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Hardware

That feeling of dread

I’m watching TV this past Sunday, streaming TV shows from my networked hard drive (a Buffalo Terrastation) to my Netgear EVA as my DirecTV is still out. I had noticed that when I hit play, it was taking a much longer time to start the show, but they started, and then halfway through one show it stopped, and couldn’t connect.

Walking into my office, all the lights on the Terrastation are flashing. The web interface came up, and the diagnostics report that one of the hard drives has failed.

Ack. Ugh. Many bad words I don’t want my children repeating.

A feeling of dread. Panic setting in – what isn’t backed up? What am I going to lose? What will my wife think?

I run some more diagnostics, generic drive failure messages. The Terrastation won’t give me status on the raid array because of the drive failure. Why, oh why was I running in drive spanning mode and not in a raid configuration where if a drive failed I’d still be ok?

The Terrastation has 4 160GB drives with the option of drive spanning, RAID 0, 1 or 5. Running a small version of Linux, which I always meant to hack with a custom firmware but never did for SSH access, it has FTP and Samba. I had Samba shares set up storing all my music, photos, videos and backup shares for both my wife and me. The Terrastation streams that content to my Netgear EVA at my home theater, the Sonos music players all over the house, and the hacked Xbox in the family room.

The lost data appears to be minimal – I have a full backup of my music on my desktop’s hard drive, and it looks like I have a copy of most of the photo’s, though I need to double check. Ironically, I lost most of the video’s I’ve downloaded since my DirecTV dish has been down, but that is what Bittorrent is for.

I’m not sure what was in the backup directories, I know I haven’t backed up much lately.

Now the question is – when is redundant backup not redundant enough? Do I want to take one of the extra computers I’m not using and install FreeNAS or Openfiler? My good friend Mr. Holzer recently built a FreeNAS server using compactflash to boot the OS with a bunch of hard drives. The price of external drives keeps falling as well, do I want to just be lazy and buy another one of those?

I hate that feeling of dread – I’ve lost my personal music collection and had to re-rip it at least 3 times now. I know hard drives don’t last forever, and I’d rather be safe than sorry.

Harmony 880 on Linux

I received an email from Phil Dibowitz two days ago regarding his work on trying to get the Harmony 880 remote working on Linux. He had seen a blog post from late last year where I had added on to Aaron Bockover’s bounty to get Harmony support working.

Ironically enough after responding to his email, I went through my morning routine of checking the news on the ‘net while I ate breakfast, and saw the same story on Digg (linking here), and now a few hours later, Phoronix has picked up the story as well.

I would like to post one correction to the stories I’m seeing: this was originally Aaron Bockover’s idea. Aaron is a Linux developer and maintainer of Banshee, everyone’s favorite music manager for the GNOME desktop.

I’m excited to see all the interest in getting Harmony remotes working on Linux, and take Phil’s advice: give Logitech constructive feedback that we want to see support on Linux.

Dear Lazyweb: Bluetooth Adapters on Linux

Dear Lazyweb: I’m looking for a USB Bluetooth adapter that is Linux friendly.

I have two headsets with boom mics I’ve used on my desktop – one is a cheap off-brand, and one is a very nice Plantronics. I have been working on a podcast off and on for the last couple of months using Jokosher, more as a test to learn Jokosher so I can add audio to screencasts and help show users how to use Foresight.

Unfortunately, the sound quality on the boom mics is lacking – the cheap off brand sounds tinny, and the Plantronics makes it sound like the mic is 10 feet away from my voice, and doesn’t really move on the headset so I can position it better.

However, I just received a Jawbone bluetooth headset for my cellphone. The Jawbone’s claim to fame is that they made it for DARPA, and it blocks all ambient noise so you only hear the user’s voice. My hope is that it might work well for voice recording on Linux. But I’m not sure how compatible the different USB Bluetooth adapters are for pairing a device like a headset, and I don’t even know if Jokosher or other applications will see the headset as a microphone for voice recording.

If anyone has any thoughts, please leave a comment here, or drop me a line at pcutler _at_ foresightlinux dot org.

Thanks!

Ubuntu 6.10 Burning Problem

Since I built my new computer a few months back, and installed Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft, I have only been able to burn using sudo. My old machine burned fine without sudo, so I was guessing it was because I’m using a SATA DVD-RW drive.

I found this tip on the Ubuntu forums and it fixed my burning problem – Gnomebaker has no problem working as a normal user after applying this fix.

Step 1:

As root (or in a terminal type: sudo gedit /etc/udev/rules.d/15-local.rules This will create a new file called 15-local.rules. Add a new rule in the file:

# SCSI devices<br /> BUS=="scsi", KERNEL=="sg[0-9]", NAME="%k", GROUP="cdrom"

Step 2:

Reboot.

