Mmm... Unexplained Bacon

The REAL Blu-Ray Scam

2010-04-11T09:40:00.000-06:00

On Christmas day 2008 I received a pretty sweet gift. It was a brand new blu-ray player fresh from Bestbuy. The price on their Insignia NS-BRDVD player had dropped to realm of mortals and my in-laws really came through with the gift (Thanks!).

I already had a 1080p television so I was pretty excited by the prospect of finally watching some 1080p movies on it. And the movies looked great. So I chose to ignore all the noise about blu-ray DRM being evil and the fact that there would probably never be a legal way to play my blu-rays on Linux, and started to buy into blu-ray.

Fast-forward a year. I recently had some friends over and we were going to rent and watch a movie or two blu-ray. These were new releases, and they wouldn't play. They locked up right after the menu when starting to play the main feature. That seemed weired, so I updated the firmware to the latest version available (which was several months old), and tried again. Still they wouldn't play so I thought the disks were bad and returned them to Blockbuster. Then I watched something from my existing collection. A week later I tried it again. I rented a new release and tried to play it and the same thing happened, lockups on the main feature. It turns out this is a firmware issue due to blu-ray DRM and almost no new movies will play in my player. And I am not the only one with this problem, this forum documents other users with the issue. It seems that because my model has been discontinued, the manufacturer, Insignia (which is BestBuy's house brand) is no longer providing firmware updates.

I took the player back to Bestbuy and they would not help me at all because it has been discontinued and I am out of the 1 year warranty period. That is the real Blu-Ray Scam. The players must be constantly updated to keep up with DRM changes, but manufacturers usually only have a 1 year warranty period and after a model is discontinued they usually don't provide new firmware updates. So they are free to stop providing firmware updates a year after the players are taken off the shelf, and then everyone who bought it has to go buy a new player if they want to watch new movies.

So the question is, which manufacturer can I trust to keep updating the players so I don't go through this again?

Olympics

2010-02-21T16:56:00.003-07:00

Why does NBC continue to string us along with horrible Olympic coverage? They show highlights, but spread them through the 5 hour block, so there's no way to plan ahead. "And coming up in 17 minutes, the semi-finals, featuring Ohno. See if he makes it to the finals, but we can't tell you when those are."

If I wanted to watch a show about athlete stories, I'd tune into the History Channel.

I want to see the sports. I'd like to be able to plan my time. And for that, please let me know that, hey, Speed Skating is on at 9:00. Snowboard cross coverage is at 7:30, and Curling, well, that's all day long.

But no, NBC wants to sell me a drama about Vonn and the Olympic gold, only stay tuned, because after this commercial for yet another asthma drug, the significant conflict in this story unfolds.

NBC Sucks.

The Last Straw

2010-02-09T22:33:00.000-07:00

On Saturday night I had need of an additional wifi access point at my house. So, I scrounged up an old Belkin access point and plugged it in. Since I already have an access point running on channel 3, I just left the new one on channel 6. Some time later my son noticed that the Wii controllers would not sync. He had been playing the Wii for several hours so my response to his desperate plea of "Fix it", was "Go outside."

I thought nothing of the problem until Sunday when the Wii controllers still would not sync. I started to wonder if that additional access point caused enough interference to make the Bluetooth Wii controllers in-operable. Bluetooth is designed to handle interference by hopping to the next 1 MHz wide channel. However, I don't know how well that works when syncing. To get a feel for the situation I ran a nifty little program called wifi radar. According to it I live in what could aptly be described as a "wifi rich" zone. Every 802.11 channel had at least one, and usually several active access points.

My need of the extra access point expired on Sunday night and as soon as I unplugged the access point I tried to sync the Wii remotes. This time it was immediate Wii sync success, and they have been fine ever since. I guess that extra access point was the Wifi that broke the Bluetooth's back.

Picasa 3.5 on Linux

2009-10-11T20:21:00.000-06:00

Since Google has dropped the ball on the Linux version of Picasa 3.5 I had to find my own way to install it. The method from here did not work for me. When I tried to install the windows version of Picasa 3.5 on my version of wine (1.1.30) it just hung and used up all of my memory.

