Friendfeed suger fortfarande åt sig detta...?

Hade ändrat inställningar för vilken blogg FriendFeed skulle ta info ifrån, men såg att mitt senaste inlägg här dök upp där iaf. Testar nu om detta fortfarande sker, bugg i så fall!

Tillbaka till ordningen

Efter att ha blandat alla sorters inlägg i denna blogg så har jag nu farmat ut till två nya bloggar, obnoxiousdeepthought.blogspot.com och detvarsom.blogspot.com. Förhoppningsvis har jag nu denna blogg till de mer sällsynta inlägg som passar vad jag ursprungligen skapade den för. Och eventuellt kanske den försvinner (eller ändrar riktning? Jag har en liten idé...) och så flyttar jag materialet till Evernote istället. Vi får se helt enkelt!

OpenOffice saknar outline-läget!

En av de saker som jag gillar med Microsoft Word är outline-läget. Eftersom det emellertid är en hel del annat som jag inte gillar så försöker jag använda OpenOffice. Men Openoffice saknar outline-läge!!! Det gör det svårt att använda Openoffice effektivt så tyvärr kan jag bara använda det i enklare dokument. Jag trodde verkligen att detta var fixat för länge sen, men inte då. Dåligt av utvecklarna att inte få till detta tycker jag, särskilt som det uppenbarligen uppmärksammades för sisådär sju och ett halvt år sen!
Fixa.

Testing if I am alive

Mediahemmet uppdateras ungefär med samma hastighet som jag bygger om min mediapc - dvs i glacial takt...

Nåja, testar härmed Cellspin.net från min iPhone 3G. Kanske kan leda till flera uppdateringar framöver. Hopas kan man ju...

Interlude: Guitar Hero III

Got GHIII for Christmas and I have finally had the time to start playing. I suck. However one of the issues is that the game is jerky at times. I have managed to configure the audio lag so that the game is playable, at least usually, but sometimes it starts to almost stop and then start up again. Most of the time it happens a while after something apart from strumming has happened - like me using the whammy bar or I have hit a star power streak...

I have installed the 1.1 patch, I don't have any other programs running, all settings are at the lowest and I have tried the trick with using the black background but I still have these jerks at times. I run it on a computer on the low end of the requirements spectrum, and I use the integrated video (nforce430/6150 motherboard), which might be the cause. I guess I'll have to go buy a new GPU and hope that does it... However! How on earth can a game such as GHIII be such a *horrendous* resource hog??!?!??

Last thing I'll try is to disable the network and possibly other hardware while playing. I might also increase cooling of the northbridge or something.

Or I could get a dedicated gaming computer. I have a nice unused portable case so I could bring it down to the TV when we have friends over. However I had hoped that the HTPC I have built would be enough so I could avoid lugging a computer over the house. So I might end up getting better hardware for HTPC instead, but it's annoying work since I use the fanless hfx mini case, and getting everything and especially the heat pipes in place is a royal pain, and takes time (of which I have precious little already due to our small children). Also, the htpc has been extremely long coming anyway...

More on Arch Linux coming in a later post...

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Mythtv trials

Mythtv is nice.

I have problems, but finally this time it seems I'm getting how it works - at least the tutorials work :D

Ok, so I tried Mythbuntu hoping that everything would just work. It did, but only sort of. I got stuck on how to configure the remote, clearing out data after a configuration mistake etc. Also, I was a bit annoyed that LCDproc wasn't included in the default install and that the remote never seemed to work. It could start the computer so I knew it was sending signals, but I was unable to control Mythtv...

So enter a tips from an IT support guy (not mythtv-related...). I had already decided to more or less roll my own mythtv so when I heard that Arch Linux might be nice if you like to tinker I decided to go with that as it seemed to be just that little bit more automated than Slackware (which is usually my first choice otherwise).

Arch provides packages for Mythtv so most everything is included, but I had to set up xmltv and LCDproc myself. I now have a working system but I need to list some issues. Next post...

