Category: Tech

Anything technology related that isn’t covered by one of the sub categories.

GCW moves to a new box

If you’re reading this, then NfGCW has successfully returned to the web after being moved (along with all the other sites) from my trusty ol’ G5 PowerMac to a brand new MacMini. Overall, the Mini is awesome; with the exception of 3D gaming (which I never do on my server box) it’s faster than the … Continue reading “GCW moves to a new box”

If you’re reading this, then NfGCW has successfully returned to the web after being moved (along with all the other sites) from my trusty ol’ G5 PowerMac to a brand new MacMini. Overall, the Mini is awesome; with the exception of 3D gaming (which I never do on my server box) it’s faster than the G5 at everything I’ve thrown at it. I suspect that’s being helped by the increased RAM in the Mini — 4Gig, up from 1.5 in the G5.

I’m also running Snow Leopard now, which meant that once again I had to go through the dance of getting the AMP (Apache/MySQL/PHP) configured properly. Highlights for 10.6 include:

  • I installed the latest x86_64 version of MySQL. For my traffic level, I doubt that will make a significant performance difference, but you never know.
  • The PHP that comes with SL is actually current and includes the PDO drivers for MySQL. That’s great because it’s one less thing to install/configure versus previous upgrades, but there is still some work to do:
    • edit /etc/apache2/httpd.conf to uncomment the LoadModule for php5_module
    • copy the /etc/php.ini.default file to /etc/php.ini, then edit php.ini and modify (at least) the lines that contain “default_socket” to point at /tmp/mysql.sock, and lines that contain “default_port” to 3306.
  • At this point, php and mysql both worked (as evinced by the fact that phpmyadmin would run, and tell me useful stuff), but the blogs were still failing. It turns out that everyone (i.e. php and mysql), were now finally agreeing that I needed to use the “new” password format, so with a touch of…

    SET PASSWORD FOR 'wpuser'@'%' =
    PASSWORD('not really my password');

    …we were good to go.

Of course, I still have all the other sites to work through. Sheep’s Ahoy is fine. Both the wiki(s) and the gallery seem to be working, but the genealogy site is completely busted. Unfortunately, that’s going to take more effort to get going again, since it has several dependencies on php4. I may have to rethink that one; one possibility is just to suck the content out of it, and then switch to a Mac based genealogy program that can publish to the web. The good news is that the G5 box is still around, so that can wait until I have some free time.

Anyway, let me know if you see anything weird happening.

Fly Fusion Pentop

So there I was, wandering through the local Zeller’s at Bayshore, when I saw a rack of those Fly Fusion Pentop computers that came out a while back. Given that I hadn’t actually heard anything about them for quite a while, I had assumed they had simply gone bankrupt, and the fact that the pens … Continue reading “Fly Fusion Pentop”

So there I was, wandering through the local Zeller’s at Bayshore, when I saw a rack of those Fly Fusion Pentop computers that came out a while back. Given that I hadn’t actually heard anything about them for quite a while, I had assumed they had simply gone bankrupt, and the fact that the pens had stickers that said $20 on them, did nothing to convince me otherwise.

But I figured that for $20, it might be an interesting toy, so I grabbed one, along with a couple of pads of paper and a new memory card, for a total (according to the sticker prices) of about $40. Of course, I had to by the extra stuff too, because it wasn’t clear that I’d be able to get it later (if the company was gone).

Anyway, I took it all to the cash, and low and behold, it was being offered at a further 50% discount, so I ended up walking away with the whole load for $20. Cool.

Now, unfortunately, things took a turn for the worse.

I brought it all home, took out the install CD and stuck it in my Mac… Nope, no mac version of the software… Ugh.

“Ok”, I think, “I’ve got my Vista gaming PC, I’ll try it in there.”… Stick the CD in, try to install, CD decides it needs to get a newer version off the net… Download fails. But I’m a stubborn cuss, so I try it again… Nope, download fails again. Ok, one more time… Yes! Everything downloads and installs correctly.

