dongle for me. Yes – it’s small, compact and does digital tv without requiring a non-existant free PCI slot in my Shuttle MythTV box.

Having had great success with my last bit of new hardware (a really cheap Logitech QuickCam Express or something) – plug it in and it “just works”. Oh Linux how you are better than Microsoft Windows for hardware usability!

But this was not to be. It uses a vp7045 chipset, which has drivers both in Ubuntu 6.06 “Dapper” and in the latest v4l-dvb hg tree.

But for the life of me I couldn’t get it to tune into any TV stations (for those of you who like using hardware and not just having expensive boxes around, you will appreciate how tuning into a TV station is rather important functionality for a TV card). So I started having a look around the interweb for possible answers.

The best I could come up with was “are you sure you have all the cables plugged in” – yes, I was.

So seeing as this is the first digital TV dongle in this house, I wondered if the signal just wasn’t getting here. I got a friend to bring around a spare digital set top box. It worked fine. Brilliantly in fact – it even worked with the shitty small antenna that came with the dongle. So it wasn’t an ability to receive.

I then came across this post to the linux-dvb list titled “New VP7045 with TDA10046 instead of MT352 (was: VP7045 tuner doesn’t work)”. Which really does hint at the problem!

I could be one of the lucky ones with a new revision that uses the TDA10046 instead of the MT352! (after getting some debug info from the card out of the driver – it was reporting itself as v1.02, so quite possible).

Maybe time to hack the dvb driver for it? Things seem pretty modular, so it couldn’t be too hard, right?

Well, the vp7045-fe.c file is the front end (well, what it assumes is the front end) for the vp7045.c dongle. So all I really need to do is to get it to use the tda10046 frontend (under frontends/tda1004x.c) instead of the vp7045-fe.c fe code.

Well, it seems as though the tda10046 is an i2c device while the vp7045-fe isn’t. Hrrm… I’ve never really done much with i2c, so this’ll be fun!

I’ve currently managed to hack the driver so that we do some things to do with the tda chip – although i haven’t gotten in detecting the i2c adapter – which means we’re never going to get a front end! (in fact, when you plug in the device with my modified driver you get a “no frontend detected” message from the kernel).

i’ve tried poking on the #linuxtv channel on freenode to no avail – so it seems like i’m on my own for a bit.

A good way to spend midnight until 3am though :)

I’ll probably end up doing the same tonight. Why? Because it’s just so much fun.

Oh, and if anybody has any pointers – it would be appreciated.

I am, of course, assuming the hardware itself isn’t faulty. I have no MS Windows system around to test on.

Maemo 2.0 (Nokia 770 Internet Tablet OS 2006)

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Installed the Beta on my 770 the other night – rather cool I have to say. A few small niggling things, but it is BETA.

Things feel snappier, the thumb keyboard thing is actually pretty good, the handwriting recognition seems faster, perhaps a bit more accurrate (but still nowhere near even the Newton MessagePad 120 – with version 2 of the OS of course).

I still need to get the screen fixed on mine though, as soon as you get much black (or blue) you get ugly stripes and it becomes unreadable.

Can’t wait to get GPE PIM stuff working. Oh, and actual syncing with Evolution.

Welcome – Ubuntu Linux 6.06LTS

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Welcome – Ubuntu Linux

I took the plunge and last night I upgraded my laptop (my primary work machine – as in it cannot be busted[1]) to Ubuntu 6.06LTS (otherwise known as Dapper Drake. The LTS is for Long Term Support). It went pretty smoothly.

I had to remove irda-utils after the upgrade as a module being loaded was causing a panic (which showed itself by having everything freeze about 4 seconds after gdm started up and you’re about to enter your username). I should report a bug for that…

It’s slightly annoying that I had to disable gdm so i could see the panic to find out what was crashing. Perhaps we need either:

  • crash dumps (a-la IRIX and others where you can then run a debugger on an image of the crashed system)
  • panic over the top of X (a-la early MacOS X)

I have to say though, I am very pleased with the upgrade. Everything seems a bit snappier (much welcome) and NetworkManager works! I haven’t tried to suspend my laptop yet though.. so we’ll see if that works.

