One step closer to joy

Mon 7-Dec-2009 in english | 1 comment

The digibox thingy has made its first two stumbling displays of usefulness! First, as a gaming console and then as a media player. Granted, things are far from “just working”, but watching recorded television on the box which hasn’t been “just working” too well was kind of a relief [0]. But i’m jumping ahead.

This weekend, my dear son Linus, four years, suddenly exclaimed that he wants a “shooting game”. He was tagging along when his big sister was visiting a friend, and that friend had a bigger brother, and he had a computer game. I never really figured out what that game was, but Linus was utterly mesmerized. I on the other hand have never been too keen on computer games. And especially unkeen on violent ones – especially now that i have kids. But heck, if the kid wants computer gaming, a geek dad will get him computer gaming. And can act as a filter to weed out Quake and its cohorts.

From a previous visit to game land, i snatched a recent copy of the Linux Gamers’ Live DVD, booted it from an external drive (yeah, my box doesn’t do optical media) and whop, there be games. Quality games, i may add. For the nice price of zero bucks. Oh the joy of open source :)

I wasn’t able to get sound through HDMI but Linus was happy. And it didn’t take long until he was steering that space ship quite adequately for a four year old who’ve never played a video game, nor operated a mouse before.

My boy is (also) becoming a geek ;)

On the media player side, i was able to manually (ungh) download a pre-programmed and listed movie from TVkaista and play it with VLC player. It wasn’t much of an Integrated User Experience (and my wife did complain that it was too complex, but she’s still buying the fact that it’s not really ready yet). But at least i showed myself – and her – that it’s possible to play a movie on that tiny box.

So what now remains is automagically downloading content using an RSS feed. XBMC can quite happily stream media from an RSS feed but if i want the original 8 Mbps feed, my 11 Mbps connection will ensure the movie will be … buffering quite a bit. So while waiting for XBMC to get this feature integrated, i’ll have to resort to some kludgy ad-hockery by using Miro or Juice as an external download (Update: Juice may need to run in XP mode on Windows 7, or then i’ll just save my resources and try gPodder instead). Which has to run as an application rather than a service. And which will lose all and any metadata which TVkaista kindly provides about the shows.

Sigh. No winning just yet. And another extra few moving parts. It seems like every solution reveals two new problems.

[Blog title reference: The Alarm]

[0] Watching recorded television was a functional requirement for system wife approval. And usability was the central non-functional requirement (which doesn’t imply that usability is required not to work :) )

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Remotely joining a Windows domain

Fri 4-Dec-2009 in english, sysadmin | Please leave a comment!

I learned something today. It is possible to have a Windows computer join a domain over VPN. My colleague suggested this to be true once but i never actually tried it myself.  And here’s how.

Be at the office, or at home. Take the computer that’s going to the customer and install all the security updates. Make a VPN conection to the customer. Check that the DNS settings for the subnet behind the VPN connection points to the nameserver of the customer. If you’re running a well configured VPN, that should happen automagically (also if you’re running Windows VPN).

Right-click My Computer, choose Properties, do the usual drill from Computer Name to join the customer’s domain. Reboot.

And here comes the trick.

Log in as the old local user. Re-ignite the VPN connection. Start –> Switch user. Log in as administrator (or whoever) from the customer domain. This will, oddly enough, de-activate the VPN connection, so you’ll need to rebuild it.

Do the other tricks you wanted to as a member of the customer’s domain.

Easy as pie, once you know the recepie.

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Piotr Grudziński interview

Fri 4-Dec-2009 in english | Please leave a comment!

I had the distinct pleasure of conducting a nicely informal chit-chatty interview with Piotr Grudziński from Riverside last Saturday. The interview was just broadcast on Frans Keylard’s show Rogues Gallery.

It was all great fun and very uninformative. I haven’t done a radio interview in ten years, but as soon as i had the “tape” running, it all came back to me. Just enough edge, just enough laid back. In fact, both Piotr and i were pleased that it was fun not to do another interview around “so what’s the album about” theme. I just wanted to present the band and him for the part of the world which isn’t intimately familiar with the band Riverside, and i think i did okay. In fact, it was Piotr who brought it up after i pressed the stop button.

One thing has changed during ten years though. Back then, i used a recorder (in the Days Of Old, it was a Nagra; later it was a Minidisc). This time i recorded straight into a laptop running Audacity so i could edit it without having to transfer the audio first. Nice. For the next time, i’ve got to get me a USB microphone and a minuscule digital audio recorder, or why not an interview mic with the recorder built in? :)

You can download the 20′26″ Piotr Grudziński interview (128kb/s vbr mp3) in case you want to hear it (again :) ).

