Category: Compgeeky

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. If so, my fav web browser must be flattered by all the imitation Firefox and Internet Exploder lavish upon it. Latest: imitating Opera’s Speed Dial feature in Firefox. No, Firefox doesn’t yet have a Speed Dial feature, but by futzing around, downloading and installing an extension, Firefox users can mimic the feature, more or less. Of course, as with nearly all the Firefox mimics of Opera features, one has to add an extension to get the functionality, whereas with Opera such features as mouse gestures, tabs as thumbnails and Speed Dial are built in, but still, being able to mimic these features with extensions (that one has to hunt down, install and hope will be compatible with your next FF upgrade) is something, I suppose.

I do like the customization menu that the plugin offers, but if it’s going to offer to mimic my Opera Speed Dial, it really ought to also offer to import my Opera Speed Dial instead of making me manually replicate it. Oh, well. I don’t use Firefox much (although I do use it about 10X more–or more–than I use Internet Exploder, which I do not use at all on the Ubuntu side, unless I have a VM running where I need to access MS Updates).

Sidebar: IE8 does seem to suck less than IE 6 and IE 7. *heh*

…apparently. My internet connection, that is. In fact, I may need to call my ISP’s service number to cancel a service call. I put a little thought into it and asked myself why no slowdowns on email send/receive while navigating web pages was horrifically slow all of a sudden. Hmmm… OK, told my router to stop using my ISP’s DNS servers and go back to OpenDNS. Voilà! I know not if others have experienced DNS problems with the ISP’s servers, but I ought to at least let ’em know, eh? (Besides, if folks use other DNS servers, it’ll take some load off the ISP’s servers, ya think? ;-))

Well, perhaps I’ll hold off until tomorrow a.m., since the service man isn’t scheduled until Wednesday afternoon. See if this holds up for a day or so.

Nice to have my connection working properly again, though. You might give thought to checking out OpenDNS. Getting the biggest bang for your buck with the service requires a (free) registration and allows you to have several levels (including a degree of specificity) of filtering. I chose to have OpenDNS filter out obvious phishing sites, but other options are available, including some that would enforce many workplace acceptable use policies, e.g.,

(Yeh, all this is probably my fault anyway. I had been using OpenDNS and had great success with it but had switched back to the ISP’s DNS servers and… for some reason sometime this weekend, that just went wonky. Of course I’ll look into that, but I’m perfectly pleased just to have things working now. Moral: if it ain’t broke LEAVE IT ALONE *heh*)

*heh* So, I have MediaPortal working well (not with the QAM channels my TV card is designed to catch, but the others, OK) on this PC and can tune in over 70 channels and… there’s not one single solitary thing worth watching on any of them all night long.

Typical of TV recently, though. Guess I need to look into Netflix and/or Amazon’s movie rental plans if I want to get all that much use from this thing for “TV” viewing. But not until after midweek, at the earliest. My connection that was between 7 and 8 mbs a few days ago has now developed problems and Wednesday’s the first day my provider has a serviceman available. Fortunately, the one (you read that right: one) that services this area is quite good.

‘S’all right. I have MORE than enough to keep me busy w/o a reliable internet connection. Now, if only this will post the first time I hit “publish”… 😉

…one at a time. This one: download/upload speeds for my internet connection. I was pretty well pleased for several years after ditching dialup for a cable internet cnnection, because I went from a nominal 56kbs connection to a nominal 3mbs connection. Pretty good. Then my service provider began upgrading and things improved beyond that for a while, until enough users in my neighborhood began dragging the real connection speed down, clogging the pipes, as it were, in our shared node.

But recently, my cable company has undergone another round of service enhancements, and now,

And

…are pretty normal upload/download speeds.

Nice, since I’ve begun streaming more media and am considering a Netflix or Amazon addition to our media use (just discovered that Amazon.com both sells and rents movies–knew I could buy ’em there, but the rental part came as a surprise). I like our local rental place–good folks and all–but finding movies there can be a bit difficult (or impossible) from time to time, and sometimes we just feel like a bag of popcorn and a good flick. When–hopefully this summer–I cobble together a HTPC for the main TV, we’ll be glad of the bigger bandwidth pipe and faster flow for streaming/downloading those movies.

Just another gripe about computers. Don’t get me wrong, please. For the last 20 years of my life (well, the most recent 20 years–I’m not sure yet that the last 20 years will be MY last 20 years ;-)), computers have become integral to my daily life–work, play, even personal interactions (send an email or IM to a family member in another part of the house? Sure do. *heh*). But the things just naturally irk me from time to time as well.

