Since this has becoming CV's Aspect Ratio and Computer Service Blog, I should mention a recent positive service experience, this time with my first encounter with the Apple Genius Bar.
My work MacBook Pro 17" (yeah, I know, sorry) had been acting flaky--strange pauses, incredibly long boot times, and nowhere near the battery life that Apple was advertising. So I made an appointment at the local Genius Bar to see if they could figure it out.
As I was headed there I realized that possibly the Migration Assistant hadn't done quite as good a job as I'd hoped in moving things over to the new computer. Maybe something had been moved over incorrectly, or there was some kind of conflict between older programs and newer ones.
The Genius Bar genius (hee hee) thought similiarly, particularly after rebooting with an external drive showed fine performance and fast boot times. We tried deleting a few things like Parallels, but it didn't seem to help. So he proposed an Archive and Install. I'd have been able to handle that myself but since the Genius Bar was all set up to do so, I let the genius do it and left to hang out at Barnes & Noble.
After a nice Archive and Install, the machine is fantastic. Nice quick startups and ridiculously long battery life (at least as long as I'm not running TweetDeck... I love those Adobe AIR apps but man are they resource hogs). Yay Genius Bar.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Linux bails out Vista AGAIN
Was using the Mrs.'s HP computer and saw that it wanted to install a Service Pack update. I figured that Microsoft would have had that down by now, so I said go right ahead. Then my daughter tried to use the computer for a school project, and came to tell me that "something was wrong" with it.
Indeed something was wrong--it was blue-screening on startup with one of those darling Windows errors, specifically, "STOP 0x0000C1F5." I Googled it and found a number of messages saying that it was due to (yes) faulty download and/or installation of a Service Pack update, with most of those saying the best solution was to wipe the hard drive and reinstall. Hey, thanks a lot, Microsoft, I owe you one.
Luckily I found one message that suggested booting from a Linux Live CD and deleting a particular directory on the Windows drive. So I burned a copy of GParted, booted from it, opened up a terminal, typed in the magic Linux command line incantations, and restarted. Had some scary moments during repair, with various freezes and error messages and all kinds of CHKDSK repairs, but eventually Vista was indeed back up and running.
I know, I know... you're asking why I didn't just install Linux on the computer. I agree, I should have.
Indeed something was wrong--it was blue-screening on startup with one of those darling Windows errors, specifically, "STOP 0x0000C1F5." I Googled it and found a number of messages saying that it was due to (yes) faulty download and/or installation of a Service Pack update, with most of those saying the best solution was to wipe the hard drive and reinstall. Hey, thanks a lot, Microsoft, I owe you one.
Luckily I found one message that suggested booting from a Linux Live CD and deleting a particular directory on the Windows drive. So I burned a copy of GParted, booted from it, opened up a terminal, typed in the magic Linux command line incantations, and restarted. Had some scary moments during repair, with various freezes and error messages and all kinds of CHKDSK repairs, but eventually Vista was indeed back up and running.
I know, I know... you're asking why I didn't just install Linux on the computer. I agree, I should have.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Starting to watch those movie things again
With Lost on a two-week hiatus, and not really caring all that much about any of the current Dancing with the Stars stars, I'm thinking it's a good time to get caught up on my movie watching (which nowadays strictly occurs during treadmill sessions, unfortunately).
Today it was Quantum of Solace. I'd seen criticisms of it all over the place that the editing was awful--it was trying to do the Jason Bourne thing, but took it a little too far. I'd have to agree that many times it was almost impossible to figure out who was shooting at what, or what boat was crashing into what car. And I didn't really care that much about the plot or the characters--Craig's Bond is too much of an automaton, suspiciously T-1000-like. But basically the initial criticism succeeded in lowering my expectations, and I ended up liking the movie OK. Daniel Craig is still a potentially appealing Bond, so we'll see how the third movie shapes up.
Two more complaints about this one, though. First, if you're building a hotel, reconsider hydrogen fuel cells as the power source. Seems to be a class-action lawsuit in the making. (That was vague to avoid spoilers.)