What I realized is that the 3.0 version of Picasa for linux that I already have installed runs on wine. So I just used that version of wine to install the 3.5 version of picasa. On my machine the binary is in /opt/google/picasa/3.0/wine/bin. Using wine from there Picasa 3.5 installed without a hitch.

The biggest advantage of Picasa 3.5 is the facial recognition feature, it scans all of your photos, identifies the faces and lets you tag them with names. The cool part is that once you have tagged a face the program attempts to find all the matching faces and automatically tag them for you. It works pretty well, and it is a lot of fun to go through your photos to see who is there.

Now, if only I could get Netflix to work without Virtualbox...

All a twitter.

2009-08-03T00:09:00.000-06:00

Awesome codebook. Now I can start twittering.

Almost Android

2009-05-03T18:37:00.006-06:00

I just got a cool new cell phone. No, not the iphone, the other cool new touchscreen cell phone. Nope, not the Tmobile G1 either. Give up? I'll give you a hint, my carrier is Verizon. Doesn't ring any bells does it? That is because Verizon has a great network but for some reason they haven't jumped on either the iphone or android bandwagon.

My new phone is the xv6900. It is an HTC touch stripped down for Verizon. The important part is that it has a touch screen, is fairly small and lightweight and is pretty sweet. The main problem is that it runs windows mobile. When I use it I feel like I am stuck on the Island and we timetraveled to 1998.

To improve my lot in life I started searching for solutions, it turns out that other people have decided that this phone is a great canidate for Android (I agree), and they have put some work into porting it. The site is here http://it029000.massey.ac.nz/vogue/. I downloaded his latest work and put it on my micro sd. After running haret.exe, my phone magically rebooted into Android. I was so happy to see the green litte robot icon pulsating on my screen. After that things went down hill. First my phone would hang and I discoverd I needed to edit a defaults.txt file to set my radio version, so then I upgraded my phones firmware and tried again. Now it works much better, but it is still not perfect. The main drawback is that the dialer app craches, and it doesn't notify me of voicemail.

Android, even in a primitive state does show me one thing, how much better my phone would work. Windows mobile is sluggish and feels outdated. Android is fast and modern. Why Verizon wouldn't jump on the opturnity is beyond me.

Psychedelic Ubuntu

2009-04-30T20:08:00.001-06:00

I have been trying to get ABC.com to work in Firefox under wine on Ubuntu 9.04, here is what I get:

I don't know why it happens, but I have to reboot to return to normal. It reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Homer smokes pot and then tries to shave. He starts to bleed in rainbows. My guess is that compiz doesn't play nice with the wine/firefox ABC.com media player. I'll post updates as more information become avaliable.

Update: I discoverd that my suspicion is correct, the problem is with compiz. If I disable visual effects then the problem goes away. ABC.com still doesn't work in wine, but I don't get the psychedelic screen effect either. Tie?

NX + Compiz = grey screen

2008-11-25T11:13:00.005-07:00

I use NX in Ubuntu 8.10, but my normal settings (remote xterm) result in a grey screen. While I have not yet discovered the incantation to disable the compiz grey screen in Ubuntu, it turns out that there is a workaround: Disable X Agent encoding via NX Client -> Configure -> Desktop -> Settings. After that, no more grey screen of annoyance.

$ ssh -L 2200:destination:22
In NX, set server to localhost, port to 2200

Top 7 reasons this list is only 5 items long

2008-11-22T22:53:00.003-07:00

5. ADHD. I swear I have it. Just like all people my age who grew up with MTV and video games, I can't concentrate on one thing for more than 20 seconds.

4. I lack creativity. Seriously.

3. I realized halfway through this list that lists are really, really, really lame.

2. A thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters typing for a thousand days could only produce five semi-coherent sentences.

