2.0 is so 1.0. Web 2.0, Identity 2.0, Business 2.0, they are all so 2005. So it is with great pleasure that today, I announce the all new, 2.0 2.0. The second generation 2.0. It has more dots, and more oh’s. It is a pardigm shift in the way the creative mash-up culture will version versions. So hold on tight to your long tails, we are going vertical, the future is now, or was it yesterday?
Today while eating yet another Felipes burrito in the little park in Cambridge, we witnessed a guy with desert storm style camoflauge pants, a big coffee mug, a tri-fold patio chair you can lay down on, and a Dreamweaver MX book walse in, set up shop and proceed to feed the pigeons bread. This is why I need my camera on me at all times. This is also a lifestyle I hope to one day achieve.
While rushing to the T for the first leg of my commute home, I passed This Old House host Kevin O’Connor and plumbing & heating expert Richard Trethewey on Mass Ave. in Cambridge. Looks like their latest project is a house in Cambridge and they were setting up to film one of those classic TOH cheesy bits.
Click the photo for full photo.
As of a couple days ago, Vermont Public Radio, my old local public radio station, is now podcasting their Midday Report and VPR Local News. Feed links on their podcasting page.
And WBUR, my new local public radio station, recently added an MP3 stream of their broadcast, which means greater choice of clients one can use to listen, plus much more straight forward stream recording.
The one feature that caught my eye with the latest Audio Hijack Pro 2.6 upgrade was “Bookmarkable MP3’s”. I asked on the Rogue Amoeba forum how this was being done. Turns out that Apple took a different approach than their bookmarkable AAC files. Instead of changing the File Type or extension, which has some downsides, they add a frame in the id3 tag which makes iTunes and 4G iPods treat it as bookmarkable, which has its own downsides. The frame is “PCS” or “PCST” according to the research of the folks on these two iLounge forum threads: “How are mp3 podcasts bookmarkable?” and “Quick First Report on Chapter Tool Used on a Mac“.
Unfortunately, my quick test of Audio Hijack Pro failed to produce a bookmarkable MP3 that would work on my iPod. It showed up in iTunes but wouldn’t transfer during the iPod sync. Perhaps the iPod doesn’t like some other setting I was using for the MP3.
Hoping someone will update one of the numerous command line ID3 editing tools to be able to add this frame to an MP3. WBUR, the local public radio station finally added a MP3 stream so I’ll probably transition my podcast recording set to mostly use streamripper.
After getting basic MythTV functionality running, I wasn’t particularly astounded with the interface. One really annoying thing is that show descriptions, titles, etc., regularly are cut off because they aren’t given enough room on the screen. So I decided to look at what else was out there. I read some good reviews about Beyond TV. I installed XP on a spare hard drive and then installed the demo. It is a commercial app which is unfortunate, but still no monthly fees for guide data. Seems fairly straight forward and easy to set up. However, whenever I tried to watch live TV it kept crashing.
Turns out my PVR 500 tuner card is bad. It is showing up as 32 devices, which I thought could possibly be normal but turns out it is definitely not. I’m RMA’ing it to Newegg and a new one is on the way. Unfortunately NewEgg refuses to cross-ship so I ended up just ordering a new one and have to send the bad one back for a refund.
I’m also curious about trying Windows Media Center Edition, but Microsoft still refuses to sell unattached to a PC.
All the tinkering is starting to get old… but with Tivo becoming stupider by the day (now charging subscribers a $150 early termination fee.) the pain still seems worth it.
Got word from my sister that she and her husband made it safely to Dallas from Houston. It took them 23 straight hours to go approximately 239 miles. Before leaving they moved all their downstairs belongings to the 2nd floor to avoid flooding from hurricane Rita.
Meanwhile, my commute home last night was snarled because two shirtless men got into a fight on the Redline. One ended up dead on the tracks, apparently electricuted. And for good measure one shot was fired. Boston globe story. Note to self, don’t argue with anyone on the T.
Gallery 2 was finally released about a week ago. I installed and briefly played with one of the release candidates and today installed the final version. It is definitely a big improvement. Supporting multiple galleries from one base install is huge since I maintain 8-10 separate installs and upgrading them all for every security release sucks.
There are two issues I’ve run into that are currently preventing me from moving my gallery over.
