Linux is Lovely

My Linux box crashed a little over a week ago and it upset my whole mental apple cart. I wasn't doing anything particularly bad, surfing the net, and maybe I opened one too many commercial, bloated websites, but it crashed the system but good. When I rebooted all I got was the command line interface, the GUI was gone. Okay, I am not going to try and figure out how to fix it, I'll just reinstall the OS. I've done that before, so it's not like I will have to learn anything completely new, though since it's been a year since I last had to do this it may seem like it.

As I recall, the last time I used an 8 gigabyte USB flash drive. I should still have it, I mean nothing ever gets thrown away, but rooting around in my pile of computer parts failed to turn it up. Okay, fine, download the latest version and burn a DVD, which means I need to fire up my old Zbox, because while my current box has a DVD drive, it is not a burner. The Zbox does. But the Zbox internet connection is screwed up.

So I boot the backup partition on my main box, download the 2 gigabyte iso image file, and copy it to an external hard drive (I have a stack of them. Pick one, any one), carry this external drive over to the Zbox, plug it in, and burn a DVD using Brasero.

Install the latest OS over the broken one and we're back! And then I turn to YouTube and there's no sound. WTF? We've had sound coming out of PC's since day one, how can there be no sound? Poke and prod and find that Intel makes 35 different versions of the sound chip my system uses and the driver doesn't necessarily recognize all of them. The recommended fix is to replace the kernel with a newer/older/different one. Now all I have to do it figure out which one I have, which ones are available, and how to replace just the kernel. I suppose I'll sort it out eventually, but it's kind of a pain.

I suppose a the smart thing to do would be to buy a new system, and if my time had any cash value that would be an option, but since it doesn't, I get to play plumber.


Huh? Follow me down an analogous rathole and I will explain.

The toilet in the master bath started leaking. The fill valve and its fittings are the usual culprit being as they are under pressure, but the underside of the shutoff valve (where the water supply line comes out of the wall) was dry, and any leak from the supply side will run down the line and drip off the bottom of this valve. So if it's not the fill valve, it must be the wax gasket where the toilet meets the sewer pipe. That's happened here a couple of times, but the toilet is solidly mounted, so maybe not. What else could it be? There is a little water where the tank mounts to the base. Could that be it? I've never seen one of those joints fail before, but it sure seems like the culprit. Pull the tank and the gasket. It doesn't look really bad, but it's doesn't look great either, so off to Lowe's where I pick up a couple of Kohler tank gaskets and a Fluidmaster flush valve kit. Get home and examine what I've got. The Kohler gaskets don't look to be quite right. Open up the Fluidmaster kit and, lo and behold! A perfect gasket! Put the toilet back together and we're in business.

If I had called a plumber to fix this, it probably would have taken a week to get someone to come out, and they would have simply replaced the toilet and charged me $500.

Good Luck

This is an acknowledgement to the god of luck. I had a couple of small things happen that just made my life a little easier. Last week when I was first trying to get this Zbox thing working, I needed some cables to connect stuff up. I needed a DVI cable to connect the Zbox to a computer monitor, so I could see if I could get on the internet before I went to the trouble of wiring the TV room. The TV uses an HDMI cable, which won't work with a computer monitor. The TV is too big, clumsy and heavy to drag across the house for a quick test like this. And I have to make the test, because you know Murphy, if I connect up the wired internet connection first, it won't work. Anyway, I look around and I find one, which is really weird, because I didn't think I had one. It could have come with the Zbox, or with the monitor I bought back in January. In any case I didn't need it at the time, but I saved it, meaning I threw it in the box with the other nine thousand cables I have collected.

Then I need an adapter to connect the headphone jack on the Zbox to the RCA jacks on the home theater sound system. I have needed one before and had to make it out of pieces from other cables, and I am fully prepared to have to make one this time (make or buy? Make will take a quarter hour or so, but will require no money. Buy will require about the same amount of time and a small amount of money, but would mean talking to people at Radio Shack who always ask you for your address, and if you say no, they ask again. Screw you, Radio Shack.). But I look in my big box of cables, and looky here, I have one, factory made even. Where did that come from? No matter, it works.

