Archives for April, 2005
Current Gadgets and Computer Lineup
For some reason, I felt like listing these out, then I figured, “why not blog it?”
Gadgets:
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Canon Digital Rebel: 6MP Digital SLR Camera
Sony DSC-S70: 3MP Digital Camera with LQ (Low Quality) MPEG movie recording
Sony DSC-F1: SubMegapixel Digital Camera - The First ever Sony Cybershot
Philips DVP-642: Progressive Scan DVD Player that plays DiVX movies as well as MP3s, MPEGs, and VCDs. (I have two of these)
OmniFi DMS1: Device for streaming audio files via 802.11b or Ethernet to a home audio system
OmniFi DMP1: Device for playing digital music in the car using a 20GB HDD
Rio Chiba 128: Portable MP3 player with an additional 256MB SD Card
Computers:
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AMD64 System: (Windows XP SP2) AMD 64-bit processor (3500+) 1 GB of PC3200 DDR Dual Channel RAM 36GB Western Digital Raptor SATA Drive 120GB Western Digital Caviar IDE Drive 40GB Seagate IDE Drive Sony 8x DVD+/-RW Dual Layer Sony DVD-ROM Visioneer 9120USB Scanner ATI Radeon 7500 DVI-Out (64MB) ATI HDTV Wonder Samsung 19” Flat Panel Monitor
Reliable Linux System: (Ubuntu 5.04) Intel 1GHz Celeron processor 1 GB of PC133 SDRAM 40GB Western Digital Caviar IDE Drive 40GB Western Digital Caviar IDE Drive HP 4x DVD+RW Matrox G450 (32MB) KDS 19” CRT Monitor
Alex’s System: (Windows XP SP2) AMD 2600+ processor 1 GB of PC3200 DDR RAM 13GB Maxtor IDE Drive NEC 4x DVD+RW Nvidia GeForce 2 MX (64MB) Compaq 17” CRT Monitor
Sony Notebook: (Windows XP SP2) 1 Ghz Pentium III-M 256MB SDRAM 40GB HDD 12” Screen
Yamaha Missing The Boat?
Unless this is in Japan dollars (I know there is no such thing), this DVD player will surely ‘miss the boat’ at a high price of $950.00. Sure it plays DiVX, WMA, and MP3, but so does my $70 Philips player. My Philips DVP-642 also has Progressive Scan, so unless this thing is HDTV, or a 700-watt THX receiver built-in, I’m sure DiVX lovers will pass since (lack of spending) money is typically the motive for downloading DiVX movies.
Check out the Yamaha article at Tom’s Hardware.
Ubuntu cgi/perl
Okay, some things in Ubuntu are great, but others are a little on the quirky side. I say this because they do some things completely different than most other distros, which is probably a good thing, but me coming from experience with two other distros, it is kind of hindering. I had a handful of simple perl files I wanted to serve up, but there was no cgi-bin/ in the already naked /var/www/ directory. When I tried adding one, that didn’t work. When I tried adding a ScriptAlias to the one I added, that didn’t work. I then ran across a post in the ubuntuforums that had mention of /usr/lib/cgi-bin/. Having never seen this before, I was skeptical, but as always I’m putting doubt where there needs none. It seems either the Ubuntu crew or the Apache 2 developers decided to put the cgi-bin for the web server under the /usr/lib/cgi-bin/ directory, which still makes no sense to me because all things web exist under /var/www/. Go figure. I tested my scripts placed under /usr/lib/cgi-bin/ and they work great.
BTW, to keep myself sane, I added a softlink to /usr/lib/cgi-bin/ under /var/www/. 
Nero MediaHome
Nero Ultra Edition comes with a nice collection of software that many times I have no idea what they do because I just never open them if I install them at all. I just stumbled across this package while perusing the media-servers.com forums. Nero MediaHome is an UPnP Media Server capable for serving Music, Photos, and Videos over the network. I have it configured, but not being home right now, I cannot test its capabilities just yet. My OmniFi DMS1 was detected immediately and should be able to browse the directory I shared through MediaHome. This software is similar to MS Media Connect, and neither of them have the full-featuredness of SimpleCenter, the software that comes with the OmniFi unit. SimpleCenter is more of a media manager, but if you don’t need those capabilities, and I do not, then MediaHome and Media Connect should do just fine.
