Category: Geek

Ha Ha, You Can’t Read This (Yet)

You never really realize how much you’ve come to depend on the Internet until you lose it for a while. It’s been really dodgy all weekend for me now, even as I write this (yay for hosting your own server).

So, maybe I should play a game. My current Diablo 2 character is level 26 on the USWest realm and OH WAIT. Well, I could play single-player. I don’t really want to build a character from scratch again though, so maybe I should go download the Atma editor and OH WAIT. Well, maybe I could play a class I haven’t really used much before, and see how it plays from the start. I’ll just check for a decent skill build on the Arreat Summit site and OH WAIT.

I can still watch TV though MythTV, at least. Some of the channel listing entries look a bit out of sync though. I should check that the lineup is right at schedulesdirect.org and OH WAIT. Oh well, I wonder what the other F1 thread guys thought about the race OH WAIT.

There is still some network activity getting through, but not enough to reliably connect to web sites and such. I’m curious as to what kind of traffic there is, so I could sniff it by getting the ‘tcpdump’ package, and Ubuntu will even download and install OH WAIT.

I even popped over to the office for a little while just to check some of my regular sites. Good thing it’s only a quick trip away. 99% of the time these problems resolve themselves, since they tend to affect large blocks of customers, but I’m not so sure this time.

Edit: Well, it seems to be partly working again, or at least some sites load (albeit slowly), though I still can’t get to some others. Only took 36 hours…

Edit Edit: And it’s dodgy again as of the morning. Woo.

We Like Movies Too, Eh?

Apple announced recently that movies were now available online via iTunes in Canada, and I figured I’d try one out of curiosity since I’ve never done any kind of online rental before, and so I picked THX 1138.

The download went without problems, and I could even start playing it while it was still downloading, but the playback of it was rather no-frills, with a lot of the usual controls missing. No subtitles (which I occasionally like to use for muddy or quiet dialogue), no chapter marks, no stream info, no extras… The picture quality was about on par with a DVD, but HD was not an option, since you specifically need an Apple TV box before you’re allowed to rent those.

Overall, it worked well enough, but I think the price was a bit high ($4 rental, $15 to purchase, but most are even higher) for what you get, and I probably won’t be making a habit of it.

So Far The Home Team Is Up By 2 Gigs

Right now, MythTV is recording an episode of Rome for me. But at the same time, a transcode job is in the middle of converting some other shows to MPEG-4 to free up some disk space.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me that my idea of amusement is to keep checking the amount of free disk space every few minutes just to see which task is ‘winning’…

I Guess It’s Not Possessed After All

Having installed a few games to the Windows partition (already down to only 20 gigs free!), it was time to pop back to OS X.

Performance is definitely much better than the old iBook, of course, and I no longer feel as constrained about what I can run at the same time. It’s nice not having to worry about whether Firefox is chewing up too much memory or CPU to launch MythTV reliably, or if VLC is going to be choppy because of swapping. I should also now be able to run more things at the same time that I wouldn’t have bothered with before, like Skype.

There are still some hardware quirks I’m running into, too. The space bar is a bit insensitive in that presses on the very ends of it often don’t register, so I have to make sure I give it a good hard tap a little further in. Gaming might be a bit less feasible now that I’ve experienced it running at full load for a while; the fans aren’t too bad, and could be drowned out by the game’s sounds or by wearing headphones, but the CPU quickly makes my lap just a little warm…

I also had a weird time figuring out what was ‘wrong’ with the LCD’s backlight. It seemed like its intensity would fluctuate a bit, often noticed just out of the corner of my eye while typing, but if I sat there and stared directly at the screen for a while, nothing would happen. There were other weird cases too, where I would have the backlight at half-intensity, pick it up and carry it a bit, and the backlight would suddenly be set at full. What I didn’t realize though, is that the ambient light sensors on the Pro units aren’t just for the keyboard backlight; the LCD backlight is by default set to automatically adjust as well. I guess the ambient light in my living room and the typing of my hands were enough to make it a bit erratic, and it’s now stable after disabling the option in the system preferences.

