Techlish

Hardy Har Har

2008-05-08T23:47:42Z

I have some minor annoyances with Ubuntu Hardy Heron:

Installing the latest version of btnx, deleting all the buttons in it, and reconfiguring them has not resolved an issue I was having where Firefox 3 beta overrides btnx's configuration. FF3's override stays after FF3's closed, but restarting btnx resets the mouse buttons back to what I want them to be. If I don't use FF3 beta, the mouse buttons stay fine. One possible culprit is the FireGestures add-on for FF3. My favorite All-In-One Gestures isn't updated for FF3 yet, so I had to settle for FireGestures. I'm still looking into this.

Print driver. I was trying to see if XSane, a scanning engine for Linux, was usable, and decided to install a package of HP drivers. Lo and behold, my HP Laserjet 1200 printer was wroth at such action, and perforce decideth to lock up ye systemme when accessed. I've fixed this driver-related screwup and still hate XSane's insanity. So Windows is still where I go to scan images. Grr. I know, that's an XSane issue. But the printer driver shouldn't be updated unless I tell the damn thing to be updated, mmkay?

I guess this next one isn't really a Hardy issue, it's an XMMS issue. XMMS, the Linux Winamp, is not available under Hardy Heron. Imagine my delight when I found out that XMMS was replaced with XMMS2. 2 must be better than the first iteration, right? RIGHT!? Well, yes and no. Turns out that XMMS2 is a daemon that does a great job of playing music, but it expects user interaction through the command line rather than a GUI. This blows my mind a little. I mean, I understand that they're pulling away from coding graphics and just want to focus on the playback, but come on, why not have a superbasic GUI? Instead there are plenty of potential XMMS2 front ends that are in development, none of which has the ease of use of XMMS. *sigh* On the other hand, exaile, the Gnome version of amaroK, a decent iPod-aware program, is looking pretty stable, and it seems like the quiet playback issue has been resolved. So I'm using that now for music.

I have a cron job that runs hourly to mirror my current home directory structure to my file server via rsync. After I booted into Hardy, I tried to run the cron job manually to get a snapshot of any config files that had changed. Interestingly enough, hard drive access on my file server went berserk. Turns out that a directory called .gvfs in my home directory was pretty much a mirror of the entire hard drive. Yep, the cron job was trying to sync up the Gnome Virtual File System. The job crashed out with an error, fortunately, so I excluded that directory and all's good now. So that was fun. Running df at the command prompt, there's an entry called "gvfs-fuse-daemon" that's the same size as my hard drive. Again, the Gnome Virtual File System is the culprit. Having looked at a general overview of what the GVFS project is doing, I'm all for it, but 'tis a might bit funky at the moment.

Finally, and this may be an NVidia driver issue, there are some occasional visual glitches once in a while that resolve themselves, but a flash of discombobulated video isn't something I like in my desktop experience. Anyone else seeing this with a high end NVidia card?

Good things about Hardy far outweigh the negatives. It's much more responsive overall, and seems to run my CPU cooler for some reason under the same load. Boot time is very snappy. Google Notebook and del.icio.us seem to have embraced Firefox 3 beta with mostly-functional updates, which, aside from my mouse button woes, were my big beefs with Firefox 3 beta. It's good. Just more troublesome than my Feisty Fawn to Gutsy Gibbon upgrade.

Night Watch

2008-05-04T23:14:13Z

I just finished the last book of the Night Watch trilogy by Sergei Lukyanenko and wanted to dispense some thoughts. I'll start by paraphrasing one of the back cover quotes by saying that the books are part typical modern hidden group of supernatural others stories, part hardboiled detective stories, but it also must be noted that the three books of short story collections are written by a Russian and set in Russia, giving a light, glossed-over view of that culture. Some of the "Russian-isms," like characters using the full name of another character they are speaking with much more frequently than Americans would, jarred me until I got used to it, and lyrics of (I assume) modern Russian music that the text quotes deal with themes that are much more thought-provoking than most I've heard in English. The cross-cultural immersion reminds me of some parts of the movie "Lost in Translation". Fortunately, there aren't any parts where a lack of familiarity with the Russian culture hinders understanding the plot, but the stories are definitely more interesting with these added cultural tidbits.

The tales are fairly classic noir detective pieces in structure, with some variation thrown for good measure, but magic and the epic Cold War-esque battle between Light and Dark form the setting instead of fedoras and a dark cityscape. Like any good noir, Lukyanenko explores varying moralities fairly deeply, but the stories are about equally split between psychological exploration, maneuvering/discovery, and physical (and metaphysical) action. The pacing is pretty good, with a bit of a lull at the beginning of the second book that picks up tremendously before that book ends. Some of the dueling conversations between the various factions throughout the trilogy are fascinating, and some of the characterization is excellent.

Additionally, while the trilogy hinges on the evolving worldview of one main character as well as his triumphs and failures, each of the three books highlights interactions with one of the three main underground factions in the setting. As a whole, it's a fun, not too dark, but not too light, exploration of Good vs. Evil that I highly recommend. Although they are much more gritty than Harry Potter books, and not as well written, I think most people who liked HP would enjoy these, as well as anyone playing horror roleplaying games.

Hardy in da Haus

2008-04-29T04:32:30Z

I took the plunge into Hardy Heron already. So far I have mainly good things to report. I had issues getting the NVidia driver to work right with my 8800 GTS 512, but after utterly uninstalling the one that envy installed under Gutsy Gibbon and installing the NVidia driver through recovery root prompt with a -f to force installation, the driver's installated fine. Another hardware-related issue arose from btnx, which I used to map a couple mouse buttons, seeming to be a little confused. I had to redetect buttons, for example, then the newly remapped buttons work fine in most things, except that Firefox doesn't seem to be consistent with it. I'll have to experiment more to see if I can figure out what's happening.

But as I said, so far, mostly so good. I want to play with the new task scheduling to see if I can break it. Seems like CPU usage with BOINC using no more than 80% of the CPU is a bit odd. I mean to say that CPU usage had a pattern when looking at the System Monitor in Gutsy, but not so much in Hardy, where both CPU cores tend to stick around 100% usage more of the time... Ah, I forgot about the file indexing, that's probably rolling in the background and since I turned off the indexer tray icon I'm just not seeing it. Durr.

The Firefox 3 beta that's included with Hardy needs some more work, but I expect updates to come in as the application's development reaches release. Inclusion of a beta as a main browser in a desktop OS is a bit odd to me, but it's just about fully baked, so no biggie.

Seems like Hardy's a touch more responsive than Gutsy, but I haven't pushed it hard, as I said above. I think the thing I like most about Hardy is the commitment to be supported for three years.

Now I'm off to play with multimedia apps to see how they do.

I Don't Much Care for JOLT

2008-04-21T04:27:10Z

Internet access here at the haus was amazingly slow for the last couple of days, even after some warm reboots of the firewall/router, changing DNS entries, etc. I didn't spot anything on cox.net's network status about an outage, and was getting normal network speeds on the internal network. Traceroutes to multiple external sites weren't consistent as to where there might be an issue. I took my time troubleshooting because I didn't have a good reason to need full Internet speed and figured that cox.net would find the problem in a couple days if it was in their network.