Yesterday I am going to wash some cat bedding in the garage sink, because of the continuing war on fleas you know, and the stuff is NOT coming in the house, but it really needs to be decontaminated, so I am going to wash it by hand, but the stopper, you know, the rubber plug thingy, has disappeared. What do I have that I can use for this? I look around, and my eye lights on a milk jug lid. Could it possibly? Well, yes, it actually might. But if you press this thing in there, how are you going to ever get it out? Well, it is a fairly thin piece of plastic, I can always cut a hole in it with my knife, or use a corkscrew. I put the lid in the drain and put a couple of inches of water in the sink and then I use a claw hammer to try and remove it and it comes right out. That right there is an amazing piece of double luck. A piece from another planet that fits the hole, and it does not become irretrievably jammed.

Memory Haiku

I started playing with Haiku (the open-source descendant of BeOS) again this week. Being a systems kind of guy, the first thing I want to do is see if I can rebuild the OS (operating system), in particular, the kernel. If we can do that, and reboot the system using the newly generated kernel, we are pretty much golden. That means you have

• the source code (text files), 
• the tools for turning that source code into binary code 
• that the boot loader can load and 
• that will run once it is loaded.

    If you can do all this, then you can pretty much do anything. You can make any changes you want to any program or the kernel itself and try them out. If they don't work, you can always go back to where you started.
    I did this first part about eight months ago (or was it eighteen months ago?) on my Zbox. It worked and I was happy, but then I got distracked, or depressed or something and I didn't do anymore with it.
    This week I tried it with an old Dell desktop system that younger son had corrupted with Ubuntu (boo! hiss! down with Ubuntu!). I also chose the Dell because I had a regular keyboard and mouse I could use with it. All I had for the Zbox was a compact keyboard with a built in trackball, which works okay in a pinch but it's not something I want to use for massive keyboarding.
    I installed Haiku from a CD (the same one I had used with the Zbox), and I downloaded the source from the web, but it would not generate a new OS. It complained about not being able to find "package", which I think is some kind of new file management system. Complaining about this to the Haiku mailing list got me some prompt responses, but none of them were very helpful.
   So I decided to wait for my USB hub to arrive from Amazon (which would enable me to use a conventional mouse. For some reason the Zbox can't comprehend using more than one USB port for input devices. Or maybe that's just an Ubuntu problem.). Hub arrived, plugged in the mouse and regenerated the OS no problem.
    Next step is try actually running this newly generated kernel. Normal system etiquette requires that you keep one good copy of the kernel on the disk at all times and employ some kind of switch to tell the boot loader to load your new, test version, to see if it works. (Back in the day there used to be actual mechanical switches on the front panel to do this. Now we've got some kind of software to do the job.) If it works, find and dandy. If not, you reset the switch and go back to your original, known, good copy.
    So this morning I am looking around trying to figure out just which steps I need to take in order to test the new kernel. I read and I poke around and I try this that and the other, but I feel like the nerd who has been looked outside of the big party. I can hear all the cool kids having a grand time inside, but I cannot find the key to unlock the door. I've had enough so I decide to bail for the time being and turn the machine off.
   A while later I have some idea I want to check out so I turn the machine back on, and what do I see? A two item menu:

1. Haiku   
2. Haiku 2

It's already been
done! How did I do that? I
don't remember. Arrggghhh!
 

Linux is Lovely

I finally bought a computer to run my TV. It's a Zotac Zbox and I bought it from Amazon. I was looking at these earlier, mostly because they use a processor and and a graphics controller that are supposed to work with MythTV. I stewed about it for a while, mostly because I couldn't get a clear picture of just what was in a Zbox. It seems Zotac isn't interested in clarity. Apparently, they are trying to sell consumer electronics, which means saying lots of stuff like "new, improved, shiny", and not anything technical or specific. What clinched it was that Amazon had reduced the price by a third (33%). Last week it was $500, this week it is less than $400.

I have not used it to watch any TV yet. It got here yesterday, and I got Linux installed on it without too much trouble, but the wireless networking bit doesn't seem to want to work. I could hook up wires, but all the wireless pieces are there, so it should work. I'll fool with it for a bit and see how it goes.

