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By now you have probably heard about the digital tv switchover deadline in February of 2009. In case you haven’t, head on over to http://www.dtv.gov/ to get the long story. The short story is that analog TV signals will be turned off as of February 17, 2009. If you get your TV using an antenna, then there is something you need to do to get ready. You can either buy a new TV with an ATSC tuner in it already or you can purchase a government subsidized digital to analog converter box. To get your $40 coupon head over to https://www.dtv2009.gov/.

Last friday I received my coupon in the mail. The coupon comes in the form of a prepaid credit card and you can use it at any store that sells approved converter boxes. I took mine over to Best Buy and picked up their Insignia branded converter box. This box is fairly basic providing one digital input, one RF output and a composite video output but the box is proving to be quite up to the task. The composite output allows you to get stereo sound (surround sound in fact) from the device and an improved picture over the RF connection. It also offers just the current program and the next program on it’s very simple program guide.

Now you might be thinking there is nothing wrong with the current system and that just couldn’t be further from the truth. Even though your old analog TV isn’t digital, the picture will be virtually perfect and in some cases better than you’d get if you had dish or cable. Audio too will be improved and if you have a surround sound system then any show that uses surround sound will be available to you in surround sound as well.

While the analog to digital switch over is a bit of a hassle the quality improvement is very much worth it. If you have any old TVs that are still in good shape and you don’t want to buy a new one then I strongly recommend going the converter route.

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A while back I saw a post on digg.com that talked about some new software that was currently in an invite only beta test called Dropbox. Dropbox allows you to synchronize folders between computers and if you watch the video over at their site I think you’ll be impressed.

But as I said, it’s invite only. So what is a guy to do right now? Well believe it or not Microsoft actually has something very similar and it too works with both Windows and Mac. Now if we’re to believe everything the the Dropbox video shows us, Foldershare isn’t quite as robust but it is free and and more importantly it is available now. Check it out at http://www.foldershare.com/

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In my previous entry I mention my Super Smash Bros. Brawl testing and one of the other tests I wanted to do involved determining how much data is required to play a four way game. My home network setup is a bit involved yet I couldn’t find a way to route the Wii through a device that I could measure network usage with.

To make a long story short, I found that you can configure your Mac’s wireless to “create network” and unlike a Windows PC that would setup an adhoc network, the Mac will act like a normal wireless access point or wireless router. This was fantastic because the Wii will not join an adhoc network. With my Mac set to create a new network I was able to join my Wii to it and determine that a four way game in Brawl requires at least 10KB/s of network traffic in both directions.

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Whenever I can I’ve been playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl. This game has sucked me in more than I ever thought it would. In fact, I even once thought the game looked too chaotic, something that I wouldn’t like.

Well one of Brawl’s major components is online play and all to often I find myself playing with someone and there is a lot of lag. While I wanted to blame Nintendo completely at first I thought I should at least verify that the issue isn’t on my end first.

I set out doing this by getting my Wii connected to the internet through my usual wireless setup and thing sending a ping request to it from my Linux box. My wireless router is less than five feet from my console and yet I’d see at minimum a 2ms delay. 2ms doesn’t seem like much until you ping my laptop and get .600 ms over the same wireless connection.

I kept pinging the Wii while playing a round of Brawl online and I found that at times, the delay *just on my network* would go as high as 111ms! Now, the Wii might be doing packet prioritization but I doubt it. Anyway, 111ms is quite a bit higher than I would typically get to any other web site I usually visit. The round trip time to yahoo.com is around 64ms. If I’m seeing typical times to Nintendo’s servers and then I add in that my Wii’s wireless is contributing between 2-30ms (take out m y worse case) it’s easy to see why some Brawl games suffer from a lot of lag.

To combat this issue, I picked up a LAN adapter from Best Buy. When using the lan adapter the delay still isn’t great, but it is at least rock solid at 2-3ms no matter what is going on. This is a huge improvement in my eyes and if a person is at all serious about online play with the Wii, a lan adapter is key.

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Early in March I decided to give Leopard another try on my mini. There have been a few updates, namely the graphics update and 10.5.2, that were rumored to fix the issues I was having. After a couple of weeks with Leopard, I again removed it in favor of Tiger (10.4). Either there are problems with Leopard or OS X is the most finicky operating system I’ve ever used (people tell me to reinstall).