Turning Traitor

Today was Windows’ turn on the MacBook Pro, as I partitioned off some space for Boot Camp, installed Vista into it, and did the usual driver updates, applied SP1, etc., and that part went fairly smoothly.

Some things are still weird when Windows is running, though. You have to double-touch the pad and click if you want to emulate a right-click, which makes it easy to accidentally trigger a scrolling action in the process. And the Alt and ‘Windows’ keys are backwards from where they’d be physically located on a traditional PC keyboard, which is being hard to get used to. I’ll have to dig around and see if I can adjust these, though there wasn’t any obvious settings that I’d noticed.

I also experienced the infamous Windows wireless bugaboos, with the connection cutting out in the middle of a file transfer and Vista refusing to recognize any more wireless APs at all, even though the iBook sitting right next to it could see them all just fine. That also hung the command prompt that was doing the transfer, forcing me to hard-power-off the system since it wouldn’t let me shut down while it was still hung, either. Wheee. That was pre-SP1 though, and it hasn’t reoccurred since, so far.

I still have to get around to installing apps and games on it, now. It’s not exactly blazing fast, as it only gets half the 3DMark06 score of my desktop machine, but on the other hand, the entire MB Pro probably weighs less than just the video card in the desktop… Since I don’t want to be dragging a bunch of discs around with me, I’ll be focusing mainly on games that can run without requiring one in the drive. Fortunately, I’ve got quite a few such games already via Steam and Stardock.

Say Hello To My Not-Quite-As-Little Friend

Well, my iBook G4 is now just over four years old and was starting to show its age, especially with more CPU-intensive modern video and the ever-increasing appetite of newer apps for more memory. So, I had to get it a buddy:

And by buddy, I mean replacement of course, since my iBook will probably now sulk in the closet while a fine layer of dust accumulates on top of it.

It’s just the base 15″ version, since I wasn’t really looking for a full “desktop replacement” model. I debated a bit about whether to get an upgraded plain MacBook or the Pro; the main functional difference between them now is that the Pro has a much better video chipset, but was that really worth the $700+ price difference… I finally figured that having the better video would probably let me squeeze an extra year or two of life out of it and in the end the per-year cost would be roughly similar anyway, so I may as well get all the frills of the Pro.

There are some things that are going to take a bit of time to adjust to, simply because they’re different. The bottom of the keyboard has a hard edge rather than a smooth ramp all the way up to the top, for example, and the gap between the keyboard and the trackpad is a little bigger than I’m used to. There’s no gap between some of the function keys like there was on the iBook, so my usual reference for finding F5 (the all-important Refresh key) is gone. The ports are laid out a bit nicer for the way my living room is set up though, so I don’t have to criss-cross network and mouse cables in the back when I’m using them.

As for new features, the multi-touch is nice, though I’m going to have to get into the habit of using it, since I often find myself still going to the scroll bars. The magsafe power port caught me a bit by surprise since it takes quite a bit of force to pull directly out, until I caught on to the bend-it-away trick. And I haven’t done much with any new Leopard features yet, though I did notice that Terminal has improved a lot, to the point where I don’t feel like I need iTerm anymore. I might not even bother with Time Machine, just sticking with my rsync-to-the-Linux-server scripts instead.

Now I still have to finish migrating most of my data over…

Spying On…Myself

DD-WRT has served well as the firmware on my wireless router, giving me a few more useful features and stability that the default firmware was lacking in. So I got rid of it.

Instead I’m running Tomato on it now. Why?

1) Partly because I still have occasional trouble with the wireless dropping out for a while. It could be interference, but setting the channel number seems to clear it up even if I set it back to the same channel, so it might be a problem with the wireless drivers, too. Using a different firmware will let me see if it continues to occur there, at least.