Extra OS till bärbar

Har just lyckats flytta en Pointsec-krypterad partition till en ny och snabbare hårddisk (5400 rpm vs 4200rpm). Det funkar utmärkt! Nu ska jag bara fundera ut vad jag ska göra med det extra utrymmet. Linux? OpenBSD? Om Linux, kanske skulle prova Ubuntu som alla verkar så fascinerade av. Har hittills kört Slackware, Gentoo och Damn Small Linux (från USB-pinne) så det kan ju vara dags att prova något nytt!

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Email blogging test

Right.

Sometimes I am a bit slow taking up new things. I have known about the
ability to post using email since I signed up for blogger but I've never
felt the urge to try it out. Now however as I am swamped by work and
really should be concentrating on it i thought it'd be a great time to
see if this can be a new time sink :D

So this is a test, please move along. Nothing here to see. We will
shortly be back to our regular schedule. Oh and I seem to have forgotten
to ad new ads... Adsense never gave me any income (since this is not
mainly a blog for others this fact is quite evident...) but it sure is
not going to give me anything if i don't put up any ads. Anyway, they'll
be up again when I get around to it.

Off you go little email!

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Yeah, me too.

Just in case I loose it, let's put it here. Noone ever reads this anyway and I consider it my personal notebook. Now, to use it I'd need more information but this is a first step! Gonna get my own web server working soon, then I can put this stuff there instead.

Media home status

My how time flies! Work takes its toll as well as personal life, so this blog is less updated than I'd like it to be. However, here's a brief status report of my digital home:

I am currently building a media PC based on a miniHFX chassis. The intention is to reduce the number of boxes under my TV from four to two. It will have a dual tuner card, it will use the motherboard audio and a graphic card with s-video out. The plan is to run Linux (Slackware probably) and MythTV.

I am slowly stringing cables through the pipes in my walls, so my D-link (and later the media PC instead) will have a fixed connection and then I will turn off the wireless of my D-link DI-624+ - yay! I also moved my desktop PC to the attic and since that is still my center for recording TV I needed to have an antenna outlet up there. Luckily the cable was already there so I just needed to connect it and it works beautifully apart from the fact that the desk is on the other side of the attic so I currently have a loose antenna cable lying on the floor. The move also meant that I need to string ethernet up there - but I use a wireless connection for now! It works fine and I currently have three tuners in my PC, and my new 800GB RAID-0 setup is really great for storing all the crap I intend to see at some point in time...

Oh, and speaking of D-link, I realised that I have bought lots of their stuff:

1. Access Point DWL-900AP+
2. Access Point DWL-2000AP+
3. Wireless router DI-624+
4. Wireless PC Card DWL-650+
5. Wireless PC Card DWL-G650+
6. Switch DES-1005D
7. Mediacenter DSM-320

Ok, so I've been reasonably happy with this stuff but it's worth noting that number 1, 4 and 6 all broke (although number 4 was possible to RMA, the rest were too old) so the failure rate is actually pretty high. In addition I've had TWO power adapters break with the router, one was RMA:ed and the other one broke just this weekend so I just decided to repurpose the adapter from the old broken DWL-900AP+.

I think I might change brand next time I buy some networking stuff.

Why I'm not using only Linux

There are many people blogging about whether Linux is ready for desktop use or not, and whether there is any need at all to use Windows. With this short piece I thought I'd list a few of the reasons why I don't use it exclusively.

1. It's not about OS installation, that's as easy as it can be for a lot of distros
   
2. It's not about any perceived difficulty to install software
3. It's not about not knowing what and how to do something

It's instead a lot about speed. A Linux distro is quicker to install and often has a much wider software selection (or you can compile it yourself). However, there is a lot of preparation required! You've got to read up on stuff, make sure things will work on your distro, possibly that all dependencies are satisfied, that supporting software is configured and running and so on and so forth. On Windows you install your software, sometimes you restart, and that's that.