I just can’t get used to the look of Leopard, the darker gray with the even whiter menus is just too harsh. I had apps that would crash repeatedly at random times. Thunderbird would sometimes crash while checking mail and Firefox or iTerm would crash when the system was resumed.

Ok, so iTerm, Firefox and Thunderbird aren’t Apple apps, people writing the software should make sure it works with Leopard right? Well it wasn’t just third party apps that went haywire on me. iMovie 08 would start, but nothing would show up. The menu bar would be iMovie, the app was running, but there was no actual window to work in. I reinstalled iMovie and it worked just once. Loading it again resulted in the same issue.

I also found that I ran out of memory far faster in Leopard than in Tiger. There *is* a lot more to Leopard but the difference was too much for me to handle. In the end, I’ve concluded that Leopard is either not right for me or it isn’t a good fit on the generation of Mac mini that I own.

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I’ve been using my Mac Mini as what I’d call my “primary computer” almost from the moment I received it. While I have a laptop that I can use around the house or travel with, I use the Mac because it is so quiet, it’s hooked up to a 22″ screen and because I enjoy the OS X experience. Over the months I’ve managed to find a few software titles that help me get things done.

  • iTerm – Nice terminal app that more closely resembles my favorite Windows SSH client, putty. Has tabs, etc
  • Firefox – Who doesn’t know what Firefox is?
  • Thunderbird – Mail just can’t compete with the speed of Thunderbird for IMAP accounts
  • Gamepedia – I play games and I like to track them. There are other software options available, even some more generic but I just like this one
  • Adium – Adium is a multi-protocol chat client using the same libraries as Pidgin
  • Vienna – Great RSS reader
  • Things – Simple way to track…things
  • Mythfrontend – MythTV is my DVR of choice and I need a way to access it on the Mac, this it!
  • Integrity – This is a simple link checker for OS X, similar to Xenu’s Link Sleuth. Xenu’s Link Sleuth is superior however.
  • MacTheRipper – Best DVD ripping tool I’ve found for the Mac
  • NeoOffice – This is currently the only way to run OpenOffice “natively” on the Mac. It’s slow but gets the job done
  • Remote Desktop Connection – Sometimes you need to access a Windows machine. I use this primarily to connect to my XP VMWare guest running on my Linux server for web site testing
  • Macfuse/SSHFS – Nearly identical to fuse and sshfs for Linux
  • Transmission and Azureus – One bittorrent client just isn’t enough
  • VLC – Great multi-platform video player. Perian is able to install many of the same codecs VLC will play but I have soft spot for VLC

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Where I work, I routinely get a zip file that contains files for a website. It has multiple file and folders. I simply copy these files into the directory for the website but this time I thought I’d unzip the file first to see just how long it takes. I’ve heard Vista’s extraction is slow…but I didn’t think it could be this bad.

slow

This system is pretty new, 10k drives, 2.4Ghz C2D processors.

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One thing that a number of people overlook is that RAID is NOT a backup solution. That’s right, say it with me, “RAID is not a backup solution.” RAID is at most a data availability solution and nothing more. With that in mind it is always good to have a backup. This post will concentrate on creating a backup script and routine for my Linux server as well as my Mac. Since the Mac is UNIX based I can back it up in much the same way as I do my Linux server.

Please keep in mind that this method assumes a lot of things and should not be considered for a business environment where security is more important. My method involves creating a public/private ssh key without a passphrase and worse, the root password for my MySQL server is also coded into this script. Since this is all DIY, you can expand whatever you do to be a bit more secure.

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I am in the process of setting up a box for someone and I thought I’d document the software RAID portion of it a little bit, in case it is helpful to anyone else.

I’m a bit of a command line junkie so it should come as no surprise then that I prefer to setup my software RAID sets using the command line tools available. The system in question this time is a newly installed CentOS 5 box. In this article I’ll concentrate on creating a mirrored set.

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I haven’t really discussed my gaming habit for awhile so for those interested here is an update.

The holiday season added a number of games to our collection. I can no longer call it “my” collection as now there is a game that was purchased specifically for my wife. It is officially our game collection. Anyway, I’ve been filling my time by switching off between Metroid Prime 3 and Super Mario Galaxy. Both are excellent games.

When I’m not playing Wii I’m probably playing DS. I recently finished up The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and picked up Mario Kart DS. Mario Kart DS is an older game but is highly rated.