I finally looked at my firewall/router logs when the problem didn't resolve by day three and found a bunch of malformed ICMP packets hitting my external IP address from multiple external sources. It looked like my router was under a light DDOS attack. Why? Hell if I know, I don't have anything running back here that might be of interest other than my file server, which stays powered off when no one's using a system on the network, like all the client systems. The router was saying that the packets might have been a JOLT attack. Reading further, I discovered that JOLT attacks target Windows boxes trying to lock 'em up, so someone may have thought I had a Windows box available at this IP address that they wanted to lock up for some reason. More likely it was some automated script kiddie activity. Again, wtf? Stupid script kiddies fishing for whatever joy they can, I guess. Maybe since my firewall/router didn't go down, their automated setup just kept at it, trying to knock it down before moving on. Would have been fun to tie up their resources further, but my wife and I gotta have our IntarWeb when we want it.

Simply turning off the target system usually resolves a JOLT attack according to the above site, so I cold restarted the firewall/router, effectively dropping the target completely off the Web for a couple minutes, and when the thing came back online, poof, Internet connectivity returned to normal speed. I'm not seeing malformed ICMP packets coming in like they were before, either.

My unknown assailant probably has chalked up another Windows box or router locked up and moved on. Whatever. Hope their system(s) overheat.

A Tale of Ubuntu, Windows XP, and a New Hard Drive

2008-04-09T23:39:58Z

Got a new 500 gig hard drive the other day to replace the 120 gigger I've had for long time. I knew it would be rough replacing my existing hard drive with another one thanks to my dual boot Windows XP and Ubuntu Gutsy configuration, but I wanted to do the deed to learn what was involved. I'm funny that way about computers.

The story that follows is primarily geared toward techies. Other readers may want to leave the entry now, heheh.

Tools used: Ubuntu Gutsy AMD 64-bit CD, Recovery is Possible Linux boot CD, Windows XP Pro original setup CD.

Both drives are SATA drives, and because of the way that the SATA controllers are physically placed on my motherboard, my old drive is seen by Linux as /dev/sda2, while my new drive was /dev/sda1. Since my motherboard BIOS has a setting for which hard drive to boot from, this is fine.

I started by adding the new drive into the system and booting up under Ubuntu. I ran gparted to partition the new drive. Since my original drive was initially formatted as a single NTFS partition, then I added Ubuntu on as a dual-boot, my first partition is the NTFS Windows partition, second partition is ext3 for Ubuntu, and then I have an extended partition with 2.5 gigs of Linux swap space. I mirrored this setup on the new drive, roughly matching the proportions of the NTFS and ext3 partitions but leaving 3 gigs for swap space.

I rebooted the system into Ubuntu Gutsy using the Live CD so I could manipulate file systems "from on high". I can't express how cool Live CDs are to me now. Anyway, I copied the old Windows and Ubuntu data to the proper new partitions using rsync. Here's where I blew it on the Windows side to start with, but more about that later.

I had the presence of mind after reading some other Ubuntu hard drive upgrade stories to find out the uuid of the new partitions and edit both the /boot/grub/menu.lst and /etc/fstab files on the new drive to update their uuid entries with the new partition information. Note for the future: Looking under /dev/[disk]/by-uuid/ you find links to the /dev/[partition] so you can figure out which uuid goes to what partition without guessing. Lost about an hour to guessing on those before I figured that one out.

I rebooted using the Recovery Is Possible (RIP) CD, which I now highly recommend in any Linux user's toolkit. I dropped to a command line from GRUB (type "c") and typed in "setup (hd0) (hd0,1)" to install GRUB into the new MBR and tell it to look at the second partition on the drive for boot information (remember Windows is on the first partition). That went fine.

Then I pulled the old hard drive out of the configuration and booted into Ubuntu Gutsy. Bada boom, bada bing.

Windows wasn't booting right yet, because I hadn't put system information on the Windows partition yet. DOH! So I booted up the Windows XP setup CD, told it to reformat the first partition, and let it start installing off the CD. There's a point partway through the XP installation where it restarts the system to boot from the hard drive and install more off the CD. This was where I pulled the CD out of the drive and booted instead into the RIP CD configuration, because at this point I know the Windows XP system information has been written. I also know that in the process, XP has overwritten the master boot record with its own boot information, so I redid the GRUB setup trick from the RIP CD again and rebooted into my Ubuntu Gutsy configuration. The Windows XP partition mounted as usual because I have it automount on startup in Ubuntu Gutsy, so I rsync'd files from the old Windows configuration to the new one, then rebooted the system into Windows XP. There have been a few hiccups with Windows, notably things like the desktop.ini files showing up all over the place because they aren't hidden anymore, and the recycle bin got corrupted, but overall things look like they're playing well. Why? rsync probably didn't keep Windows file attributes, my attempt at getting at the Windows admin password through an Ultimate Boot CD utility to boot into a Windows XP recovery console mangled some parts of the registry, or both. Either way, I'll probably copy old to new through Windows XP next time.

So the new drive's now running both my Windows XP and Ubuntu Gutsy configurations and I've pulled out the old drive to keep as a spare. The new drive's noticeably faster than the previous one, which is nice. Total time on the upgrade, including headscratching and booboo resolution was about a day. Total work time was probably about 8 hours, most of which was copying files hither and yon.

This exercise has shown me a few things. I have a much better understanding of Linux's hard drive "guts" and where in Ubuntu to look for device and boot configuration data. Ubuntu is easier to migrate than Windows XP. I don't think I have a use for the Ultimate Boot CD anymore, much as I used to like it. Recovery Is Possible is an excellent resource for Linux hard drive upgrades and recovery. Most importantly, though, I now know that I can rebuild my entire configuration from backups if there's a catastrophic meltdown. This last one makes me mighty happy, and I feel like my Ubuntu-fu is almost as good as my Windows-fu now. Am I going to get Vista-fu? I'll try not to for as long as possible. I'll just keep getting mo' better with Ubuntu.

vi Nerdery

2008-04-06T02:23:00Z

Why Use vi? answers that ancient, well-worn question admirably for any *ix-heads out there who wonder. Especially programmers. vi's my editor of choice on *ix systems. It's everywhere, I understand it, though not nearly as well as this guy does, and holy crap is it powerful for just about any application I can think of having to do with real work.

I was browsing further about vi and one of the links from the above page led me to a vi tutorial page and then on another one linked from that one I found a fascinating little dojigger in the form of a Dvorak keyboard layout map for vi commands. Now I have the layout, but can't find the page again to link it up here. But this is tres cool for me, a Dvorak keyboard layout usin' dude. Thanks, vi / Dvorak gurus!

Shuffling the Stranger Castle Compass

2008-03-31T03:59:54Z

Yep, another little theme shuffle here. I got tired of having slow scrolling on the old theme, though I loved it so.

I finished up Bryson's I'm a Stranger Here Myself and have to say it's climbed to number two on my favorite Bryson books list, closely following In a Sunburned Country. After I wrote my previous review, the next few episodes in Stranger were simply sublime pieces of humor, some of Bryson's most humorous work. Serves me right for reviewing a partially-read book.

