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A really good friend of mine likes call me an OS whore from time to time. It’s all in fun but he is right, I am. I can’t make up my mind which OS I like the best. Windows, Linux, Windows, Mac? Which is it? To be honest, I don’t know. I change my mind depending on my current needs, current capabilities of the operating systems of the day and I really just like to tinker. I also like to use whatever works based on what I need to get done.

Although my current favorite OS is definitely OS X I’m not exactly afraid to try out other operating systems. OpenSolaris is an OS I’ve played with before simply because I wanted to get to know ZFS, an incredible file system that should not be over looked. I have written about ZFS before but haven’t really worked with it much since then.

My interest in OpenSolaris and ZFS has been renewed as of late because of the need for a good amount of storage in the most cost effective manner possible. In the coming weeks I’ll be posting quite bit as I learn how to use OpenSolaris. Many posts will simply be reference information for myself and others might be more educational. Stay tuned.

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I always thought it was just the tech crowd complaining about Vista but that isn’t so. Apparently “average users” are unimpressed with Vista and/or the machines it comes on or they’re having such a difficult time they need to buy a book.

Exhibit A) College student is upset with her junk laptop. Vista won’t access certain university resources and the battery is always dying.

Exhibit B) Book store worker says she has gotten a half dozen or so people in the last couple of weeks looking for books on using Vista. For an OS touted as being easier to use that doesn’t sound promising. One customer was a trained IT professional.

Exhibit C) My own experience. Windows explorer and the save dialogs are a complete cluster fu*&. Browsing for files is a royal pain because the explorer window shows three different views of the same crap, it is just overwhelming and even with all the information you still feel lost. Also, why does the entire machine hang off of the desktop? Doesn’t make sense.

Or how about the borked send to compressed file thing? If you right click on a file and choose send to compressed file the OS will dutifully compress the file and then highlight the part of the file name you want to rename. How convenient! Only problem however is that the highlight doesn’t have keyboard focus, you have to use your mouse anyway. Maybe it’s because I choose to show extensions but either way, pretty lame.

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People are sometimes amazed at how quickly I get some things done. Truth be told I’m lazy and hate having to do more than I need to. Sometimes it is great to have just enough programming background to be dangerous.

I’ve posted about for loops before and they are probably one of my most liked bash items. Here is another reason why.

I’m working on a web site and I need to edit a bunch of files, they all need the same edits done and there is no reason I should get interrupted from working on them all in series. Enter the for loop! With the following command I can edit each file in VIM and when I close the file the next file will open for me.

for I in `ls *.php`
do
vim $I
done

Nice and simple.

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Ever since we moved into our house the subwoofer output on my Sony receiver has been crappy. It would randomly cut out causing all low frequency sounds to go away. Left with nothing more than a small set of speakers the sound was extremely tinny. To get the sound back I would just wiggle the connection on the receiver or even unplug the cable from the subwoofer and plug it back in. This would some how rejuvenate the connection for just a little while longer. I’ve always thought I knew what the issue was but never took the time to properly fix it. Well this past weekend I said enough was enough.

I pulled my receiver out of the entertainment center, cut the power to it and removed the six screws holding the cover on. The subwoofer port sits on a secondary board in the receiver that is fortunately easily removed. With the RCA cables removed on the outside and a ribbon cable and another connector on the inside there is only the matter of removing four screws. With the screws removed the board comes away from the receiver and I am able to get my first look at the bottom of the board.

It turned out I was right all long, a simple solder joint break.

The fix here is very simple. I got out my trusty soldering iron and heated up the joint and added a slight amount of solder. I don’t have a finished pic but you can look at any of the other solder joints above, that is how it ended up.

I then reversed the above procedure. With the joint soldered correctly the subwoofer doesn’t cut out anymore and in fact, the subwoofer seems sound better than I ever remember it sounding while in the house.

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A while back I posted about having ordered EyeTV and the HD Homerun. I promised a post once it all arrived and here it is.

If you didn’t visit any of the links I provided before then here is a quick over view of what I ordered. The HD Homerun is a network based dual ATSC/QAM tuner. ATSC is the new digital broadcast standard and QAM is the how many channels are distributed on the cable system. Chances are the cable TV provider in your area provides at least some QAM channels. The HD Homerun has two hook ups meaning I can record two shows at once or watch and record a show or even watch two shows at the same time. The HD Homerun will also allow you to use one of the ports for ATSC and the other for QAM if you so choose. The HD Homerun’s ethernet port runs at 100Mbit and easily supports watching a pair of channels. Based on some entirely unscientific google searching, I found that the highest bitrate available using ATSC is about 19Mb/s while QAM is around 56Mb/s. Like a wireless network, neither actually hit those rates often so the HD Homerun is quite capable of streaming two channels at the same time.

I went with the HD Homerun over any of the other tuner options because it doesn’t lock me into a tuner that works only on the Mac platform. As much as I love Mac and all I just didn’t want to drop cash on a solution that would tie me indefinitely to the Mac platform for watching and recording TV.