1. My boss came in and I had to go back to work.

Utterly immature

2008-11-04T00:30:00.005-07:00

By this time tomorrow, America will know a bit more about what government we can expect for the next few years. Unfortunatly, I think that many important issues have not made headlines. Given the current economic situation, we are likely to have a recovery that any politician can take advantage of to extend that to 8 years. For that time, then, if Barack Obama is elected president:

We will have a president who has accomplished nothing notable as a senator.
We will have a president who is less experienced than a single term governor.
We will have a president who is the most left-wing senator in history.
We will have a president who has profited from Freddy Mac's collapse.
We will have a president who campaigned with illegal foreign funds.
We will have a president who befriends social and religious extremists.
We will have a president who plays by the worst Chicago rules.
We will have a president who has an "utterly immature" foreign policy.
We will have a president who will "Spread the Wealth Around".
We will have a president who sees America as "just downright mean".
We will have a president who thinks that rural Americans are "bitter [and] cling to guns or religion".
We will have a president who has no solution to the immigration problem.
We will have a president who has been wrong on every Iraq issue since the war started.
We will have a president whose supreme court will consider wealth redistribution.
We will have a president who aims to make electricity costs skyrocket.
We will have a president who will mortgage our future for more entitlements.
We will have a president who will continue to increase the country's debt.
We will have a president who will not stand by his promises.

Well, it could be worse.

Bacon, Explained

2008-10-26T15:21:00.004-06:00

For extra bacon goodness, you may need to run on over to the bacon of the month club. Or if you want to try the bacon without the high shipping fat, order the 13 bacon combo for about 1/2 the price. If you just must have something else, browse around, then send a box of bacon popcorn, or hickory bacon salt, or one of the other delectable bacon bits to your favorite bacon lover.

andLinux

2008-10-09T21:58:00.004-06:00

I have tried several VM solutions for running windows and Linux side-by-side, and unfortunately none of them are very seamless. Often I just want X11 & a good shell to my linux box, and while I could just use PuTTY with X11 forwarding, at other times I really want a local terminal. For those times, there's andLinux.

This little gem runs colinux as a service; by default it starts up a shell as root, but with a few tweaks you can run as your own user.

Bacon Boy

2008-10-08T21:56:00.002-06:00

For a blog titled "Mmm... Unexplained Bacon" there has been a total lack of bacon related articles, bacon trivia, and bacon poetry. That ends now! Check out this article about imaginative bacon treats, it both inspires me and grosses me out. Even I wouldn't eat bacon wrapped tofo, but chocolate chip bacon cookies might do the trick.

I would like to add my own bacon bits to the list. How about a slice of chocolate bacon cream pie with pringles for a healthy midnight snack?

Back From the Dead: How I saved my netgear gs108 gigabit switch

2008-10-02T18:54:00.003-06:00

Yesterday evening I noticed that our internet was not working. After checking a couple things on the laptop I went to the basement to check the DSL model and switch. All the lights on my Netgear GS108 gigabit switch were blinking about every second or so. I figured that all it needed was a power-cycle. But that didn't fix it.

A quick look at Google showed several other people had this problem, and it appeared to be bad capacitors. The switch is covered with a lifetime warranty, but sending it back would mean at least a week without the internet working. So I decided to follow this example and fix it myself.

The GS108 is a well built switch with a nice metal case, it comes apart easily using only a phillips screw driver. Here is the inside showing the faulty capacitors:

Only one of the capacitors had a bulging top, a teltale sign of failure. But I elected to replace both caps closest to the power supply because they were both the same type and size. The failed capacitors were 1000 micro farad, 6.3 V. I didn't have any that size, but I found some 2200 micro farad 6.3 V caps from an old power supply that I was able to salvage. The new caps are much larger, so they couldn't go directly on the board, so I added some short leads, wrapped them in electrical tape and folded them over.

Here is the finished product.

It is not pretty, but it works.

Congratulations, SpaceX

2008-09-28T23:58:00.001-06:00

You inspire us, SpaceX

From WordPress to Blogger

2008-09-22T23:40:00.001-06:00

It's not often that you hear of someone moving a blog from WordPress to Blogger, so let me explain the primary 2 reasons that we have moved.

Content hosting. We have hosted our own server in the basement for long enough to invite Google to have a go at it for a while. We have already moved e-mail out to Google.
Ease of use. We don't need all the power offered by WordPress (we could edit the PHP, add a module, or other things), and those features that we use are now supported by Blogger.

Except that there are no tools, so here is a basic script. There are also some drawbacks to using the gdata api--you cannot create posts for other users, even if you are an administrator, and apparently all comments are owned by you as well.

