WWDC no 802.11n in on the 3G S iPhone!? Drat!

July 2, 2009 in Apple, Backups, Coffee, Computer, Linux, Mac, MythTV, Technology by admin | No comments

So, with the new iPhone 3.x OS you will not be purchasing an 802.11N enabled wireless chipset.  Apparently the new 3G S model does support 4G HSDPA but not 5 GHz 802.11N wireless with the new lower powered Broadcom BCM4325. Apparently the 3G S model is a bit snappier. When is the 802.11n iPod Touch coming out? That’s what I’m waiting for. I saw that Garret had a very small LG phone that’s basically free from Verizon, if I could find that used/new and then go with a Touch remote… we’ll see how it goes…. Windows 7 RC is OK. It works, for what it’s worth.

I like Ubuntu 9.04 with MythTV…. I’m going to go back to that but probably do a dual boot leaving Win7 RC just in case…. Sadly, for Netflix playback due to Silverlight DRM a Windows XP/Vista/7 VM or even an OS X VM is necessary for Netflix streaming…. or buy a Roku box, unfortunately our TV doesn’t have 2 HDMI inputs… I’m surprised no one has been able to reverse engineer the Roku Box’s chipset and put the Silverlight DRM code out there…. Or even just have a “Roku Box VM”…. Why not, right? Seems possible, when you consider how almost all old video console games can now be played and fit on one flash drive.

I brewed with the Yama 5 Cup Vacuum brewer today. Thank you Conor and Leigh, awesome gift BTW; best of luck in your trip West. The coffee is very good, very clean, very smooth. I currently am grinding Gimme’ Coffee’s Picolo Mondo variety. Thank you Japanese vacuum brewing technology and to Chris for the awesome vintage German Peter Dienes grinder which does it job remarkably well for a hand grinder over twice as old as I am.

Yama Vaccuum Brewing by Digital Colony

Yama Vaccuum Brewing by Digital Colony

My Vintage PeDe looks similar, all metal on top though

My Vintage PeDe looks similar, all metal on top though

Hackable?

Hackable? Image from ehomeupgrade.com blog

blast you mt-daapd! blast you!

May 28, 2009 in Mark by admin | No comments

So I thought that Firefly / mt-daapd was working under Jaunty 9.04 but I was wrong. It does in fact stream remote .mp3s but it doesn’t transcode the FLAC. Boo. Apparently it’s usual for things to break when they’re upgraded, but it worked fine on the old Dell PIII which makes me think that maybe I should go back to that. 9.04 may be required as a front-end (using VDPAU) but if I can get some 8.04.2 LTS stable love on the back-end and have all this other stuff working I’d definitely prefer that. Did you know that the AMD XP 2800+ had a 78W TDP? I sure didn’t. That’s a hot little puppy. This cheap Intel e5200 I bought is significantly faster and cooler than that guy, my only regret is that it doesn’t have VM/VT natively. Man. So sad, I thought I had it all going strong.

More Great Coffee Shops in New York

May 21, 2009 in Mark by admin | No comments

So if you live in NYC and you’re looking for a map of the best coffee shops all over Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens then look no further than this blog and the associated map “On the Road to Epiphany” which we assume to mean the epiphany one has when drinking great coffee, or wine, or beer. Though perhaps the allusion is “the road” as in the journey one goes one when seeking such a state; in any case the blog is about good coffee and has maps and info about NY City’s best coffee.


View The Road to Epiphany Do-it-Yourself Guided Tour Map in a larger map

Linux is a temperamental mistress

May 20, 2009 in Audio Server, Computer, DIY, Linux, MythTV by admin | No comments

There is not doubt that you get out of MythTV what you put into it.  I spent a good day, post system build, just getting things going.  I upgraded to the 180.51 stable NVIDIA driver for the 9400 GT card that I have, at first it presented some problems, but I used Synaptic upgrade manager with Jean-Yves’ Avenard.org optional kernel builds with VDPAU support and the machine seems to run pretty cool.  Yes that Antec 120mm fan is loud but I think I can run it on the low setting. Why Antec builds cases with fan holes that seem to be able to produce noise is beyond me.  Since it’s an exhaust you’d think they might as well make it a super open mesh or just an open circle.

The Apple “mini” Remote still doesn’t work.  I was able to get LIRC to recognize it via the HDHomeRun IR input, and it wrote to some .conf file somewhere, but it’s unclear exactly how to set it up from within Myth.  But Apache works, I need to install Avahi and Netatalk again so I can get access to all the recordings from the other computers on the LAN.  I still wouldn’t mind having a low powered server as a dedicated back-end, especially if I could run MT-DAAPD on that, ideally it’d be gigabit and something like an old Sempron 3000+ headless with say over 2 TB’s of free space.

I fixed a floor pump today that had a bad O ring using only teflon tape.  Science.  Also I had a double Americano using Stumptown beans at City Girl cafe on Thompson this morning.  So good… wicked Sláinte.

