Eddie's Fancy

Off for a beer. Or two.

I’ve got a headache, the fire alarm went off because of a faulty detector. In-ear headphones work well to take the high frequency edge off.

Just got mail intended for someone in Paramus, NJ. Post Office is just a wee bit off.

Just watch ISS and the Shuttle go by overhead. Awesome sight.

Grr, Chrome and Safari insist on printing headers/footers, no way to turn it off.

Hail! Coming down pretty hard.

Off to sell some books. I have far, far too many books. And far too many unread ones. It’s on the verge of pathological.

I’m just a girl who can’t say nnn…..

Darn, mobile safari won’t open and import vcf files from a url. Very annoying. The iPhone mail app will import a vcf attachment.

I’ve been a fan of hard-boiled detective novels for years. Unfortunately I started with Chandler and Dashiell Hammett so it’s been downhill since then. I’ve read about John D. MacDonald for years, but just now picked up the first Travis McGee novel.

McGee is a finder of lost things, he enjoys life on his houseboat in Fort Lauderdale until he runs low on cash, then takes on a client to find whatever they need found. In “The Deep Blue Good-by” (reminiscent of “The Long Goodbye” by Raymond Chandler) he is hired by a showgirl who is missing money acquired by her father from India during WW-II.

I liked McGee and the book clipped along at a good pace. MacDonald doesn’t quite turn a phrase like Chandler or Hammett, but he makes up for it with a moving plot.

I’ve put the rest of his books into my checklist, I’ll definitely be on the look-out for them as I browse used bookstores.

Gack gack gack gack, gack gack. Gack.

Gack gack.

New bluetooth headphones have a slight audio delay, throwing off sync in videos. Supposedly power cycling while pausing will fix this.

Makin’ yogurt, waiting for the milk to cool. Microbiology in the kitchen, just need some agar petri dishes.

Finally some photos from Indrani’s Birthday trip. Keep in mind, I had the flu the entire time, so don’t expect Ansel Adams.

View Slideshow

I upgraded my media box to the Ubuntu Jaunty and the video and audio promptly stopped working. The video I fixed by upgrading to a new intel xorg server that’s intended for the next ubuntu release. Given that there was a fix for this issue for the previous release, I’m not sure why Jaunty didn’t include it.

Audio was a bit stickier. I have a USB to optical adapter I’ve been using for years to connect a PC to my receiver. Upgrading cleared out my configuration and I had to recreate it.

First part was getting the snd-usb-audio kernel module to load. I spend much time trying to get snd-usb-audio to load as the primary audio device but for some reason the intel driver kept getting priority. I didn’t want to modify the system too much, it makes upgrading such a hassle. I settled on this, modify /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base:


alias snd-card-1 snd-usb-audio
alias sound-slot-1 snd-card-1
option snd-usb-audio index=1


This will load the usb audio device in the second slot. Now, normally I create a .asoundrc file in my home directory containing this:


pcm.!default {
type hw
card 1
}

ctl.!default {
type hw
card 1
}


Which tells alsa to use the second audio device as the default one. This worked for the Ubuntu desktop, media players, and the navigation sounds in Boxee, but not for audio playing in Boxee. Much googling occurred.

Eventually, I found another alternative, asoundconf. I deleted .asoundrc, then ran asoundconf list to get the list of current audio devices, and then ran asoundconf set-default-card [device] to create a .asoundrc.asoundconf in my home directory forcing the default audio to route to the USB audio device.

Reboot, and all worked. Until the next uprade.