Secondly, I realize that they were attempting to avoid the "type-on pseudo-computer terminal" titles to identify where Bond was at any point in time, but I really didn't like them doing it in a variety of fonts and sizes, as well as trying to incorporate it into the film (e.g. the "London" title was in the road). In fact at one point, it was incorporated so well (the La Paz title) that they had to fade it out early to make sure you didn't think that the La Paz airport had this giant glowing "La Paz" sign in front of it. They did (do?) the same thing with "Fringe" on Fox--didn't like it there, don't like it here. Yes, I am old.
Today it was Quantum of Solace. I'd seen criticisms of it all over the place that the editing was awful--it was trying to do the Jason Bourne thing, but took it a little too far. I'd have to agree that many times it was almost impossible to figure out who was shooting at what, or what boat was crashing into what car. And I didn't really care that much about the plot or the characters--Craig's Bond is too much of an automaton, suspiciously T-1000-like. But basically the initial criticism succeeded in lowering my expectations, and I ended up liking the movie OK. Daniel Craig is still a potentially appealing Bond, so we'll see how the third movie shapes up.
Two more complaints about this one, though. First, if you're building a hotel, reconsider hydrogen fuel cells as the power source. Seems to be a class-action lawsuit in the making. (That was vague to avoid spoilers.)
Secondly, I realize that they were attempting to avoid the "type-on pseudo-computer terminal" titles to identify where Bond was at any point in time, but I really didn't like them doing it in a variety of fonts and sizes, as well as trying to incorporate it into the film (e.g. the "London" title was in the road). In fact at one point, it was incorporated so well (the La Paz title) that they had to fade it out early to make sure you didn't think that the La Paz airport had this giant glowing "La Paz" sign in front of it. They did (do?) the same thing with "Fringe" on Fox--didn't like it there, don't like it here. Yes, I am old.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Improved writing
No, not my writing, believe me. Improved writing on the shows 24 and Lost this year.
24 in particular is MUCH improved over last year. I haven't seen yesterday's episode yet, but in the previous episode there were some excellent scenes. Specifically, the back-and-forth between Jon Voight and Hank from Twin Peaks about Starkwood's involvement, and the scene where Tony tells Jack that the guard "was dead the second he stepped out of that door." It's just as unbelievable as ever, but the writing is what is keeping me coming back.
And the last episode of Lost ("He's Our You") was quite good as well, with Sayid dead-panning the line "A twelve-year-old Ben Linus just brought me a chicken salad sandwich," and with Hurley winking to the audience with a line saying something like "I mean, anyone could see that one coming."
I also liked where one of the Dharma Initiative members threatened to "call Ann Arbor" if they didn't resolve the Sayid problem. Whoa, shout out to Ann Arbor!
24 in particular is MUCH improved over last year. I haven't seen yesterday's episode yet, but in the previous episode there were some excellent scenes. Specifically, the back-and-forth between Jon Voight and Hank from Twin Peaks about Starkwood's involvement, and the scene where Tony tells Jack that the guard "was dead the second he stepped out of that door." It's just as unbelievable as ever, but the writing is what is keeping me coming back.
And the last episode of Lost ("He's Our You") was quite good as well, with Sayid dead-panning the line "A twelve-year-old Ben Linus just brought me a chicken salad sandwich," and with Hurley winking to the audience with a line saying something like "I mean, anyone could see that one coming."
I also liked where one of the Dharma Initiative members threatened to "call Ann Arbor" if they didn't resolve the Sayid problem. Whoa, shout out to Ann Arbor!
Friday, March 13, 2009
30 Rock Quote of the Week 3/12 edition
"You told me to be more proactive!"
"No, I told you to BUY Proactiv!"
"No, I told you to BUY Proactiv!"
Atomic Ant build notes
Let me blow the dust off of this blog. Koff koff.
OK, a couple of weekends ago, since I was going to have some free time, I ordered a bunch of parts from NewEgg to build a new MythTV front end computer. The computer I was using as a front end was probably three years old, energy-inefficient, and couldn't play HD material without using XvMC as an assist. Unfortunately, a few months ago, for some unknown reason, anything on CBS in HD no longer played via XvMC... CBS always had the highest bitrate HD broadcasts, and apparently something changed about the signal and made it just a bit too much for XvMC. So I could watch 30 Rock on the front end but not The Big Bang Theory. This was clearly justification for getting a new computer.
