Total Conversion

So I had upgraded to iTunes 10 and immediately downgraded back to 9.  Reason being, iTunes stopped seeing my Fedora 12 servers DAAP shared music library.  My server is running Amahi 5.5 (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED) and stores all my ripped mp3's, oggs and flacs.  I was quite content using iTunes to play it as its one of the few decent players on the mac.  Compared to linux, there are very few decent players that support daap.  My player of choice, songbird,  as well as amarok & banshee don't support daap on OSX, but work perfectly in any recent linux.  Hell, even my android phone works over wifi, so I am very happy with the server side setup. So Apple introduces iTunes 10 and totally breaks daap for me.  I expected that Apple would just leave it and expect all the various NAS / streaming server manufacturers to work around iTunes, but amazingly, Apple recently introduced iTunes 10.01, which fixes the issue. It required a restart of the service on the fedora box, which was a qui

Had some issues following some of the posted guides online when trying to convert the Lazarus IDE to GTK2. The first portion worked, whereby you compile the LCL to GTK2 first, but the second step, which was to compile the IDE itself kept failing. I eventually got it working by compiling it from the command line. I did a: make clean all make LCL_PLATFORM=gtk2 and it worked. Please note to do all of he above as superuser / root.

After trying various solutions, I settled on the following one. http://monespaceperso.org/blog-en/2010/05/02/upgrade-alsa-1-0-23-on-ubuntu-lucid-lynx-10-04/ I am currently running Linux Mint 9 and the above worked perfectly for me. Hope this solves your problems...

from Ubuntuforums, where much credit is due! gksudo rmmod psmouse  to disable gksudo modprobe psmouse to enable of course, you can script it, make an icon, etc. Tested and working on LinuxMint 9. Original thread / discussion which covers all kinds of info about this laptop here. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1449001

This year, on Father's day, my wife bought me a stunningly small usb memory stick. 32gb of space crammed into a tiny space. I knew it was a recipe for disaster, and on Friday, my fears were realised. I couldn't find it when I got home. I must have left it at work. It bugged me the entire weekend and so this morning I came in extra early to look for it. Oh no, an empty desk.  Have the cleaners been here?  What now?  Desperately, I move in closer... Is there something between the desk units?  It looks like something next to the telephone wire...Could it be?? It looks shiny, this is good.  What are the chances?  Could just be a coin or something?? Oh yeah!  Thank you thank you thank you....My nuts remain intact! So problem over, for now.  This bloody thing is so small I have to take extra care.  It had just slipped between the cracks WHILE I was packing up.  It was there and then suddenly it had disappeared.  I'm just glad there's a happy ending though

http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=594 This one is specifically for the HTC Desire, but navigate up a folder to access other Android devices like the HTC Legend, Nexus One, Motorola Droid, etc. In each sub-forum you will find like minded owners and their app recommendations and even downloads / links.

Found a cool site to browse and install apps. Its an alternative to using the Market app on the phone. http://www.appbrain.com You create an account and install the appbrain app. From that point on, you can browse top apps, recommended apps in more detailed categories than on the normal Android Market on the phone. Being a desktop app, its more comfortable to browse and read the images & reviews. You get urls to click to install the apps you want and they sync wirelessly to the phone itself. Pretty sweet. I found apndroid and 3g watchdog here and installed them. pretty cool site.

A couple of weeks ago my HTC Hero was stolen. Woe is me. However, I had used it enough to become an Android fan. I knew that my replacement phone would be another Sense based Android. I had a contract upgrade due as well and plumped for a HTC Desire. As Pat (from TLLTS) has been saying, the snapdragon processor is amazing. The phone is fast and responsive and makes the Hero seem pedestrian in comparison. Its quite a huge improvement in terms of usability. Android 2.1 is awesome and 2.2 looks set to shake things up when it launches on HTC. I can't wait. Some of the things I have installed include C64, Sega Genesis and Amiga Emulators, C64 Sidtune players and the amazing Tower Raiders game. Of course mundane things like RSS, MAPS, Video and Audio are totally catered for. I believe there is a divx player working as well, but haven't seen it on the Android Marketplace yet. The screen resolution is lovely and the camera seems unchanged in hardware from the Hero, but

I've been running AMAHI as my principal server for a few months now. It Fedora 12 based and shares media wonderfully. Recently I picked up a Hauppauge PVR 150 and decided to get MythTV working. If you don't know what Myth is and what it can do, I suggest Youtubing it. I have always thought of Myth as a sort of exam or qualification. Once you reach a certain level of skill, you can get it working. It tests your patience and your skills, especially if you have non-standard hardware or live outside the US! Anyway, finally got it working *ON* the Amahi server. It was a real achievement for me in that I didn't have to do a fresh install of a clean Myth installation. I layered it on top of the existing Fedora 12 and Apache installation. Feeling pretty chuffed. Next job interview, if asked about my linux qualifications, would like to reply. I have a working MythTV backend with multiple frontends on Linux and OSX, but I'm sure that the interviewer would glaze ove

After disabling GDM and using KDM instead, I could no longer log in as my normal user, only as root. It seemed like a permissions error. Seemed like KDM could not read my home folder. I ended up using the following command... restorecon -R -v /home to restore KDM. I restarted X and it worked again. Thanks to the original poster at http://www.mail-archive.com/fedora-list@redhat.com/msg23145.html