URL rewriting - This surely has a simple fix, but I was surprised to find that they changed the URL convention for galleries. They provide some instructions for redirecting gallery 1 urls to gallery 2 urls, but I haven’t found an explanation of why they changed the URL’s. Unless there is a good reason, I need to reconfigure it to just use the old URL scheme.
iPhotoToGallery - I use this iPhoto plug-in for uploading photos (with titles and comments) to Gallery. According to the developer, it should work. It worked once for me, but now all I get is “Unknown Error: 1001″ when trying to connect. Searching the gallery forums didn’t turn up anything.
Just got word that my sister is evacuating Houston, TX for Dallas due to hurricane Rita. They’ve been talking about it hitting Galveston on the news. I just didn’t realize Galveston is only 50 miles from Houston. Texas is so darn big I just picture everything being hundreds of miles apart. I also thought it was just getting attention because our hyper-sensitivity to hurricanes at the moment, but is now categorized as a category 4. Hey Deptartment of Homeland Security, where the heck is our color coded Hurricane chart? These numbers confuse me. Math is hard.
Update 6:00 p.m: Hurricane level: EEK! Rita upgraded to Category 5.
Corin went from having 4 Blue & White G3’s in her classroom to zero at her new job. I’ve been trying to think of creative ways to get computers in her new classroom. I suspect grant funders are more likely to give grants to public schools rather than a private. So next I wondered about thin terminals running Linux. I’m familiar with the Linux Terminal Server Project. The problem in this case is that there are no old computers laying around. Plus computers consume electricity. Having a big boxy, electricity sucking, computer that is basically just used to bootstrap to the terminal sesrver seems a little silly. So the next obvious solution would be to buy an actual thin client. A quick perusal of thin client vendors reveals that a thin client costs around $300, $250 if you go ultra low-end. This is crazy. You can buy or build a full blown low-end computer for $300.
So my current question, which I’ve yet to find a real answer for, is what is the possibility of connecting multiple monitors, keyboards, and mice to one computer. Purchase one beefy computer, and then simply fill the PCI slots with cheap video cards. Many video cards can even support two monitors. 5 PCI slots, plus one AGP slot, plus a USB hub and you could in theory use one computer to serve 6-12 users.
It suspect this has to be possible by editing the heck out of a X.org/XFree86 config file and other hackery. I seem to recall a product for doing this under Windows a few months ago. All I came up with so far is “Buddy B-680” which I can’t find a price for and appears to include additional hardware which I’m not sure would be absolutly necessary.
My estimate:
Reasonably beefy computer: $1000 (in Corin’s case, the most common activity would be web surfing and spreadsheet.)
6 video cards: $150
6 keyboards and mice: $150
6 crappy monitors: $600
That means providing a “workstation” for 6 people for around $1900. That is $316 per workstation including monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
Update: Just came across this old How-To from 2001. A few hacks involved. Perhaps things are in better shape with XFree86 and Linux 2.6: HOWTO: Multiple local XFree users under Linux
So I quickly realized that the state of MythTV in the, yet to officially be released, Ubuntu 5.10 (breezy) is screwed up. The main MythTV application is version 0.18 (the latest available)… however, the packages for the rest of the plugins are all at version 0.17. And because the packages are all in multiverse, I have no idea how much attention they are going to get from maintainers. So plan B is to reinstall all Myth related items from source on Ubuntu, which I don’t really want to do because it will likely be a pain to set up and maintain. Plan C is to use Gentoo.
OnLife is pretty neat OS X application that keeps track of your application use (currently supports Firefox, Mail, iTunes, Safari, TextEdit and iChat.) I fired it up, and kept it running today. It plots points on a graph of actions you took with an application (ie. visit a web page, listen to a song, read an email.) It then caches the contents of those items and allows you to search for them later. It is what a browser history should be. You can search for words found inside all the web pages you’ve visited, not just looking/searching titles by time like most browsers. The graphing piece allows you to get a good idea how you work and what you were up to. Click the picture to get a graph of my application use from the time I installed it until 5:00 pm.
At work, we recently set up a couple new 64-bit servers. We went with AMD64 Ubuntu (Hoary on our production server, and Breezy on our development server). Everything went quite well. Then we go to install Real Producer… a 32-bit binary. It turns out that running 32-bit binaries along side 64-bit ones isn’t quite there yet. After searching for an answer, it appeared that the best solution was to set up a 32-bit chroot environment and run Producer out of there. People recommended this route to get other (source-not-available) binaries such as Real Player, Macromedia’s Flash player working. It is also necessary for MPlayer that use 32-bit Windows libraries for playback.