Some say that the package repositories of many distributions are superior to finding and downloading some unknown installer from the net, but I have to say that just looking at the descriptions there it's impossible to know if you want to install a particular app, you will anyway wish to look at a web page with screen shots, documentation, FAQs and so on. From the actual install perspective the repositories are great, but from an information perspective they suck.

In short, with Windows you work less to get things working, with Linux you have more control, but you can spend aeons setting up stuff to work similarly to a Windows desktop if you're not happy with the defaults.

ivtv tuning problem workaround

Since my last post about problems testing if the ivtv drivers really work by finding a signal I have been thinking how to solve the problem. As the wiki states that you should avoid installing anything like mythtv since that might cause problems instead there should really be a way to scan for signals. I finally gave up and rebooted into my Windows XP installation and used "TuningAssistant.exe", which is part of GBPVR. It asks for your country and whether you receive your channels via air or cable of some sort and then scans the whole frequency band. Luckily it also displays the frequencies where signals are found so I wrote down the information and rebooted back to Linux and could then use

ivtv-tune -f196.250
cat /dev/video0 > test.mpg
ctrl-C

and then watch the clip in xine. Yay, I can see!


Now, on to Mythtv!

Media home developments

I have started to play with getting Mythtv to work. I have the intention of setting up my computer (never to be shut off!) running Slackware 11 as a Mythtv backend, and with VMWare to feed my wife's Windows addiction and for testing, possibly I'll have an older Windows installation for games although I aim to use WINE (in some form) at a later date. The latest version of Mythtv supports UPnP streaming so I finally see a potential for a very nice and integrated solution with my current setup.

But first I need to satisfy the Mythtv requirements, for instance getting the ivtv driver to work. But that's not easy!!! Things seem to work, but I only get static and the way to test seems not very conducive to quickly scanning through the frequencies and finding signals... I just don't see what to do, especially since the wiki discourages installing mythtv or other apps to avoid problems and as far as I can see there's no scanning utility in the ivtv package.

I am on a local cable network so the national channels listed by Teracom are probably not quite corresponding to the channels I receive. So how do people do this?!? I tried installing xawtv because you can change channels using the arrow keys, but no signal (and some say xawtv and ivtv don't mix). On Windows I use GBPVR, which includes a scan tool and there's no difficulty at all. I don't even know what I need to know to use the tools to find the channels - and I can't find the info in the wiki. There's a certain step missing and I guess that I need to continue looking, but I do not know what I'm looking for...

Should I go ahead and install Mythtv? Another tool? Can I otherwise check that the ivtv drivers work? I mean, static is not terribly interesting...

GAAAH!

Are people listening

Title leads to an interesting blog entry on Linuxtoday by John Terpstra from October 3rd, claiming that people make the wrong decisions because they don't listen.

Hmm, I think I know what he means, but is the problem really in listening? To be honest, if an expert (or a salesman for that matter) starts talking about all the details in a good solution, also not shying away from things that might go wrong I'd say most people will not have a problem listening, but a problem understanding. What's good about a Linux or any Open Source solution probably goes way over the head of most people because due to lack of understanding, the concepts discussed and their technical advantages and disadvantages compared to some proprietary system are way too fuzzy and intangible.

One big problem for Open Source Software is still that it requires you to acquire quite a lot of knowledge in one way or another to make the correct decisions. Don't get me wrong, this is a very good thing (tm), but it's not what people are used to. In the example cited about a SOX audit:

"He asks the local network manager to configure a particular data file for change tracking so that it will log all file access, all file changes, and to report same with a matching user network logon record. The network manager says he needs time to figure out how to do that."

This was not the answer the auditor was looking for and I believe the network manager should have understood that. He should have said "OK" and solved the problem (now I realize that the auditor might have wanted to have it done while he was standing there, but let's assume he didn't).

You always have to adapt the message to the receiver and the FLOSS community is not quite there yet.

Oh yeah, one other thing

I'm sort of changing the focus of this blog (on a whim of course!) although not by a terrible lot.