Take my exploration of media center apps. As I’ve catalogued, the best of the lot I’ve tried to date has been MediaPortal. Works fine, but. *sigh* OK, I’m using it on a fairly capable computer: AMD 64X2 5600+ with 4GB RAM and a 1GB vidcard driving a nice 22″ “widescreen” LCD, etc. Heck, the TV tuner card I’m using is about $100 discounted at Newegg. Nice card there, too. But. If I have MediaPortal running (or any of the others I have tried to get working), that’s it. I can’t run it in a Window with some TV show on (MythBusters, for a recent exampe) and actually DO anything in other apps. Now, I have no problems watching a TV show while typing away on a blog post (What? You thought I was putting actual, well, thought into these things? ;-)), but noooo. Not when MediaPortal’s running, even thoiugh there’s plenty of room on this monitor to size the show in a window and have a workable-sized window to browse or manage email or even do remote support at the same time. (It’s not like a TV show is going to take up much mental effort on my part to watch, now is it?)

*sigh* Oh well. I guess I can just do as I did for years before I began using computers: read a good book while watching TV (and sometimes listening to music as well). I just need to use those extra “CPU” cycles I have laying around.

(Just to be fair, I do get better video and sound from my computer system than from our main TV and stereo system–for TV at least, though certainly not for music. There, it’s very nearly a push with the edge going to the bigger system in the bigger room.)

OK, no Norwegian jokes, please; I’m married to My Favorite Norwegian (OK, so she’s 100% American, but everyone in her family back umpteen generations is Norwegian, so again, no Norwegian jokes). Swedish jokes are fine, though.*

Oh, what’s with mentioning Norway and Norwegians at all? That’s where Opera browser comes from, folks: Norway. And the folks who build this lil browser are smarter than your average M$IE coders, IMO, and quite likely smarter than your average Norwegian, too. They’ve figured out how to make giving away the best browser on the planet make money, for one thing, but it’s the “best browser on the planet” that interest me.

And they’re doing it again–making some serious waves with Opera Turbo, a feature that’s strictly in the preliminary testing phase but which is also just as cool as can be in addressing a huge concern for mobile users or indeed any user with a slow connection.

See the video here or check the text intro here. A snippet:

Opera Turbo is a cross-platform solution, available for desktop computers, mobile phones, and other Internet-enabled devices. By compressing network traffic by up to 80%, Opera Turbo helps to enable the sustainability and scalability of networks in order to meet traffic demands and ensure a superior browsing experience.

Now, while my nominal download speed is usually in excess of 3mbs, I know lots of folks who would benefit from this. Heck, most DSL users would benefit from it, as slow as DSL quite often is.

It’s still in development, but you can download a time-limited test version and try it out if you wish.

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Update: Well, I’m using the “time-limited test version” of Opera 10 Turbo right now, and even on my nominal (usual) 3mbit cable connection it’s noticeably faster loading pages. Really snappy! Since I’ve been using the snapshots of the Opera 10 alpha for daily use for the past month or so, it’s really comparing apples to apples when I compare the newest alpha snapshot without Turbo to the newest alpha snapshot with Turbo.

Seriously nice.

Continue reading “Smarter Than Your Average Norwegian?”

Here’s a pic of one nice feature in MediaPortal: “My Weather”. Despite the cutesy *gag* name of the feature, it’s really nearly as useful in some ways and more useful in others than the default weather applet in Ubuntu, and MUCH better than such buggy and intrusive things as Weatherbug (*gagamaggot* I hate that thing).

Nice. Good data (I actually know the guys who manage the local weather stations–have been “hands on” with one of their dedicated weather computers) presented attractively in the easily-recognized Weather Channel format–for my lil Third World County town. Yep. That’s third world county central info. Edges it just past the Ubuntu default weather applet that can’t report any data closer than 30 miles away.

As I said, nice.

Now, if only MEdiaPortal didn’t crash evwery time I try to minimize it normally. Oh, well, if I use “Show the Desktop” it doesn’t crash, so there’s a kludge-around. Hey! The thing’s just in a newly-released 1.0.0 version (although an upgrade/patch to 1.1.0 is projected for… this coming Saturday), so I’m just pleased that it works better than M$’s Media Center on my hardware/locale situation.

While I’ve not got an antenna attached for FM radio, after playing around with media center apps in both Ubuntu and Win7, I have to give the edge in media center/home theater pc stuff to Windows. TV only “sorta” worked in Ubuntu. The much ballyhooed MythTV and other options–including MythBuntu, LinucMCE, etc.–for integrating TV/Radio/Video/Music into PC use are just too much like work to get ’em functional and too rough-edged to boot, even when they do work. Kudoes for great effort on the Linux side, marks down for actual accomplishment.

On the Windows side… *sigh* I could wish everything Just Worked out of the box, but “it ain’t necessarily so” as the song goes. Windows Media Center… what can I say? I don’t like its look and feel, but that’s just my idiosyncratic response. What killed it for me was that while everything BUT one thing worked pretty well, that one thing was… setting up TV. Yep. Every Single Time I got to the channel download the thing choked. Bah.

Hauppauge’s own WinTV apps almost got TV working. Got further than Windows Media Center, at least. But still, no joy.

GBPVR looked promising but stumbled getting out the gate with Win7–“wrong OS” or some such error.