I followed that up with Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle which, as many Dick novels, has a somewhat cryptic ending. The novel is about the movements of the I Ching and its relationship to a novel that all of the major characters are reading. Man in the High Castle is an alternate history, but so is the novel that the characters are reading as they go about their various activities. Reading or interacting with this fictional book is a minor glue that holds together the characters, becoming more and more important as the novel proceeds. The conclusion has some fascinating psychological gyrations that I won't spill. Suffice it to say that this mental twist of an alternate history inside of an alternate history takes a spectacular dive off a cliff by the story's close. Additionally, there is a strong theme of cultural interaction as Eastern, European (German, actually), and American cultures collide and intermingle in the book. Dick stereotypes and humanizes these various cultures, commenting with deft strokes, and leaving no clear winner in the comparisons. As you can probably tell, I dug it muchly.

A friend's loaned me Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass and its sequel. So far I like the setting, the characterizations, and how the plot's flowing, but I'm starting to see a religion vs. science theme that might get a bit irritable to me. Hopefully it's not drummed up too much.

Is Social Networking a Fad?

2008-03-22T19:45:39Z

Bob Cringely ponders whether or not social networking is destined, like CB Radio, to crash and burn.

I think social networking will be around for a while, but its popularity's going to dwindle some over time. I find it to be a bit of work to keep up with too many different people on too many different sites these days. Even though I still have an account on LinkedIn from years back, I don't think I've logged on there since '06, because I can't think of anything I'd be interested in there that I can't get from another virtual location. These days I gravitate more toward tools like Google Reader that can aggregate data from bunches of different blogs and other sources these days, and anything that can't be pulled into such a site gets left behind.

What do you guys think about the proliferation of closed social sites on the IntarWeb?

Linux and Media

2008-03-13T04:03:39Z

I'm still using Linux for my primary desktop for the foreseeable future and wanted to weigh in on the state of multimedia compatibility. Well, at least my own experiences. To catch up some readers, I've jailbroken my iPod Touch, it's running the 1.3 firmware, and I'm able to connect to it in Linux through SSH. Which brings me to the crux of this, a commentary on the state of multimedia apps on Linux. Frankly, they're behind Windows apps, which makes me grumpy enough to not put links in this post.

Amarok, for whatever reason, doesn't play well with my GNOME-based Linux setup. I have no idea why, but it locks right up on startup. Maybe I should try it again since the KDE libraries have been upgraded recently. This left me with gtkpod as my Linux iPod-related music manager. gtkpod wants to look at my existing file library when it starts up, when I change some information on a song, etc. It becomes a click, do something else for a few minutes, click, do something else for a few minutes routine. Not good. Synching to the iPod Touch is slow, mainly because I have most of my music library in Ogg Vorbis format that gtkpod happily converts to mp3 for me on the fly. This I like.

On the Windows side, there's iTunes, which is functional but system-intrusive, and the latest beta of MediaMonkey, which I purchased because it does what gtkpod does, doesn't intrude like iTunes, and is fairly speedy except for the ogg-to-mp3 conversions. iTunes doesn't let me put 3/4 of my library onto my iPod Touch because it doesn't want to even look at Ogg Vorbis files in its default configuration. Screw dat.

So my best iPod Touch manager is a Windows application now. 'Sokay, I'm in Windows playing games fairly often anyway. But it's irritating. The problem is Apple's dopey attempt to control the iPod's content. This is hardware that's being marketed to tech-savvy, Apple, the community will find workarounds. Open it up! I have an iRiver H340 that I can directly access like a hard drive (actually it is a hard drive) through USB. No special software's needed, I just plunk files onto the thing. If there's something new on the unit when it powers up, it updates its database and away we go. The iRiver also plays .ogg files, which probably make up over 75% of my music. But you guys have probably heard about that enough already in my blog.

OK, so after writing this so far, I noticed that my Audacious configuration is playing my freshly-ripped music with pops and clicks. I dropped the CPU usage on my BOINC configuration without any relief. Thinking maybe it was the original file, I played the same file flawlessly through XMMS. DAMMIT! I'll play with it more some other time.

My point is this: Linux's amazing flexibility has a serious drawback in the form of a lack of stable and cohesive media handling. While I'm no slouch when it comes to doing crazy stuff to get something to work on Linux and understand the value of such as learning experience, I'd rather not have to do it. I'd also rather be able to have one or two applications to do my media than one that's better at handling my 5.1 speaker setup or WMV files or DVDs with deep menu systems than another.

Linux leet hax0rz, please can I have something that works as well for me as MediaMonkey for organizing my music and interacting with my iPod Touch, and something with the excellent playback capabilities of foobar2000? I'm too dumb and busy to figure it out on my own. Actually, I may try foobar2000 using Wine. I already know MediaMonkey doesn't work under Wine.

Sometimes I miss Windows's "it just works" when it comes to multimedia.

Stranger Format

2008-03-12T01:47:43Z

I'm still reading through Bill Bryson's I'm a Stranger Here Myself and enjoying it very much, but the similar format of each entry is weighing slightly on that enjoyment. They're too short, unfortunately. While the content is still very good, Bryson's unable to go into enough depth on some topics in these three- to four-page essays to really cover them as effectively and hilariously as he does in his longer works. Maybe part of it is also that he didn't have much time to put each of these together before it needed to be published originally. Some bits are convulsively funny, absolutely classic must-reads for any middle-aged American, and the rest is good examples of short humorous prose, so I still highly recommend the book to any Bryson fans and also to anyone interested in the works of Dave Barry and Garrison Keilor, but it's probably number three on my favorite Bryson books list.

Boy Did I Lie... Catching Up

2008-03-04T19:11:25Z

I so lied when I said content would pick up last post ... Just had a bunch of other stuff going on in meatspace, but I'm back. I think I'll just blorp out a mish-mash and let you poor folks slog through it rather than splitting into separate tech and "-lish" posts, so hold on tight.

Neil Gaiman recently made some headlines by releasing his masterwork American Gods for free. If you haven't read this book, I can't recommend it enough. Gaiman is unsurpassed at creating modern mythology that dips deeply into prior mythological work, and American Gods and the Sandman graphic novels are not only Gaiman's best, but the best literary works of the genre, and definitely among the best works of modern fictional storytelling. It's free now, so go git it!

I've begun reading Bill Bryson's I'm a Stranger Here Myself, a collection of short articles that Bryson wrote for a British readership after moving back to America. They are absolutely hilarious diatribes about various oddities of American life delivered with Bryson's brilliant blend of razor wit and deep reverence. This may be his best, narrowly beating out In a Sunburned Land as my top Bill Bryson book. Bryson's neck and neck right now with Dave Barry as my top literary humorist.

Moving on through the "-lish", here's an unbelievably cool tropes wiki. What's a trope? From the front page of TV Tropes, they are "devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations." This means tropes are important to writers, critics, and anyone else interested in modern story-telling, including roleplaying gamers. It also means absolutely fascinating reading because the entries are just about everything but dry.