I will continue to make this a blog about my little slowly ongoing media home project, but I will also make it a place to rant and rave a bit. What this means is that sometimes topics are quite likely to be off-topic. I have discovered a need to express myself in bursts of annoyance at some issues of today's society so I'll do that now and then. I'm getting older and grumpier so I need a place to vent. I might get another blog name if it takes over too much but I hope not ;-)

"94 bottles of beer on the wall, 94 bottles of beer..." Cheers!

Ok, english might get me some notice...

I'm not in the least bit surprised that my infinitesimally small section of the blogosphere hasn't been noticed that much. My own intentions all along were just that I want to be able to take notes on my media-enabled home project. However, a certain craving has manifested itself, and since the only comments I have are from some sort of "bot" begging me to visit "its" site. So english it is. Actually i find it somewhat easier to think in english when it's related to computers and technology. It's a sad situation and I'd really hate to see the swedish universities stop providing advanced courses in swedish. As an engineer I believe it is extremely important that you are fluent in your own language as it pertians to your field.

But I digress.

I also drink beer, but I snuck away from the corporate party for a while ;-)

Anyway, the Wife Acceptance factor has struck again! I had to give up on only recording video on our main computer and instead return the VCR to its spot under the TV set since I, yours truly, had mistakenly shut off/killed the computer during recording of beautiful wife's important recording for the third time. NB: There were no insurmountable technical difficulties (apart from some streaming issues that I have fixed), just that the solution was not stable enough if I forget about it - I need a dedicated box for this...

So I am currently investigating various chassis for use as a base for building an HTPC. The new miniHFX from german mCubed looks sweet, but we'll see. It's not exactly cheap but it fulfills a major requirement: silence.

Second problem is that video editing is so slow (if I want to get anything else done at all)! I need to set up a bunch of SATA disks in a RAID1+0 (or 0+1) configuration I think - or get a SCSI controller plus disk... Again, not exactly cheap. And if I build an HTPC I might offload this task from my machine so the problem goes away. Decisions, decisions...

Still haven't done my homework to provide a network picture. Soon (tm).

Ta-ta! Oh, btw: Sweden will probably crush England in tonight's game :-O

Organisk förändring

Tänk om man kunde skriva mera, det vore skönt - men det finns ju så mycket att läsa också och dessutom en hel del att göra så skrivandet få ta långa pauser ibland.

Jag har fortfarande inte ritat någon nätverksskiss. Eftersom det är ett hemmanätverk så kan jag ju hålla allt i huvudet, men vad händer om någon anna n ska ta över? T ex om vi säljer huset någon gång, eller om jag ska tipsa någon annan om hur man gör (eller skulle kunna göra) för att bygga sin egen decentraliserade video-, foto- och musikanläggning... Nåja, det kanske kommer...

För två veckor sedan drog jag äntligen en nätverkskabel i kanalen mellan kontoret och proppskåpet och igår kontakterade jag! Nu ska vi se om min lilla NSLU2 är mer med på noterna när det gäller filkopiering . Den verkar nämligen ha ogillat den trådlösa länken mellan skrivbordet och routern i proppskåpet, medan det funkade bra när den var inkopplad på skrivbordets switch. Dessutom kanske mp4 och avi till DSM-320 funkar bättre när man slipper två trådlösa hopp?

Kanske skulle dra nätverkskabel till vardagsrummet också, och avsluta projektet "Gömma kablar i list längs taket" (har väl stått still ett halvår eller så nu...) med att peta upp antennkabeln och dessutom en ethernetkabel så att jag inte behöver använda det trådlösa nätet alls. Det har iofs funkat ganska bra, men vissa problem tror jag beror på det trådlösa nätet.

Har förresten låtit DSM:en uppgradera sig till version 1.07eu, vilket har fått mycket skit i diverse forum, men för mig har det iaf inte funkat mycket sämre än tidigare, något fler konstiga låsningar möjligen, men det kan lika gärna bero på nya versioner av servermjukvara. Tycker fortfarande TVersity är bäst.