There's also a problem with what is supposed to be on the screen. There should be a menu bar of sorts across the top of the screen, and a status bar across the bottom, but they are barely there. I suspect the screen size is not getting communicated properly.

So I have Linux on my TV, but no TV over the internet yet.

More Fun with Chromebook

What we have here is a Chromebook connected to a Dell keyboard and a Samsung video display. The Chromebook lid is propped open with a 3-hole paper punch. If you close it much further it will shut off. The three-hole punch has a nice wide base that spans the evil touch pad, and it is tall enough to hold the lid open. The mouse is a little weird. Sometimes it disappears, but since it's a big screen and a small cursor I'm not sure whether it really disappears or I just fail to track it. But I circle around for a couple of seconds and we sync up, so not perfect, but good enough.
     Open up the Files app (which accesses files actually stored on the Chromebook, not in the Cloud), and the big screen goes dead. Now you need to open the laptop screen to see what you are doing. I went through this rigamarole to get this picture up here, though I'm not sure I needed to. Too many places to put stuff, too many places to get stuff. Whether you can get by without making use of the Files app remains to be seen.
     Meanwhile, over on codingame.com, I was working on a program to deal with the Teads programming puzzle. I had gotten my program to successfully deal with most of the test cases, but there were two where it timed out. Timed out? Hmmph. Must be a glitch in the coding games site. So I tried it on my Zotac Zbox running Mint Linux (that's it sitting under the left hand edge of the monitor with its cool glowing blue circle). It took over two minutes to deliver an answer. Hmmm. Program did run to compeletion, but two minutes? That is a heck of a long time to run for a simple academic exercise. I mean this isn't a Windows program that is spinning its wheels mindlessly while it tries to figure out what it should do next, this is a heads down, running full tilt, adding the numbers, making the calculations, marching down the lists, no dilly-dallying around here, and it's taking two minutes? That's enough time to count the population of Earth. Twice. Something is not right.
    Okay, enough the with mental gymnastics (programming) for a bit. Let's see what else we can do. Well, I got my Chromebook out this afternoon to talk to my daughter (on Skype). Let's see what else it can do. So I plug in my Chromebook, just for grins, see if it will work, and lo and behold, it mostly does. But can I compile a C program here? Well, yes, you can. Seems there are several websites that will let you write, compile and run programs, just as though you were sitting at a regulation Linux terminal. Okay, let's try out our test case. I'll be durned. It compiles and runs, and it only takes seconds to complete. How can that be?
    Now the Zbox has an Intel Atom processor, which is like the cheapest and feeblest Intel processor from 3 or 4 years ago, but it is still a 32-bit processor running at some number of giga-hertz. This website ran this program ten times faster. What kind of processors are they running? This is just a little unnerving.

P.S. I wrote this post with the help of a bottle of cheap grocery store Champagne. Coincidentally,  Detroit Steve sent me a this link today.

P.P.S. A couple of development websites. Might only work with Chromebooks.

• Source Lair (used this one for my sample program)
• Cloud 9 (haven't tried this one)

Update: Google's already been here. Adjust the settings, leave the power supply plugged in and you can even dispense with the paper punch.

Tekno-Joy: Blue-Ray, DVR, DVD, Linux, MythTV, PC, TV, Zbox

I canceled our cable TV service, so I now I need to get on the stick and get some kind of computer setup so we can connect our TV to the Internet. We have a Roku, and it works fine for watching shows from Netflix, but it only gives you limited access to the Internet, as in limited to the channels you are willing to pay for. There might be some free channels, but I haven't found anything worth watching there. I can access the photos I have uploaded to Picasa.

I had an old Linux box that used to work fine, until it quit a few months ago. Then there is this program called MythTV that is supposed to turn your PC (Personal Computer) into a DVR (Digital Video Recorder). It's Open-Source and it's free, and I've got this old Linux box, so I thought I would give it a try. Fixing the Linux box was simple a matter of re-seating the video card. Used my Windows based PC to download the MythTV program and burn a CD (Compact Disk). Used that CD to install the MythTV program on the Linux box. The Linux box booted. Once. And then it died, dead.

Error code says the memory "module" was bad. Took the memory stick over and plugged into my old Windows PC and it works fine. We've had other problems, off and on with this motherboard. I think I'm gonna call it scrap.