These are the notes for building said computer and as such may be an exceedingly boring post to all of my 3 readers. Feel free to check out the 30 Rock quote instead.
I used as the model for this front end the "Atomic Ant" that Cecil Watson created over at the KnoppMyth forum (minus the tuner). It's very small, very quiet, capable of HD when using something NVIDIA is calling VDPAU (it allows for hardware-accelerated playback of both MPEG2 and x264 files, meaning that XvMC is ultimately doomed), and best of all when you price out all the components at NewEgg, only ran about $350. So I bought all the parts and got them in on Friday just in time for a fun weekend of squinting at jumper cables and cutting my knuckles on sharp edges.
The InWin case opened up fairly readily, but since it's such a small case there wasn't a lot of room to work. I probably should have removed the power supply in order to get the motherboard in place, but a little bit of forcing worked OK and luckily didn't snap the board in two. I snapped in the RAM, installed the hard drive, installed the passively-cooled NVIDIA video card (noting that I would have to make sure cables didn't touch the heat sink), wired up everything. All was going well... until I went to install the slimline DVD drive.
Slimline DVD drives say they have an IDE interface, which I guess they do, but they have a completely different connector than our friend the ribbon cable. Didn't know that. That was problem #1. Problem #2... slimline DVD drives want to be mounted in notebooks and use teeny-tiny screws to do so. Said teeny-tiny screws were not included with the slimline drive or the InWin case. So I couldn't use the DVD drive to install anything. (I've ordered an adapter to let the drive work with standard IDE ribbon cables, but it hasn't shown up yet, and I still can't find the screws I could use to mount it to the drive bay.)
Undaunted, I closed up the case, confirmed it could power up, and decided to try installing an OS by building a bootable USB memory stick. I found a utility called unetbootin, which works under Windows and Ubuntu. I was able to build a bootable Parted Magic drive, which allowed me to format the hard drive, but any attempts at building a bootable Ubuntu stick wouldn't work... the graphical installer would freeze. (I also then discovered that Ubuntu 8.10 actually includes the ability to build a bootable USB, but that didn't work any better.)
I forget exactly what error messages I typed in to find out why it wasn't working, but it turned out that it was some kind of conflict between the video card and the motherboard. By removing the NVIDIA video card and just running off of the onboard Intel video, I was able to get Ubuntu 8.10 running on the system. I then used Synaptic to install MythTV components (effectively getting Mythbuntu running on the system), and connected to my MythTV back end.
And what a surprise! On-board video let me play back 720p HD recordings no problem! Even 1080i recordings played back pretty well, although it did glitch from time to time. Power consumption was a mere 35-40 watts, it was darn quiet, all was well again...
But of course it wasn't! Hah!
If I tried to play back 1080i recordings at 1.2x speed (a great feature of MythTV), it would stutter during playback--it just couldn't handle it. So yesterday I decided to try to get the NVIDIA card back in the computer and get VDPAU working. I'd found this website by Jean-Yves Avenard that made it seem fairly easy to use his custom MythTV build, a few libraries, and the 180.xxx NVIDIA drivers to get it going under Ubuntu. Another plus is that it didn't require an upgrade of the MythTV database, which would be required if I'd run KnoppMyth R6, for instance.
First snag. Putting the card in the Atomic Ant and rebooting threw a ton of segmentation faults during startup. Very annoying, but searching for the motherboard part number turned up this thread on the Ubuntu forums that described the exact problem and the solution (blacklisting some AGP stuff... this was what was screwing up my initial installations, probably).
Second snag: I'd set the Ant's IP address to a static one, but hadn't added in any DNS info into /etc/resolv.conf, so couldn't find anything beyond my local address. Added my router as the primary DNS, rebooted, fixed.