Starting the software showed it to be one of those crappy, fixed size UIs built with Flash or VisualBasic or whatever, with no apparent way to proceed. Wait! It says it will only recognize the pen if it’s plugged in and turned on. Alrighty! Plug the pen into a USB port, turn it on and…

Get the driver search dialog. Nope, no Vista drivers available from Windows Download. Offers to look on the CD… Nope, no drivers on CD. (Which clown thought it meant it made sense to ship a Windows device without drivers. Ugh.)

Check their support site, which is singularly unhelpful…

Ok, now I’m getting frustrated. Then it comes to me: I’ve got a netbook that runs XP, maybe it will work with XP. Hook up an external USB CD drive to the netbook, stick the CD in, download the new version of the software (again), start it up and… Nope, the bloody fixed size UI is too big for the netbook screen!

God, talk about ways to suck the enthusiasm right out of ya.

One. more. try… Hook the external monitor out from the netbook to another display, and sure enough, I can finally run the software. Now, just 15 more minutes of randomly filling in stuff and connecting to a website, and creating both an admin and a user account(!), and leaving personal data that I really should not have to, and…

I get a page that shows I haven’t done anything with the pen yet.

Now, all I have to do is charge it up, and I can actually try it.

*sigh*.

SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone (Updated)

So, as you may already know, I have a Slingbox Solo. I continue to be quite happy with it, and use it regularly to watch TV on one computer while playing WAR on the other. One of the things that made this device particularly compelling to me, however, was the claim that they were going … Continue reading “SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone (Updated)”

So, as you may already know, I have a Slingbox Solo. I continue to be quite happy with it, and use it regularly to watch TV on one computer while playing WAR on the other.

One of the things that made this device particularly compelling to me, however, was the claim that they were going to come out with SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone. When SlingMedia first announced this, they said it would be available sometime in the first quarter… Well, apparently that didn’t work. However, it was submitted to the AppStore early in April.

So what’s going on?

Some people in the industry are reporting that carriers have pushed back on this app, since they didn’t want to support the increased demand on their networks. Others are saying that because of the nature of the app, Apple is just being extremely careful about it. Personally, I find that somewhat unlikely; any company that could (briefly) publish a shaken baby app can’t be all that careful.

In any case, it’s been a full month now that Apple has been sitting on the app, and it’s time to let it go. Either that or, hey SlingMedia, just release it on your website. I’ll jailbreak the phone to use it, so help me Apple, I will.

Update: SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone is out. Apple and Sling Media bowed to the carriers, and removed the ability to stream over 3G, even though beta versions of the app supported it. That, together with the $30 (!) price tag, was almost enough for me to bail on it. I did decide to buy it eventually, and the capsule review is “works well over wifi”.

Rubik’s TouchCube

I saw this over at Engadget… Rubik’s TouchCube splashes modern day onto timeless classic The post describes a new variant on the Rubik’s Cube with no moving parts, which uses a microprocessor with embedded LEDs to display colors on the faces, and touch sensors to recognize gestures that allow you to “rotate” those colors. Here’s … Continue reading “Rubik’s TouchCube”

I saw this over at Engadget…

Rubik’s TouchCube splashes modern day onto timeless classic

The post describes a new variant on the Rubik’s Cube with no moving parts, which uses a microprocessor with embedded LEDs to display colors on the faces, and touch sensors to recognize gestures that allow you to “rotate” those colors. Here’s a picture from the Engadget post:

Engadget image of Rubik's TouchCube

Now, at a purely pragmatic level, this doesn’t make a lot of sense; why would you replace a perfectly good $5 toy with an electronic version that will cost ten times as much. [ed: Gizmodo is reporting that it will cost $150.] However, It did get me thinking again about intelligent devices…

One way to look at it is that this device is just as a “middle ground” between a purely physical object (i.e. the original toy) and purely virtual expressions of that toy — something like Erno’s Cube for the iPhone:
1_3d_basic

There’s more to it than that, however.