I found some gems of awfulness on the TV Tropes "So Bad It's Horrible" entry to share. Beware, these are toxic. First, The Eye of Argon, one of the most terrible fantasy epics ever. (This is "terrible" in the senses of both really bad and terribly violent at the same time) Next, widely regarded as the worst poem in English, I present the short horror of Theophilus Marzials's "A Tragedy".

Finally, in the roleplaying game category are two stinky examples of So Bad It's Horrible that I have to spotlight. The second is near and dear to my heart, as you'll see. Read this review of FATAL. FATAL was an RPG that I got maybe a page and a half into before I completely wiped my freely-obtained copy online somewhere. There's a link to the FATAL PDF at the top of the review if you're really desperate. I'd rather say I'm not linking to it than linking to it. Then there's the Wraeththu roleplaying game. As some of you may recall, I subjected myself to the first Wraeththu novel and started on the second before tossing the whole series out as utter rubbish, so this review of how terrible the RPG is strikes a sympathetic chord with me. The review's more oriented toward gameworld and setting analysis than system mechanics, and it's hi-lariously harsh. Shockingly, people are evidently paying money for the Wraeththu game.

I'm done with purely literary topics for this post. As a bridge to tech topics, here's an interesting article about "cultural" aspects of free operating system users (i.e. Linux). Especially interesting are items 5 and 6 in the list: "Free software users explore" and "Free software users expect to help themselves". In other words, free software users tend to be more confident and technically savvy with technological tools, something I find to be generally true. Linux nerds, ho!

Speaking of Linux, Anyone mounting FUSE filesystems under Linux should check this article out about setting up afuse, a FUSE filesystem automounter. I'm using FUSE to ssh into my iPod Touch, but I have a pair of scripts I run manually to do the mount and unmount of the FUSE filesystem that are working fine for me. Still, automation is good, right? So I might look into this on down the road.

Finally, I present InfoWorld's all-time top 25 flops list. I disagree heartily with some of these, such as iPod imitators, and wanted to link this up to air my strong ongoing opinion that money flows from sources to media makers to promote their products. I don't have any evidence to back this up on this particular article, but just from the iPod imitators entry I have to wonder how much InfoWorld and/or the author of this article benefits from Apple. My iRiver media player beats the shizzle out of my iPod Touch in one major area: media compatibility. I like Ogg Vorbis audio much more than MP3, so thanks to Apple's unwillingness to allow their media players to play this totally free compressed audio format, I'm highly inconvenienced. Dicks. There are workarounds, but why should I have to go there? Just open it up, Apple! Sorry, started ranting a little there. I also disagree with other entries in the list, such as the PS/2. The PS/2 wasn't popular with consumers, but it was an important interim step in the evolution of PC hardware that shouldn't just be discounted as an outright failure, for example. So this is thought-provoking on a couple levels for people who've been teching for a while.

Adam Boeglin, the excellent porter of various apps to the iRex iLiad, generated a new FBReader version a month or two ago. I plopped it excitedly onto my iLiad and found that I have almost no use for the new version unless I can get it to be the default reader for .txt files and I can access the options to change the font and alter text formatting for different files. This bums me out, because otherwise, it looks to be a nice update. Adam's now beating on a usable browser for the iLiad that looks hawt, but I'm browsing via my iPod Touch these days if I need a portable browser.

One more note about the iLiad and then this post's toast. I have read bunches of formats of ebooks on my iLiad and I have to say that the iLiad-formatted PDF offerings at Feedbooks are the finest. You download a book, move it to the iLiad, find it in the iLiad's hierarchy, pop it open, and stop thinking you're reading something in an electronic format. No resizing, fine legibility, and the flexibility of the iLiad's built-in PDF reader all combine into an excellent, seamless reading experience. Bravo, Feedbooks!

iPod Touch Upgrade, Sandman, and Other Reading

2008-01-27T18:29:23Z

I've now got a jailbroken 1.1.3 firmware iPod Touch. Some of the apps I was using didn't quite work right with the new firmware but that seems to have been resolved with a bit of upgrading. I learned some things about how ssh works to get the iPod Touch syncing back up with Ubuntu again, too. What good is a toy if it's not edjikayshunal? The deeds are done and I'm good to go, back to using it as my primary in-car music source. Aw yeah.

Best of all, no iTunes was involved, though I find myself browsing through the podcasts once in a while.

I dove into the three Sandman graphic novels that one of my stepdaughters gave me for Christmas last week and utterly devoured them. There's unbelievably good stuff in there, and now I have GOT to get the last graphic novel to finish up the story because the ending of the last book I have leaves a gigantic change that needs resolution. Mr. Gaiman, I salute you and thank you again for this amazing literary journey.

I'm still cruising through The Secret Adversary and enjoying its breathless sensational pace and the whole English society setting. One of the protagonists calls a friendly young man a brick in one sentence, and while I thought at first that she was berating him unjustly for dimwittedness, I learned from context that she meant he was rock solid and dependable, as one example. Another fun difference from current usage is that "cute" is used to mean "smart". It's fun.

I haven't started Battle Royale or any of my new Bill Bryson books as my wife's tasked me with reading some of the baby-related books that she's been going through. I may have to give Battle Royale back to its owner unread.

Not that interesting this post, there's been a lot going on in meatspace these past couple of weeks. Content here will pick up, though.

PC != Windows

2008-01-17T07:26:35Z

A quick gripe: When marketing folk say "Works on PC and Mac" they almost always really mean "Works on Windows and Mac". They could mean "Might work on Wine under Linux, but definitely is supposed to work on Windows and Mac", but probably not.

This comes after reading about Apple's new transfer a DVD to your computer thingy.

iPod Touch under Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy 64-bit is GO

2008-01-17T06:32:42Z

I got my iPod Touch syncing through Ubuntu Gutsy via gtkpod! It's not a full solution, because gtkpod doesn't handle some of my files correctly, possibly due to directory depths on my file server, so I have to look into that further, but gtkpod will convert my Ogg Vorbis files to mp3 format and send 'em to the iPod Touch. The full solution was, frankly, laborious. I'll go over all of the general steps, though, and let people hunt down the details because I sure as hell can't find them now.

Ensure Wi-Fi is working at home for the iPod Touch.
Set the iPod Touch to not autolock. Very important step while working with the Wi-Fi, avoiding many connectivity issues.
Jailbreak the iPod Touch. I ended up leaving mine at 1.1.1 firmware release thanks to issues with the 1.1.2 jailbreaking.
Install the BSD subsystem and OpenSSH onto the iPod Touch through the newly-available Installer.
Set up OpenSSH on my Ubuntu system.
Set up SSH access to the iPod Touch.
Use ipod-convenience to set up a mount point of /media/ipod on my Ubuntu system and test it.
Install the latest and greatest gtkpod. Configure it to point to my music library and the iPod Touch. Manually get gtkpod to add library subdirectories because it doesn't seem to go down more than a couple of directory levels. Test synchronizing a non-mp3 to the iPod Touch. Adjust as needed and retest. Repeat until it's working.

iTunes is still useful in case I totally blow out the iPod Touch or I feel a deep sense of urgency to upgrade the firmware. At this point I haven't got either of those issues, but I am interested in some of the podcasts I can get through there. I might rent movies through iTunes, too, I dunno. If I do, it'll be to watch 'em on my computer rather than the iPod Touch. I don't get why someone would want to watch a full length movie on such a tiny screen.

