BeigeJournal

Just a quick note that the Jabra BT 250v bluetooth headset works just fine with the Apple MacBook. The Mac Bluetooth setup wizard pairs it up just fine and it works with Skype as you’d expect.

I read Dave Slusher’s insight about David Coursey a while ago, the one in which he says, “he is like a street whore expressing incredulity about and contempt for those who would have sex for fun,” and I finally heard the interview he was referring to a week or two ago. That is a memorable way of describing it. Coursey seems remarkably down on the possibility that people would write or talk (or presumably, sing, paint, photograph, or code) for fun, even though it’s pretty easy to find lots of examples of people doing exactly that. I think though, that he really missed the point of RSS, and that feeds into it.

I think he used the New York Times as an example, saying that, sure, you can get an RSS feed, but why not just go to the web site with your web browser? I agree: for the purpose of just plain reading, an RSS feed from the NY Times, or Boing Boing, or CNN, or any other site that gets updated constantly, is not a really a big added value. If you wake up and wonder what the Times has to say, sure, just go to the web site. I guarantee they will have something up there that wasn’t there yesterday. What the feed is really useful for are the amateurs who only write (or record podcasts…) when they have something to say, which might not be very often. If I have to remember to visit Joe Intermittent Blogger’s site to see if he’s written anything yet this month, eventually I’ll forget about him, but I can keep dozens of very occasional feeds in Bloglines, or in my podcatcher, and every now and then a nugget of goodness will appear from someone who doesn’t say much but who I always want to hear from.

The whore thinks servicing thirty-five guys every night is too much work for anyone to do for fun. The professional radio guy thinks the minimum any one person can do is four hours of morning drive-time-radio every single frickn’ day, and no one would do that just for fun. If you had a broadcast radio transmitter and only turned it on for a half-hour a week at unscheduled times, you would not have any listeners. If you put out a podcast every other week or so, it is entirely possible for people to put your feed in their software and receive your show. There have been four “Live from the Formosa Tea House” podcasts in the history of podcasting so far, but I really like them all. I wouldn’t want to miss any of the occasional “Really Learn Spanish” podcasts. The feeds are in my podcatcher, and when something new is posted, I get it automatically. It’s not some sort of terrible burden on me that happens on an infrequent, irregular basis. You don’t have to put out 12 hours a day every day just to keep people from forgetting about you.

The vision of a bright podcasting future is not a thousand insanely dedicated people each putting out 8 hours a day, it is a million normal (kind-of) people, each putting out what they can.

Pictured here are my old 44 megabyte five-and-one-quarter-inch full-height hard disk drive, which was once in a blazing fast 20 MHz 80386 (with a full two megabytes of RAM!), and my new two gigabyte flash-memory CF card for my new digital camera. The hard disk cost $440 back in 1988, which is some $700 in today’s dollars-light. The CF card cost $200 minus a $30 rebate.

We also see here that that useless 32 megabyte card they ship with the camera isn’t completely useless after all. With it, you can photograph the real memory card.

In a desperate effort to capture the coveted “least useful Firefox extension” title, some skillful people with too much time on their hands have created on egg timer extension, available now. They have a fabulous logo, the firefox curled up around an egg. It puts an icon on the bottom of the window, which when clicked gives a menu with soft, medium, and hard as choices. A dialog box pops up to tell you when the required cooking time has elapsed. Arguably even less useful than Firesomething, in that Firesomething is a minor source of entertainment every time you start your browser whereas EggOn, while in theory useful, is probably not something you are actually going to time an egg with, unless you really need help.

(Now that we are hopefully over the beta version upgrade churn, maybe I should install Firesomething again….)

I’m not sure if I can express with mere written words just how I feel about configuring Windows 2000 to use a Jetdirect networked printer. The instructions at HP’s web site where we got the drivers for the HP4550N color LaserJet simply said to use the add printer wizard. We assumed, therefore, that the wizard must be fairly easy to use. The process starts off with selecting either “local” or “networked.” Since this printer is directly connected to the network, in another room, no less, we chose “networked.” We then futilely spent much time entering IP addresses and wondering why it couldn’t communicate with the printer. I finally decided to type “jetdirect windows 2000” into Google, and the top hit was a web page from HP which started off by explaining that we needed to select “local printer” in order to install this networked printer. Yes, someone at Microsoft thought that, logically, in the install wizard, the clearest category for a printer networked using TCP/IP on the Internet would be “local” and not “networked.” Someone at HP thought that even though they have a lengthy and very clear document already on their web site explaining the completely counter-intuitive method for getting one of their Jetdirect-equipped printers, like, for example, the 4550N, to work with Windows 2000, there was no need to point people to this document on the driver download page. “Just tell them to use the wizard. I’m sure they all know that a Jetdirect printer is considered ‘local’ and not ‘networked’ by Win2k,” they thought.

I have an old 32MB USB flash memory device that works fine on a number of Linux systems. All that was needed, given that the USB support was already in the kernels, was a line something like this:

in /etc/fstab to allow mounting of the drive.

Several people with newer, higher capacity devices have not been able to use them with the old RedHat 8 box at work, however. We’d get errors in /var/log/messages such as the following:

kernel: Device not ready.  Make sure there is a disc in the drive.
kernel: sda : READ CAPACITY failed.
kernel: sda : status = 1, message = 00, host = 0, driver = 08
kernel: Info fld=0xa00 (nonstd), Current sd00:00: sense key Not Ready
kernel: sda : block size assumed to be 512 bytes, disk size 1GB.
kernel:  sda: I/O error: dev 08:00, sector 0
kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:00, sector 0
kernel:  unable to read partition table

I was unable to find any useful advice on the web. I took one of these drives home to test there and it worked fine on that system, an old P-III with Fedora Core 2 and a 2.6 kernel.