Shared Directories
Status
Ubuntu, NeroLinux and DMA Support
Ran into this issue when running NeroLinux. It told me that DMA was not enabled for my burner, so I hunted down (Googled) the instructions on the web and found this in a forum.
enabling dma is as simple as opening a shell and running sudo hdparm -d1 /dev/hdx (replace x for whatever drive you want to enable)
Of course it worked like a champ.
Walgreens Sparkling Clear
If you are a fan of flavored water, then you must try Walgreens’ Sparkling Clear flavored water. It is sweetened with Splenda and contains no sodium. Essentially it is 0s across the board (except FLAVOR!). These were priced at $0.79 for awhile, then suddenly jumped up to $0.99. I guess they figured out the demand was there. This week (until 16-Apr-2005), they are running a special on these where you can get 2 for $1! You can’t beat half price on these babies. There is a limit of 8, which most of the time won’t be an issue because these things are so popular, you’d be lucky to get eight of your favorite flavor.
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Flavors I’ve seen:
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 Enlarge |
Ubuntu
Well, I’m trying my hand at Ubuntu, a Debian-based Linux distribution rapidly gaining popularity. I started the install this morning, but had to leave for work, so it is still pre-firstlogin. My main reason for trying out this new distribution was hearing reports, primarily from my friend, Jason Brinkle, about how Ubuntu is very easy to upgrade without having to reinstall the OS. It upgrades all packages including the Windows Managers (i.e. Gnome and KDE). Some other distros may have this capability, but this is the first I’ve heard of it, and I’ve tried several versions of Mandrake and RedHat/Fedora. If all goes well and this is distro is that much better than any other, then I’ll will most definitely push this distribution on anyone contemplating the move to Linux.
Some musts for my own linux desktop include:
- mplayer and mplayerplug-in: for general video playback standalone or browser embedded
- NetJuke: for streaming mp3s
- Azureus and bittorrent: for torrent downloads
- Gallery: for it’s fantastic user interface and price
- GTK-gnutella: for general P2P service
- rioutil: for managing my Rio Chiba mp3 player
- NeroLinux: for all things burned
- Adobe Acrobat 7: though not open source, they still know how to do it best
Adobe Photoshop CS2
Adobe just released a new version of their famous Photography software. You can read more about the new features at DPReview. 
I will likely not be able to afford this software because they pretty much price it out of the amateur market. To keep my pocketbook in check, I’ll continue to use Gimp!!
Phoenix
I ran across this web browser on one of my many backup CDs. Phoenix, if you don’t already know, was one of the first releases of what is now Firefox. It went through a couple name changes before they found something that someone else wasn’t already using (Phoenix - BIOS, Firebird - DB, and finally Firefox - available). This particular version is 0.4 and if you want to see exactly how far they’ve come since then, try it out. You should be able to dowload this anywhere on your system and double-click the phoenix.exe file. A profile will be created in your Application Data directory, but other than that it is self-contained. Get It!
If I’m not mistaken, I may have first tried this web browser in version 0.2, and I’ve followed it ever since. If you want to read the history of the world’s fastest growing browser, check out this article.
Netflix is still slow
I remember the days when I would put a movie in the mail and they would receive the following morning, then ship out that next one that afternoon. I would then receive my new flick the following afternoon.
Day 1 - Send back to Netflix Day 2 - (AM) Netflix receive my movie Day 2 - (PM) Netflix ship next movie in Queue Day 3 - (PM) Receive next movie from Netflix
3 - 1 = 2 day turnaround (~12 movies per month for one queue slot - best case scenario)
Now the situation is a little more sluggish. They are actually waiting to send out my next movie.