2) And also because Tomato has one feature that DD-WRT doesn’t: bandwidth monitoring. Not that I’m running into any limits or anything yet, but I’m curious as to just how much I’m using up, and Tomato will track it in a variety of different ways: real-time, and totals on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

Otherwise, they both have pretty much all the same features that I need, so switching over wasn’t too painful. The only stumbling point was getting it to mount a Samba share for storing the bandwidth monitor history, and that was just because I’d forgotten to add the new user I created for it via ‘smbpasswd’.

I’ve Had Better Kool-Aid

Another big Apple Event has come and gone, and in turn:

MacBook Air: Meh. Not for me, since I’m fine with the form factor and weight of my iBook as it is, and I’m more interested in having better performance and functionality. I don’t actively hate it though, since it doesn’t really replace the other notebooks, so we’re not being ‘forced’ to upgrade to it.

iTunes Movie Rental: Irrelevant right now as it won’t be available here for a while yet. It looks like pricing will be about the same as the XBox Live Marketplace, so it’ll come down to a battle between which has the better library of titles. I also don’t have an easy way to stream iTunes to a TV right now, but that might be resolved by the time it’s ready here, though there’s an implication that HD rentals are only available through the AppleTV, and I’m not buying one just for that.

iPhone updates: Looks nice, but I’m still not a cell phone person.

Time Capsule: Now this is actually interesting. One of the things that really annoys me about my MythTV setup is that it runs on a really large, noisy tower PC right now. If I could replace that with say, a Mac Mini as the server, stacked on a Time Capsule acting as the storage, and using a USB capture card instead, it would be a lot smaller and quieter… And then I hear my wallet go “OW!”

Otherwise, I’m still holding out for a MacBook Pro update, which should be due sometime soon.

Thanks, Norton

I had an odd problem after rebooting one of my work computers yesterday. When I went to log in, it said that it couldn’t load the local profile, that it could be lost or corrupt, and created a temporary profile for me to log into instead.

All of my usual files were there in my profile directory, so it wasn’t because I’d lost some critical files. I rebooted a couple of times in case it was a temporary thing, but it continued to happen. I also booted into safe mode and could log in just fine there, so the files weren’t corrupt either. After poking around the logs a bit, the cause of the error seemed to be that the profile files were in use when it went to try and load them. A bit of googling revealed that this is a common problem when using migrated profiles, but that wasn’t the case here.

But, then I realized that a virus scan was being kicked off when the system booted, since one hadn’t been run in a while, and one of the first sets of directories it scans is…the user profiles. Symantec AV was probably scanning my profile directories at the time I was trying to log in and causing sharing conflicts on the files.

After rebooting again, I waited five minutes before trying to log in, and everything worked fine once more.

Ding Dong, The Disc Is Dead

With the news that Warner Bros. is dropping its support for HD-DVD and producing Blu-Ray discs exclusively from now on, the HD format war is pretty much over and Blu-Ray is the winner. The only major HD-DVD supporter left is Universal, and it’s unlikely they’re going to want to stay on a clearly losing side.

It’s actually a good thing that one side is finally gaining a dominant upper hand, since otherwise it was poised to be another VHS-vs-Beta war all over again, and the confusion would have kept people away.

The larger war is still only half-won though, as Blu-Ray still has to convince people to choose it instead of, well, plain DVD. People already get tons of extras and what they think is a decent-looking picture with DVDs, so is the higher resolution alone going to sway them into buying new players and more expensive discs…

(Maybe I won’t regret getting a PS3 after all.)

Can’t Get There From Here

The feature list for the Fall Dashboard update for the 360 is out now, and the big new feature that’s got everyone abuzz is support for DivX/Xvid codecs.

That is indeed awesome, but upon reflection, it doesn’t really do *me* much good. My MythTV frontend is a bit flaky right now and I’d prefer something better, but the 360 can’t stream from MythTV right now regardless of what format the video is in. Other streaming solutions exist, but would require transcoding the video on the fly, which degrades video quality. But, I don’t really want to watch TV on the LCD monitor it’s connected to right now anyway.