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Singelshopping

Tue 1-Dec-2009 in svenska | Skriv en kommentar!

En bytta lättyoghurt, tre specialöl (alla olika), en liten påse salmiak, en ask mikro-popcorn, en fryst thai-nånting för en och två påsar gurusoppa presenterade för en söt kassaflicka skulle kanske ha verkat pupsigt på nåt hjälplöst vis [0] om det inte var för ringen som flashade fram på vänster hand då jag skulle underteckna bankkortskvittot. Nu var det bara patetiskt. Aj kan int karln sköta sej själv när frun är borta?

Jag är säker på att butikskassorna analyserar sina kunder beroende på deras uppköp.

[0] för tio-femton år sen då, än sen då?

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Revo InstallFail

Sat 28-Nov-2009 in english, geek | Please leave a comment!

I have it! I have it! I have my rhombic computer! :) (yes, it looks as a skewed box and i don’t know why)

After much searching, the customs did find my little Asus. I went to the customs office, checked out the computer (no tax but 22% VAT) and happily drove home.

Plugging in was easy as pie. The power brick is of the laptop kind, which means it has a detachable power cord with a “mickey mouse” connector, so changing it from a US cord to an EU one was no problem. I would have hated having an ugly adapter around. Kudos to Asus for that.

Two seconds after powering up, i was greeted with a Splashtop-powered minimal interface with a web browser, chat and Skype. The setup also included a media player but since it didn’t play media resources on the network, didn’t give it much more thought. Also, it seemed like i wasn’t seeing full HD resolution on the telly. Quite a shame really. A near-instantly starting media centre would be… nice!

The next step was going to the system installation feature. And even though i’d bought a Linux computer, the installer only offered me one choice: Windows Vista. With no license key. So counting Splashtop as Linux, i indeed got a computer with Linux.

Next i’m going to test booting from an XBMC Live distribution on USB.

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Raiders of the lost box

Thu 26-Nov-2009 in Uncategorized, english, geek | Please leave a comment!

The home entertainment network project has progressed with the box having been located.

After having waited nearly a week for the customs department to signal me that i can come and fetch my Asus, a colleague of mine suggested i’d give ‘em a ring. Unlike many other official instances here, the customs still live in the Soviet era when they were stiff and unfriendly and in such a monopolistic position that they didn’t have to care [0]. So i did call them.

I was a bit surprised when my call was answered nearly immediately. I told the receptionist that i had this EMS tracking number and i wanted to know where my box was. According to the tracking, it has been under their wings for a week now. But no, when it comes to EMS tracking numbers, i would have to call the postal services, Itella [1].

Which i did.

The AVR [2] at Itella calmly told me that i was in line, that the typical waiting time was eight minutes, that the call was being recorded and that queuing was going to cost me. Schweet. From there on, things took a turn for the better.

Seven and a half minutes later, a gentleman with butler-like qualities answered, clearly stating his full name and enquiring what i might be enquiring today. Upon telling him, he agreed that the package indeed should be at the customs but instead of asking me to call back, he double checked by recipient address and said he’d check with the customs.

One minute later, he confirmed that my computer indeed was where i had suspected but that he was not able to get its current status at this notice. Could he perhaps call me back after handling the issue with the customs?

Heck yeah!

He repeats his name (in case i want to call him back, i suppose?) and gets on the job.

Another ten minutes and my phone rings again. We now know that the computer is at the customs’ location by the airport and i should ring the customs tomorrow mid day to confirm i can pick it up. Incidentally i’m going for a customer meeting tomorrow just by the airport. How excellent!

I tell him what a hoopy frood he’s been and how much i appreciate his efforts. I give a pile of thanks over the wire and a happy so-long. He responds with a butler’s calmness, thank you and goodbye sir.

Respex and kudos to the Itella customer service. You rule.

I wish the coming weekend was longer, so that i could get down and do some serious tinkering. Thankfully, going to see Riverside (and hopefully interview/photograph) on Saturday is a valid reason not to be too buggered about it.

And there are other, more architectural problems, of which i’ll be writing shortly.

 

[0] Thinking of it, couldn’t there be competing customs?

[1] Long gone are the times when the post was called the post.