But now my Windows PC is behaving weirdly. Admittedly it has good reason to act up. It has a virus. It is not a bad virus, it's just kind of annoying, but it is thoroughly entrenched and getting rid of it is going to mean reformatting the hard drive. Again. Which takes time and is annoying. Also, it's got this memory module from the flakey Linux box, and maybe it's flakey as well. And then there's the whole hard disk disappearing and reappearing trick, and who knows what's causing that. It might be time for a new computer.

So I've given up on the old Linux box and I'm looking at some kind of PC to use with the TV and I find this Zotac Zbox, which looks pretty cool, except it comes it 31 different flavors ranging in price from $200 to $600. The most expensive ones come with a Blue-Ray optical disk drive and I am wondering do I even need one?

When DVD's came out, it was pretty obvious that the picture they delivered was a whole lot better than what you got from videotape, even with the old CRT televisions. I was thinking DVD's were just fine, and that Blue-Ray is gilding the lily, but now I hear that standard DVD's only deliver 480p and my big screen TV can handle up to 750p, maybe even 1080p. (The bigger the number, the higher the resolution and the better the picture, I suppose.)  So would Blue-Ray look that much better? I thought VHS was fine when it was all I had.

So now I'm wondering what kind of resolution I am getting over the Internet, and what will it be like in the future? Is Blue-Ray really going to take over? Should I go ahead and get a Blue-Ray player now just to avoid having to look for one in the future? Also, as Blue-Ray gains momentum, manufacturers are going to be looking for more short cuts, and the life expectency of Blue-Ray players may go down. Might not make any difference though. By the time the Blue-Ray players fail, Blue-Ray may be obsolete.

On the other hand, we hardly use any DVD's at all. Most everything we watch comes via the internet. We do get some broadcast channels, but until we get a DVR, I am not even going to consider them.

Update: I wonder if there is any possible use for old optical disks. Sure, there are some music CD's you will want to hang onto forever, but we are generating a zillion useless disks everyday. They are this decade's version of a sheet of paper, use it once and throw it away. I wonder if you could build a stove that would burn them cleanly? Or maybe you could glue stacks of them together to make casters, or chop them up to make chaff for military aircraft. Gee, I'm just full of good ideas this morning.

Google Feedback

Blogger's editor is a little flakey, has been for a long time. My desk computer is being a little flakey also, so I can't really know whether the problem is with Blogger or with my computer, so I don't really feel I have solid ground from which to issue a complaint.

But now I've got the new whiz-bang Zbox, and while it has numerous problems, I am able to get on the net, which I have been using to try and fix these problems.

Since I am here, I thought I would go ahead and write a post about what's been going on, and since we are all new here: new hardware, Linux instead of Windows, and a newer version of Linux since the last I time I played with it, I would go ahead and try the new version of Blogger.

And what happens when I try to write a post? Blogger is still up to its' old tricks, but now we have a feedback button on the bottom, so let's give them a little, to wit: 

Why is the first line indented just a smidgen? This is not just a problem with the new interface, it's been around for a long time. If every time you pressed the Enter key, you got an indentation to start a new paragraph, that would be fine, but you don't. You only get one on the first line, which is dumb. And it isn't even a proper indent, which should be three or four proper characters (not a narrow character, like a lowercase L or i). If you indented after every Carriage Return, one wouldn't need to put in an extra blank line to separate paragraphs, and you could get more text on the screen. That may or may not be what you want, but this single little bitty indent at the beginning is just wrong.

P.S. What's the deal with "separate"? I swear this word gives me more trouble, or maybe Google is just screwing with me. It does not matter whether I spell separate with 2 a's and 2 e's (separate) or with 1 a and 3 e's (seperate), the spell checker always complains.

And while we are complaining about spell checker, why does it complain about a's, but not about e's?

Chrome-Linux-Mint-Book-Google Mashup

Chromebook running Remote Desktop, connected to Zbox running Linux (hiding under the paper). Big monitor is connected to Linux. Mouse is plugged into Chromebook. Text on virtual screen on Chromebook is too small to read. Move mouse and watch the cursor on the Linux box. It's a little disconcerting when this stuff actually works.

