Eddie's Fancy

Looks like I’ve gotten notifications working again. A nasty hack of chained email accounts, but what are you going to do.

I’ve put out a new Bookit release v0.6.0.

Finally upgraded my router from v23 to v24 sp2; one issue was driving me mad, let me spare you some stress.

I’m using DNSMasq both as a dhcp and dns server, in v23 I manually added a domain line to the Additional DNSMasq Options field. After upgrading, I couldn’t get IP addresses served up to my boxes, a royal pain in the butt.

Telneting in, I noticed dnsmasq wasn’t starting so I poked around the config file, /tmp/dnsmasq.conf. Two domain lines, one for my private domain and one from my ISP. Running dnsmasq manually confirmed it wouldn’t start.

I changed two things in the DD-WRT gui. One, remove the manual entry for domain and set it in the LAN Domain field of the DHCP Server section. Second, set Used Domain to “WAN & LAN” to prevent the ISP’s domain name from filtering through.

I don’t know if this was important, but in the dhcp-host settings I flipped the positions of the IP address and host name. Not sure if both work or if it changed between releases, but as it’s working I’m not going to change it now.

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.

It was a rainy day. A really, really rainy day. And the wife was out giving at talk at UH. So far after eating a bowl of cereal while watching Farscape I decided to design some business cards. It seemed the thing to do at the time.

Googling around for various card LaTex templates I finally found on adapted by John Vernaleo that was easy to modify and looked nice. It stole the idea of including a GPG fingerprint from another template I found included it on the bottom the card.

I spent sometime sitting on the couch browsing various designs and decided a logo was needed in the upper left corner to spruce thing up a bit. I tried my initials but they it seemed a bit plain. When my wife came home I asked how to write in initials in Bengali and came up with a simple design in The Gimp.

I printed a test page and the anti-aliasing on the fonts used for the logo didn’t translate very well. What I needed was a log in encapsulated postscript that used an outline font so it would print correctly at the small scale used for the card. Time for a new tool! Back to Google, I decided to try my hand at Inkscape. Not too shappy.

Export as eps and include in the file and…it looks like crap. I need to left align the logo but the table environment used to center the text didn’t work quite like I wanted. After much poking around I came across a suitable solution; a three column table with expanding space on the left and right, text in the center, and a three column spanning left-aligned top row with the logo. Not bad.

My hand-cut version weren’t quite straight enough but I had some Avery templates from a previous project. After a bit of adjusting I was able to fit them into the punch outs fairly cleanly. I considered making them two-sided, but I usually use the back of business cards for notes and decided to keep it empty. Not bad for a morning’s work.

SQLite Manager has become an indispensable tool for me. I’ve been using SQLite databases for both Firefox based plugins and iPhone applications and have been getting tired of doing everything through the command line. This Firefox plugin puts a basic GUI around the database interface and makes it easier to manage the database. Plus it’s cross platform, so I can use it on Windows at work, Linux on my laptop or Mac on my iPhone development machine.

The text interface has a redraw issue, which is odd, and makes entering queries annoying. Hopefully this will be fixed soon. Even with that, it’s a must have tool.

I’ve been using an ancient ShuttleX running MythTV as a media PC for years now but it was getting very long in the tooth. The fans were too loud, it ran too hot, and wasn’t fast enough to play HD video without shearing.

I wasn’t planning on building a new computer right now given the economy, but two things changed my mind. First, I started playing around with Boxee and quickly became very happy with it even though it’s still alpha. Secondly I came across an intel atom based Mini-ITX motherboard for $80 with S-Video out for $80. Throw in a case, memory and hard drive and the total cost was a tad over $200, that I could handle.

A few minutes of Googling indicated that all the features I wanted with work with Ubuntu so I ordered the parts from New Egg and Buy.com on Friday and waited for Tuesday to come around for delivery.

Hardware

Parts ordered were:

• Intel D945GCLF2 motherboard
• 2GB Kingston RAM stick
• Rosewill Smart RS-MI-01 BK Mini ITX Tower
• a Western Digital hard drive

I’d scavenge the DVD drive and PCI wireless card from the previous computer.

The board has two SATA connectors, one of which I’d use for the hard drive, one PATA connector for my old DVD drive, one slot for RAM, one PCI slot (for the wireless card) , front and back audio connectors (which I would only use for initial testing) and most importantly a rear S-Video output.

Here’s a side view of the case:

There’s room for a 5.25″ inch drive on top, a floppy (unused) and a 3.5″ drive on the opposite side.

