Geeks are GREAT Lovers

When this site was started my goal was keeping it updated with my technological goings on as well as some parenting tips that have worked for me along the way.  As you can tell by the infrequency of my updates, I’ve failed miserably at my goal.  No excuses.

What have I been doing you may ask?  I’ve recently upgraded my television, reciever, and gotten a PS3.  Having the NS4300N has been a godsend while endlessly streaming “Meet the Robinsons” for my son, who will watch the movie over and over again.  I’ve conquered the whole blu-ray ripping, sucessfully backing up a blu-ray and copying it to my NAS for replay in all of its full 1080p glory on my PS3 (purchased and built a new server/workstation to achieve this goal).  All of this while trying to keep up with my son who continues to blossom and amaze me.  Since the time of my last post he has begun speaking and his vocabulary is growing exponentially every day.  As you can tell I’ve been very busy.

Anywho, I upgraded Wordpress for this site to 2.8.2 and thought I should post something to test it out.  I’m not making any promising anything but I will try to keep this updated.  After looking at the lack of hits here, I’m not quite sure why.

No Comments » Posted by geek / Uncategorized

Turns out my attempts to hack the latest UPG file were all for nothing.  I found that the previous documentation on the UPG file format can all pretty much be scrapped due to the introduction of bcrypt to the whole mix.  I spent about 3 hours trying to figure out why all of the old files could be picked apart using dd and the new one wasn’t working the same way.  The ingenious people at Promise decided to bcrypt the upgrade file.  This wouldn’t be so bad if the key was available somewhere, its not.  I had to move the upgrade file to the NAS, change the extension to .pef (Promise Encrypted File?) and then run the local bcrypt on it (from command line on the NAS).  This gave me the file with the usual padding as expected.  I went ahead and edited some of the files in the UPG and packed everything up, moved the file to the NAS, bcrypt’ed it again and told the NS4300N to use it to upgrade itself.  To my utter suprise, it did just that.  Everything ran like a top and everything got unpacked, copied, and on reboot, the NS4300N became a doorstop.  I wish I knew exactly what happened but I don’t.  My guess is that some permissioning somewhere wasn’t kept correctly, but I can’t be 100% certain on that.

Good news is my unit was less than a year old and the good people at Promise sent me a brandy new one (RMA).  Bad news is, I had to blow everything away on my old RAID to get it running.  I’m in the process of copying all of my music over now.  So, back to the drawing board on the upgrade hacking.  I do have an updated MediaTomb package in the works that I have tested on my new server which  provides for rsyncd, admin telnet access and sudo permissions.  I’m working directly with the guys developing mediatomb and should have an unofficial package out after they release 0.12.0 in December ‘08.

No Comments » Posted by geek / Uncategorized

I’ve had mine for about 9 months and have done everything I can to hack in to it with varying success.  I’ve gotten telneted in to it and enabled rsync so that I can keep my music synchronized from my Linux laptop to it.  My wife backs up her Windows Vista laptop to it nightly and it just runs.  The native UPnP server that comes with it fuppes is good (especially with the latest update v1.01.0000.01) but I found that mediatomb is much more functional and recently found a package for it here.  I’d like to keep it updated so I am going to start to do that here hopefully with the help of the mediatomb developers.  You can download it from here.  There is some information on the contents of the ppg file here.  I’m going to try to hack the upg package (SR5 is out now) to see if I can get it to write the changes I make as part of the mediatomb service start permanent.  If it works out I will post the hacked UPG file here.

No Comments » Posted by geek / Uncategorized

One word…  DVDStyler.  After going through the Linux authoring tools, some of which were good but seemed to hang at certain points, DVDStyler is the hands down winner for simplicity (and it works).  The operation is straightforward, even I fiigured it out in a few minutes and created an ISO.  Rather than burning through DVDs you can create the ISO image and then preview them in xine (xine dvd://<FULL PATH TO ISO>).

In the previous post I mentioned that I was trying to get the videos up to Google Video.  I’ve managed to do that with the videos in the DVD format.  They are a pretty good size and look good after a few seconds of streaming.  It would probably be better to convert them to a smaller size before uploading due to some bandwidth restrictions.