I went through the trouble of getting a chroot environment set up. It actually worked pretty well. Using dchroot makes running the binary transparent. However, it still seemed like overkill to set up an entire alternative universe to run a single binary. After more searching, I finally came across Debian documentation: Using a IA32 chroot to run 32bit applications. From the title, and quick skim, it looked like the “official” answer was in fact to use a chroot. I showed the page to Seth to show the explanation, and he actually reads the section titled, “The quick way”, which I had apparently skimmed completely over. Turns out there is a ia32-libs package that contains, “minimal set of IA32 libraries packaged for use in a 64bit Debian system”.
Installed the package (also available on Ubuntu) and sure enough Real Producer runs without issue.
Washing dishes is probably my most despised chore. So yesterday we finally found the portable dishwasher we wanted in stock at the local BestBuy of all places. We knew in advance however that it wasn’t going to fit inside the little Ikea cubby hole that Corin had purchased. So today’s mission was to make the cubby hole wider and taller. After what felt like hours at the Home Depot, we felt confident that the hacksaw, cordless drill, 28 1/8″ by 24″ piece of plywood, various bolts, screws, and some odd plastic nubbin things, we would be able to transform the cubby. It came out fairly well… and I got a cordless drill out of the deal. The dishwasher itself is a GE Nautilus GSC3400 Convertable Portable Dishwasher. I’m not sure what makes it convertable, it doesn’t look very easy to transform to a built-in. It’s first ever wash is in progress right now. It is certainly louder than our old built-in washer, and it also needs to be connected to the sink faucet. The tubing that makes the connection is only about 3 feet which means to do a load we have to roll it out into the middle of the kitchen. It also means you can’t use the sink. But as long as the dishes come out clean, I’ll be happy.
It is 1:00 AM, Corin and Ketzel have gone to bed long ago, but after fighting on and off for much of the day, trying to get the ivtv modules/drivers installed, I finally have MythTV running. Video and Audio come from the tuner. The biggest problem is that the documentation is horrendous. There are so many suggested ways of setting it up, which include so many unknown variables (hardware, tuners, os, software versions) that trying to get a clear answer is tricky.
I’m currently running Ubuntu Breezy (5.10) with MythTV 0.18.1 and ivtv 0.3.9. I haven’t played around much with it, but there are already a ton of things that are broken or still need to be set up.
I decided enough was enough, and ordered a pre-built IR receiver hand made by Thomas Schmid-Lindner in Germany. The site claims it will arrive in about a week. Including shipping, the total comes to about $26 USD. According to the site’s broken English, it seems like it should work. The fact that it is RS232 does have the upside that I can connect it to a long cable and have the computer in another room. USB has a pretty short maximum cable length. In theory, I shouldn’t have to buy another thing.
I’ve been looking around for a remote to control the MythTV box. There seems to be surprisingly little documentation. There are three pieces, the remote itself, an infrared reciever, and software called LIRC that ties them together.
On the remote control side, I wanted something similar to a Tivo remote. I even considered just using my Tivo remote, but I think I want a little more flexibility. Logitech Harmony remotes seem to get decent reviews, they are shaped like the Tivo peanut remote, and they are fairly configurable. They are however a bit expensive… although there are much more expensive remotes out there.
However, the Harmony 680 showed up on TigerDirect.com today for $70. Usually it is around $120. So I snapped it up.
Finding an infrared receiver is proving a little trickier. There are plans for building your own, but that is just ridiculous. There are a few people selling them, but they all seem to be in Europe. Most also seem to use the RS232 port. People, it is time to move on. USB is not exactly new. There seem to be a few other products out there, but it is very unclear if they will work.
Yet another reason I’m moving to MythTV. A reader reported that an episode was inadvertantly flagged so that it only be saved to a specific date and couldn’t be used with TivoToGo. May have been a mistake, but it showed nasty functionality that Tivo has added to make content producers happy at the expense of customers.
The rest of my MythTV hardware has shipped, should be here on Thursday.
Google news just dumped this in my news reader. The Mini Cooper Frankfurt. Looks like an intern was playing with the photoshop transform tool and they decided to go with it. I’d prefer a Cooper with 4 doors, but it is cool that they are experimenting.
Stories:
While flipping through the Mini Cooper’s user manual I learned of a neat feature that I don’t quite understand. The car has a keyless entry remote built into the key itself. The remote obviously contains a battery… which is bound to die. Mini’s solution is to use a rechargable battery that charges when the key is in the ignition. What I don’t get is how the battery is actually charged. The key is metal, but there is no second contact point to actually make electricity flow. My electirc toothbrush uses magnetic induction to charge without physical contact, but it seems like the key is too small and too far away for that to work. Might have to crack it open.