I recently purchased a silver Sony digital reader (Pocket Edition , PRS-300) 
I typically read paperback books for around 80 minutes a day on my round trip train commute, and I have spent two days reading off of the Sony e-reader. These are my early experiences. Continue reading
If you are looking for a 3G phone running Android on AT&T, the pickings are slim. (Mostly because AT&T’s 3G bands are not compatible with many other carriers, and most Android GSM phones work with T-Mobile’s 3G bands. If you are willing to drop down to quad-band EDGE data most GSM Android phones will “work” with AT&T, they just suffer from slow networking.) Continue reading
My Thinkpad X31 laptop with a Radeon M6 graphics chip had a problem with ACPI Suspend/Resume. About every five resumes, the graphics card would get messed up, making the screen unusable.
The computer would suspend/resume fine otherwise, but I’d be forced to reboot just to get X working again. (Just shutting down X and re-starting it wasn’t enough.)
The easy solution is to pass a “nomodeset” option to the kernal upon boot, but to do this on different versions of Ubuntu you need to do modify files in different places.
9.04: Edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file, and look for the defoptions= line. Add nomodeset to the end. Run sudo update-grub afterwards to save your changes.
9.10: Edit the /etc/grub.d/10_linux file to add a line such as:
GRUB_CMDLINE_EXTRA = "$GRUB_CMDLINE_EXTRA nomodeset"
or just add “nomodeset” to the end of a previous GRUB_CMDLINE_EXTRA entry. After this, run sudo update-grub.
10.04: Edit the /etc/defaults/grub file and change GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="" to
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="nomodeset"
(You may have to run sudo update-grub again, or it may be taken care of for you)
Commentary: I find it funny that in each of the last three version’s of UBUNTU the name and location of the grub configuration file has changed…
After upgrading my IBM X31 Thinkpad to Ubuntu 9.10, I noticed that libnotify (notify-osd) pop-ups were having a visual artifact when rendered that made the text unreadable. After a half hour of searching the net, I determined that this was because my M6 chipset doesn’t support Render Acceleration correctly, and the default xorg.conf file from Ubuntu does not disable that setting for my graphics driver (Radeon M6).
The solution is to add the option:
Option “RenderAccel” “false”
to the “Device” section of your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.
If you are connected to an AT&T cell phone via a USB cable, you can use wvdial to access the Internet. Edit the /etc/wvdial.conf file to look like the following:
[Dialer Defaults]
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Modem Type = USB Modem
Baud = 460800
Stupid Mode = 1
New PPPD = yes
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
ISDN = 0
Phone = *99#
Password = CINGULAR1
Username = WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM
Then, just start up wvdial to connect to the Internet!
I am using a EL1300G-02W computer as a HTPC using MythTv.
It would play back 720p HD video just fine with the original processor, but couldn’t quite commercial flag new recordings in real-time while also watching a live feed. [This wasn’t a big issue, as I very rarely watch new recordings live.]
Even though it works working perfectly fine as a MythTV box with the original processor, I had been keeping an eye open on Ebay for a replacement X2 (dual core) processor for the AM2 socket.
I was limited to CPU’s that produced 45W or less of power, which basically means the “e” line ( 4450e, 5050e, 4850e, BE-2400, 3250e). These types of processors had been selling for $50-60, but then I lucked out and found an an AMD Athlon X2 BE-2400 2.3 GHz Processor which I was able to get cheaper than average ($32 w/ shipping!).
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I recently checked out all of the music player visualizations for the MythMusic module (part of MythTV). They vary widely in CPU usage and visual appearance. I wanted the CPU to be at least 50% free to work on transcoding or commercial flagging in the background while music was playing, so I avoided the especially fancy ones. I also found that the ones that used OpenGL used small amounts of the CPU (as they offloaded much of the processing to the GPU).
Selected visualizations (good effects, but minimal CPU usage):
Here is a list of visualizations that might be worth the extra CPU hit based upon their cool visual effects:
I suggest avoiding the following visualizations, as they use too much CPU for what they produce:
The following three visualizations gave me problems:
If you are getting ERROR: AtomicParsley type messages in your mythexport.log file, it may be because ffmpeg isn’t exporting the files correctly. One reason for this is that config’s in mythexport that have spaces in the name cause problems. The workaround reported here is to remove the old config, rename it into something that doesn’t have a space, and then re-create the user-job using the new config. (For good measure, I made sure the user-job didn’t have spaces either.) After this, be sure to re-start the mythtv backend to make your changes take effect.
Switching to an eMachines EL1300G computer drastically cut the running power consumption of my MythTV setup, to an average of 45 watts when idle. (The old computer used 141 watts when idle.)
This makes it practical to leave the computer on 24/7. I had set my old computer to shut itself down when not recording, but this required a 2 minute boot-time wait anytime we wanted to watch TV. (When it was not already awake recording a show). Even when the old computer was off, the constant current draw from the other devices (UPS/HDHomeRun/Amplifier) was 17 watts.
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Executive Summary: The eMachines EL1300G-02w is a good choice for a low power home theater PC (HTPC) or media computer. Pros: Small form factor, low energy use, low noise with stock fans, DVD-DL R/W +/- optical drive, lots of media card readers. Cons: 160GB stock HD will need to be swapped out for back-end use, VGA video out (only), Analog Audio out (only), minimal expansion capabilities.
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