No Comments » Posted by geek / Geek and Video

I’ve got a Canon HV20 high definition (1080i) digital camera and I’ve been working on getting video from the camera up to google using Linux.  The tools provided by windows vista are lacking to say the least.  There are a couple of good tools that make getting the video off the cam easy.

First you have to get the high definition off of the cam.  For this I use dvgrab.  The important thing to remember is that for high definition you must specify the -f hdv command line option.  The exact command line I used is:

dvgrab -f hdv -a -timecode <FILENAME>

This takes the imput from the first channel (firewire) and automatically appends the date and time of the recording to the filename provided.  Each time a new recording is detected it automatically starts a new file.  Pretty handy if you want to take the video off a whole tape at once.  The video that is left is in a very large format and not really worth much.  It is in high definition which is 1280×1080 in my case and doesn’t play well in anything excluding VLC media player.  The files are huge and unless they are very short in duration YouTube won’t let you upload them.  To get them in to a more reasonable size I use a utility called tovid.  My main goal here is to try to get the video files on to a regular DVD, or up to a video site like Google Video or YouTube.  The first thing I do is take all of the raw HD files and back them up to my NAS.  After that I take the files one at a time and convert them.  The command I use for that is:

tovid -ffmpeg -interlaced_bf -ntsc -dvd -wide -noask -in <INFILE> -out <OUTFILE>

I’ve found that using ffmpeg does a better job of syncing the sound with the video.  The options are pretty self explanitory.  The output is a DVD formatted video file which is much more playable by typical video players and of a much more manageable size.  A simple cat command will put any videos together that you want to make in to one.  Once you do that though you’ll have to use the above to fix the SCR before you can put them on a DVD.  I’m in the middle of figuring out exactly what tool to use to actually get the files to a DVD.  Once I figure that out I’ll update.

1 Comment » Posted by geek / Geek and Video

Little did I know there is a way to specify compiz as your default window manager.

kcontrol -> KDE Components -> Session Manager -> Change the Window manager to compiz

If you still want to be able to configure compiz through fusion-icon, launch it with the -n parameter (-n, –no-start      Run, but do not start a window manager).

If you’re running c-f with an nvidia card (as I am) and you are having some problems with the inactive desktops not refreshing properly, I found that adding:

Option       “UseCompositeWrapper” “true”
to my device section fixed it for me.  Some day nvidia will fix the problem permanently.  I’m using the Beta drivers now and they don’t address the issue.  Next post will be on uploading video from my HD camera to video sites (google and youtube).

No Comments » Posted by geek / Geek

Awesome idea! I bet the neighbors love that thing.

No Comments » Posted by geek / Geek and Ideas

I read this blog today and it rang pretty true for my limited experience.  I admit that I am guilty of the 50/50 mentality and will work harder to be a 100/100 player.

No Comments » Posted by geek / Marriage

I came across this article on Stumble! today and it got me thinking about when I was a kid. If my parents ever thought twice about letting me and my brothers (all together or singularly) go “out to play” they didn’t show it. We knew that when it was time for dinner we needed to be home. My wife and I both share memories of playing with our friends in our neighborhoods unsupervised by parents. Things are different than they were when I was a child, but I’m not afraid of my neighborhood (the same one my brothers and I rode our bicycles in when we were kids) and I certainly don’t think it is dangerous. There are a few people I would consider to be shady characters roaming around the place but not in a ratio greater than I encounter when I show up to work everyday. We certainly shouldn’t trust everyone to be guardians of our children, but we should trust our children to take the tools we have given them to make good decisions about the people and situations they encounter. If we don’t let our kids use the tools we give them and sharpen those tools, then we aren’t keeping them safe, we are ensuring that they leave the home with shoddy equipment.

No Comments » Posted by geek / Kids and Parenting

This is a great way to teach kids about physics, machines, dynamic fluid flow, and the like. A virtual physics lab on your computer! Here is the wiki with a great demo video.

No Comments » Posted by geek / Uncategorized