Step 3:

In a terminal type the following (hit enter after each):

sudo chmod 4755 /usr/bin/cdrecord<br /> sudo chmod 4755 /usr/bin/cdrecord.mmap<br /> sudo chmod 4755 /usr/bin/X11/cdrecord.mmap<br /> sudo chmod 4755 /usr/bin/cdrdao<br /> sudo chmod 4755 /usr/bin/X11/cdrdao

That should fix it, especially if you’re running Gnomebaker. If you’re running K3B, run K3Bsetup and hit the above link for more if you’re a KDE user.

Thanks to wilko on the Ubuntu Forums for posting this fix.

Sony's Playstation3 Unveiled

Sony unveiled the Playstation3 at a launch event at E3 last night.

Quick facts:

US Launch: Nov 17th

2 Versions (Comparison Chart Here):

$599: 60GB Hard Drive, HDMI, Wireless, Memory Card Reader

$499: 20GB HD, none of the above

2 million to ship at launch, 2 million more by end of the year, worldwide.

The combination of Blu-Ray built in, as well as the previously announced Linux operating system make this the console player for me. But only the $599 one – HDMI is a must-have!

Toshiba's HD-DVD player: Just a HTPC?

Could Toshiba’s just released HD-DVD player, the HD-A1, really just be a home theater PC disguised as a normal DVD player?

Sure enough, as seen on this blog and in the video, Toshiba’s HD-DVD player contains an IDE HD-DVD drive, P4 2.5 ghz, 1 gig of RAM, and a flash disk running Red Hat’s linux operating system.

As The Digital Bits noted, no wonder it takes the thing a minute to boot up.

Like the blog author above, I’m waiting for Blu-Ray – sure, it’s Sony’s technology, and their track record isn’t the best, but the compression and size opportunities (for the discs) are better with Blu-Ray than HD-DVD.

In's & Out's of 1080p HDTV

Team Xbox has an excellent story going through the details of 1080p HDTV vs. 720p and 1080i. Easy to read, it goes through all the technical information you need to know about the next generation HDTVs coming to market, and how Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will play with them.

The last two pages go through TV recommendations, and while I disagree with the writer that DLP is the best way to go, it’s an informative read on the best DLP TVs on the market. Like the writer, I’ve heard excellent things about the DLPs from Hewlett-Packard – who would have thought a PC maker could make an excellent HDTV?

The writer takes a shot at Sony’s SXRD towards the end, and seems unaware of Sony’s public announcement that their 2nd generation SXRD coming this fall will be 1080p compatible. The fall timeline gives me heartburn – even with the basement flooding putting my basement behind schedule, the SXRD is what I want, and I’ll be ready in June. Sony’s SXRD is a LCoS technology, which is a step ahead of DLP, with better blacks and a better picture.

HTPC Components Ordered

I ordered all of the parts for my home theater PC over the weekend, as a few things were on sale. Of course, my basement needs to cooperate and stop flooding. I have to get the carpet / pad replaced now. But this gives me two months to get the system built, Ubuntu installed, and MythTV configured.

  • 1 pcHDTV HD3000 PCI card for watching / recording HDTV with.
  • Abit 939 Motherboard (KN8), to go with the x2 4800+ I’ve had for a while.
  • 2 GB of Corsair RAM
  • 1 Silverstone LC16 home theater PC case, with 500w silent power supply, and 2 extra 80mm fans
  • 1 Pioneer DVD-RW drive (black)
  • 3 Seagate 300GB SATAII hard drives (call it 100 hours of HDTV recording)
  • And a Hauppauge PVR-250 for recording standard def TV that I’ve been hanging on to for a while
  • 1 BFG 6600GT PCIe video card – needed a GT to fit in the HTPC case

Almost everything was ordered from Newegg and PC Alchemy.

I need to do some more research if I should be using Ubuntu’s 64 bit version with MythTV, I’ve read mixed things. But the AMD x2 should perform extremely well for a HTPC. It won’t be easy getting everything configured, but god knows I’ve been researching it long enough, and now it’s go time.

DRM drains your battery

More reasons why DRM is evil:

Cnet recently conducted a test of MP3 players, and DRM encoded WMA files drained the battery faster than DRM-free MP3s.

When it comes to the Creative Zen Vision:M’s 14-hour claim, CNET got about 16 hours of playback time with MP3s from a full charge, which was a nice surprise. However, when they tried playing WMA 10 DRM crippled subscription tracks on it, they only got just over 12 hours; a loss of almost 4 hours (~25%) of playback time due to the battery-hungry DRM. CNET found similar results with other players with WMA DRM drastically reducing battery life by up to around 20%. Apple’s FairPlay DRM seems to have less of an effect with battery life being reduced by around 8% when compared with MP3 playback.

iRiver H10 on Ubuntu Linux Howto

I’m pleased to announce that after looking into it off and on for the last 6 months, I’ve got my iRiver H10 5GB fully working in Linux for the first time.