EyeTV is software for the Mac that can talk to the HD Homerun to watch a show or record (or both). It provides a some what confusing interface that lacks any sort of intuitive flow. This is really unlike most Mac apps. For example, when using the program guide you can click on a show to view details about the show such as a full description. Once on this screen, there is no clear indication of how to return to the program guide again. There is no back button of any sort and clicking on the Program guide button again doesn’t bring you back where you were. Instead, you are supposed just click anywhere on the detail screen to go back where you were.

Despite the interface EyeTV works rather well. One of my favorite things about EyeTV is how it works with the Mac to wake it when it is time to do a recording and the EyeTV helper app will launch EyeTV. While I have heard rumors of Windows Media Center being able to do this I’m not entirely sure that it can and can do it reliably.

Another thing EyeTV can do is re-encode and then share via HTTP any recordings that have via the network. The encoding is small enough to work with a 802.11g network yet of good quality. Best of all you’re not tied to just viewing the files on another Mac, Windows is welcome too.

If you looking for a way to watch and/or record TV the HD Homerun plus any DVR software package is a good bet. EyeTV for the Mac is definitely the way to go despite some interface shortcomings if you are a Mac user. If you like MythTV on Linux or Media Portal or Media Center on Windows the HD Homerun is a great choice.

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A while back I wrote about how I lost my file server. On my file server were a number of video files that I was editing in iMovie 08. While I had managed to transfer the files from tape again, my project file still showed the files as missing. Recently I finally decided to get back to fixing the project and here is how I did it.

I headed over to Apple’s discussions area and searched a bit. After a while I found a thread that discussed my exact issue and it mentioned editing the project’s project file. Well, that was for an older version of iMovie. iMovie 08’s project file is a binary file rather than a straight text file making it much more difficult to edit.

So, rather than edit the file I thought I’d take a look at the contents of the file and make sure my files were in all the same spots iMovie was expecting them to be in. Using terminal, I browsed to my iMovie project file location of ~ruedu/Movies/iMovie Projects/Big Production. In this directory is a file called Project. On this file I used a command called strings. Strings will search for and display any strings that are present in a binary file. Using strings, this is what I saw.


X/Volumes/RAID/iMovie Events.localized/Video/clip-2007-11-03 14
;08;26.dv
X/Volumes/RAID/iMovie Events.localized/Video/clip-2007-11-03 14
;10;25.dv
X/Volumes/RAID/iMovie Events.localized/Video/clip-2007-11-03 14
;1

I then compared this to what was really present on my RAID volume. Sure enough, the file names didn’t match. It was


X/Volumes/RAID/iMovie Events.localized/Import/clip-2007-11-03 14
;08;26.dv
X/Volumes/RAID/iMovie Events.localized/Import/clip-2007-11-03 14
;10;25.dv
X/Volumes/RAID/iMovie Events.localized/Import/clip-2007-11-03 14
;1

I renamed Import to Video and restarted iMovie. My project was now correct!

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I recently found myself renaming a website and needed to change some common text in a bunch of php and template files. Here is the code I used to get the job done.

for I in `find . -name "*.php"`; do sed -i "s/old name/new name/g" $I; done
for I in `find . -name "*.tpl"`; do sed -i "s/old name/new name/g" $I; done

Sure a truly savvy person could have done this in one line but that’s just not as fun.

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In getting ready for the coming TV season I wanted to get my recording capabilities up to snuff. I’ve grown tired of trying to get MythTV working and decided to bite the bullet and buy a solution. I decided on a HD Homerun with some EyeTV software for mac.

The great thing about the HD Homerun is that I’m not tied to the Mac for watching or recording TV, I can use just about anything I want including MythTV (despite giving up on it for now), Windows Media Center and even just VLC. I post some more about it as soon as it gets here.

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A few times a day I head over to craigslist.org and look in the computer, electronics and game & toys section for things people have under priced so I can sell it for more somewhere else. I’ve had really good luck doing this on a number of occasions and even though it is never a huge money maker it feels good to buy low and sell high.

Well last week I came a cross a deal too good to be true but bit anyway, a Power Mac G4 MDD that wouldn’t boot for $60. This particular model sports dual 1Ghz G4 processors, a SuperDrive and an 80GB hard drive. The machine has room for three more hard drives and one other 5.25 slot. With the onboard gigabit ethernet this machine is actually a pretty good performer.

After picking up the machine I got to work figuring out why it wouldn’t boot. The machine would actually turn on and tone but not the usual Mac start up tone. It would tone once and then flash the power button. I looked up the issue on the web and found that the single tone meant no RAM was present. This was odd since all four memory slots were filled with 256MB sticks of DDR PC2100 RAM. According to some docs on the web this was the correct type of RAM for the 1Ghz MDD model. On a hunch, I decided to try PC2700 RAM and viola, the machine booted into OS X (10.2) and has been running just fine since. It even runs Leopard quite well despite being about six years old.