The PS3 is in a better position, being connected to the bigger TV and it’s already close to being able to stream from MythTV; it sees the server, but says that the video files are corrupt (choking on the MP2 audio stream, perhaps). DivX support is coming to the PS3 as well, but it’s not clear yet if that will include Xvid as well. But wait, even if it did, I’d have to transcode my MythTV files to Xvid (which is actually easy enough), but then they’ll be stored in a Nuppelvideo container format that neither the PS3 nor 360 will support. Sigh.

One of these days I’m just going to have to tear down my entire home theatre setup and rebuild the whole thing from scratch…

Here Kitty Kitty…

Well, the release of OS X Leopard is imminent now, but I don’t think I’ll be picking it up.

At least not by itself. I’ve gotten a lot more use out of my iBook than I expected (browsing the web from The Comfy Chair is so much better than at the desk), but it’s almost four years old now, and is starting to show its age. It has trouble keeping up with even Youtube videos without a bit of stutter, the screen still feels a bit cramped, it bogs down a bit even with the maximum amount of memory in it, it would be nice to dual boot to Windows once in a while, and so on.

I think I’ll wait until the next hardware refresh though, just to make sure I get the latest-and-greatest, and by then there should be a dot release or two of Leopard out to help stabilize things, too.

I’m still not sure whether to go for a MacBook or a MacBook Pro this time around, though. The primary difference (based on the current specs, anyway) would really be in the screen size, resolution, and video chipset. A higher res would be nice to relieve the cramped feeling a bit, and it would be nice to have enough horsepower to run some games that are still usable on a laptop. But is that niceness alone worth the $600 difference? Hmmm.

And hopefully they’ll also adjust the prices to account for the recent currency surge. I’d actually save over $250 by ordering from the US Apple store instead of the local one, right now.

Uncle!

Alright, I give up. For a very long time I’ve been wary of specialized, often proprietary programs for organizing my data. Keeping a sensible directory structure always seemed to be good enough, without having to worry about programs becoming obsolete, incompatible metadata formats, licensing changes, platform restrictions, data-corrupting bugs, and so on.

But, I’ve reached the breaking point. There are some things that have just become too unwieldy to manage with my ‘old school’ ways, or features I’m missing out on that I can’t easily replicate myself, so I guess it’s time to start giving these programs a chance.

And first up, of all things, is passwords…
Continue reading “Uncle!”

Now That’s Targeted

I just got my first spam message where the subject line was structured like a bug report. Not the same bug reporting system we use in our office, and the name wasn’t familiar, but I still had to open it anyway just in case it was from some auxiliary office or channel partner or sales liaison or whatever, some of whom have their own systems. Sigh.

It was the same old ‘hot stock tip!’ body though, and I’m surprised the filters aren’t doing a better job of catching those, since a lot of the phraseology and keywords are often similar.

I’d Go See That

I was going to play more of Halo 2 tonight, but before I could do so I got distracted by a coding challenge link someone posted and wound up working on that all evening instead.

I’m relatively weak on theory, so I went for the fairly simple brute-force depth-first tree search solution. It’s fun to see some of the titles it generates, though, like “3 NINJAS KICK BACK STAGE BEAUTY AND THE BEAST FROM 20000 FATHOMS”! I’m just not sure it’ll finish before the heat death of the universe occurs…

The longest chain it’s found so far is 231 movie titles long, and looks more like the junk text you see in spam messages nowadays.

TANSTAAFL

Well, the free ride has ended: as of the start of this month, Zap2It no longer provides free TV listings data for programs like MythTV. It’s disappointing, but it’s also hard to complain about something that you didn’t have to pay for in the first place.

Zap2It doesn’t seem to want to have to deal with individuals, so Schedules Direct has been set up as an alternative provider to resell the data instead. There’s a recurring fee now, but I’ve found it too useful to go without, and it’s been set up as a non-profit company so they can try to bring the cost down as much as possible. Switching over wasn’t too painful; I just had to get a newer version of MythTV from the ‘proposed’ repository, add a new listings source, and rerun ‘mythfilldatabase’ to get the new listings.

And, now that I’m paying for it, I can now legitimately complain about all the minor little annoyances! ;)