The H10 comes in MTP mode – Microsoft Transfer Protocol, insead of being a UMS – USB Media Storage device. MTP is needed for Plays for Sure compatibility, so it will work with Napster-To-Go or Yahoo, for example. A UMS device, when plugged in, just shows up as a drive letter on your PC, so you can drag and drop files on to it. Sacrificing Napster-to-go (which I haven’t used in 6 months) is a small price to pay to use this on Linux – especially as no modern online music store has a Linux client yet.

The steps needed update your firmware, convert your iRiver to UMS mode, and then you need to install EasyH10 to rebuild your music database. Do this at your own risk!

How I did it, and be prepared to lose any music on your H10:

  1. I updated my firmware from 2.03 to 2.51 MTP, [version 2.51 at iRiver.com][1].
  2. Go to the [Misticriver.net H10 Wiki][2]
  3. Follow the [instructions to convert your H10 from MTP to UMS][3].
  4. Download EasyH10: [Windows or Linux tarball][4] or [Debian / Ubuntu package][5]. (I used the [i386 Debian package][6] on Ubuntu 5.10 with no problems).

  5. If installing on Ubuntu or Debian, at a terminal, type: sudo dpkg -i easyh10_1.2.1-1_i386.deb

    • Plug in your H10 to your Ubuntu box. It should mount in /media/H10 (if it didn’t, for the purpose of this, I’m going to use that going forward).

    • At a command line type:

      cd /usr/share/easyh10/model (On Ubuntu, could be /usr/local/share/easyh10/model on other distributions) and then ls

      Find your model in the list, I have a H10UMS_5GB_FW2.04-2.51.model so we’ll use that in the next step.

    • From a terminal, type in the following: cp /usr/share/easyh10/model/H10UMS_5GB_FW2.04-2.51.model /media/H10/easyh10.model (Or whichever corresponding version you have, copy it over as easyh10.model in the root directory of the H10).

      • Unmount your H10 (right click and click unmount), unplug the USB cable, let it reboot and install, and then plug it back in to your PC.
      • Copy some music in to your H10/Media/Music directory. Not Music the directory!
      • From a terminal type easyh10 -Un -on /media/H10 to rebuild your database. That should be it! However, if you run in easyh10 and see this, like I did:

      `EasyH10 [CUI] 1.2.1 Copyright (c) 2005 by Nyaochi

H10 model template: /media/H10/easyh10.model
Path to database: /media/H10/System\DATA/
Path to music: /media/H10/Media\Music/
Path to playlist: /media/H10/Media\Playlist/
Playlist extension: .plp

Enumerating music files:
236 files found.

Reading H10 model template:
H10 (UMS) 5GB firmware 2.04 - 2.51

Obtaining media information from 236 files:
236 files obtained.

Updating database

Writing H10 media database:
Failed to write the H10 database (code = 8). (That smiley face should be an 8 )
ERROR: Database update.` Per [this thread on the EasyH10 forums][7], delete all your files in the H10/System/DATA folder. Run it again, and you should see: `silwenae@shaftoe:/usr/share/easyh10/model$ easyh10 -Un -on /media/H10
EasyH10 [CUI] 1.2.1 Copyright (c) 2005 by Nyaochi

H10 model template: /media/H10/easyh10.model
Path to database: /media/H10/System\DATA/
Path to music: /media/H10/Media\Music/

Enumerating music files:
236 files found.

Reading H10 model template:
H10 (UMS) 5GB firmware 2.04 - 2.51

Obtaining media information from 236 files:
236 files obtained.

Updating database

Writing H10 media database:
100%: (H10DB.hdr)
` It’s my understanding that after every time you add music files to your H10, you need to run EasyH10 to update your database to let your H10 know that the music is there. You could choose to play songs through the Browser on the H10, but it’s easiest in Music. Unfortunately, the H10 isn’t recognized in [Banshee][8], but with how the database needs to be updated each time, I doubt it will ever work. Though this is a great start for using in Linux, as this was the last thing that required me to have a Windows box. [1]: http://iriver.com/html/support/download/sudw_view.asp?searchProductIdx=&searchCategoryIdx=&searchString=&page=1&idx=739&tmpSearchProductIdx=&tmpSearchCategoryIdx=&tmpSearchString= [2]: http://www.misticriver.net/wiki/index.php/H10 [3]: http://www.misticriver.net/wiki/index.php/H10_Firmware_Conversion:_MTP/UMS [4]: http://easyh10.sourceforge.net/download.html [5]: http://webb.ens-cachan.fr/debian/pool/main/e/easyh10/ [6]: http://webb.ens-cachan.fr/debian/pool/main/e/easyh10/easyh10_1.2.1-1_i386.deb [7]: http://easyh10.sourceforge.net/forum/index.php?topic=39.0 [8]: http://www.banshee-project.org