Remote Desktop works! For a couple of minutes anyway.
    Is Thursday something special in the Google-verse? Because now it's working. Yesterday it wouldn't even pretend to work. Downloaded and installed the 32-bit remote host package, it tells me it's already installed. Downloaded and installed the 64-bit version and it tells me it's the wrong architecture. That's reassuring. For a while there I was afraid 64-bit had become some kind of new-speak for ungawdly amounts of memory. Issued the cryptic start-host-service command. Nice command, doesn't even acknowledge that it has been invoked. I suppose that's par for a service.
    I got connected for about 30 seconds and then the Chrome browser or Linux or both crashed. Restarted and was able to reestablish a connection, but now I need a new access code. This is may not be the solution I am looking for. The whole point is it to have constant, uninterrupted access to the Linux box. If I have to keep a keyboard and monitor plugged in so I can restart the remote-desktop every time it crashes, that kind of defeats the purpose.
    When I got connected it was kind of slick. The virtual Linux desktop was scaled to fit the smaller Chromebook screen, which made it kind of hard to read. But the Chromebook mouse's cursor is showing up on the remote desktop image, and on the real Linux monitor, so I could ignore the virtual image and just use the virtual cursor on the real screen.
     The upshot was I was able to scan a couple of documents using the Linux box, and now I am back on the Chromebook. Unfortunately, during the time I was writing this the remote connection died.

Enter The BIOS, Part 2

Woke up way too early this morning so I thought I would see if I could sort out some of the problems with my new toy (Zotac ZBOX).

Figured out a few things about getting into the BIOS:

• Does not have to be a cold boot.
• Press the Del key immediately after power on. Do NOT wait for the Zotac splash screen. You have about three seconds after you turn on the power and splash screen comes up.
• Wireless keyboard works fine. I bought a wired USB keyboard just to see if that would make a difference. It did not.
• Only the left hand, front panel USB socket works with the BIOS. Either front panel USB socket works with the OS. Matter of fact, I had both keyboards plugged in at once and I could use either one.

The power on push-button can also be used to turn it off. Press and hold for about five seconds and it will shut the machine off. Reminds me of the run-away car tragedy in Southern California back in 2009. Guy couldn't figure out how to turn off the engine in his rented Lexus.

Now we can look at the HDMI problem. Enter the BIOS and look around and find . . . nothing at all about audio or video. I issue reports of my findings to Zotac and Nvidia technical support. I will have to wait and see what they have to say.

Next I try Netflix. I can get to their website and get logged in, but I can't watch anything. You can't play Netflix on Linux. I poke around a little more, and I see something about how you can use Google's Chrome to watch video from Netflix. I download and install Chrome, and now I need Netflix's special plug-in module, but it's still no go. I finally realize that the Chrome / Netflix combination only works on a Chrome Netbook or some-such. Fortunately I still have my Roku.

I am beginning to think I need a panel to hold all the remote controls for this collection of gizmos. At least I'm not paying the $100 a month to the cable company any more.

Now you see it . . .

My new Zotac Zbox occasionally gets all spastic and ignores what I am typing for a few seconds. I am pretty sure Linux is the problem, but then I realize I'm using this new wireless keyboard and maybe it's causing the problem. So I go looking for customer reviews. I'm not finding anything that implicates the keyboard but I come across this picture:

 which features a disappearing USB port, at least here and now. When I first saw it on the original page (2nd picture in the second group), I could see the USB port plain as day, but within a second it had disappeared, and all I see is featureless black. When I select the picture inside of Blogger's editor, I get a red view of the pic, and the port is again visible.

I imagine it's a function of the video hardware and the drivers that are causing this. It's weird though how it's visible for a second before it disappears. Is something dynamically adjusting the contrast? And who is it?

As for the dropped characters, I complain on Launchpad, but I am not getting much in the way of encouragement. Stupid computers.

Update: the visibility of the port depends on the viewing angle, at least on my screen. Now that's really weird. What the devil is going on here?

Update 2: On my plasma screen, changing the viewing angle makes no difference. The port remains invisible.