[2] automated voice recognition, which was able to tell my “no” apart from the other option (“yes”)

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Geeky passwords

Tue 24-Nov-2009 in english, geek | 3 comments

It’s kinda sad when my ungeeky users don’t understand the sheer brilliance of the passwords i create for them.

  • c=0.3Gm/s
  • H2O=water
  • Pi<=22/7

Shame regular users can’t type out funny characters. Otherwise π ≈ 22/7  and c ≈ 0.3 Gm/s would be both more correct and more secure. On the other hand, i do occasionally include spaces in passwords but sometimes get weird looks when i inform them their new password “Cheers, matey!”.

One day i’m going to give somebody the password e^(i*phi)=cos(phi)+i*sin(phi) out of sheer frustration. Or eiφ = cos φ + i sin φ, if i’m particularly nasty. Let’s see how they insert italics and superscripts into their passwords.

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The call for a media centre

Mon 23-Nov-2009 in english, geek | Please leave a comment!

Two or three weeks ago, our digibox gave up. Over its last months, it got slower and slower. The boot-up times became increasingly sluggish, and eventually it became so laggy that it couldn’t even record stuff anymore.

Digibox?

For those outside Finland, a digibox is what we call the “set top box” (which, in these times of thin television sets, resides under the set, not on top of it) which allows our analogue TVs receive DVB television or, which is increasingly their job, record stuff. So in all essence, the modern day VCR.

I did two things. First, i backed up all essential stuff (mostly moomins [0]). Then i did a whole bunch of testing. Our digibox is a Linux appliance, a Maximum 8000 [1], so there were a few things i could figure out. I did a disk check, first on the device itself and then connected to my laptop. I tried running the box without an Ethernet connection. I formatted the disk’s partitions with the built in formatting tool and I re-installed the whole damn box with factory settings. Turned out that “formatting” it only removed the files, so using instructions on the Maximum discussion board, i really formatted the disk using a laptop. The box came back up but was just as sluggish. I even took it to a friend who has an identical box (sans problemos) and tried it there. But all to no avail.

Finally, i asked on Twitter what the best recording digibox out there would be. The answer was TVkaista.fi.

TVkaista is a service, basically “your VCR on the ‘net” with which you watch or download any program on the free-to-air stations in Finland. Legally [2]. A bit like the Hulus and BBC services that exist in the big world. All for a nice fee of 98 € a year. And with some reading of their news pages, i was able to subscribe to a free testing account. Not bad.

Turns out that there is hope for integration (ah! there’s that word again!) with TVkaista. On the pages for your recordings, you can “import to iTunes”. What happens is that iTunes connects to your recordings as a podcast. If you check out the properties of that podcast, there’s a regular URL to a regular RSS feed behind it. It just requires authentication, which wget can handle just fine.

The integration doesn’t stop there though. For a more hard core approach, i could apply some magick to the RSS feed and with that be able to download the full resolution shows instead of the iTunes-ely compressed ones. Or i could get the TVkaista-XBMC plugin and have the magick applied for me. Which would be nice. And if the plugin isn’t magick enough, i’ll just have to learn enough Python to improve it (oh the joys of open source :) ). Or – this just in — i could use the Boxee feed which uses Yahoo! Pipes magick. Whoa.

But i’m getting way ahead of me. Right now the Asus Revo i’ve ordered for the project is sitting in the customs, and have done so for nearly a week. Turns out you don’t have to pay customs for imported computers but you have to pay 22% VAT. I guess that’s what the customs are thinking about. Or then their department is just filled with imported computers waiting to become media centres.

If you’ve actually read this far, here’s an easter egg. Post a nice comment if you want a two weeks’ free TVkaista trial account from me!

More to follow.


[0] I never said they were essential to me :)

[1] the name, pretentious as a progressive concept double album

[2] OK, this has been disputed, but so far not actually deemed illegal.

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Fluff-fluff

Fri 20-Nov-2009 in meta, svenska | 2 kommentarer

Ett stortack till Göran Söderström som inte bara skapade fonten Navelfluff (se gårdagens) men även skickade mej en ny header till navelfluff.org i precis rätt storlek. Finemang!

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Navelfluff, the font

Wed 18-Nov-2009 in english, geek, meta | 2 comments

Schweet. There is a font called Navelfluff. It’s nice and fuzzy but boy it must be heavy as a vectored font. In fact, there are two variants of the font, one with much fuzz and one with even more.

The font family is priced at 75€, so it’s not like i’m going to purchase it. A sample text “Navelfluff” would be nice though for a blog header :)

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