The answer to the problem of some USB flash drives working and others not, apparently, is upgrade to a current kernel.

I just purchased an HP dvd530i DVD/CD burner. This is a DVD+R, -R, +RW, -RW, +R DL, CD-R, and CD-RW drive, with up to 8x DVD+/-R, 4x DVD+/-RW, 2.4x DVD+R DL, 12x DVD-ROM, 40x CD-R, 24x CD-RW, and 40x CD-ROM speed claimed. This drive cost me $110.

I have an old 650 MHz Pentium III system running Fedora Core 2 Linux. This drive replaces an old Plextor CD-RW drive.

I never used any GUI tools for CD burning but I wanted to try out the drive quickly without learning a new set of tools for DVD burning, so I tried k3b, a GUI CD/DVD tool. With an up-to-date Fedora system with yum already in use, I needed only to type yum install k3b to get k3b. I then discovered that I needed the dvd+rw-tools, which is not in the k3b dependency list that yum uses, so yum install dvd+rw-tools installed that. I eventually discovered that if you want to burn MP3s to an audio CD automagically you’ll need the k3b-mp3 plugin: yum install k3b-mp3

There are a lot of rather bad open-source GUI tools and I’m not much of a fan in general of GUI interfaces for this sort of thing, but I am very impressed with k3b.

The main reason I wanted the drive was for backup purposes. I have an old TR-4 tape drive which has stopped working. The tape transport seems to run, but where the bits go no one knows. This drive can store 4 GB on a tape that currently costs about $32. A blank DVD+RW, holding 4.4 GB, costs around $1.40. The DVD drive is much faster, and of course disks are much easier to work with than tapes, so obviously the DVD system is far superior.

This drive, like all the newest ones, supports double-layer DVD+R DL media with twice the capacity of the usual disks, and the very latest version of the k3b software supports this, though I have not been able to actually buy any DL media yet. Once it becomes widely available I suppose this feature will be useful from time to time.

I watch few movies and have not yet bought a DVD video player. I was eager to see if I could play movies on my computer. I bought a copy of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring at Borders. In the United States it is technically a crime to play a legitimately purchased DVD on a legitimately purchased computer using unauthorized software. There are, of course, exactly zero officially licensed DVD player programs for Linux. There is some unauthorized software, however. I had thought that I might end up spending some time installing software, but it turns out everything was already installed. I just typed mplayer dvd://1 and it all worked just fine. It takes around 30% of my old 650MHz PIII to play DVDs. After I have time to actually watch the movie I’ll let you all know what I think of it. I do have to admit that the thrill of breaking the law by watching this movie with open-source software is a bit diminished by the fact that what I’m doing is paying $28.99 for a completely legitimate copy of a movie and then watching it on a computer that I paid a lot of money to buy in a completely legitimate manner. It’s hardly a bold strike against The Man. There is something wrong with the lawmaking system in the USA.

So far I’m very happy with this drive.

I am a major IT Conversations fan and have become a regular listener of Dave Slusher’s audio entries. I believe it was Slusher’s blog that pointed me to Maciej Ceglowski’s Audio Blog Manifesto, available as audio and as a text transcript. I have to say, I think it is one of the funniest things I’ve listened to recently. The background music really does it for me, I guess. Joi Ito’s audioblogger smashup is pretty good, too.

It’s not clear how seriously to take some people in this debate, and I think the angry people and the funny people are getting confused.

I have started thinking about what sorts of thing audio is particularly good at. The IT Conversations recordings of conference talks make perfect sense, of course. The interviews seem to work well, too. It’s not altogether easy to make an interview work well in text. A conversation really needs a great deal of editing to work as text, which may not be easy to coordinate among the participants. Monologues, in contrast, are easier to edit, and thus easier to render as readable text, though there are times when audio can be valuable.

I seem to have more audio, mainly from IT Conversations, than I have time for, but since audio can be listened to with partial attention while doing other things, it is nice to have. I’ve been working on scanned slides of my vacations in the Gimp while listening to audio.

This site has been hosted by ICDSoft for nearly one year now, and I renewed my contract without hesitation. The current price for a third of a gigabyte of disk and five gigabytes a month of traffic is $60 per year, though as a current customer I was offered another year for only $40. They also now offer one GB of disk and 15 GB/month of bandwidth for $120/year. The service works. There may well have been a time during the year when the site was down, but I wasn’t aware of it. They run mail servers that will accept incoming mail and relay outgoing mail, which work fine. The web-based control panel is reasonably easy to use. The servers run Linux. They’ve never tried to sell me anything I didn’t ask for, they’ve never bothered me at all, they just keep the server running and leave me alone, which is just what I want.

The service isn’t perfect. You do not get the ability to SSH in to the server, and you get the Apache access logs but not error logs. These omissions make debugging the blog software setup more difficult, but I’ve managed. This is, after all, the low-cost end of web hosting.

Overall, I’ve been very satisfied with the service. If you want cheap, no hassle, web hosting for a smallish site and can live without SSH access (or error logs), ICDSoft seems like a good choice.

This gentleman was having a bad computer experience, and turned it into a hilarious video. I’ve had experiences like that, too. You want to know what really gets me? When something crashes that wasn’t running any software other than the OS at the time. How does that happen? Implementing that feature must take real technical knowhow.