Author: Andrew Huey

new office

I haven’t posted anything on this blog in a couple of weeks. I’ve been really busy with stuff associated with my company’s move to Somerset, NJ. I’ve learned a few things during this move, but it might be difficult to post a list without getting snarky. I’m tempted, though! Suffice it to say that a lot of things can go wrong during a company move, and it’s easy to underestimate the time and effort that will need to go into it. Oh, and two days before a move is a *really* bad day to have your main e-mail server crash!

more fun with consumer electronics

I decided to update the firmware on my HD-DVD player tonight. I don’t have the thing anywhere near my home network, so I figured it would be easier to do the firmware update via CD-R rather than trying to do it over the Internet. Lesson one: the Toshiba HD-A3 doesn’t like CDs burned with Nero. It seems to like CDs burned with ISO Recorder, at 2x speed. I picked up that tidbit from AVS Forum, which is a great source of information on various audio/video stuff. So now I’ve got the HD-A3 at firmware version 1.1. I’m not sure that’ll make any difference for anything I’m doing, but I feel like I’ve accomplished something.

I also ran over to the local Apple Store and picked up a new battery for my iBook G4 today. I’m pretty sure I want to get rid of the iBook and get a new MacBook soon, but the old battery had almost completely died over the last few days, and I really didn’t want to pick up the new MacBook right away. So the new battery seems to be charging as it should right now. Hopefully, it’s a good battery and will get me through until whenever I get the MacBook.

consumer electronics mess

I got an HD-DVD player today, the Toshiba HD-A3. It was on sale at Best Buy last weekend for $200, with 10 free HD-DVDs (2 in the box, 3 at the checkout, and 5 by mail). I still have an old-fashioned CRT TV, so the actual HD stuff isn’t really going to come through just yet. I’ll probably buy a new TV early next year.
To make room for the HD-DVD player, I had to do a bunch of rearranging in my living room. I finally got rid of my old casette tape deck, which apparently wasn’t even hooked up to my receiver. (I’m not sure how long it’s been disconnected, but I don’t think I’ve used it at any time in the last five years, at least.) And I put my old laser disc player aside, since I haven’t used that in the last few years, either. My VCR is still plugged in, but I don’t actually have any cables from it running to the TV anymore.
I’m keeping my old DVD player (also a Toshiba; picked up from Woot for $40), since I think it supports a few formats that the HD-DVD player doesn’t, such as DivX.
So, that leaves me with a receiver, DVD player, HD-DVD player, Sony PS2, Wii, and Tivo. The Tivo output goes into one video input on the TV, while the other four items go into a four-port switch box that goes into another video input on the TV. Complicated, but I guess not as complicated as it would be if I tried to keep the laser disc player and VCR in the loop.
I haven’t had a chance to actually do much with the HD-DVD player yet, but it seems to work OK. It takes about a minute to boot, and about 30 seconds to load a disc. That seems kind of excessive, but I guess it’s still typical for an HD-DVD player. I think I may continue using the old DVD player for regular DVDs, just due to the quicker load time.
Meanwhile, I think I still have about 50 DVDs I haven’t watched yet. (Most of them are anime DVDs I got during a big sale at Right Stuf. Still, that’s a lot of DVDs.)

nine books

I started reading this post on the NY Times site earlier this evening. I had to stop and bookmark it for later, since there were so many interesting lists in the comments. If you’re looking for a good book to read, just run though the comments and pick one out! So many good books, so little time. I’d second the many recommendations for 100 Years of Solitude. Ditto for the Harry Potter books, the Dark Materials trilogy, Hitchhiker’s Guide, Shakespeare, Vonnegut, Borges, Bradbury, Flannery O’Connor, and a bunch of others.

And there are some interesting recommendations for books I haven’t read, but that might be worth adding to my Amazon wish list: Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, for instance. I ran across a reference to one of his other books recently, but, prior to last week, I’d never heard of him.

The Road got a few mentions, and that’s another one I haven’t read. Looking at the description now, though, I see that there are cannibals in the book. I generally find that I’m disappointed by any book with cannibals in it, so maybe I’ll avoid that. And it’s got the Oprah stamp on it too, which is kind of scary.

And this list reminds me, again, that I still haven’t gotten around to reading Animal Farm. Sigh.

iPod Touch

I picked up an iPod Touch at CostCo today. Primarily, I’m just looking at it as a replacement for my Nano, which I’ll probably be selling to a friend for a few bucks. I like it a lot, though there are a few little annoyances. Here’s a couple of bullet lists of good and bad stuff:

Good

  • The interface, in general, looks nice and works well. The multi-touch stuff works well.
  • Safari works well on most sites, and there are a lot of sites that are formatted either for the iPhone/iPod Touch specifically, or more generally for mobile devices, that work really well. The browser on the PSP, by comparison, doesn’t work nearly as well.
  • The screen looks pretty good. I synced a few episodes of Heroes down to the device, and they look nice.
  • QuickTime and PDF support in Safari. (I was actually pleasantly surprised about the PDF support. I wasn’t expecting it.)

