Chris​Hubbs​.com

The title is just a warning that some of your eyes might glaze over whilst reading this post. Others of you will find it interesting. Still others of you might have good advice to offer me…

Anyhow, I needed a good geek project to work on this weekend, I wanted to try something new. So I have this old PC sitting downstairs that I’m not using for anything except as a backup for the laptop and for doing filesharing (gotta love indieriver.net!), and it’s bogged down with lots of stuff; I’ve had it for 5 or 6 years now and never wiped it or reloaded it. So, I decided to have some fun and try doing a Linux installation. I actually settled on Ubuntu, which appears to have a fairly decent desktop interface and a nicely-designed installation.

Installing Ubuntu was actually very easy. I backed up the little data I wanted to save onto the laptop, then went ahead and repartitioned the 60 GB hard drive. The installation went quickly, and I was up and running. Getting a driver to work for my D-Link DWL-G122 USB Wifi adapter was a bit more of a challenge. But I got it working Saturday night after some serious consultation of the Ubuntu help forums.

Basically I’m stuck with two things right now. 1) I have a printer attached to the Linux machine, and it works fine. However, I need to get it shared with the laptop. I almost had it last night, but no such luck. There’s some combination of Samba and CUPS settings that I haven’t hit on yet that should do the trick. 2) I need to get a file sharing program running. The obvious choice is Azureus. However, it’s running into Java errors and hanging up on me; I end up having to kill -9 it every time. I did a brief web search for other torrent programs that might be good, but haven’t found anything I’m very happy with yet. I used Utorrent when I was using Windows, and like it a lot. Unfortunately, there’s no Linux version available.

Any suggestions from anybody for a torrent program? Should I just try debugging the Java issues in Azureus? Since that’s the primary function of that PC, it’d be nice to have it working. And I can’t afford to spend too many more nights up past 10 pm working on it. It makes it really hard to get up in the morning and run.

CID has free wireless internet in the terminal. My flight was delayed by about 15 minutes, but now I guess it’s about time to board. I wonder if DFW has wireless? I guess I’ll find out in a couple of hours.

Yesterday my PDA totally locked up, just froze with the backlight on and nothing on screen. Finally last night the battery gave out. But apparently there is happy news! My dear wife reports from home today that when she plugged it in to the charger, it came back up and appears to be working correctly. Let’s hope that it keeps it up - I don’t like my choices for replacing it, even if I could afford them:

First there’s the Palm brand products. I like their OS, but I’m getting a sour taste in my mouth for them after my recent troubles.

• Cheap-o Palm Zire 22. Does most of what I need, but has a lousy screen (160x160 res) and is under-powered. $99.
• Palm Tungsten E2. What I have right now. Causing problems after 9 months. $199.
• Palm Tungsten TX. Bigger screen than what I have, plus it has Wi-Fi built in. $299.

Or, I could make the big leap and go to the ones running Windows CE, or whatever the heck they call it now.

The trouble there is that the bottom-of-the-line units start, price-wise, about the same place that the Palms stop. I could get the basic Dell Axim for about $250 right now, sans case and extended warranty.

Let’s just hope my E2 is back alive and good to go for a while. As much as I rely on it to keep me on schedule, $250 for a product that lasts only 9 months is ridiculous.

On the heels of my stereo receiver biting the dust, tonight I pulled my Palm Tungsten E2 out of my pocket to schedule a lunch meeting, and it came up dead. The backlight stayed on, the screen was blank, and it wouldn’t respond to a reset, even a hard reset. I’ve only had it for 9 months. Of course, the Palm warranty is only 90 days… what a rip-off.

I don’t know what I want to do about a PDA now. I might try going without it for a couple weeks and see how much I miss it… but I know it’ll be bad. If I hadn’t just spent $200 on a stereo, buying a new PDA wouldn’t seem totally out of the question, but now… grrr… and I’m not very motivated to want to buy another Palm brand PDA. I’ll have to see what kind of employee discount I can get on a Dell handheld, maybe.

[Kudos to Roger for playing along with the Veggie Tales reference.]

A follow-up on yesterday’s adventures with the stereo receiver. I hit my local Best Buy last night (and boy, do we need some competition for them in town, but that’s another post…) and ended up purchasing a Yamaha HTR-5930 receiver. It’s got the usual bells and whistles: Dolby ProLogic and DTS decoding, 100 watts per channel, etc. It was actually quite easy to hook up last night and get running; more intuitive than the Onkyo that died.

Didn’t have time to play with it much last night - it was getting too late. But a little bit of LoTR:The Two Towers on DVD was enough to assure me that this thing will kick out some serious sound.

No, not the blog. My entertainment center, usually. But last weekend for some reason the LCD display of my Onkyo HTS-650 reciever bit the dust. The amp still works, but you can’t see the display, so you can’t tell what source is selected, or what options, or anything like that. This isn’t the first thing to break on this receiver; it totally died a couple of years ago when it was still under warranty. Back then, two trips to the authorized repair shop in Coralville were enough to get it fixed. It’s no longer under warranty now, though.

I could take it in to see about getting it repaired, but I’m having a hard time being motivated to do that since the thing seems to have a failure history. What’s gonna break next? It doesn’t make sense to keep taking it in for repairs when after only a few repairs it would’ve been cheaper to buy something new.

I think I’m going stereo shopping tonight.

It’s taken too long, but noelridge.org is finally up and running with real pictures of our people and a color scheme that’s much more readable than the old light green. Now there’s just regular maintenance to do… but that’s fairly easy.

This task has been on my list of stuff to finish for far too long now, so it’s good to get it done.

OK, so when we bought our 40-hour Tivo, it was small-ish for storage space, but it worked. Now that we’ve got subscriptions going for kids programming like Sesame Street and Zooboomafoo, I’ve been wishing for some more storage space. Having been assured by Mark that the upgrade was fairly easy, I decided to take it on myself.

Step 1 was to get a larger hard drive. I didn’t want to spend a lot, but I wanted a lot of space. A Christmas gift card to Best Buy (thanks Ryan!) was a good starting point. Then I found a good deal on a Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 160 GB hard drive. It started at $119.99, but has $80 worth of mail-in rebates. So I picked it up today and got started.

There are good instructions out on the web for upgrading to a bigger Tivo hard drive. The most detailed and useful was www.newreleasesvideo.com/hinsdale-how-to/index9.html. It has very specific step-by-step instructions.

Step 2 was to crack open the Tivo and backup its hard drive onto the new hard drive. Most of the time here was spent just opening cases and swapping in and out hard drives. Per the instructions I had created a bootable CD running some specialized Linux, and that allowed me to do all of the fun backups and restores.

The whole copying process (including all of the programs I currently have recorded) took about 2 hours to complete.

Step 3: put everything back together and check out the system status page.  The results: 40 or so hours of recording space in “Best” mode, up to 183 hours in “Basic” mode.  I think I’ll stick in “High” mode, which’ll give me 83 hours of recording time.

Note: depending on the type of Tivo, you may not be able to use all the hard drive space; older Tivos software limits you to addressing about 137 GB. However, my Series 2 Tivo model TVD540040 is able to address larger amounts, so I was able to use all 160 GB. Woohoo!

I’ll echo Mark’s comments here on Tivo upgrades; I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was. If you’re comfortable swapping hard drives in and out and setting the master/slave jumpers, you can do this. No problemo.