But a recent version of f-spot is welcome, I’m thinking I’m going to start using it for my photos. The next trick is going to be when i completely run out of disk space on my laptop for them.

The new Rhythmbox has me using it again. Disappointed not to see google talk support in gaim (although maybe i’m just not looking right).

The Window List still exists – a UI element I solemly think should die a quick death. It didn’t work in Microsoft Windows 95 with more than a few windows  open and it doesn’t work any better now (okay,  a little, but not much).

I want to take a second and marvel at the look of the new Human theme. It is rather lickable and, as we know, the only thing that matters with UI is how much you are licking your monitor. Even without wizz-bang GL compositing powered by cold fusion bucky ball quantum knot computers, it seems nice.

gnome-xchat is taking a little bit of getting used to, but the toast that pops up when somebody “stewart: hey”‘s me is useful.

Epiphany has received some updates too which are quite welcome. A bunch of elements used in phpBMS for Web 2.0 stuff are a lot faster. In previous blog entries I’ve said why I’m using Epiphany and not Firefox. I may re-asses this at some point, but I’m not really in any mood to manually move over saved passwords.

Evolution seems to suck up a bit less memory. Started out only using about 247MB. Now 338MB+52MB for evolution-data-server though…. maybe I’m just not feeling it as much due to other things chewing up less. WHY THE FUCK DOES IT TAKE 390MB FOR A PUNY 10GB[2] OR SO OF MAIL?

On the other hand though, there’s been a bunch of UI improvements in Evolution that are really welcome. I’m quite pleased with the upgrade.

My Bluetooth seems to have broken (my send image from phone to laptop didn’t work). I haven’t had time to debug yet.

Is it just me or do fonts look a bit better too?

I’m probably going to run beagle soon too.

The new version of Deskbar seems to work a lot better. I’ve noticed I’m using it more. Although is it worth 37MB of RES memory?
Tomboy seems to have gotten a bit better, but I’m still experiencing a bug where if i click anywhere that there isn’t text in my “Start Here” note I get a new note with some random large chunk of text from my “start here” note. I credit tomboy with a lot – namely a boost to productivity and not loosing notes. I massively heart it.

I’ll be trying MonoDevelop again to see how easy it really is to whip up something quickly. In breezy things seemed to crash too often to be useful.

The support for switching between audio output devices is much welcomed. However, there still seems to be some bugs – especially related to USB audio devices. I have an iMic here that I bought years ago and am again using since the headphone port on my laptop seems to be having problems (electrical connection related, not software).

Liferea (feed reader) has a lot of improvements. I think it’s chewing less RAM too.

I had to fiddle with my keyboard layout things to get my DVORAK layout working properly. It still seems as though Ctrl-Alt-Left Arrow (and Right) to switch between Workspaces only works for the left cntrl and alt – not the right ones (that are closer to the arrows). Although now the little keyboard applet shows “USA” for Dvorak, “USA*” for QWERTY and “Swe” for Swedish.
My build of MySQL that I use (for important things – i.e. my invoices that make sure I get paid) that is typically a close-to-top-of-tree 5.1 install kept working after the upgrade – i.e .binary compatibility didn’t get boned. I did, however, need to rebuild some of my MySQL source trees afterwards (some linking with SSL foo failed, clean build fixed it).

I also did a fresh install from the Desktop CD under VMWARE on another machine. Quite nice installer.

I feel like I’ll move my Mum’s machine over to 6.06LTS very soon (this weekend) as I’m confident it’ll be a great release for her. I’m sure she’s going to love f-spot. I’m also going to introduce her to rhythmbox, Sound Juicer and possibly last.fm as she now has speakers plugged into her computer and a CD player in her car (okay, had it for a while, just slack in getting her up and running burning copies of CDs for the car).