Stor nackdel är att Twonky (som jag kör på min NSLU2) inte funkar alls bra, gränssnittet och även filmer och musik "låser" om jag använder den som server. Vet inte om det beror på burken själv eller om det är Twonky som bråkar. Ska väl skaffa ytterligare en NSLU2 för att felsöka...

Långsam förändring och utveckling gör iaf att man aldrig står still :-D

Inte död ännu...

Det har tagit mer av min tid och energi än väntat att vara hemma med barn. Det finns så mycket man vill göra och en hel del som man måste göra så bloggen har fått ligga nere ett tag...

Men!

Mediaspelaren lever i högönsklig välmåga och har nästan ersatt videon eftersom jag har införskaffat ett TV-kort (Hauppauge PVR350). Kommer snart att lägga upp en nätverksskiss, men eftersom jag också långsamt drar kabel i huset så ska beroendet av trådlös koppling minska, så då blir det vissa förändringar.

Översiktligt så spelar jag nu alltså in TV på datorn (mpeg2), denna kan sedan ses nästan direkt via mediaspelaren. Jag använder TVersity, en lysande ersättare till D-links mediaserver för detta. Använder GBPVR plus xmltv för programmering(inspelning.

Reklam skär jag bort med hjälp av Cuttermaran (demuxar först med DGIndex, vilket också ger mig indexfiler så att jag kan "frameserva" till t ex Virtualdub om jag vill göra avi:er senare). Detta är nästan nödvändigt eftersom DSM:en rent ut sagt suger när det gäller att spola. Man kan hoppa, men det bli ju alltid några chansningar innan man hamnar hyfsat rätt...

Har också införskaffat en NSLU2 och provat Twonkyvision på den, hade lite strul med den HD jag använde så ett nytt försök kommer.

Som sagt, önskar jag hade tid med mera detaljer här...

Vi hörs!

Ok, nu testad trådbundet oxå

Har inte haft så mycket tid att skriva på sistone, men nu har vi testat mycket kort i svågerns 10Mbps-LAN. Funkar fint, men inte hunnit se om några av de problem jag upplevt med trådlöst nät försvinner. Snart finns det dock tid till sånt, ska kanske också försöka dra nät hemma. Kanaler finns så det är bara tidsbrist som stoppar...

Sliter just nu med att transkoda en viss filmfil (mov med 3ivx-video och aac-audio), av nån anledning verkar det hemskt besvärligt att få Medialounge att spela upp den! Sitter med GSpot och försöker förstå varför vissa filer spelas upp och andra inte - lyckas inte hitta någon gemensam nämnare för de som inte funkar! När det problemet är löst så är det värt ett eget inlägg eller två!

Har för övrigt testa Windows mediaserver och inte märkt någon större skillnad på den och D-links mediaserver. Ska även testa TVersity, den verkar mycket intressant.

Börjar även lura på att av säkerhetsskäl ha en dator separat för nöjen (spel, mediaserver/-kodning, osv) och en för "seriös" verksamhet (bank, dokumentlagring, osv). Just mediakodning innebär i ett skede att man laddar hem och testar många olika program (eller så gör jag iaf) och det känns ibland som om man trots uppdaterat OS, AV och brandväggar inte riktigt har kontroll. Fet server med tv-kort, halvfet speldator, bärbar nyttodator och en extern hårddisk för backuper skulle jag vilja ha. Dålig acceptans för sånt hos äkta hälften dock, men vi får väl se.

Första test av DSM-320: MVG

Kommer berätta detaljer i ett senare inlägg, men kort ville jag notera att "Medialounge" fungerar eminent. Jag laddade ned senaste mediaservern (1.03) och uppdaterade spelaren till senaste firmware (1.05eu tror jag den hette). Det tog mindre än 10 minuter att få allt att fungera och då kör jag ändå trådlöst! Bra jobb D-link! Lite hackande ibland (både musik och video), men i stort sett fungerade det hela över förväntan. Efter att ha läst bl a forumet på ezboard måste jag säga att jag hade väntat mig värre.

Kanonkul!