Anyway, this means my iPod Touch is now officially a useful toy for me rather than just interesting to dink around with. Thanks to all of the hackers and developers who are opening up the iPod Touch under Linux. I'm hunting for online tip jars for you people...

Self-Review and a Video Card Battle

2008-01-13T06:19:18Z

I did a quick review of this blog just for grins and was surprised to see that it's been going for almost two years now. So I survived all of 2007 without running some version of BBS or forum, the longest lapse in doing so in a couple of decades. I miss it sometimes. Other times I think about the amount of time I spent on it vs. the amount of time I have to do such things now. Still, it was a great social thing for me, and I don't regret much of the time spent at all. I wouldn't be nearly as good at figuring out how to do things on computers without that experience, wouldn't have my excellent stepdaughters because I wouldn't have met my first wife, and just wouldn't be me without having run The Place of Magic.

I know it's cliche to look back on the past at the beginning of a new year, but I think it's important to see where you've been to try to keep the journey so far in perspective so it's easier to focus on what's ahead. Unfortunately for me, there's a lot of regret involved in some of my past decisions. I was young for too long... heheh. But again, I wouldn't be me if I hadn't done things the way I have, and I'm pretty happy with me right now. Overall.

But enough about that, I've been considering some system upgrades lately that are much more interesting. I made the mistake of buying Unreal Tournament 3 recently and while it's playable on my system, my nearly two-year-old video card's just not up to the task of displaying sci-fi violence with Unreal Engine 3. The NVidia 6800GS-based card's treated me extremely well, even better than my last ATi card did for its "lifetime". I have my eyes on an NVidia 8800GTS video card with 320 megs of RAM, but other than playing this one game, I don't have a reason to upgrade. Really, I don't. Compiz Fusion is fine under Gnome with a considerable amount of visual bling, I just have the ol' hardware lust thing going again. I should put the money toward credit card payments. Dilemmas, dilemmas.

So the next day after writing the above I got a new video card in NVidia's 8800 line. While Windows XP installation was a breeze, Ubuntu seemed to fight every step of the way, first by blanking the screen out and turning my monitor off while the opening splash screen was going, and then by beating down just about every attempt I made to get the video drivers installed. I even installed links, the text Web browser, so I could search the Web because I couldn't get X to come up consistently.

Many thanks to the Ubuntu support forums and posts from the developers of Envy for helping me to resolve these two issues. The last issue I ran into was that the currently-released NVidia driver for this card pegs the fan speed at 100% and sounding like yet another jet engine of dooooom. The latest beta of nvclock has the option to force this particular card into auto fan speed mode, which is very quiet, but getting nvclock set up was a bit problematic as well, including a brief trip through dependency hell. I Learned Stuff Overall.

How's the video card? It's so fast I hardly even see it. Unbelievable. Unnecessary. But awesome. Half-Life 2 with everything turned all the way up is smooth as silk. Unreal Tournament 3, too. And everything else I have on here.

So back to reading things. I have trouble reading non-nerdiness and nerding at the same time.

This post saved without links so you guys can give Google a bit more of a workout.

Conversions, Feedbooks, and Reading

2008-01-03T20:56:25Z

HowTo Convert a Friend to Linux starts out hilarious and proceeds into thoughtful and helpful advice on this nerdtastic topic. One thing I thought was most interesting was the lack of dual booting or usage of a secondary system for Linux immersion. Both of these things have proven invaluable for me, a PC gamer who needs Windows to play many games on, and those fallback measures should prove at least useful for others.

In other news, IPv6 may be coming to a root DNS server near you on February 4 of this year. What does this mean? It means that full end to end IPv6 over the Internet will become possible without the use of any IPv4 (aka "The Way TCP-IP Is Now") hardware. It also means that sysadmins should check their DNS servers and firewalls for compatibility, though not IPv6 compatibility but with the ability to send and receive packets over 512 bytes in size. See the article for more details.

IPv6 is definitely coming, folks, and while IPv4's still going to be going strong for years, IPv6 is eventually going to beat it down. My prediction is that in five years IPv6 will be the predominant protocol used in new networks. Late this year I plan to look at my network hardware and nodes and see what I'd need to upgrade to IPv6. I probably won't make the switch, even partially, until 2009 at the very earliest, but we'll see.

Feedbooks.com, one of my favorite online book sources, has a rough beta of their iNewsStand software available for the iRex iLiad. I haven't tried it yet, but this service is poised to be a killer app for any ebook reader that supports it, able to bring in RSS feeds, Web-based news, books, Sudoku puzzles, and possibly other information and interactivity right onto the ereading device. It appears that FeedBooks already has a working Kindle version of this application. Bravo!

In other iLiad news, I find that browsing on the thing is just too slow. But reading a lot of text or PDFs on the iLiad is like night and day vs. the iPod Touch. There's no comparison at all. One funny side effect of the iPod Touch's touch screen is that the more you use it with your finger, the more finger grease ends up making reading a little tougher. It's never enough to seriously affect usability, but it's there. The screen's too small for serious text reading, but it's fine for interactive fiction and general Web browsing. Decent for Google Reader, too, with Google's special mobile device formatting. But for anything of decent size, the iLiad's the way to go. I like it more than regular paper books now.

I've been exchanging paper books with a friend lately and recently finished up her copy of Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko. I liked it a lot as a variation on the usual "world of dark scariness" type of story. There are vampires and shapeshifters and other Others in it and all of this works in the context of the stories, with explanations given as needed while the plot unfolds in each of the three parts like a chess game. Readers may be able to guess what's going on before the end of each story, which is also extremely fun. The absolutes of morality figure strongly into the novel's overarching plot and themes, and by the end of the final part, readers have a full understanding not only of the main character, but the nature of the epic struggle between the Light and the Darkness. There is also a hint of information about a third group, the Inquisition, which oversees the actions of the two more active groups, leaving plenty of space open for more exploration. Night Watch is an English translation of a Russian book, and so some Russian mannerisms, such as stating a person's full name fairly frequently during conversation, show through, but these don't detract from the book so much as ensure that the reader knows the action happens in a non-English-speaking part of the world. I'm looking forward to reading the next books in the series.

My friend seems to be into dark sorts of stories, having also loaned me a modern Japanese Lord of the Flies tale called Battle Royale and another book called Wraeththu. Battle Royale is almost unreadable for me, basically looking more like a gratuitous slaughterfest than a revisitation of the morality play that Lord of the Flies presents. I'm going to plow through Battle despite the occasional survivor count notices plastered throughout the text because it's supposedly much more subtle than it seems. Wraeththu, written by Storm Constantine, is about Young Hermaphroditic Mutants In Love, and after reading the first novel of the trilogy between this book's covers, I can't stomach more. I don't understand why there are so many weird names for places, people, and things, or why most members of this astoundingly powerful new race have such gigantic, sappy relationship hangups. Constantine has generated a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting pregnant with interesting story possibilities, but it seems as if he's using it as an outlet for Anne Rice-esque passionate vampire stories that are dissimilar enough to Rice's tales to avoid being lumped wholesale into the same cauldron with Poppy Z. Brite and others of that genre. I guess I'm not into "standard" romance genre fare, even with mutants and magic.