I didn’t get Avahi out of the box after the upgrade… I wonder if I need this manually for the “Share my Music” feature of Rhythmbox to work. Installing now, so I’ll soon know.

I haven’t tried Ekiga (GnomeMeeting, but new name) Internet Phone yet with any SIP things. Since I have a physical SIP phone (a SNOM-190) I may not really use it (except when travelling). Good to test at some point though.

The real OpenOffice.org 2.0 is much overdue – as I’ve sworn rabidly about before. Big difference being this version actually works.

A very worthwhile upgrade IMHO.

The next box to get the upgrade will by my MythTV box – or Mum’s. But probably both this upcoming (long) weekend.

[1] I, of course, have up to date backups and a quick disaster recovery process (get machine, xfsrestore / and /home, continue working). However, this is a pain in the arse.
[2] This may be wrong… “du -sh Maildir” just takes too damn long. My Maildir is currently 1.7GB in a tar.bz2 archive.

Cool Dolphin SCI interconnect stuff

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http://www.dolphinics.com/ make this cool SCI socket hardware that can be used with MySQL Cluster (for example, like their example setup).

Their tech provides high performance (350MB/sec avail to the user) and low latency (worst case is like 2 or 3 micro seconds to send 512bytes to another node). So can pretty much kick the butt of gig-e.

We could probably do some really cool stuff with boosting performance (even further) when using SCI with some of the things I have in mind for multithreaded ndb kernel – basically changing some of the ways we do sending and receiving signals and improvements in shared memory stuff.

Big points from the presentation are:

  • small messages sent using basic CPU instructions (it’s remote memory mapping)
  • low cost to write to remote memory address
  • raw worst case send latency for 8 bytes is about 210 nanoseconds
  • no need to lock down or register memory
  • TCP/IP processing not done in software
  • Just LD_PRELOAD the library and it does your (user specified) Ip communication over the SCI interconnect
  • can be fully redundant (dual cards, distributed switching)
  • each card is about 5w of power (rather insignificant compared to other techs apparrently)
  • really small time for failover

It’s also good to note that 10 gigabit ethernet doesn’t really buy you anything in reducing latency. SCI gives you both improved bandwidth and latency.

People looking into wanting more performance in MySQL Cluster should have a good look at it.

It’s also used in fighter planes – which make cool loud jet noises.

(err… i didn’t mean to sound to rah rah. hopefully i’ve just sounded like i think the tech is shiny)

UPDATE: corrected milli to nano.

UPDATE mk2: corrected nano to micro. Oh how I wish I just typed correctly to begin with. At least I’ve had some rest now :)

Mike Hillyer’s laptop melting and backup fun at UC

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Mike Hillyer’s Personal Web Space » Blog Archive » It’s Alive!!

Mike’s laptop went funny, but he had a backup of his presentation.

So, something about my backup strategy.

I have a policy that anything that I really care about is backed up. If it’s not backed up, I don’t care about it.

e.g. while I’d be sad if my mythtv box suddenly had a disk failure, I can always put in a blank disk and I don’t loose too much.

My email is fetched onto a server at home, and I use offlineimap to keep an up to date (nearly) copy on my laptop. I also, at least weekly, burn the entire thing to DVD (it still fits, when bzip2 compressed).

Also, for all that other stuff that is pretty important (/home), I do a xfsdump to external disk.

I also now (on a paranoid spending trip at Fry’s) have a small portable drive that is roughly twice the size of my /home partition. The idea is that on the road I can regularly do an xfsdump to this  – in fact, two complete dumps (and one or two incrementals on it).

Call me paranoid, but I like my data.

I also make sure I burn photos to DVD, but that’s more periodic as there’s a lot of them now.

final prep on UC presentation (and new toy)

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I bought a new toy yesterday (and about time I did). A Logitech presentation clicker thingy:

Picture(14) (1).jpg

It has the laser pointer, the forward and backwards slide buttons and, arguably most interestingly, a built-in timer with vibrate alert.