I've mentioned before that my Windows 7 installation feels slow and sluggish. Having used Linux on the same box for almost a month now, I was curious enough to check out the slow windows performance this morning. Firstly, I was shocked that the 130gb partition was almost full. I just had 1 VM on it (XP ironically). This was about 40 gb. Nearly everything else was original Vaio supplied software. I was shocked at the amount of OEM software on this machine. I was going to blog that I have uninstalled 40 apps already, but its actually more. I have uninstalled about 30 apps already and there's still > 10 left in the control panel add / remove applet. What is truly scary is that this is only software with the word VAIO in the title. This excludes the Mcafee/Symantec/Adobe software which I am also going to remove. With names like "VAIO Content Monitoring Service", I am only too happy to remove these bits of bloat. I wonder if this software is being provide

Haven't really taken stock yet, but thought I'd list the current IP connected devices in the house. Desktop PC - OSX Snow Leopard Server - Fedora 12 + Amahi Laptop 1 - Ubuntu 10.04 / Win 7 Dualboot Laptop 2 - Ubuntu 10.04 Laptop 3 - Ubuntu 10.04 Laptop 4 - OSX Snow Leopard AppleTV 1 - OSX (Tiger?) AppleTV 2 - OSX (Ditto?) PS3 XBOX 360 Wii PSP 1 PSP 2 Nintendo DS 1 Nintendo DS 2 iPhone HTC Hero - Android 2.1 Damn! Never realised it was that many. I guess that's why my WiFI is so slow... Speaking of which.. Siemens Wireless N Router Linksys WRT 54G Router Marconi DSL Modem My 2 LCD TV's probably run embedded linux, but they're not technically ethernet capable so don't have to include them, but I wanted to push my device count > 20 and my linux device count > 10 ;) Does this mean I'm a geek???

Still having fun. Got sound working thanks to the amazing folks on UbuntuForums. If you are having similar problems, google solutions using "hda-verb" to get the latest. Its a changing topic with improving fixes all the time so better to get the latest tips yourself to get it working. The one I used was taken from https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=509542#c5 Which was linked on the Ubuntu Forums. Still having ATI 5650 problems. Apparently it works in Ubuntu 9.10, but since I'm running 10.04 beta, the problem is still evolving. Some people have it working on a fresh install, but I upgraded a 9.10 installation to 10.04 alpha and have been doing the daily updates. I might have some residual configs I need to delete before it works. Its a Friday afternoon now. Setting myself the goal of having it working by Monday.

Had issues with 2.6.32 kernel, card not detected, etc. Installed 2.6.33 using info on this page http://www.ramoonus.nl/2010/02/25/linux-kernel-2-6-33-installation-guide-for-ubuntu-linux/ and it worked for me on Ubuntu Lucid Beta. I expect 2.6.33 on Fedora/openSUSE should sort the problem on those too. Hope this helps somebody out there!

So I bought a new laptop. Sony Vaio E Series Model VPCEB17FG. Its a gorgeous machine and I am hoping to get 2-3 years quality life out of the thing. It comes with Windows7 and I decided to at least give Win7 a fair go. Unfortunately even with 4gb ram, this feels slower than my wife's nearly 2 year old Macbook with half the ram. What the hell? Now, Win7 fans, everybody tells me its not that bad, but how come my XP VM runs so slowly compared to the same thing on the Macbook? On the Macbook, the XP VM had 1.2gb ram, but because I have more memory now, I have allocated 2.5gb to it. Now, applications seem unresponsive and database access seems much more sluggish. I am running some mysql databases on the vm and application access to the database seems markedly slower. Not 10 or 20%, but 5 or 10 times slower. Again, what the hell?? My current theory is that the Windows XP VM on Windows 7 is to blame because effectively I am running 2 antiviruses, 2 anti spyware / malware and ulti

Some history... I *love* gadgets. I am insanely fussy about which phones I have. Before my contracts are ready for upgrade, I research and plan and drool about my next phone. My history of phones goes back to 1995 when I got my Ericsson 388. Lovely tiny phone. Followed over the hears with an Sony Ericsson T610, P910 and eventually got my first Nokia, the N95. Often when phones are released, they ship with one or two features missing. Either a lower spec camera or no FM Radio or something to make you want more. For the first time, with the N95, I got the perfect phone. When my two years were up (September 2009) 6 months ago, I couldn't find a single phone that could do all the things it could. Finally 6 months later, I realised that it was a once off event. I would not be so lucky again. I'd have to compromise when I bought my replacement. The fact that it took 6 months before I did shows you how much I love that phone. This blog post is supposed to be about my new HT

So I wanted to burn some video clips to disk, but the resultant disk image was too big to fit on a dvd. I could have removed one file and it would fit, but the issue was that it was only a few megabytes too much. It seemed like I needed to lose 1 or 2 minutes of video to make it fit. I immediately reached for my usual answer to the problem ffmpeg. FFMpeg, as everybody should know, is the video editing command line tool of choice. It was a simple matter of setting start and end times and clipping the file. However, it normally requires a bit of work getting the parameters right and converting times to seconds, etc. I wasn't in the mood. Secondly, I'm using OSX. There's supposed to be a GUI way to do this. So a few searches later, I had my answer. http://www.squared5.com/svideo/mpeg-streamclip-mac.html Enter Streamclip. OpenFile. Seek to the Point you wish to clip. Don't drag a selection, just select the frame you wish to use as the trim point. Now, in the edit

So. One of my biggest complaints with Linux has been the Audio popping I've been getting which I blamed on PulseAudio. I had gotten used to using my computer with the sound turned low, so didn't notice that the same problem existing using it on OSX. I finally realised it was a speaker problem when I tried to use the speakers without the computer to provide music at a pool party. Lo and behold. Clicking and popping like crazy. So all the time I blamed it on Kubuntu, or PulseAudio, or whatever, it was just the bloody broken speakers...