The first problem I ran into involved my stubby short fingers. They made it difficult to get a good grip on the I/O back panel and pop it into place, plus pressing the motherboard tight enough against it to line up with the mounting holes. There’s not a lot of room above the screws, luckily I had one of these ratcheting screwdrivers:

Which made it much easier to get in there and tighten down the screws. The connectors on the case were very well labeled and the reference sheet for the motherboard allowed me to make quick work of assembling everything. I ran into two issues with cables. At first I routed the SATA cable the wrong was and was unable to disconnect it from the main board. No amount of hand pulling would get it out. A quick tug with pliers worked but damaged the cable end. Luckily I had spares in my parts box. Also the standard ribbon cable for use with the PATA DVD drive didn’t seem to work, so I fell back on the high quality PATA cable with a round, shielded cover from the parts box.

Software

First big test, power on. No magic smoke! I tried to boot the memtest86 CD discovered the PATA cabling issue. Swap that out and ran memtest86 for a few hours. Once that passed, I went ahead with installation.

For a while I’ve been using Ubuntu on everything Linux based except for the server which I still ran on Debian for stability reason. So far Ubuntu seems to be the perfect blend of stability and ease use. Fedoroa changes too often and too frequently had software issues. Debian is too out of date for desktop use.

I grabbed a Ubuntu 8.10 disk, booted up, and everything installed like a hitch. It’s times like these I’m glad I bought a 100 foot Cat5 cable. I didn’t have to worry about getting the wireless network setup immediately.

One issue I was expecting was trouble with the intel driver and S-Video out. I connected a spare TV and sure enough nothing would sync. I installed the alternate drivers discussed here and was able to get a 1024×768 mode working. Using xrandr I was able to see many other modes listed, but few would work reliably. Once I found a compatible TV mode (720×576), I ran into the issue of getting the computer to boot into that mode with only a TV connected.

This helped at first, I created a custom /etc/X11/Xsession.d/45custom_xrandr-settings script to set the correct mode on X11 start if an external TV is connected. It seemed to work fine until Gnome started. A few minutes of googling pointed me here, Gnome thinks it knows best and tries to override your xrandr settings. A tweak in the gconf-editor disables this and now it will boot into the correct mode when the TV is connected.

Now the big step, install Boxee. Everything seemed to work at first but quickly the video and audio would either not work, playback at incorrect speeds, or die completely. Back to Google and a look at the logs. PulseAudio is apparently a big issue with Boxee. I disabled with with a few edits to various config files (lost my notes, sorry) and everything seemed to work.

For the actual audio solution, I pulled out the USB – Toslink adapter I had been using on the previous Media PC. This came with a Sony MD Recorder and I love it, the audio quality is fantastic and work out of any USB port. I hope it never breaks because I have idea how to replace it. On the previous installs this always was a major pain to get working, but I had not issues at all this time. I edited the module configuration file to make sure the usb audio module was enabled and was set to the default audio output in the alsa configuration.

I also plugged in my USB IR transceiver and installed LIRCD selecting MCE2 as my remote type. Worked like a champ first time.

I moved the computer into my stereo shelf and started playing with Boxeee.

Boxee

As of right now I’m using build 0.9.8.4826 of Boxee and am pretty happy with the results. Most things work, but there are a few nagging issues.

It randomly crashes. To be expected since it’s alpha software and it’s not enough to prevent me from enjoying it, but more stability would be nice. The Last.FM plugin seems to either crash or lock up every time I use it.

It won’t play DVDs. This may be a hardware or Ubuntu issue since mplayer doesn’t work with a disk either, but it is annoying. I may buy a new SATA drive next month and try it out.

Hulu.com won’t work through Boxee. Not their fault but hopefully will be addressed. For now I can use it through Firefox and it looks great.

The auto scanning and metadata lookup for TV shows does not work. I’ve read every thread on the forums about this and tried every suggestion but nothing worked. I was able to manually select one episode, have it search thetvdb.com for the tv show, and then apply the results to the entire directory. I don’t add shows often so this will work until a new build/fix is released.

Also, Boxee won’t seem to playback a copied DVD file structure even though the wiki says it will. Creating an iso image from the directory does work so I’m happy. The menu system is a bit broken, the highlights displayed but not the background image, but as I mainly ripped DVDs to a divx file this isn’t really an issue for me.

So far I’ve been very happy with the results. I mainly use the computer for playing back video files but the integration of streaming content of the internet is fantastic. cbs.com and others have a large amount of free, legitimate content available. Once the code matures and it becomes more stable and the hulu.com situation is resolved this will be a kick ass product.

Edit to add

JonnyG asks about hard drive installation. Below is a scan of the installation guide that came with the case. The 3.5″ drive installs on its side on the right side of the case. Click for the full version.