What’s annoying is that the forward/back is done by page up and page down – and this doesn’t work for the “appear on click” thing for OO.org. Luckily for me, I just about never use that “feature” as the in version of OOo that Ubuntu ships in their stable release (5.04) is just too darn buggy in that area. I do sometimes wonder if people use the stable release of their product for any real work.

But it’s a nice little device and seems to be an improvement of the using the remote control feature of my phone to do the same thing (if you didn’t do anything for X seconds, it disconnected and had to renegotiate something that took a few seconds).

mythtv scheduling

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So, naturally, while at linux.conf.au I still need to get to my home mythtv box to set (and check) what’s going to be recorded.

I can also have a look to see what my flatmate has set to record.

It looks like I’m missing the tennis one day to have “Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Guide to All Creation” recorded.

Hrrm… for some reason I’m not unhappy with that….

upgraded mythtv box to breezy

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Finally got arround to upgrading the mythtv box. Less RAM being used is good – it’s only got 512MB and some of the recordings were getting pretty fragmented due to having to flush things to disk a bit too often. Hopefully things will be a bit better now.

Annoying things were:

  • Having to reboot into the old kernel to get the wireless driver to download the new kernel source package
  • having to again reboot to get gcc-3.4 to build the rt2570 module with the gcc-3.4 compiled kernel
  • rebuilding lirc again (but that’s easy)
  • still having to manually load the sound card driver.
  • no fancy boot screen (at least on my lilo setup)
  • no automagic convert to grub now that it seems to work with XFS

But a lot less painful than previous big upgrades. The debian way between releases is so nice it’s not funny.

Things left to do:

  • rebuild mythtv with proper lirc support so i can stop using irxevent and get lirc going with an auto launching xine/mplayer and use the box properly as a DVD player too. (this is not actually related to the ubuntu upgrade, it’s just a thing i’ve wanted to do for a while – and it’s my own fault i didn’t do it right in the first place)
  • upgrade from mysql 4.0 to 5.0 (hey, maybe 5.1 ndb dd just to really be eating our own dogfood :) – again, not related to the ubuntu upgrade.

I’ve also set it up to tape the tennis, although at a low priority so my lovely flatmate doesn’t get annoyed if she misses her shows :)

Oh how I need more tuner cards.

Thanks goes to jdub for quickly asking what the upgrade issue was. No thanks goes to me for making my things left to do list look like it was related to the upgrade.

Slashdot | Sun Open-Sourcing UltraSPARC Design

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Slashdot | Sun Open-Sourcing UltraSPARC Design

This is pretty ultra-cool news. Especially in academic circles and for upcoming chip designers.

I’m sure that there’s decent business models in place so that they don’t cannibalise their hardware sales.

What would be very cool is if cheap manufactures pick up slightly older chip generations and produce them for dirt-cheap prices. This means more commodity hardware – which is very good for humanity.

It also makes it possible to run an even more open platform where even the source to your CPU is available!

Solaris 10 under QEMU

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I’m currently watching a Solaris 10 install under QEMU on my laptop. It seems to be taking a while, but getting there.

(I got a Solaris 10 DVD in my AUUG shwag)

Basically, I want to play with DTrace and see how easy it is to do things with it. Solaris seems to be the requirement. I don’t want to have a partition for it nor run it as a primary OS. So, qemu it is.

I can also then use the funky disk image foo with qemu so that i don’t waste a lot of space (mmm… sparse disk images).

For a 7GB qemu-img created filesystem, used intirely as /, it seems that there’s 128MB overhead for having the file system. The installer is chugging away writing things and this seems to be constant.

So, all in all i should end up using a bit less than 3GB of real disk space for a full Solaris 10 install in a qemu image.

Hey, ACPI buttons work!

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rockin. The buttons at the top left of my keyboard work on ubuntu!

what looks like running away makes the screensaver come on (password protected). Useful. Replaces that shortcut i’d set.

The bluetooth button always has. plugs/unplugs the internal bluetooth adapter.

The world with a ring on it doesn’t do anything.

But the little wireless button works! Rockin. no more ifup/ifdown foo!