Third snag: adding the URLs for the Avenard repository and running an apt-get update/upgrade wasn't sufficient to install the upgraded MythTV and NVIDIA drivers. After multiple attempts, I read on some web page that you need to remove all existing NVIDIA drivers before trying to install the 180.x drivers from his repository. After a few removals/reinstalls and checking the Hardware Drivers app, I finally got 180.x drivers running. Not sure why it took multiple attempts to do so. Things might have gone more smoothly had I removed the drivers before I tried installing.
Fourth snag: I got MythTV running, changed over the playback profile to use VDPAU for all video resolutions, and kerpow--trying to play anything resulted in an instant crash back to the Mythbuntu desktop. Needless to say, big snag here. Luckily I knew the drill: run mythfrontend from a terminal and add the option to log all activity to a text file. I checked the text file after the crash and it was complaining about not finding GLX running. It should be running--I instaled the NVIDIA drivers!
Nope, it wasn't running... nosing around in some forum posts with people having similar problems suggested checking the X.org logs. I found some command line command that grep'd the log for lines dealing with "nv". At the top of the log it was clear that the "nv" drivers were still in use and not "nvidia". So, the other step that was only offhandedly mentioned was that you have to manually edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf to load both GLX and to use the "nvidia" restricted driver. (Wish I could document this better but it's lunchtime and I'm hurrying and it's already too long and boring, eh?)
Anyhow, did this, rebooted, checked X.org logs, "nvidia" was in use (yahoo!), started up MythTV on the Atomic Ant, and -- YEAH BABY! Success.
At which point I thought to myself "this really would have been easier with a Mac."
OK, a couple of weekends ago, since I was going to have some free time, I ordered a bunch of parts from NewEgg to build a new MythTV front end computer. The computer I was using as a front end was probably three years old, energy-inefficient, and couldn't play HD material without using XvMC as an assist. Unfortunately, a few months ago, for some unknown reason, anything on CBS in HD no longer played via XvMC... CBS always had the highest bitrate HD broadcasts, and apparently something changed about the signal and made it just a bit too much for XvMC. So I could watch 30 Rock on the front end but not The Big Bang Theory. This was clearly justification for getting a new computer.
These are the notes for building said computer and as such may be an exceedingly boring post to all of my 3 readers. Feel free to check out the 30 Rock quote instead.
I used as the model for this front end the "Atomic Ant" that Cecil Watson created over at the KnoppMyth forum (minus the tuner). It's very small, very quiet, capable of HD when using something NVIDIA is calling VDPAU (it allows for hardware-accelerated playback of both MPEG2 and x264 files, meaning that XvMC is ultimately doomed), and best of all when you price out all the components at NewEgg, only ran about $350. So I bought all the parts and got them in on Friday just in time for a fun weekend of squinting at jumper cables and cutting my knuckles on sharp edges.
The InWin case opened up fairly readily, but since it's such a small case there wasn't a lot of room to work. I probably should have removed the power supply in order to get the motherboard in place, but a little bit of forcing worked OK and luckily didn't snap the board in two. I snapped in the RAM, installed the hard drive, installed the passively-cooled NVIDIA video card (noting that I would have to make sure cables didn't touch the heat sink), wired up everything. All was going well... until I went to install the slimline DVD drive.
Slimline DVD drives say they have an IDE interface, which I guess they do, but they have a completely different connector than our friend the ribbon cable. Didn't know that. That was problem #1. Problem #2... slimline DVD drives want to be mounted in notebooks and use teeny-tiny screws to do so. Said teeny-tiny screws were not included with the slimline drive or the InWin case. So I couldn't use the DVD drive to install anything. (I've ordered an adapter to let the drive work with standard IDE ribbon cables, but it hasn't shown up yet, and I still can't find the screws I could use to mount it to the drive bay.)
Undaunted, I closed up the case, confirmed it could power up, and decided to try installing an OS by building a bootable USB memory stick. I found a utility called unetbootin, which works under Windows and Ubuntu. I was able to build a bootable Parted Magic drive, which allowed me to format the hard drive, but any attempts at building a bootable Ubuntu stick wouldn't work... the graphical installer would freeze. (I also then discovered that Ubuntu 8.10 actually includes the ability to build a bootable USB, but that didn't work any better.)
