Fnord.

NPR

Y’know, what I really want is simple - to be able to tune in to NPR from my squeezebox now and then, and catch some programs that I like. You’d expect that to be easy, right?

Nope. I’ve just installed mplayer on Debian so that AlienBBC can work so that PublicRadioFanBrowser can work.

Note that this requires several very odd steps, like downloading Windows link libraries, because many of the mplayer-supported formats are proprietary. Interesting world we live in.

Whew. AlienBBC, at least, works - I can tune into those stations, and mplayer transcodes them on the fly from Real into MP3. That’s pretty cool.

PublicRadioFan, which apparently hooks into the website of the same name, is still borked.

All this because the most popular programs (Marketplace, All Things Considered, Car Talk) are locked behind paywalls. If you wanna good laugh, look up the price of Marketplace on iTunes music store some time. As if!

Server, performance, Mac v Linux

I had no end of problems running Squeezebox on the Mini. Every time the server rescanned the library, or itunes updated its podcasts and triggered a rescan, the squeezbox would either drop connection, glitch the audio, or both. I spent a lot of time debugging this one, and here’s what I came up with.

We have (alas) version 1 of the squeezebox hardware. It seems they put too small of an audio buffer in it, so that any short server glitch causes it to lose its little brain. The v3 hardware has increased this from 2MB to a mind-boggling 64MB, which probably fixes the problem.

For me, moving the server from the mini to my main server, a Dell 3GHz P4 running Debian, has totally fixed the problem. Even rescanning the library, compiling code, etc, have no audible effect.Much better. (This with a library of about 11,000 tracks, circa 80GB).

pbcopy/pbpaste. Command-line integration with the copy and paste buffer. For example:

  cat ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub | pbcopy

Change terminal windows with alt-~, hit apple-v, boom.

Very useful.

I have to admit, the fact that DopeWars is out for blackberry becomes even more appropriate when remember the Crackberry nickname.

I spent a lot of time playing this on Palm, so it’s like having an old friend back. An old, abusive, creepy yet compelling friend.

Free, and highly recommended.

If you’ve computed for a while, you’ve probably had a few hard drives die on you. They don’t last very long, especially the mass-market models. Then again, the godawful ST251 was even worse.

Anyway. Where was I? Ahh yes. Certain sounds of drive failure can, to this day, fill me with instant fear. The slow spindle, the head farming gronch… all inspire some variant on “When was my last backup?”

You can relive them all, courtesy of Hitachi. They posted these sound clips as diagnosis tools, but personally I think they’d make an awesome system startup/login sound.

Even after epic hacking, different wireless setups, subnetting, etc, etc, the Squeezebox continues to glitch when playing tunes from the mini.

Damnation.

So the next thing to try is move the music to linux, NFS mount it onto the mini, and see if that works. That way, I can still use iTunes for podcasts. Wish Apple’d port it to Linux.

Anyhoo, the point of this post is to bookmark this page explaining automount in a very clear manner. Avoids the NetInfo GUI altogether, and the only thing missing is the

  sudo killall -HUP automount

step.

We’ll see how this works, but if nothing else I can now have my music on my central server, where it gets better care than the random laptop drive I have it on now.

If you point your Blackberry’s browser to mobile.blackberry.com, there are several free downloads for your enjoyment. Among them are several addictive games.

This page lists four of them.

I’ve been seriously hooked on Rooster, which is a superb remake of Frogger. My high score is currently just over 1000, on the second space level.

This page from RIM talks about the game and its development.

Free. Go get them all, play what you like. Highly recommended.

It’s now possible.

This would have saved me much grief, back when I was trying to unlock my 7290.

Dunno if it works, but one of these days I want to get an 8700 for T-Mobile, and right now you can only get them for Cingular.

In my continuing (and pointless) obsession with mech watches, I’ve been looking for an analog with GMT.

Purty, eh?

Looks like a Chinese copy of a Rolex, Miyota movement. Ebay, $25 plus $20 S&H from Asia. Cheap, in the mail, and am I looking forward to it.

Clearly, this whole watch thing has gotten a bit out of hand.

One of the lame things about flying is that everything costs money, and usually too much. For example, you need to have maps to fly, by law. Usually a sectional or two, and perhaps a terminal chart. Eight bucks each as of Jan 06, and they last a few months. Then there’s the every-56-days AFDs, your subscription for your aviation GPS, etc, etc.

It seems like Jeppesen has a monopoly on charts. You certainly can’t get electronic charts from the FAA, anyway.

You can now get them from SkyVector.com The chart snippet above is from my local GA field. Skyvector does not claim to be legal or canonical, but its very useful, has lots of gmaps-style navigation, and is highly recommended by yours truly.

While working through beginner’s guide to ssi, I just could not get it working on Debian by following their instructions. I’m running Apache 1.3, and the AddType mojo just did nothing.

I finally found this page, which had the magic. You need another Apache module called mod_includes, so run the following as root:

apache-modconf apache enable mod_include

You should see this message:

Replacing config file /etc/apache/modules.conf with new version

Restart Apache, and voila. Damn, that took longer than it should have!