Geek Christmas

Since I had some time off over Christmas and we didn’t have any major plans so I decided to tackle some outstanding IT project in the house.

The first thing was to clean out all the computer that used to live close to the litter box in HY’s old appartment. That was the most icky of the projects, vacuuming out the layer of the cat litter dust, stripping out all the drives, and wiping down everything. I also needed to wipe down all the stuff I dumped in the basement after moving for similar reasons.

I ran nine cat 5 cables, 2 to the TV in basement, 2 to the TV in living room and 4 to basement room with all the computers and one to the phone demark. I still need to find out if I can easily pull some cables up into the attic and over to HY’s office.

I rebuilt the asterisk server with PBX in a flash and hooked the Sipura 2002 into the house telephone lines so we can use normal cordless phones for making calls. I also signed up for axvoice to get 200 minutes of US/Canada minutes. The international rates also appear to be good.

I also needed to centralize all my mp3/acc files on one computer, over the years the files have spead out over a number of computers. I also borked my raid array on the file server a couple years back and had a lot of MP3’s that didn’t play all the way through. So I wrote a script that copies all the mp3 from my laptop to the file sever. If it was already on the fileserver then it would over write the file, if it didn’t then it added the song to a ‘new’ folder. After after a month or so and a couple iterations fixing dumb things like ; and ‘ in the song names I had all the files in one location which are being sharing out via iTunes on the mac mini.

I also backed up all my files on my laptop and installed Leopard (macos 10.5). Apple makes it really hard to accidentally wipe your computer so took me few goes to work out how to do a full wipe. The first time I missed the small “options button” in the install that gives you the non idiot upgrader. The second time i selected to do a fresh install, but preserve user applications and files in a separate folder option. I didn’t realize it was going to copy in all saved files and applications back into the normal folders after installing. So the third time I did the nuke and destroy option to wipe the computer then install. After all that I now have a fresh install with just the applications I want. It runs nice and fast now.

I am really like 10.5, the time machine option is nice and easy for backing up the computer. The Screen Sharing App is the best way to remotely control another Mac, very very fast compared to Chicken of VNC or Vine. I had some issues with X11 doing control click for pasting till I found the developers site where I could install an unofficial update. I am not impressed with the new version of Front Row. Apple synced Front Row to match the version that comes with the AppleTV’s. It seems slower especially when viewing media on another mac. They also removed the extra level between selecting a TV Season and the episodes so you it now goes straight from TV Show to all the episodes. This sucks if you have 4 or 5 seasons of a show and only want to watch season 3.

The final thing on my geek list was to upgrade the file server to something less ancient than Suse 9.3. Ubuntu has been my Linux distro of choice for over a year now, but it doesn’t have a nice gui for setting up LVM and RAID partitions so I wanted to see what open suse 10.3 was like. I tried out the live cd on another computer and wasn’t hugely impressed with the newer version of KDE. I didn’t like the equivalent of the start menu, the final decision was made when I couldn’t get the live cd to boot on file server, so ubuntu it was. After installing I had some issues with the raid drives. I wasted most of Sunday trying different things, but both raid arrays are now online and keep working even after rebooting. I had a number of issues, first the partitions on two of the disks wouldn’t show up in /dev till I removed the entry in /etc/blckid.tab. I then had to build the raid mirror with just one drive, then wipe the super block on the other drive, reboot, then add the second drive back in. The only thing I can think of is that the drive had the superblock in both the /dev/sdd and /dev/sdd1 which was confusing it.

I still have to install vmware server, setup samba and some other junk on the file server but nfs is up and running and the macmini can see all the media.

Oh and I got a Garmin GPS Bike computer from Hongying that allows my to track my heart rate and the path I took.

So thats my Christmas geek fest.

What did everyone else do?

Postman Pat

I called in to cancel my series 1 tivo which I have had since sept 2000 and they offered me an HD tivo for $200. I ended up getting it since it it will let me transfer shows back and forward between the HD Tivo and the Series 3 I already have. I got it a couple days ago and I finally got everything set up so I can transfer shows between them and now I am watching Postman Pat which was recorded on the tivo HD in the basement and then transfered to the Series 3 in family room.

I can’t believe it they have changed the theme song, and Postman Pat now has kids, they even have cultural diversity now with an Indian family. HY is looking at me strangely………

Loose lithium batteries can nolonger be checked

This is a new one on me, According to the Washington Post you can no longer pack loose lithium batteries in checked luggage.

To help reduce the risk of fires, air travelers will no longer be able to pack loose lithium batteries in checked luggage beginning Jan. 1, the Transportation Department said Friday.

If packed in plastic bags, batteries may be in carryon baggage. The limit is two batteries per passenger.

Mmm so does this mean I am allowed to check a lithium if it is still in its original packaging?

The more they make it more difficult to fly the more I wish the US had a reasonable train system or god forbid actually wanting to drive instead.

Bike Stats (new bike)

ODO 512
AVG 14.1
max 25.2
time 23:51
trp 5.6

I have Trek Incite 8i wireless odometer that bought at the same time I bought my bike. I have been getting strange Max speed readings on and off for since i got it. I finally tracked down the porblem. If I put it to close to my mac book laptop the speed indicator goes crazy. I tried switching off the blue tooth and wifi transmitters on the laptop and I had the same problem. So that unit is going to be retired in favor of my new christmas present, a Garmin Edge 305 GPS/heart rate/cadence/Speed/altitude/kitchen sink monitor. The only problem is I forgot to turn it off last night so it died 2 mins into this mornings commute, OOOPS.

I can tell you this much for today
Total time: 2:08
26 cal burned
distance .44 miles
heart rate 131 bpm
max 15.2

Yesterday (on old bike, with hy)
Time 0:46:13
559 cal
6.69 miles
avg 8.7
max 20.2

Petrol Prices

Paying by the liter in the uk taught me to watch gas prices. The washington post is saying that the price of regular has gone down 9 cents a gallon over the last 3 week. I haven’t seen much evidence of that close to our house, but we did get regular for $2.89 a gallon in Baltimore over the weekend which is 16 cents cheaper than the cheapest of the gas stations near our house.

On a related note my car is about 40 miles away from passing the 100,000 mile mark. Maybe I will treat it to an oil change, a battery and a car wash.

Avenue Q

We saw Avenue Q tonight at the National Theater in DC. This was a last minute thing, we had talked about it for a week or so but didn’t get any tickets till Thursday. I had a lot of fun. Definitely not for the kids I think the best song was “The internet is for surfing porn” and I think they should make up a t-shirt for the line “Grab your dick and double click”. So I now have a new mouse mat. I am debating weather I would be able to use it at work.

Avenue Q mouse mat