I'm definitely more picky about literature than I thought I was a few months ago. Maybe it's that I have so much to read now via my iLiad and my threshold for what I want to spend time on has risen as a result. I also got three Sandman graphic novels and some Bill Bryson books from one of my stepdaughters for Christmas and dammit, they're calling to me, so maybe that impatience is a factor right now... I'll post something more about Battle Royale after I finish it.

And finally, I started in on an Agatha Christie public domain novel called The Secret Adversary. So far I'm enjoying it as a variation on my usual fare and as a fine introduction to Christie's general writing style. I see why her work's so popular, with its engaging dialog and characterizations. I've been warned, though, that I shouldn't try to figure out who's done what until the very end, as Christie's notorious for bringing in extra characters and such during the final exposition scene, making correct deduction extremely difficult if not impossible in her stories. It's fun light reading, making a fine contrast with my other recent reading.

Yet Another New Toy

2007-12-26T19:57:59Z

Happy holidays, folks! Hope this finds you all well and nerdly! It's definitely finding me that way, even though I'm having to venture into the Big Blue Room for social interaction. Actually, I like the familial gatherings, but the nerd in me twitches for a keyboard and Intarweb access despite enjoying the food and conversation.

My big geeky "present" so far this fine season has been a 16 gig iPod Touch that my place of employment gave me for my part in the extensive amount of work that my department has done for the company in the last year or two. And the fact that said extra workload has finally completed. To be honest, I wouldn't get one of these things myself, but for free, I'm finding it a hugely fun toy.

Why wouldn't I want an iPod Touch of my own? Well, for starters, the vast majority of my personal music library is in Ogg Vorbis format, which the iPod doesn't play. iTunes will play them, but the iPod doesn't. I already have a 40 gig iRiver H340 that plays my music and with Rockbox installed, I can have some other fun with it as well, so I really don't need a personal music player. I also, after working with it for a while, dislike iTunes a bunch. Gimme something like foobar2000 or the Audacious music player that isn't tied to Windows and, well, doesn't suck.

Don't get me wrong, iTunes does its basic job fairly effectively, managing content and synchronization from system to iPod nicely, but its playback quality isn't so hot (I have a 5.1 speaker setup and a near-audiophile pair of ears) and its inability to deal with directories of music for organization is a massive drawback for me. Since iTunes doesn't understand Ogg Vorbis tagging, probably 75% of my music comes up as "-" in iTunes's listing with no artist, etc. Brilliant. I'm not about to go through all of my Ogg Vorbis songs and convert them, thus my conclusion that iTunes sucks for music playback and library management for my particular configuration.

So I've been looking at how to use the iPod Touch for other tasks than music playback, and found some very interesting tasks for it to perform as well as the possibility of non-iTunes library management and iPod synchronization.

Obviously if I have a Wi-Fi connection I can do a few things that the iPod Touch is designed for such as surfing with the built-in Safari, browsing YouTube videos, and perusing the iTunes store. But I spotted a note in the Ubuntu community docs that tells about mounting the iPod as a file system under Linux and decided that hell, the thing was free, I might as well mess with it.

First step was to jailbreak the iPod. Jailbreaking took me an afternoon of messing around because it appears that there's a broken component of the 1.1.2 jailbreak upgrade. I might have done something wrong somewhere for the three times I tried and retried, but it looks like a bug in some library management that's out of my hands. Not a big deal there, I've left the iPod's firmware at 1.1.1 because I'm too lazy to work directly on a local copy of the package myself. Once jailbroken, the possibilities explode for possible things to do on the iPod Touch. I have a newly-released test version of ScummVM on my iPod Touch along with Curse of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and Sam & Max Hit the Road to play. Lights Off has sucked up entirely too many hours of my time. I've customized the regular interface look. I have several English dictionaries installed on it. I'm considering grabbing NES and/or Playstation emulators. I'm sure someone's working on MAME already. I have the interactive fiction interpreter Frotz on the thing that I can use with my purchased Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces of Infocom for hours of fun.

Best of all, though it's particularly nerdy, I'm able to mount the iPod's file system on my desktop through ssh and screw with it directly. I can use the iPod to store whatever I want through this, and there are already two applications that will take advantage of this interaction to allow for syncing from Linux to an iPod Touch/iPhone. However, the package issue I mentioned above appears to be affecting my ability to install the latest versions of these two apps so I'm using iTunes under Windows for the moment to sync music and videos onto the thing. Once that bug's resolved, though, bye bye Windows iTunes. Don't let the door hitcha on the way out.

Thanks to my workplace for giving me something to spend several days happily dinking away on, thanks to Apple for giving the hacker community such a fun toy to play with, and especially thanks to all the happy hackers out there building cool things for this beast. One thing I'd like to see is a local-running version of the iDice web app so I can roll dice on the iPod even if I don't have a WiFi connection. The other is for someone to patch the iPod music playing stuff to play .OGG files. I'm not able to work on this 'cuz I don't have the focus now for programming that I used to. kthkbye

A Pointing Device Configuration Tale

2007-12-10T20:17:59Z

Things around here are getting close to whatever passes for normal. I've been reading a bit, but most of my extra time's been going into fiddling with Ubuntu. As a result, I have a good Ubuntu pointing device configuration story for the nerdy.

As some of you may know, multi-button pointing device manufacturers spend their time creating good button configuration utilities and drives for Windows and sometimes Macs. Hardly any of them create Linux configurators for their devices. While Linux programs are available that allow for absolutely incredible pointing device configuration, solutions that mimic the functionality of Windows or Mac configurators end up being Frankensteinian combinations of multiple Linux tools. Most involve relating the results of a lot of trial and error. This is such a story.

I've been wrestling with having a not-fully-to-my-liking pointing device configuration for months now, battling with it off and on without success until this morning. A special shout-out is in order for two Web resources: This page gave me a couple of vital pieces of information I needed. Coupled with the excellent btnx application, the keys to the kingdom were mine, so to speak. btnx in particular is an awesome weapon in the Linux mouse configuration arsenal, but on to the story.

I use a USB Microsoft Trackball Explorer these days for my pointing needs. You might want to keep that picture up while I describe what I'm doing here. There are two buttons near the thumb, one large lower one and a smaller one above it. I'll call the two thumb buttons "big thumb" and "little thumb". A mousewheel sits between the two thumb buttons. Two more buttons sit to the right of the trackball, one under where my ring finger normally is, and one under my pinky. I'll call these "ring" and "pinky" buttons.