Blogger also has a limit on the number of posts that you can add on any given day, so if you have too many you will have to split it over a couple of days, or, perhaps, use a different mechanism.


#!/usr/bin/python
# Sample script to import data from wordpress to blogger.
# Assumes a modicum of scripting ability & access to the wp database.
# Don't blame me when it doesn't work! 
#
from gdata import service
import gdata
import gdata
import atom
import MySQLdb
# Replace the following global variables with the
# correct values.
USER='blogger@gmail.com'
PASS='blogger_password'
BLOGID=12345
DB_NAME='wp_database'
DB_USER='db_user'
DB_PASSWORD='db_password'
WP_USER='me'
DRAFT_MODE=False

# Semi-permanent.  You can find this via comment feed.
TAG='tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-%s.post-" % BLOGID

# And now for the actual script (which is pretty simple).
blogger = service.GDataService(USER, PASS)
blogger.source = 'my-dataimporter-1.0'
blogger.service = 'blogger'
blogger.account_type = 'GOOGLE'
blogger.server = 'www.blogger.com'
blogger.ProgrammaticLogin()

# Creates a post with title, content, and post date.
def CreatePost(title, content, dt):
  entry = gdata.GDataEntry()
  entry.title = atom.Title('xhtml', title)
  entry.content = atom.Content(
      content_type='html', text=content)
  if dt is not None:
    entry.published = atom.Published(
        text=dt.strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ"))
  if DRAFT_MODE:
    control = atom.Control()
    control.draft = atom.Draft(text='yes')
    entry.control = control
  return blogger.Post(entry,
      '/feeds/%s/posts/default' % blogid)

# Creates a comment with title, content, and post date.
# (Actually, the title becomes part of the post).
def CreateComment(postid, title, text, dt):
  entry = gdata.GDataEntry()
  entry.content = atom.Content(content_type='html',
    text=re.sub(r'<[^>]*?>', '', 
                "%s\n%s" % (title, text)))
  if dt is not None:
    entry.published = atom.Published(
      text=dt.strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ"))
  blogger.Post(entry, 
      '/feeds/%s/%s/comments/default" %(blogid, postid))


conn = MySQLdb.connect(host='localhost',
                       user=DB_USER,
                       passwd=DB_PASSWD,
                       db=DB_NAME)

# Create all posts.
cursor = conn.cursor()
cursor.execute( "SELECT u.user_login, p.post_title, " +
                "p.post_content, p.post_date_gmt "+
                "FROM wp_posts p, wp_users u " +
                "WHERE p.post_author = u.id ")
result_set = cursor.fetchall()
for row in result_set:
  print "Adding %s" % str(row)
  CreatePost(row[1], row[2], 
             "Posted by %s\n%s" %(row[0],row[3]))

# Create all comments
post_feed = blogger.GetFeed(
      "/feeds/%s/posts/default" % blogid)
for entry in post_feed:
  postid = entry.id.text[len(TAG):]
  if entry.title.text is not None:
    cursor.execute(
      "SELECT c.comment_author, c.comment_author_url "+
        "c.comment_content, c.comment_date " +
      "FROM wp_comments c, wp_posts p " +
      "WHERE c.comment_post_id = p.id " +
      "AND p.post_title = '%s'" %
      MySQLdb.escape_string(entry.title.text))
  comment_set = cursor.fetchall()
  for row in comment_set:
    t = "Posted by %s" % row[0]
    if len(row[1]) > len('http://com'):
      t = t + " at %s" % row[1]
    CreateComment(postid, t, row[2], row[3])

See the blogger python api (gdata api).

A tale of two Linux Users

2007-10-04T11:39:00.000-06:00

I am currently engaged in a Linux experiment. I have put Ubuntu linux on the computers of two people who have very little computer experience. They will both be family computers, one will see heavy iPod usage, the other will be used a lot for school work. My initial feedback is that it should work fine. People really could care less about what operating system is on their computer. I think that they are under the impression that it is somehow part of the computer. Like any other appliance, there is no distinction between the hardware and the software.