Linux & Video

Sidereel.com and Megavideo, my favorite source of boot-leg video, are disappointing. As it has been, Sidereel provides a long list of web addresses for most any show I want to watch. However, for some shows, every one of those web addresses is a dead end. Someone has started checking up on the pirates. But not all shows, just some.

Sidereel has also got some sponsors, which is good for them, but they are putting up these huge mouse-over pop-ups, so in order to use the site, you have to watch where you slide your mouse, or you will spend all your time closing these stupid pop-ups and you will get nowhere.

Xfinity is making some shows available over the net, but you still have to wait for the same amount of ad playing time as you would if you were watching it off of cable or over the air. Most of the ads are for other TV shows and they will get played two or three times every commercial break. The video quality is watchable, but not really all that great.

iTunes offers most of the shows I want, but they want $3 an episode to watch, $3.50 if you want to download it. The video is supposed to be 720p, which should be pretty good.

Broadcast at 1080p seems to be the gold standard, so now it looks like I need a tuner, but I am not sure I have a connection point on the Zbox that can handle that big a stream of data.

 YouTube has started putting video quality rating/selector on some of their videos. I think 240p is prettty typical for your average YouTube video.

Standard DVD's operate at 480p. The numbers (240, 480, 720, 1080) refer to the number of horizontal lines in the image. The p means progressive, which means each frame is complete. If there is no p, then there should be an i, which means interleaved, which is what the old analog CRT televsions used, which basically means each frame only gives you have a picture. The first frame gives you all the odd lines and the next frame gives you all the even lines.

Note these "standards" don't say anything about how wide the picture is. And then there's the compression method they use. All this video that is getting transmitted over the air or over the net has been compressed. About the only place where it isn't compressed is the HDMI cable from the set top box to your TV.

I really don't want to download any movies or TV shows. I don't want to keep a copy around. There are probably a couple of hundred DVD's floating around the house that we have accumulated over the last 20 years. Some of them have never been watched. Most of them were bought for the kids, and a few of them have been watched more than once.

I enjoy watching movies and TV dramas, but only if I have someone to watch them with. There are very few things I can watch by myself. Top Gear is the only one these day's, and I often skip over the interview with the star.

Zotac & Linux

Scanned copy of Linux Mint Printer Test Page

My old Windows XP machine has been getting flakey. Programs would lock up, files would disappear. Last night the mouse quit working. At first I thought it might have just been a piece of dirt over the lens (sensor? You know, the giant red spot in the middle of my miniature misshapen model of Jupiter). But no, a short while later it quit again. Tried different mice, checked the mice on another computer, by passed the USB hub, tried other USB ports, nothing. And then I get a notice that 'new hardware has been detected', a USB mouse in fact. Now, isn't that nice. You stupid bag of bolts.

I try looking on the net, but that's no help. To paraphrase engineer Mike, if something is broke that shouldn't be broke, it can't be fixed. We pile up these houses of cards and one day one the cards flakes out and the whole thing collapses. Is there any point in digging through the wreckage to figure out what went wrong? If it was an airliner and hundreds died, well then, yes, we'll do it. But your mouse quit? Throw the whole pile of cards in the trash and buy a new deck.

So now I'm running Linux Mint on my old Zotac Zbox, and it seems to be working pretty well. Last time I tried Linux, which was a couple of years ago, I went with Ubuntu, because that was apparently all the rage. That didn't work so well. Ubuntu was trying out something that was supposed to make it work with phones and tablets. What it did was make it clumsy and slow. It was so bad I gave it up in short order.

Linux Mint seems to be pretty good. Booted and installed off of the DVD, recognized my screen. Even recognized my printer, set up and connected when I asked it to, and even printed a test page. This is looking pretty good. But does the scanner work? Yes, indeedy. Scanned the test page I just printed.

Linux is supposedly all Open Source all the time, but Mint is operating under relaxed rules, which means they allowed Adobe in, which means Adobe flash works. I'm not real happy with Adobe. They seem to be bent enhancing Acrobat until it dominates the universe. I suppose it works for some people, but I prefer Foxit for PDF files. One trick I have found is that by disabling the Adobe Flash extension, most of those video ads that automatically pop up and start playing are blocked, which is really nice. You do have to enable Adobe Flash every time you want to watch a video or play a game, but right now it's a worthwhile tradeoff.

