No more pink walls

Many of you out there will have already been subjected to my furious advocating, but for those who missed it:

This coming Saturday the newly formed Ballarat Linux Users Group (BLUG), in conjunction with Linux Users Victoria (LUV) will be holding an install-fest and full day mini-conference. The day will be held at the University of Ballarat and is, of course, free and open to anyone.

We’re hoping that the day holds something for anyone interested in linux and/or open source software. For anyone who has always wanted to try linux but didn’t know where to start, there will be people around all day that are more than willing to help out. For those who have already discovered the joys of linux, there will be talks held throughout the day, that are aimed both at first timers, but also those looking to delve more deeply into what linux is capable of.

So, I’m hoping to see as many of you as possible there this weekend, particularly those who made the journey to linux.con.fau  this year (hint hint). For any further details, checkout http://blug.asn.au/wiki/index.php/March_Install-fest

Well I finally got around to ‘finishing’ another of the little projects I’d been playing with. This one is probably extremely boring to nearly everyone but me, but franklin I don’t really care, it was useful for me

Basically I whipped up a little site where you can pull Australian Stock (ASX) quotes, for any group of companies you wish, in RSS form. The site is still a little rough at the moment, but if this is useful to anyone else its at: http://noisymime.org/asx

Incase anyone is wondering why the hell I would bother wasting my time creating something like this, it all stemmed from the MythTV setup. I’ve got the MythNews plugin loaded which allows you to read RSS streams in a nice pretty format on your TV in the morning. I thought a set of stock quotes would be good too, but alas after searching I couldn’t find any service providing this (For free at least), so I did the crazy thing and made it myself.

Well my all encompassing MythTV box is finally nearing completion! It still needs a little bit of new hardware (BIG HDD and new vid card) to go in, but its bascially done. It’ll show and record digital TV, has a pretty Web interface for when I forget to tape something before I leave the house, play normal video files and music and tell me the weather in the morning.

I have to admit though, the whole thing was a huge pain in the ass to get working right. The DVB tuner card in it (DVico Dual) probably caused the bulk of the problems as the drivers for it are in a constant state of flux. Once I got that working, the only other tricky thing was channel tuning. This really should be a simple procedure but until MythTV includes something that will actually scan transponders automatically rather than requiring the correct transponders first, then its always going to be difficult.

For this reason, I’m providing a quick set of instructions for anyone else in Ballarat (Victoria, Australia) who is trying to setup a box like this.
Note that these are tuning instructions only and assume that your tuner card is already operational and that you have MythTV installed:

1. Firstly, grab this tuning file that I created for Ballarat
2. Run ‘scan au-Ballarat‘. You should see it pickup the various digital services from each channel. If not then it means that you’re reception is no good or you are picking up from a different transmitter. Either way you might as well stop now as the rest of the instructions won’t work
3. Execute the following command:
   ‘scan -5 ~/au-Ballarat |cat ~/channels.conf – |grep -v :0:0:[0-9]*$|sort |uniq > ~/channels.conf’
   This will produce a channels.conf file that MythTV can import.
4. Run ‘sudo mythtv-setup‘
5. Select the bottom option, Channel Editor
6. Select Scan for Channels
7. Change the scan type to ‘Load from channels.conf’ and enter the absolute path to the channels.conf file you created above (Note: Relative path names do not work)
8. Start the scan. That should find you all the channels and add them in.If you want
9. If you want to include guide data, you will need to add the XML TV id’s as well. These can be obtained by running:
   “tv_grab_au –list-channels –loc VICReg –srv freesd” (You can change the freesd to freehd if you’re using High Def channels as well
   If you don’t have tv_grab_au you can obtain it from: http://www.onlinetractorparts.com.au/rohbags/xmltvau/
10. Finally, exit mythtv-setup and pull down the guide data:
    ‘sudo /etc/cron.daily/myth-backend‘ or
    ‘sudo mythfilldatabase‘
    Note: The above is on an Ubuntu system so the path to your cron files may vary.

And hopefully that should get you to the watching TV stage. Good luck!