I think I will run into problems with a couple of things. One is dial up internet, the other is stupid web sites that only work with Internet Explorer. Ipods appear to work well, but not having access to the iTunes store could be a problem for one of the families. I'll keep you posted.

Enable CAC card in Linux and Firefox.

2007-03-29T22:10:00.002-06:00

Or, How to get the ActivCard Gold USB 2.0 CAC Card working in Linux Ubuntu 6.10.

First you will need a windows box to flash the device. Follow the instructions here.
Once it is flashed to a SCR-331 make it work in Linux. Install the necessary software.


sudo apt-get install pcscd pcsc-tools libpcsclite1 libpcsclite-dev libccid

Plug in your flashed reader and the light should flash to see if it is working do:


sudo /etc/init.d/pcscd stop
sudo pcscd -f

Then put in your card if it is working you will see a

Card ATR: XX XX XX XX XX XX XX

line.

Now to get it working in Firefox, you need coolkey.
get the latest version here.
Go where you downloaded cool key and untar it,


tar -xvzf coolkey-1.1.0.tar.gz
cd coolkey-1.1.0
./configure

You need to have a compiler installed, Ubuntu does not ship with one by default.
If this works do


make
sudo make install

Now open Firefox and go to:
Edit->Preferences->Advanced
Choose the Security tab and then Security Devices.
Choose Load, give it a name - I named this device ActivCard Gold USB
For Module browse to /usr/local/lib/pkcs11/libcoolkeypk11.so and click Open and Ok.
Wait and click Ok again. It should successfully add a new security module.

Now you need to add the DoD Root Certificates, get them here:
http://www.installroot.com/

On this page I Clicked on DoD Root then clicked the three certificate links. In the Downloading Certificate dialog I clicked on all three check boxes for each certificate.

Now you should be able to log-in. Be sure to choose your email cert when accessing your email.

You can check that it is working by going to www.my.af.mil and logging in.
If you have problems with the email site you may need to go to
Edit->Preferences->Security and under Certificates click on Ask Me Every Time, otherwise Firefox tries to login with the non-email certificate.

References
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_DoD_CAC
http://pcsclite.alioth.debian.org/ccid.html
http://symbolik.wordpress.com/2007/02/26/scm-scr-331-usb-smartcard-reader-firmware-upgrade/

My Gamefly deathmarch

2007-03-22T02:40:00.001-06:00

Here is my quick review. I signed up for their low price $13 month trial ($23/month after that) service. I thought it had to at least be ok. Boy was I wrong. Instead of getting to play video games I got to wait for games in the mail. I experienced at least a week turnaround times, usually longer. In 45 days of having service I have rented 4 games, and one of them was the wrong game which I had to return. Waiting another two weeks to get a game to play. You can't cancel the service early in the month and then return the games. When you cancel, it is effective immediatly and if you just paid, tough, no refunds. Oh, and they didn't send a friendly email a day or two before charging you for the next month. The charge just kindof shows up.

On the positive side they do have a pretty good web interface. It works a lot like netflix's. You select games to go in your GameQ and they send them out in order. And you can buy rented games at about a $10 discount off retail.

If you have problems with the service don't bother trying to get them fixed, they offer email only support and it is pretty poor.

So to recap, I have been a customer for a 45 days, got to play 3 new games, received one wrong game and one game was lost in the mail when I returned it. So now I only get one game for the rest of the month. I will not be renewing this time.

On Finding a Wii

2007-01-02T20:44:00.000-07:00

In my previous post I mentioned that we got a Scooba for Christmas; what I failed to mention is that we actually got two of them. One of them we took back to Targay for a refund in hopes of replacing it with a Nintendo Wii. My vote was for a Roomba, but I think the wife and kids will win this round. That is if we can find one.

I have been to several Target, Walmart, and Gamestop stores to find a Wii. The problem is nobody has them yet, they are still selling out as fast as they come in. Playstation 3's are another matter. Nearly every store has had at least one PS3. Walmart had 3 today. If only I wanted a PS3...