Linux Is Lovely, Part 11.10

I started this round with Ubuntu a month or two ago, and already we have a new release. I have been getting update notices for a week or so, but I have been putting them off: I don't know if I am ready for another set of problems with Adobe's stuff. This morning though there is a new notice: new version, not just a few patches. I decide to install it. Who knows? Maybe it will fix some of the problems I've been having. Maybe not, but nothing worse than tracking down the root cause of a problem only to find out it's been fixed by some update you haven't installed. So I installed it, and then I filed this notice with Launchpad (don't know if you will be able to see it without registering):

No major problems on Zotac ZBOX. Installation went smoothly and system rebooted successfully on first attempt.

I did notice a couple of things:
- the window that pops up announcing this thing (is it an upgrade or an installation, or an installation of an upgrade?) cannot be resized.
- complete upgrade took between one and two hours. Took one hour (!) just to do the download. I suspect the server of being the bottleneck. Might have been deliberate as this is the first day this thing is available.
- 40 minutes into the one hour download it stopped and asked a question. Something about if I wanted to replace a preferences file. For grins I say show me the differences, and it shows me an encrypted version of the differences between the two files. Really ugly, but mostly a really bad place to ask a question like this. Ask it before you start, or after you have completed the download. Or maybe this was a deliberate attempt to ease the load on the server?
- at one point a terminal window opened and started reporting errors. Something about how it couldn't create such and such a file. Scrolled on and on and on. Infinite number of files would be my guess.
- the terminal window expanded past the bottom edge of the screen. If there had been anything down there I needed to click, I would have been in trouble.
- wanted my password when I rebooted. Does this mean I am logged on as super? Regular login is not supposed to have a password. If I was super, that would be cool, then I wouldn't have to type sudo before every command I issue in the terminal window.

 Now that it's installed I've noticed a couple of other things. Then Firefox menu bar is gone. Don't know if I need it. We shall see. The other thing is a row of icons along the left hand edge of the screen. Since screens are getting wider, it makes sense to put things there, rather than to slice a band off the top or bottom of the screen just to hold a couple of items. Screen space is still valuable, best not to waste it.

Be is Back

A few years ago a new PC OS (Personal Computer Operating System) appeared on the scene: Be. Unlike Windows, it was intelligently designed. Unlike Linux, it wasn't saddled with 30 years of obsolete baggage. Or vice-versa. In any case, it was new and it promised to be a heck of lot better than either of our two old warhorses. It failed to make a dent in the market and collapsed.

Now it has been resurrected as Haiku, and this time it's Open Source. I bought a copy of Be back when it first came out. I played with it a bit, but it never became my mainstay. I suspect there were a couple of critical applications missing back then that caused me to continue using Windows. In any case, I used it for a bit, and it seemed solid enough. It just wasn't quite ready for prime time.

I did little reading about it and it seems like Be found its' way into a several professional audio-video machines. This is good. This means that it might be reliable, something Windows and Linux will never get the hang of.

Now all I have to do is create a new partition on my Zbox, which means burning a new CD. I could probably do it with the existing Linux command line tools, but the amount of verbiage I would have to sort through to find the commands (and sub-commands) I need is daunting. I tried. Burning a CD is antithetical to my nature: everything you need is already on this disk, you don't need to waste 27 cents on a blank CD you will only use once. So you have to type a few commands, whassamattar you? Your fingers broken?

No, the problem is finding the instructions I need. It will be quicker and easier to burn a CD with a copy of GParted. I hope it works.