I don’t know whether the TouchCube would be as satisfying to use to actually play Rubik’s Cube as the original is, but assuming they got the responsiveness right, it’s probably close. The thing is though, once you’ve separated the physical gestures from the resulting visuals, you can then start looking at other uses for it.

Obviously, the TouchCube could be used to play different games; you could, for example, play memory games (à la Simon) on it. If nothing else, this gives it more long term play value.

Now, imagine building in a little more awareness of its surroundings, then you could do things like:

  • dim the colors so you can play in bed at night
  • play competitively, with feedback from other nearby TouchCubes
  • or how about having all faces on the cube flash red when your cell phone gets a call — I could just see it, sitting on my desk, warning me when I forgot to take my phone out of silent mode, with send to voicemail being connected to stroke the top.

The possibilities are endless, but there are pitfalls. If we were going to live in a world where intelligent devices like this are common, we would have to ensure that they followed a common grammer for communication so that we didn’t end up increasing the cognitive overhead unboundedly (“So, my chair just jiggled. Does that mean the phone is ringing, or that I have to lose weight?”). They would also have to communicate with each other to allow the most capable device to provide the information (but also just to avoid being blinded when everything in the room simultaneously flashes at you).

Anyway, there’s nothing new in this ramble; people have been talking about this stuff since the ’60s. The TouchCube just got me thinking about it again, and hopefully this post did the same for you. 🙂

NAS

I have been using a Linksys NSLU-2 with a couple of USB drives attached to it as my home backup/file server, but… both of the drives are getting old — one 3 and one 4 years — something not good for a system where you are backing up important data (like this website 🙂 ) … Continue reading “NAS”

I have been using a Linksys NSLU-2 with a couple of USB drives attached to it as my home backup/file server, but…

  1. both of the drives are getting old — one 3 and one 4 years — something not good for a system where you are backing up important data (like this website 🙂 )
  2. The NSLU-2 (commonly known as a “slug”) has been very slow to access from XP with the latest service pack — Dennis and Deb were both hit by this.
  3. I wanted more storage space. No, I didn’t actually need it yet, but I was down to my last 150Gig or so.

Given all this, it seemed like it was probably time to look for a new network attached storage (“NAS”) box. After a certain amount of wandering around on the web, I narrowed the choices down to three boxes, each of which provides two internal drive bays:

Linksys NAS-200
Somewhere around $150 locally in Ottawa; comes with 2 USB ports that would allow me to plug in my existing drives; but by all accounts the slowest of any of the available devices
D-Link DNS-323
Approximately the same prices as the NAS-200, but significantly faster; only 1 USB port which can be used to control a printer or UPS, but not a drive
Synology Disk Station DS207+
Faster and more powerful than either of the others; around $400 in Ottawa.

Now, you know that I would normally go for the most powerful box, even though it was more expensive, but my normal dealer, PC Cyber [“Hey, man, you got da stuff?”], did not have any in stock, so I ended up getting the DNS-323 and one 1 terabyte drive. (I actually picked up the DNS-323 at Best Buy, because I had been given a gift certificate there for my birthday.)

Installing the drive was trivial — no screwdrivers or wiring required. Just lift up on the front cover and pop it off, slide the drive into the bay, close the lid. Booting, formatting the drive, and configuring it with separate storage areas for Deb, Dennis and I all went without a hitch.

I then started copying everything from the drives on the slug to the DNS-323, whereupon I learned two interesting lessons:

  1. Copying files between two fileservers by transferring them back-and-forth across a network with a wireless-N bridge in the middle of it, is somewhere between 4 and 5 times slower than doing it on the other side of the bridge. I learned this when I mounted both servers on my G5, dragged a massive backup directory from one to the other and had it say “estimated time to completion: 29 hours“!
  2. The slug is really slow. I didn’t do a lot of testing, but by my count, copying from an internal drive on a Mac to the DNS-323 was >10x faster than copying the same file off the slug.