So the device has four "normal" buttons and a scroll wheel, which counts as three buttons (the wheel button itself, wheel up, and wheel down are all treated as buttons). That's a total of seven buttons, right? Actually, Linux picks up nine buttons on the device. My testing has determined that any button configured as button 6 will browse backward in Firefox, and button 7 is a browse forward. However, none of the buttons on my configuration normally map as buttons 6 or 7. The ring and pinky are buttons 8 and 9 according to xev. Go figure.

The normal configuration for the Trackball Explorer is for the big thumb button to left-click and the little thumb button to right-click. The ring and pinky buttons are set up as back and forward buttons for browsing in Windows, but Linux, as noted, doesn't care much about them. The mouse wheel acts as expected. This default configuration leaves the right click in an awkward position where users can't hit both right and left clicks at the same time. I'm not sure who thought this up, but it makes zero sense to me from a usability standpoint.

So my first configuration change is to move the right-click functionality to the ring finger button, freeing up the little thumb button for something else in the process. The tool of choice for this task is xmodmap, whose particular usage for this piece is generally covered here, though not for this exact application. Go check it out. Before working with xmodmap, though, this page mentioned taking a little visit to the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to ensure that the right driver's being used. On the Trackball Explorer, I have to have the Protocol line under the mouse configuration set to "ExplorerPS/2" or the system only sees 5 buttons. I spent many moons wrestling with duplicate mouse button functions before spotting this gem. Ensure that the number of buttons is set to 9 and ZAxisMapping is "4 5" for the Trackball Explorer. Make any changes needed, then restart X (I just restarted my system to be sure). Again, these settings are specific to the Trackball Explorer. Trial and error or Google searches should net settings for other devices.

Now xmodmap can reconfigure the buttons. Install xmodmap via whatever means you have available and set it up to start with your X session. The whole command line should be "xmodmap .xmodmaprc" so it loads its configuration file from your home directory. I built my .xmodmaprc file as follows:
pointer = 1 2 8 4 5 6 7 3 9

This switches pointer buttons 3 and 8 to move the right-click functionality to the ring finger button and set the little thumb button to do nothing. Run "xmodmap .xmodmaprc" from your home directory to remap the pointer buttons, and test by seeing if the ring finger button acts as a right-click in various applications. The little thumb button shouldn't do anything when clicked.

This is fine and dandy, resolving a major complaint I have with the way this device is set up by default, but at this point the little thumb and pinky buttons aren't configured to do anything. I like to set them to copy and paste in Windows, so I went about setting them to Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V respectively in Linux since most applications "know" those key combinations as copy and paste. btnx has this power, and while there are some other solutions out there that might have the same capability, they require some serious research and kludgery to get working. btnx is rather elegant for this purpose.

Get and install btnx and btnx-config from this page and run btnx-config. Detect your pointing device and buttons as in the btnx-config instructions. Enable and set the little thumb button to KEY_C with a modifier of KEY_LEFTCTRL. Enable and set the pinky button to KEY_V with modifier KEY_LEFTCTRL. Don't enable any other buttons, because btnx doesn't need to mess with them. Restart btnx from the btnx-config Configurations screen and test.

Bada boom, bada bing. If you want to use those two buttons for something besides copy and paste, btnx is amazingly configurable, allowing for all kinds of variations. Like I said before, it's a must-have for mouse configuration.

As a side note, some of you might ask why I don't use two buttons set for forward and backward browsing on the mouse. Well, I actually have that functionality in Firefox after installing the All-in-One Gestures add-on. The add-on mimics Opera's built-in mouse gestures fairly well, including the forward and backward controls. Try it out, you might like the ability to browse backward by doing a right-click-and-hold then a left-click as much as I do. With this workaround available for Firefox, I decided to make copying and pasting just a mouse click away each to further reduce moving my hand away from my pointing device. Ergonomically sound, no?

Ars Does Kindle Better

2007-11-27T17:33:15Z

Of course, after I post my thoughts on the Kindle based on my reading, Ars Technica posts an excellent overview of the beast. I still like my iLiad more thanks to its flexibility, but this article's brought the Kindle up a few notches in my opinion. I'm going to play later today with hooking up a USB keyboard to my iLiad and getting minimo to work on it just 'cuz I can...

Crazy Reading and Distributed Computing

2007-11-26T06:23:39Z

Wow, what a hefty few weeks. As some of you may already know, one of my stepdaughters died on November 10th. The funeral was last week in Oregon, and there's another memorial here in San Diego coming up on the 8th. After the wildfires at the end of October and my multiple-hernia repair surgery, this last month has been a most memorable bunch of crazy time.

While handling the madness, I finished up Harry Turtledove's The Guns of the South. Turtledove's research is excellent, and the novel feels more authentic for it. The plot is a good one, with a few threads that follow a fairly straightforward trail and others that are quite surprising. The first quarter of the book starts to grind a bit, looking like the introduction to a long series of grinding battle depictions, but then the war ends and the much more interesting aftermath begins. Guns of the South is an excellent presentation of real US Civil War information couched in science fiction. I learned quite a bit and enjoyed the trip considerably. Anyone interested in US history or alternate history novels will probably like this book.

Speaking of reading, my iLiad has been indispensible in the last few weeks, always handy with reading material or potential for geeking around. I'm considering starting to use the thing for note-taking at work, too. Not that I take a lot of notes, but when I go to meetings, I can save bringing a notepad. Really I only have one gripe about the iLiad: it still takes too long to start up. Hopefully startup time gets reduced in upcoming firmware releases.

Much hype is being made about another ereader that's just been released: Amazon's Kindle ereader. As an ereader owner/fan, I just have to weigh in. I think my wife put it best when I was describing the Kindle to her: "So you can get on the Internet anywhere you have cell coverage so that you can buy books from Amazon.com? That doesn't seem terribly useful." It's butt-ugly, too, with its keypad taking up a huge chunk of potential screen real estate. The idea with an ereader is to read displayed information, not to type, so chewing up screen space is an awful usability tradeoff. This is assuming, of course, that the Kindle's not able to chat or run word processing software. If it can do those things, maybe a keyboard's useful on it, but I don't see either of those tasks available on the Kindle, making the keyboard a serious waste of space. Give me a virtual keyboard on a bigger screen, I can still type with it. Or have an external USB port like the iLiad so you can run a bit of software and plug in a USB keyboard.

My biggest complaint with the Kindle is that it appears to be unable to simply read documents. You can email documents to the Kindle, but Amazon.com charges for converting the documents to a Kindle format for you. This locks out the ability to grab some of the excellent free text on the Web and read it on your Kindle. If I'd paid $400 for one of these things, I sure wouldn't want to pay more to read a free classic novel from Project Gutenberg or one of the other free book sites, thanks.

Even though it's being bagged by ereading groups and many techies, the Kindle brings much more interest to ereading, and that's a very good thing. One thing that it gets very right is its EVDO Internet connectivity. My iLiad can do Wi-Fi, but the no-usage-payment EVDO connectivity on the Kindle sounds like it'll be extremely nice. The free connectivity appears to have a price, though, in book costs and potential document conversion costs. Even though I think it's crippled most heinously, the Kindle could be just right for some folks. Anyone have any real world Kindle usage to relate?