Well, I knew it was going to happen, but Google finally released their own ‘official’ version of the Desktop Calendar plugin with the features I’d added, thus making my version obsolete and destined to fall slowly in Gadget ranking. They based their new version off my code but have also edited it to their own desires (Eg They removed the ability for a user to set their own update time, guess their servers are copping enough of a pounding). So this means I’m going to have to do something else as a drawcard for advertising as I’m still a little way off Adsense’s minimum payout level of $100.
The upside? Well, at least there’s a Google product out there with my name in the code. The other upside? Well, not really an upside, but still funny, is that Google have now inherited at least 1 bug that I’d noticed in my code. Apparently they didn’t pick it up when copying and pasting
OK that was mean, they haven’t really copied and pasted (They removed all my comments), and they did add a few other tasty features that I hadn’t got around to or wasn’t sure how to do.

I’ve been meaning to write up the paint job I gave my laptop for a while now but just have never got a round to it.

The idea was to dress up the old girl and hopefully distract some people from how shamefully old it is (PIII 1ghz). Its a linux only laptop so the obvious choice was Tux. I was initially going to just whack a sticker or something on the lid, but how boring is that?? So out came the paints, the tape nd the stencil knife.

First step was to mask the whole thing up with a combination of newpaper and masking tape and clean it off with rubbing alcohol:



The masking around the fiddlier bits I did with a scalpel style knife, just whack on a big bit of tape then cut out the bits you don’t need.

Then came the spraying of the base coats:


From memory I did approximately 5 base coats in a satin black, never once did I stop thinking about what would happen if I didn’t mask off something like the screen correctly.

After the base coats went on it was time to make a stencil. There’s a million different Tux images around but This one seems to be the standard, simple one. I made a few small changes around the eyes and Tux’s left foot so that cutting would be slightly simpler.
I printed out the image onto plain paper at the correct size and then taped this sheet onto some clear contact. Again with the knife, I cut out the image on the paper and contact then carefully stuck the contact onto the laptop:

Sprayed it metallic blue:

Prayed.

The stencil tended to unstick a little bit as it reacted with the paint. This caused a little bit of underspray which, although it doesn’t look too bad (Kinda a halo effect), was really frustrating. I’m not sure how to fix this other than using better contact or water based paint (Which means no metallic).
After 3 coats using the stencil, I took it off and sprayed on about 5 clear coats. This is where I had some problems. The clear didn’t react too well with the base coat and although it stuck fine and looks ok, I was hoping for a more ‘glassy’ look.

Finally all the masking comes off and the job was done:

The whole thing was great fun and I recommend it to anyone feeling creative.

I don’t normally post things like this, let alone on my ‘technical’ blog, but its kinda relevant.
Its possibly the cutest thing you will ever actually see thats geek related:

Yes, that’s right its a baby firefox. Someone grab a little globe and wrap this thing around it please.

Following up on last nights showing of the DS with linux… I’d like to show the following:

Yes, that’s right, its Day the the Tentacle on the DS. Well actually (and obviously) its SCUMM VM running on the DS
The Ds is bascially the perfect mobile SCUMM platform, its great! Its got the touch screen which gives a pretty reasonable interface and if I ever get some better hardware for storage I can even run the talkie versions.
Gold

Well seeing as how I’m at lca 2006, aaaand I’ve recently purchased a Nintendo DS, I thought it only fitting thaty I combined the two.
The result…? I hideous mutation that I finally got running this afternoon. Here’s the obligatory blurry photo:

It wasn’t the easiest thing to do, especially considering the limited hardware I had to work with (No CF or SD!!!) but its done.

Here’s an interesting conversation that Linus decided to dip his toes in. Whilst he raises some good points I think that, like on other occasions, his comments are based heavily around his own preferences and maybe do not reflect a wider audience. Some of Jeff’s responses are very well thought out and explain with a little more clarity where GNOME is coming from.

This is purely for my own personal reference as its a bugger of a thing to find a solution to when you have the problem.

The issue I had was with GRUB dual booting linux + windows (+OSX), which should never be difficult. The problem came about apparently because linux is on the primary drive while Windows the secondary. The error received when booting a ‘standard’ GRUB configuration is this:
“Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0×7″
When I say standard I mean somethng like the following:
title Windows XP Professional
root (hd1,4)
savedefault
chainloader +1

The fix is to change the GRUB setting to the following:
title Microsoft Windows
map (hd1) (hd0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

Which makes sense I guess, but I still think its an unnecesary step.