Eddie's Fancy

YouTube – Wassup 2008.

Good Stuff.

I’m a tech freak, but this is just goofy.

This weekend we were in Chicago and I took a trip to The Field Museum and took a bunch of photos of Sue. Here’s what it looks like in Photosynth.

So much for the big tropical storm. Doctor’s appointments canceled for this?
On the plus side I got me new iPhone -woo hoo! This is posted using the wordpress iphone client.

Ack, updated to wordpress 2.6 and broke permalinks.

Edit to Add: temporary work around until 2.6.1 is out.

The Secret of Great Bread: Let Time Do the Work – New York Times.

My wife is on a low iodine diet right now so we thought it would be a great time to try making our own bread. I basically followed this recipe but substituted one third of the bread flour with whole wheat flour. It came out fantastic. Now I need to find a way to make it in a shape more suitable to sandwiches.

A few years ago I ripped all of my CDs to mp3 files and bought a SoundBridge as the primary music player. So far I’ve been very happy with it. They’ve provided firmware updates that not only fixed bugs but added new features. The only problem I’ve had with it is one of the end caps broke off.

Now they’ve come out with a Netflix Player box that connects to your Netflix account and allows you to view their “Watch Instantly” selection on your TV. I’ve already been doing that with a laptop, but it’s been a pain to use and the video quality wasn’t that great. I figured for $99.99, I couldn’t lose.

So far i love it. The quality is not quite DVD level but it’s better than cable. The setup was trivial and it just worked right out of the box. In fact, it works so well I can only complain about minor details…

• Only stereo audio, oh well, not that big of deal.
• The selection isn’t that great. Well, I guess 10,000 things to watch isn’t anything to sneeze at but it’s nothing compared to Netflix’s DVD selection. However, this is constantly improving.
• You have to manage your queue online with a PC. Not a big deal, but it would be nice to browse via the device on your TV.
• No local playback. Again, not deal killer but I’d love to be able to play back videos I’ve stored on my local network. Still, I have my Mythtv box for that.

So far I’ve been lucky and my crappy comcast connection hasn’t died during a movie, but it’s just a matter of time. They only have enough storage for minimal caching, so I won’t be able to coast over a long outage.

My wife is happy, they have several Satyajit Ray movies online, I’ve been meaning to watch them too.

Testing out the new code to display photos. I need to play with the page theme a bit.

I spent my lunch hour upgrading the site to the latest wordpress release. So far everything seems to work.

After setting up the NSLU2 as my backup machine, I freed up the old ShuttleX box I had original bought as a media controller. I wasn’t happy with the results at the time, but it’s been a few years so I thought I’d give it another go.

The latest Mythbuntu release worked well right out of the box, and I picked up a MCE Remote on the cheap at Directron for very nice media playback solution. I need to tweak the color balance but other than that everything is going like gangbusters.

I had been trying out Netflix’s instant viewing using a laptop, so I decided to install XP onto a separate partition for dedicated use. I used hooked up a LCD panel to the main VGA out and a small TV to the S-Video out for test purposes. All worked well and I connected it to our primary TV. I didn’t have a primary display connected, since the S-Video channel should show a clone of the primary display it should just word, instead I got a C000D11B1 error from Netflix and a recommendation to reset all of the DRM licenses.

After several hours of mucking about, on a lark I connected a LCD panel, and everything worked again. For some reason, the DRM on the Netflix movies kicks in when the TV is the only display. I had heard about this when using HD monitors, but it never occurred to me that a regular TV would also trigger it.

For now I’ll just connect a display when we want to use Netflix, but I’d like to find a small 7″-8″ display to use permanently.

I keep a small box running linux in my office to act as an off site backup and local music server. Yes, I know how pathetic that sounds. It’s an older ShuttleX box and way to loud, it was becoming a distraction. So last week I picked up a Linksys/Cisco NSLU2 from newegg.com and installed Debian on it. It’s hard to tell from this photo but it’s about the size of my open hand.

I had a spare 320GB hard drive sitting around so I used that as the root partition and primary storage drive. I’ve got mt-daapd and samba running on it, plus every night it connects to my home server via rsync to backup my critical data.

So far the only negative is that the initial connection to mt-daapd from iTunes is slower than my original server. Other than it seems to work fine. I’m going to let it run for a week or so before retasking my old box.

I ran into a sticky problem today and was pleased at the solution. I’m trying to install Debian on a little NSLU2 box I bought. It’s a linux-based network attached storage device I’m hoping to replace my spare boy in the office with. It obtains and IP address using DHCP but doesn’t have an attached monitor, so short of assigned a static IP I had no way knowing what address was assigned.

Enter ettercap which is mainly used to simulate man in the middle attacks and act as a general network sniffer. Using it I was able to scan all machines on my local subnet and get the MAC to IP address mappings. Neat, but not something to try on a very large network.

Finally, after years of talking about it but never doing it, I’ve started my first batch of mead. I originally was going to go for a simple semi-sweet mead to start with, but after reading the gotmead forums I decided to go with Joe’s Ancient Orange, a supposedly fool-proof recipe.

We’ll find out in two months.

I’ve started playing with Pandora; very, very cool. You suggest a song or artist and it calculates close matches based on a large set of parameters. It then generates a flash-based music stream out of those recordings.

I only wish the licensing restrictions were looser and I could just access as an mp3 stream.

I’m 40.

Really, ouch, I’m 40.

Does this mean I can yell at kids to get them off my lawn now?