I forget exactly what error messages I typed in to find out why it wasn't working, but it turned out that it was some kind of conflict between the video card and the motherboard. By removing the NVIDIA video card and just running off of the onboard Intel video, I was able to get Ubuntu 8.10 running on the system. I then used Synaptic to install MythTV components (effectively getting Mythbuntu running on the system), and connected to my MythTV back end.
And what a surprise! On-board video let me play back 720p HD recordings no problem! Even 1080i recordings played back pretty well, although it did glitch from time to time. Power consumption was a mere 35-40 watts, it was darn quiet, all was well again...
But of course it wasn't! Hah!
If I tried to play back 1080i recordings at 1.2x speed (a great feature of MythTV), it would stutter during playback--it just couldn't handle it. So yesterday I decided to try to get the NVIDIA card back in the computer and get VDPAU working. I'd found this website by Jean-Yves Avenard that made it seem fairly easy to use his custom MythTV build, a few libraries, and the 180.xxx NVIDIA drivers to get it going under Ubuntu. Another plus is that it didn't require an upgrade of the MythTV database, which would be required if I'd run KnoppMyth R6, for instance.
First snag. Putting the card in the Atomic Ant and rebooting threw a ton of segmentation faults during startup. Very annoying, but searching for the motherboard part number turned up this thread on the Ubuntu forums that described the exact problem and the solution (blacklisting some AGP stuff... this was what was screwing up my initial installations, probably).
Second snag: I'd set the Ant's IP address to a static one, but hadn't added in any DNS info into /etc/resolv.conf, so couldn't find anything beyond my local address. Added my router as the primary DNS, rebooted, fixed.
Third snag: adding the URLs for the Avenard repository and running an apt-get update/upgrade wasn't sufficient to install the upgraded MythTV and NVIDIA drivers. After multiple attempts, I read on some web page that you need to remove all existing NVIDIA drivers before trying to install the 180.x drivers from his repository. After a few removals/reinstalls and checking the Hardware Drivers app, I finally got 180.x drivers running. Not sure why it took multiple attempts to do so. Things might have gone more smoothly had I removed the drivers before I tried installing.
Fourth snag: I got MythTV running, changed over the playback profile to use VDPAU for all video resolutions, and kerpow--trying to play anything resulted in an instant crash back to the Mythbuntu desktop. Needless to say, big snag here. Luckily I knew the drill: run mythfrontend from a terminal and add the option to log all activity to a text file. I checked the text file after the crash and it was complaining about not finding GLX running. It should be running--I instaled the NVIDIA drivers!
Nope, it wasn't running... nosing around in some forum posts with people having similar problems suggested checking the X.org logs. I found some command line command that grep'd the log for lines dealing with "nv". At the top of the log it was clear that the "nv" drivers were still in use and not "nvidia". So, the other step that was only offhandedly mentioned was that you have to manually edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf to load both GLX and to use the "nvidia" restricted driver. (Wish I could document this better but it's lunchtime and I'm hurrying and it's already too long and boring, eh?)
Anyhow, did this, rebooted, checked X.org logs, "nvidia" was in use (yahoo!), started up MythTV on the Atomic Ant, and -- YEAH BABY! Success.
At which point I thought to myself "this really would have been easier with a Mac."
Monday, January 12, 2009
HAL can drive, can't drink
John Gruber's Daring Fireball reminded me that HAL became fully operational today, January 12th, in 1992, in Urbana, Illinois. Of course, he learned a song, but you knew that. Anyhow, he'd be 17 today, so he'd probably be looking at colleges to apply to, or astronauts to kill.
Friday, January 09, 2009
30 Rock Quote of the Week
Too much stuff going on between editing video at work, the holidays, being gone to Paris for the holidays, getting sick, getting back to work and having a looming DVD production deadline, well, looming. But I can at least try to kick off more blogging in 2009 with my favorite quote from last night's 30 Rock, from, of course, Jack Donaghy.
"Thank you for telling me what I already know. You can work for The Huffington Post."
More one of these days.
"Thank you for telling me what I already know. You can work for The Huffington Post."
More one of these days.
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