Bad

  • Since there aren’t any physical controls, I’m not going to be able to use it without looking at it. That’s something that I take for granted on the Nano. I don’t think it’ll be too much of an annoyanyce, but we’ll see how that works out.
  • There’s one stuck pixel on the screen. It’s not really obvious, except on a solid black background, though.
  • The keyboard is a bit of a pain. It works, and I’ll probably get used to it, but I don’t think I’ll ever be using it to write blog posts or long e-mails. (It’s definitely better than typing on my Moto SLVR though.)
  • No Flash support. That kills some web sites that rely on it.
  • You can’t use a stylus on the screen, the way you would on a Palm. That kills some potential applications that won’t work with only finger controls, like maybe a drawing app or handwriting recognition.

We won’t see (approved) third-party apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch until next year. I’m hoping for a few key apps. First, a note-taking app. If I can get that, then I can probably (finally) dump my Palm i705. I use the Palm primarily for contacts, calendar, and notes. The Touch already has contacts & calendar; if they can just add notes, then they’ve got everything I need in a PDA. I’d like to see a good offline e-book reader, too. I don’t know if I’d use it a lot, but I’d like to have it. And maybe a couple of games that make innovative use of the multi-touch interface. Heck, even a simple solitaire game would be nice.

groceries

I don’t post about Somerville very often, but I thought I’d write a quick post to mark the passing of the Somerville Pathmark. I ran over there tonight to pick up some stuff, and found out that they’re closing tomorrow. I knew this was probably coming, due to the redevelopment plans for that center, but I thought there was still a chance that they’d leave Pathmark open. Oh well. I’ve been doing most of my shopping at Stop & Shop or Wegman’s lately anyway, but it was really nice to be able to just run across the street to Pathmark any time I needed milk or something. Now, I’ve got no grocery store in (easy) walking distance.

It looks like the borough is committed to opening up a new supermarket in that space eventually, so that’s good. And there’s some mildly amusing speculation and discussion on this over at C-N’s forums.

I was never entirely thrilled with the Somerville Pathmark, but it was a decent store, I knew where everything was, and it was usually pretty easy to get in, get what I needed, and get out. I hope all the employees manage to find decent work elsewhere, either at another local supermarket or maybe somewhere else in Somerville.

Hello from Ubuntu

OK, well, I’ve got Ubuntu working now. Here’s a few notes, in case they’re helpful to anyone else.

My machine is configured with one SATA drive and one older IDE drive. The SATA drive is my main drive, with Windows XP installed on it. I put Ubuntu on the IDE drive. The install went smoothly, but to get into Ubuntu, I had to go into my BIOS and change it so I’m now booting from the IDE drive rather than the SATA. The IDE drive now has GRUB on it, so that allows me to get into either Ubuntu or XP. And I customized GRUB to default to XP using Startup Manager, which I installed from the Add/Remove application, which is quite nice.

I’ve got an ATI video card, which worked fine by default, but of course I had to mess with it. I installed an ATI driver, then got the eye candy working using the method described here. It seems to be working OK.

I also installed a couple of other things that are pretty much necessary: The “Ubuntu Restricted Extras” package has the stuff you need to play MP3s and DVDs. And, for some reason, emacs isn’t installed by default, so you have to pull that down.

Ubuntu

I decided to spend a little time this week playing around with Ubuntu 7.10. At work, I installed it on two old Dell Latitude notebooks that we had lying around. They’re pretty pathetic machines at this point. They’ve both got just 256MB of RAM, which is the minimum you need to get Ubuntu up and running. And, at that level, you really can’t run the graphical installer. Rather, you need to run the text installer from the “alternate” install CD. Once I figured that out, though, the installs went pretty smoothly. My plan is to use these laptops for some device configuration and network troubleshooting when we move to our new office. The one thing these laptops have that our new ones don’t have is a 9-pin serial port, which is pretty helpful for doing initial router configuration and stuff like that. And Linux is usually a bit better for general network troubleshooting than Windows.

Just for yuks, I’m now trying to install Ubuntu on my desktop XP machine, on a second drive. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to dual-boot cleanly, though I’ve sometimes had problems with that in the past, with other distros. I guess we’ll see how it works out.

Up until recently, I’d been kind of skeptical about Ubuntu. There are certainly a lot of Ubuntu fans out there, but I really didn’t think I needed to bother playing around with yet another distro. In the past, I’ve used Red Hat, Corel, Fedora, and probably three or four other distros, including some fairly oddball ones. I’m pretty fond of Red Hat and Fedora, mostly just because I’ve got the most experience with them. And I kind of liked the user experience on Corel Linux, but of course that got dropped after just one or two versions. Ubuntu definitely looks like a nice, user-friendly package. I’m looking forward to playing around with it.

Well, while I’ve been typing this post up, the install finished, and I rebooted the machine. It went straight into Windows XP, so I guess I need to do some research on the whole bootloader thing.