In even more nerdy news, I've started running BOINC and have attached myself to the ABC@Home project. I read about the project on my favorite nerd news site, Ars Technica, and decided to switch from distributed.net to it. I'm part of Team Ars Technica, of course, user name Powdertoast if anyone wants to see how I'm doing.

I like distributed computing when a client is able to run 50-75% of full CPU power so there's not nearly as much impact to a system's temperature as running 100% full blast, and the BOINC client allows for this kind of configuration and more. Check out the BOINC client if you have an extra system laying around or you just want to do something good for mankind with some of your system's extra CPU cycles. There are plenty of interesting projects including SETI@Home running on BOINC.

I've been watching various gift lists as the end-of-year holidays, and it seems like they show 2007 as the year of usable small computing devices, but I'll talk more about that another time. Nerd up, yo.

I'm a Bullet-Biter

2007-10-30T20:05:55Z

I bit the bullet and installed the shell access thang for my iRex iLiad. My main goal was to change the default text reading font, but I decided to install FBReader for the iLiad instead, which has very nice text reading and font changing capability as well as adding some more document types that the iLiad can display. After tussling a bit with the installation and options settings, I've found that FBReader is a superior text reading app to the default .txt reader and set it up to default to a serif font instead of a sans serif. I have an easier time reading serif than sans serif over long periods of time.

I also installed an rxvt (shell terminal) designed for the iLiad, but I can't see myself using it much. Using an onscreen keyboard for a Linux terminal is odd, but the handwriting recognition is really awkward. First time I've ever written to a computer. My scrawling "cd .." kept coming out with three dots, for example. The handwriting recognition's close for me, but doesn't tolerate my writing idiosyncrasies well, so either I get used to how it wants me to scribble or I just use the slower keyboard. The ability to edit config files directly on the unit from the command line is extremely cool, though. I might find some uses for the terminal later.

I may try the iLiad Minimo installation next. Minimo is a mini-Mozilla installation that should allow my iLiad to connect to the IntarWeb through my wireless network for the vital browsing goodnesses that make my life complete. That's right, I'll be able to read Web funnies while pinching a loaf on a tablet-like technothingamabobber about the same size as a trade paperback, but lighter.

You know you're jealous.

Expectations .. Great!

2007-10-30T15:41:14Z

Aha! I've reached the point where Pip's fortunes .. shift. Now I'm hooked into Great Expectations again. Well done, Mr. Dickens, well done.

Side note about the iRex iLiad: It recharges pretty quickly for how much usage time you get per charge. They're evidently working on yet another big update that will improve default readability for letter-sized PDFs and other things. I'm looking forward to using it a ton while I recover from surgery.

NAS Joy

2007-10-29T23:53:33Z

With a bit of wire snipping and reconnecting, I've managed to get the 12- to 10-volt adapter and the Evercool fan into the NS4300N much more effectively, blocking MUCH less airflow and so far, appearing to work so good. Noise is reduced tremendously, to the point where the drives are what I hear rather than fan noise, though there is a small power supply fan that is barely audible. Temperatures seem to be hovering in the low 40C range, most spiffily chilly for a piece of electronica. If you have the means, I highly recommend doing this.

In other news, I'm still enjoying Great Expectations, coming up to the 1/4 way through mark. Seems like Pip's a fairly miserable young man so far, with plenty of interesting experiences, but still quite unhappy overall. I'm looking forward to a change, if one comes, and some tying together of what appear to be fairly disparate pieces of the tale. I find myself wondering why this is a classic. Maybe I'm looking too hard :(

A Different Kind of Migration and NAS Tomfoolery

2007-10-26T16:13:59Z

I was one of the more than half a million people evacuated due to the wildfires in San Diego County earlier this week. In my particular case, we had to evacuate twice. My wife and I and our animals are finally all back home as of last night, all in one piece apiece. I was back home the night before and both of us went to our respective workplaces yesterday. My heart goes out to those people who have lost their homes, and my profound thanks go to all of the people helping take care of everyone (two- and four-legged) displaced by the fires. I hope the situation in Ramona improves without violence.

Anyway, my NAS tinkering stuff finished arriving yesterday, so I went at it, putting in a quieter 80mm x 15mm fan and a 12- to 10-volt converter to slow the fan down. I ended up with a bunch more cord to deal with that is reducing the airflow, but the thing is much quieter. I'm not real happy with the unit's temperature, though, after doing a bit of testing, so I've done a bit of cable repositioning and am still testing. If I have to yank the converter, which is also the source of most of the extra cabling and thus airflow reduction, I think I'll still be happy with the quieter fan. Temperatures in the unit crept up to 52C before I shut it down the other day and repositioned the cabling. Normal operating temp is 58C or less, so I wasn't real close to overheating it, but I wasn't loading it down at the time, just playing some tunes off of it. Under load, I could see imminent meltdown approaching.

In the current configuration I just told the unit to set aside 80 gigs on the drives for snapshot backups, which means one drive is working its tiny heart out, and the temp seems pretty stable at 49C. I'll check back on it later today after the ambient room temp goes up some more.

Parts? I got an Evercool EC8015M12CA fan and an Akasa Noise/Speed Reduction Cable 12V -> 10V 3-pin from Directron.com. Still iffy on the cable, but it's a possibility.

There are some tricks needed to get the connectors redone, and if I have a winning setup I'll probably get out a hot glue gun to solidify things instead of the temporary mess I have in there now, but it's not that bad.

Whoops, temp just went up to 50C in the unit. I'll check back on it in a bit. But that means most likely I'll just stick with the fan.

A Happy Gutsy Migration and a Bit o' Tampering

2007-10-21T04:19:03Z

I upgraded both my laptop and my desktop to Gutsy Gibbon through the Update Manager. Total install times were basically overnight for each unit, and the process was surprisingly painless on my desktop. Not so much on the laptop thanks to its video, but I've worked around that. So far, I'm impressed with the update. Not a lot of big changes, mostly just some smaller stuff, more speed, more prettinesses. But it feels mo' better, more smooth and steady. And printing is very nicely updated. I haven't checked printing from Wine, let's see... Well lookee there, a fairly complex document's printed perfectly without extra configuration. I think I'm gonna weep for joy.

I won't go into a decent review, there are plenty of other ones already out there. But if you're running Feisty, check Gutsy out. It's better in just about every way.

Except for one way: The issue on my laptop is that the ATi video isn't decently supported. In fact, looking at ATi's web site, I don't see a Linux driver for anything that resembles the video processor. Kind of fun. Under Feisty, I was using an ATi driver that I'd installed through EasyUbuntu. Now I just have a VESA driver installed that seems fast enough, just doesn't have 3D support. I don't play much on the laptop, so no biggie for now. I've seen that others have the same general issue with some ATi drivers, so being nothing remotely close to a driver programmer I'll just wait for a while to see what comes up.

In other news, my bunch of bits for tampering with tamper-resistant screws arrived, so I took the back of my new NAS off. Looks like a low-height 80mm fan on the back with a standard 3-prong power plug that should be easy as pie to replace with a variable speed or at least just quieter fan. I'll do some shopping later tonight.