The robots are attacking

2006-12-30T08:45:00.000-07:00

This year for Christmas we got a Scooba. My wife couldn't wait to try it out, so on Christmas morning we cleared the kitchen and set the Scooba loose. It had been 3 weeks since the last mopping and our two kids did a fine job of making a great Scooba test floor. After the first pass on a given path some of the big grime was still there and Leslie was having doubts that this little robot was the path to mopping freedom. But by the time the cleaning cycle was complete she was a convert to the robot ways. Our floor was super clean! What happens is that Scooba makes several passes over each area and by the time it is done the floor is cleaner that it has ever been.

The scary part is that iRobot also makes military robots. And I think I have stumbled upon their secret plan. Infiltrate peoples homes with harmless looking, useful domestic robots which can morph into soulless killing machines when triggered with the right stimulus. I discovered this by accident. Caleb and I were have our usual lightsaber battle when Caleb decided to attack the mopping robot. To both of our suprise it managed to parry the blow and deployed and R2-D2 style stun gun. We had to rush Caleb to the hospital, but he was fine.

I contacted iRobot and they said I must be mistaken, their robots don't have stun guns and are programmed with human safety in mind. But they did send me a free Roomba to apologize for the incident. I figure I just need to keep the robots away from the guns and everything will be fine. So, as a warning to all robot owners, lock your bedroom doors at night, and watch them closely.Â They could turn evil at any time!

Sunrocket, my new Vonage

2006-12-01T22:08:00.000-07:00

So I got tired of Vonage not having my name on the outgoing caller-id and started looking for a new VOIP company.Â I looked at ViaTalk, but decided to go with Sunrocket.Â Today I tried installing the "Gizmo" they sent, it is a Linksys spa2102.Â Very similiar to the PAP2, but with a built in router with QOS (Quality of service).Â "Cool", thought I, "Now I won't have jittery calls when I am using the internet".Â Alas, to put it in bridge mode I must have the admin password which Sunrocket will not give me.Â I called tech support several times, but they wouldn't budge on the issue.Â Â So it appears that Sunrocket is no better than Vonage, except on price.Â Lets admit it, call quality is going to be very similiar between most of the companies.Â What will distinguish a VOIP company is customer service, price, and features.Â Sunrocket has a great price, great features, but poor customer support.Â They think locking the device is the way to happy customers I guess.Â At least I can cancel and get a refund when I find a better provider.

How to save a buck or two

2006-11-16T20:09:00.000-07:00

The other day I was looking at Pligg CMS and I saw a deal site that I really like. It's called Dealigg and it lets users vote on the best deals like digg lets users vote on stories. One the the best ways to save money is to shop around, or wait for good deals to appear on the items you are looking for.

Here are the sites I use to save money.

If you know of any other deal sites, post them in the comments below.

The Simpsons are on notice!

2006-11-13T19:52:00.002-07:00

Last nights Simpsons episode was the worst Simpsons to date. The writers have lost respect for their audience. The comedy was terrible, they have no respect for the country or the military either. They explained their jokes because instead of writing a comedy they wanted to write a political commentary. Fox needs to fire everyone who had a hand in that episode and get some new writers.

Musings on MythTV

2006-10-06T23:28:00.001-06:00

I have been using MythTV for about a year and a half now and I was thinking about the useability and economics of it all. I started out with a ReplayTV unit that had a $12 dollar a month fee, over 18 months I would have paid $216 in fees to ReplayTV. My MythTV system cost: PVR-350 $150, PCHDTV $40, Computer $350 = $540. Labor = countless hours.

As you can see MythTV is not a winner on cost. But the real question is: Does MythTV provide enough extra value to make it worthwhile?

MythTV has a lot of features that ReplayTV didn't have: Automatic commercial skipping, ease of space addition, music library, video library, web browsing, good web interface, DVD burning, easy feature additions (Digital Tuner?) and many more. The addition of a digital tuner is an interesting capability to analyze. With ReplayTV I could not add anything, which limits me to analog over-the-air channels or cable or satellite. With my MythTV system I added a digital tuner card and now I can cancel the locals on my DISH subscription, over a year that would save me another $60. Then there is the fact that maybe I mostly watch local channels anyway... Maybe I can just cancel my TV service entirely, that would save $480 over a year. Now real cost benefits begin to emerge that are made possible by the flexibility of MythTV.