Everything is now copied across to its new home. Deb is happy because I removed three devices, each with a power brick, plus a power bar from her study, and replaced it all with one; I’m happy because we now have more than double the storage we had and can access it much more quickly; and Dennis is happy… Well, actually Dennis isn’t happy because next week is exam week, but that’s another story.

Slingbox Solo

Yesterday was my birthday, and members of my extended family got together to buy me a Slingbox Solo. This was something that I had strongly hinted would be a good gift, not just because it’s the kind of tech toy I enjoy experimenting with, but also because I actually have a particular problem I wanted … Continue reading “Slingbox Solo”

Yesterday was my birthday, and members of my extended family got together to buy me a Slingbox Solo. This was something that I had strongly hinted would be a good gift, not just because it’s the kind of tech toy I enjoy experimenting with, but also because I actually have a particular problem I wanted to solve…

You probably remember that this summer I moved my home computer space from the basement to Dennis’ old bedroom upstairs. Unfortunately, Dennis’ room doesn’t have a cable hookup, so I couldn’t use the eyeTV that was hooked to my G5 any more.

The Slingbox would solve this problem by taking the video and audio feed directly from the PVR in the livingroom, encoding it as a digital stream and transmitting it over an ethernet connection. Running the Slingplayer software on a Mac or PC allows you to capture that stream and display it; to use the vernacular, it placeshifts the content. The player software also provides a fully functional remote control that looks (and works) just like the one on the PVR.

To cut to the chase, I hooked it all up yesterday, and it works exactly as described. I can now watch my TV, complete with digital cable connection and PVR functionality, from anywhere in the house (via wifi). The picture quality is perfectly acceptable and the sound is good — although I sometimes notice some slight synchronization issues.

Now, when you first install the Slingbox, it makes you configure various things related to setting it up to transmit over the internet, so for grins today I thought I’d try to figure out how to set up the Slingplayer software so I could watch my TV at home, while not on my local LAN. I figured there would be firewall problems, and even if not, there would be various settings I’d have to enter to make the software connect home, etc. In any case, I started the software on my Mac and then began looking through the menus for a hint about what to do, when lo and behold, I got this:

Slingplayer calling home

Yup, just starting the software was all it took. That’s video from my home TV, being displayed on my laptop at work. [And yes, I tested it during my lunch break.]

Oh, and did I mention they will have an iPhone version of Slingplayer sometime this quarter. 🙂

Palm Pre and the iPhone

The CES reveal of the new Palm Pre certainly was compelling. Apparently, the markets thought so too, as Palm’s stock went up a something like 35% over the course of the day (oh those damn insider trading laws). In watching the Pre being demo’ed, it was clear that Palm’s designers had learned from Apple how … Continue reading “Palm Pre and the iPhone”

The CES reveal of the new Palm Pre certainly was compelling. Apparently, the markets thought so too, as Palm’s stock went up a something like 35% over the course of the day (oh those damn insider trading laws).

Palm Pre

In watching the Pre being demo’ed, it was clear that Palm’s designers had learned from Apple how to build a compelling UI for a phone, and if anything, they had taken the concepts even further than Apple had. All I can say is, if they can just avoid the brain-dead ways that they have failed in the past, Palm will have provided Apple with it’s first real competitor.

The thing is, delivering on the promise will be hard; early on in the CES presentation, Ed Colligan made a point of saying “We only do mobile” like this was some kind of evidence that they knew what they were doing. Bah! The only reason they needed to even be thinking about the Pre was because Apple, who absolutely did not start out as a mobile company, showed them what people actually want in a modern phone.

Time will tell. With a hardware keyboard, a fast processor, a removable battery, a better camera and A2DP bluetooth audio, the Pre’s hardware is up to snuff. If they can match that with a flawless rollout and buy-in from the developer community then it looks like they may actually have a chance.