Day 1 - Send back to Netflix Day 2 - (AM) Netflix receive my movie Day 2 - (PM) Netflix places next movie in Queue to ship following day Day 3 - (PM) Netflix ships next movie in Queue Day 4 - (PM) Receive next movie from Netflix
4 - 1 = 3 day turnaround (~9 movies per month for one queue slot - best case scenario)
I not a Statistical Analyst, but I can tell you that losing the value of three movies per month is a big deal especially when it equates to actually losing 9 movies per month (with the 3-at-a-time Netflix plan). If anyone has this same issue, let me know. If you have never had this issue, let me know. I’d like some reassurance that Netflix is just screwing up and it’ll get better. If I’m going to lose the value from my plan, then I might as well save $3 per month and go with Blockbuster.com, which I already know I’ll get this same shotty service for cheaper.
After thought: One thing that is hindering Netflix quite a bit is the fact that they do not operate on weekends. I can understand no Sundays, because we all have better things to do on Sundays, but Saturday is an odd day to miss especially when the Post Office is still operating that day.
Computer Upgrade Successful
My parts came in from Monarch Computer Systems on Friday, and I couldn’t wait to dig in. As promised, they assembled the motherboard, processor, heatsink and RAM. They also updated to the latest BIOS, which is also very cool of them to do. The shipped box, came with all of the empty boxes, manuals/software, and the motherboard box that contained the fully assembled board. All I needed to do was install my stuff.
The install went smoothly, but upon first boot, I got nothing on the screen. This lit my fuse and put me in a bad mood, because I wanted this thing to be hassle free right out of the box and I just had my first hassle. This being the first time I’ve had to deal with a somewhat powerful CPU that differs from the Socket As in the past, I didn’t realize this motherboard required two powersupply connnections. The typcial ATX connection and an addition 4-pin connection. I had the 4-pin connection tied off and hidden, so it didn’t even occur to me that my problem was that. Once the 4-pin was connected, the machine booted right up and welcomed me to the world of 64-bit. Well, not really. It was the usual boot screens you always see.
Despite my eagerness to blow a whole evening on installing and loading the operating system on this fine machine, I decided to take an hour and get everything wired cleanly and with maximum airflow before moving on. This was an very easy task because the new motherboard had a better layout than the previous. Now everything is tied off and neat. All of the cards, ATI Radeon 7500 and the ATI HDTV Wonder (All two of them), and the hard drives were now installed.
Since this was an all new system, I decided to move my high performance hard drive, a Western Digital Raptor (36GB SATA 10000rpm), to the foreground and make it the boot drive with most of my programs to be running off of it. This was very easy to do in the BIOS settings, so this took all of about a minute.
[got some sleep]
The Windows install went very smoothly, but there is one deviation I had never dealt with before. When installing Windows to a SATA drive, you must hit F6 during the first stages of setup, where it asks about SCSI drivers. I hit F6 and nothing seemed to happen for about 10 seconds, then it went into a driver loading screen and asked me to put in my floppy disk containing my drivers. It loaded the disk and asked which driver to use, which obviously was the XP driver it had as the default. After the driver was loaded, it returned to the all-to-familiar setup screens and went on without a hitch.
For the most part, I am done with this machine, but I do have a few more programs to install. I haven’t put this sucker to the true test of recoding DVD quality video, but that will come soon enough and I will post my findings. One thing that I did notice was that my ATI HDTV Wonder is working much better, but I’m not quite sure why. Perhaps the faster system bus or something is letting it run free. I’m getting channels now I wasn’t able to lockin on with the previous system. That brought me much joy.
Kudos to Monarch Computer Systems for providing great service and good prices.
Windows Media Connect
Coincidentally, I found Windows Media Connect at the same time I purchased my OmniFi Media Streamer (DMS1). This is a very simplistic media software that sets up a share for your compatible streaming device to pull media from. In my case, it is only needed for Music, but it appears to support Photos and Videos as well. Check out the details here. The only bug/feature that hinders my use of the application is that it doesn’t support network drives. Your shared music, must be on a local drive. Unfortunately, I keep all of my music on my Linux box.
This program came already installed with my Windows XP (with SP2) disk, but it is available at the above link for download.