City Girl Cafe

City Girl Cafe via Noyda on Flickr

Hairbender

Hairbender via Lameen on Flickr

Awesome awesomeness

May 14, 2009 in Computer, MythTV, New York, Technology by admin | No comments

So things have been busy but going pretty well, in comparison to the Winter at least.  I’m having another go at MythBuntu 8.04 LTS on the old PIII as the Myth Back-End.  I built our Front-End this afternon.  It’s a E5200 Core Duo chip, the motherboard is based on Intel’s 4100 chipset and is made by Gigabyte. I ended up with an MSI made Nvidia GeForce 9400 GT PCI-Express x16 v2.0 video card which should be able to offload my the processing needed for HDTV and h.264 1080p video playback, from what I’ve read anyhow VDPAU and Linux have come along nicely especially in the 9.04 release which is what I’ll run on the Front-End.  The MSI supports two digital heads simultaneously over HDMI and DVI.  Unfortunately the one Antec 120mm fan is quite noisy while the other Enermax 120mm is dead quiet.  Lesson learned.  I was going to buy two of those but I cheapened out.

The case itself is pretty solid, it’s an Antec Sonata III and it came with a nice EarthWatts 500w power supply and originally I was considering trying to find a different case and keep the PSU, but I think it’ll work out.  I would say that you shouldn’t stuff like four 3.5″ SATA HDDs in this case, it’d be too hot and noisy.  I may need to buy some sound deadening padding for the walls of the case and do a little dremmel cutting to open up some grating that seems to be blocking airflow.  I was considering doing this at the Pratt metal shop but the prospect of dragging this case all the way down there was too daunting and besides, who doesn’t need a rotary cutting tool?

So yeah.  A bit of the ‘ole bike commuting across the Williamsburg bridge.  The weather has stayed pretty friendly and I’ve been taking sailing classes which have been a lot of fun.  That’s all.  Lets hope the new builds workout here so Zoe can start recording more model TV shows.

Sailing

MythTV

MythTV

My goodness, that’s good coffee!

April 7, 2009 in Computer, Mark, MythTV, New York, Sci Fi by Mark | No comments

I’ve been drinking the Stumptown Hairbender blend, usually as a “tall black” AKA an Americano (with nearly equal amounts espresso to water) at Sweet Leaf down the street.  It’s really good.  Basically, it trumps most all the other coffee I’ve had in this city, which until lately has been chock full of not very good coffee.  In the past I’ve enjoyed both Grumpy and Gimme’.  Don’t get me wrong, they were good.  And maybe I’ll do some sort of coffee round up and see how the shots these shops pull compare, but for right now, it’s insane.  The level has been elevated that much higher now that Stumptown is in town.  I’m glad for it.

I had a MySQL database failure (thanks Dreamhost) but fortunately I backup daily.  Unfortunately my backup was Latin1 and not UTF-8, because I started using Wordpress like 4 years ago.  Anyhow, it’s all converted now to UTF-8 and looks like things are OK.  Aris pointed out that perhaps my CAPCHA plugin is doing something funky, I’ll look into it.

The new SiliconDust HD HomeRun Tuner came in the mail.  Zoe is excited about MythTV recording her shows for her.  I am very sad that Terminator Sarah Connor Chronicles is ending this week, it’s like I’ve lost a child who’s going to war.  Only it’s a war in the future with evil robots.  And my son’s name is John.  John Connor.  Also I’m pretty stoked about JJ Abrams’ new Star Trek.  From the previews it appears ILM might’ve increased the SFX production values, though there probably won’t be any tribbles.  I love tribbles.  And Stumptown.

I am Netatalk you are Netatalk we are Netatalk

March 23, 2009 in Apple, Audio Server, Computer, DIY, Leopard, Music, Technology by Mark | No comments

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?  Or does it spend all weekend working out Ubuntu 8.04 command line shell commands to make a beautiful thing happen?  Namely, mount an Apple Time Capsule share over ethernet via Samba/CIFS and and then serve the data via mt-daapd to iTunes and Airport Express.  All from the command line baby.  Yeah.  Compile that package of Netatalk with libcrack2 and ssl. Talk to me dirty with inexplicable buffer writes in  vi baby.  And you’ll do a lot of apt-get.  And if you’re lucky you’ll do a few apt-get purge(s) thrown in there for good measure.

What about mounting the Time Capsule in Ubuntu?  Shouldn’t that be simple beans? You know, smbclient, smbfs, and GO right? It just works.  Hah. Apple doesn’t exactly have a support page for this sort of thing.  The crux of it for me was the domain=workgroup option, and figuring out that with Netatalk everything referenced .local addresses no the local IPs for some reason.  Whatever.  The FLAC flows now.  OGG, wavpac, you name it, this little Linux machine can serve it to iTunes whole.  No more dealing with that cursed iTunes XML library.  Unless of course you want to put music on your iPod.  I still don’t have that part completely figured out.  My feeling is you copy and add music as you want it on your iPod.

Metal Shop and Pop: Sheet Steel and You

March 23, 2009 in DIY, Mark, Metalwork, New York, Travel by Mark | 4 comments

So I went down to NC for a couple of days to build a welding table with my Dad.  It turned out pretty nicely all things considered.  We needed more practice on our MIG welds, but constructing a 4×4 foot table proved to be good exercise.  We added a small 26 inch long extension off one side that will be my Dad’s cutting area where he’ll slot in steel strap for cutting with his plasma cutter and or Oxy-Acetylene torch if he ever goes that route.  So that was a pretty solid few days of work.  At the metal shop in Brooklyn I’ll have a slightly different tack for building a base for our kitchen counter.  My plan there is to build metal brackets to go around the 3×3″ wooden legs and then finish the skirt with wood and hanging drawers.  Zoe’s aunt has a bed that will replace ours as I’ll be cutting up  the bed frame I build to use for the legs.

Finished. 1/4 MIG - tucked in to prevent death from rotary cutting tools

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