Maleficent

Disney's Maleficent | Official Full Trailer
Walt Disney Studios Philippines
I really wanted to see this movie, but being a cheapskate, I was willing to wait until it showed up on DVD. Then I had to wait for a gap in our busy social schedule so I would have enough time to think and realize, hey, Maleficent is probably out on DVD so I can order it. So I did, it showed up, and we've got an opening so let's watch it.
      We haven't used our DVD player in a coon's age, the batteries in the remote control are dead, and why can we hear the music but we can't hear what the people are saying? Seems some of the speakers in our home theater system aren't speaking. Could it be that the amp is unplugged and turned off? Who would have done such a thing? No one in MY family would have done such a thing, must have been gremlins. Or North Koreans. Plug it in, turn it on, and we still can't hear them. Punch a bunch of buttons on our reinvigorated remote control and we have something that lets us choose between English 1, English 2, Spanish and French. English 1 produces nothing but background sound and music. Spanish does the same. English 2 gives us dialog, but also gives us a narrative of what's going on, which we don't really need, I mean it's a movie, for Pete's sake, we can see what's going on. But try as we might (and we even enlisted older son, who is au currant with electronical gizmos), we can't get dialog without narrative.
    Complicated story, treachery and loyalty abound, not to mention ego and hubris. Special effects are out of this world, and what have they done with Angelina's face? She really does look like someone from the fifth dimension.
    Lana Del Rey's tune doesn't show up till the closing credits.
    I want to watch it again if I can figure out how to turn off the narrative. I'm afraid I might have to buy a new DVD player. Maybe my Zbox can do the job.

Update next afternoon: Found a fix for the audio problem. Did a little Googling. Seems there are two common audio standards. One is known as 2.0 and the other is known as 5.1. If you have an older system like mine, 5.1 doesn't work, you need to use 2.0. The language selection menu on the DVD offers four selections (as noted above). English 2 is the only one that uses 2.0, the others all use 5.1, which sort of explains why English 2 is the only one that would give us any dialog last night. Well, that's nice to know, but it doesn't really help. So I look at the DVD player menu, which is different than the menu that comes from the DVD. I poke around and finally find the HDMI audio switch that controls whether the audio is sent out to the TV or not. The TV is connected to the DVD player with an HDMI cable, which is capable of handling both audio and video. Since the DVD player is also a home theater sound system, there is no reason to send the audio to the TV, EXCEPT THAT TURNING IT ON FIXES THE PROBLEM.

Update January 2025 replaced missing video with a different trailer.

Enter the BIOS, Part 3

 I keep using this title because it reminds me of Bruce Lee's "Enter The Dragon", not that his movies were any good, but because of the attitude he brought to his fights: Intense.

The more I play with the Zbox, the more problems I run into:

• the DVD player won't play movies,
• I can't get audio over the HDMI cable,
• the Linux desktop is just slightly too large for the screen,
• the screen saver turns off the TV (or maybe the TV turns itself off), which is good, but it won't turn it back on,
• some of the video you get over the net is not very good, but whose problem is that?

I don't know, every time I turn around it seems like something else is either broken or just not working.

For instance, in the course of trying to figure out why the DVD won't play, I try to play a music CD. It works fine (of course it would, I used the same optical drive to install Linux off of a CD-ROM), but the player program does not show the names of the tunes, it only shows the track number. Oh, yes, I remember running into this a long time ago on Windows. To find the names of the songs, you need to go to a database on the net, and using the playing times of all the songs, you can find out the name of the album and therefor the names of the various tracks. I think there was one check box or something that had to be enabled to turn this on.

Linux is not quite so wonderful (Linux is Lovely, Windows is Wonderful), you have to jump through a couple of hoops to find the names of the songs, and even then not everybody wants to play nice.

Banshee is name of the music player that comes with the current version (11) of Linux, but it has no capability of naming that tune. For that you need another program. To install the latest one (Picard) requires that you install a whole bunch of other stuff, and while it would be done automatically, I am just a little suspicious. I mean, this is a fairly straight forward proposition, why do you need to install 489 other pieces of stuff (stuff being a euphemism for a more vulgar term which I am refraining from using because I am trying to be civilized about this)?

So I look a little more and I find EasyTag, which doesn't require much of anything. I install it, and ask it to look up the names for the tunes on this CD, and it can't find anything. Grump. Why not? So I do a little exploring using the name of the artist (Leonard Cohen) and the name of the album (I'm Your Man) and I get back literally thousand's of matches. Okay, there's something funny going on here that I don't quite understand. I finally pick one and it seems to work, and now all the tracks I copied onto the hard disk have names that mean something.

And that is basically how it has been going. On the plus side, we were able to watch an episode of "The Good Wife" over the internet last night. I don't think the video was as clear as we used to get using the Frontier DVR, but it wasn't too bad.