Tried several other non-solutions and then hit on MediaPortal, an outgrowth of the XBMC project. Now, XBMC isn’t suited to tuning TV or FM radio, although it does all the other media center things one might want and will (when I get another Round Toit) serve well as a media director in the old XBox I have half-modded to use it, but I wanted to tune TV (and later FM radio) on this box, so I tried MediaPortal.

MediaPortal Just Works. Oh, there’re more than a few rough edges. Scanning for channels found all the channels I wanted, and they previewed just fine in the scan, but when I tried tuning them initially, some would not tune in. (“Search the forums for solutions” time… ) The manual? Just fine. IF everything goes without a hitch. No real problem solving–or acknowledgement of issues–in the manual. Managing the settings isn’t intuitive, so a better manual would be a help.

Still, I marked “TV working on PC” off my list before my “work day” started this a.m. I’ll get into the whole “time shifting” thing later.

MediaPortal: not ready for Aunt Tilly but definitely a workable solution.

After 8-9 months’ daily use of Ubuntu 8.X as my main OS and a few weeks using Win7 beta as an alternate OS, I find some things about Windows 7 to be better than I expected from my exposure to both Vista and XP, Microsoft’s two most recent desktop OSes prior to the Win7 beta (that I’m using about 50% of the time now)… and some areas where Ubuntu still waxes ’em all. No perfect OS. *sigh*

UAC: not really that much more intrusive than Ubuntu’s method of insuring the user really does want to make system changes or install apps. A tad, but not by much.

Drivers: the only real failures of the Win7 beta to load appropriate drivers have been loading a WinXP driver for a printer so WinXp users on the network can print to the printer connected to this machine and an inadequate driver for the Hauppauge TV card–oh, a driver loaded, but it didn’t enable all the card’s features. The first problem was easily solved by installing the printer driver on any XP machine that needed access and the second by installing the Hauppauge Vista driver from the card’s maker. No biggies at all, at all.

I do NOT like Win7’s media center software, but acceptable substitutes (Hauppauge’s own media software or GBPVR) are perfectly fine by me. They Just Work, without being irritating. Mostly, it’s M$’s insistence that I’m a crook (all the DRM crap) that’s irritating, and I’m not in a mood to be forgiving about that. Won’t be, either. I really, really do NOT miss all the DRM crap when I’m running Ubuntu…

I’ve gotten used to the toolbar straightjacket. Don’t like it much, but I can use the limited, clunky M$ toolbar. Takes more clicks than being able to easily set up multiple independent toolbars, but I can work with the parent/child toolbars. (Win98, 2K, XP, and Ubuntu etc., all have the advantage here, IMO)

Getting rid of the default “category” display in Control Panel really helps. As good as earlier Windows Control Panels–better in some ways–and better than Ubuntu management GUIs.

Network management sucks dead bunnies through a straw, but I can (temporarily) work with Win7’s inability to play well with other OSes on the network. At least, now that I have printer sharing working (though not properly, still working) I can live with it for now. I don’t like the difficulties sharing files with computers using other OSes. Perhaps M$ will work through those issues between now and the RC.

I’ve had some issues attempting to remove external drives from a Win7 session. That bothers me, since I oftentimes need to switch between different external hard drives (six USB ports are just not enough for all the USB peripherals, so I guess the “solution” is just to add more ports, eh? *sigh*).

I’ve only had one experience with OS instability using this beta, and it was my fault. Really. I tried doing something I knew probably wouldn’t work, even though Win7 warned me not to, and the OS blew up, failed, fried, died, *kablooie!* (“Where was the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!” Oh, there it was… ) Had to reinstall. My fault and I knew it. IOW, this OS is pretty fault-tolerant. *heh*

Push-Shove: between Ubuntu and Win7 beta, it’s about a dead heat on installing and using VMWare Server and different VMs. Some things easier in one or the other OS, some things harder or more complicated. Maybe Ubuntu by a frog’s hair… but maybe not. Just… different. For example, VMWare Tools are a hair easier to set up when in a client OS hosted on a Win7 box, but on Ubuntu, if a client makes setting up VMWare Tools messy, Open-VMtools is an easily-installed option. Different strokes.

Changing desktop backgrounds is needlessly complicated in Win7 as opposed to Ubuntu or even XP for that matter, but working around the limitations of the interface is a trivial and only slightly irksome exercise.

One weird thing: sometimes my wireless mouse/keyboard combo start acting hinky in Win7–keyboard drops letters I have too typed *heh* and mouse begins skipping, acting as though I either have or have not CLICKed a button I have not or have CLICKed, etc. Reboot in Ubuntu: no problems. Reboot into Win7: problems return until I re-register the wireless devices with the transceiver. Weird, and it has to be a Win7 issue, since the session in between two misbehaving Win7 sessions is a native Ubuntu session where the devices do NOT misbehave. Irritating, but takes less than 10 seconds to correct–for a couple of days–each time it happens. Maybe Logitech has a solution.

Still, this is a usable OS. “Better than Vista” isn’t necessarily damning with faint praise. 🙂

All-in-all,