Category: Compgeeky

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Not Quite That Ambitious

I saw an article on building a Linux-controlled “Corretto” coffee roaster and thought, “Cool, but where would I put everything in our kitchen? I’d have to build on an addition!”

*heh*

Still, one of the things that gives Henry Ward Beecher a claim to historical immortality that rival’s his sister’s is his appreciation of good coffee:

“A cup of coffee – real coffee – home-browned, home ground, home made, that comes to you dark as a hazel-eye, but changes to a golden bronze as you temper it with cream that never cheated, but was real cream from its birth, thick, tenderly yellow, perfectly sweet, neither lumpy nor frothing on the Java: such a cup of coffee is a match for twenty blue devils and will exorcise them all.” – Henry Ward Beecher

And, after reading the above paean to a good cuppa joe and singing a few verses of O Blessed Holy Caffeine Tree i9n appreciation of The Holy Brew (#1) myself, almost the article cited above persuadeth me to do a “Linux Coffee Roaster” build of my own… Almost. I’d still need to build that addition onto the house.

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Still “On Fire”

I commented the other day on how handy it is to use a stylus with the Kindle Fire, how easy it is to make styli and even briefly described a couple I made for use on the Fire (see update below).

Yep, they all work very well, but… the very (very) nice leather case my Wonder Woman got for me (yes, she was in cahoots with Son&Heir) for the Fire had no good place to store any of he styli I have. Darn. Oh, well, a rubber band sort of “solved” the issue, even if it did look kinda kuldgey. But wait! What’s this? A faux leather zipper case for a mini “legal pad” note pad? Let’s see…

Yep, the notepad switches over to the left side OK. Five lil hook-and-loop (Velcro-type) adhesive-backed “dot” fasteners and… Kindle Fire installed, the nicest of the pen/styli in the storage loop for a pen. Zip up. Secure. Open. Shake the contraption (over my lap). Secure.

Removed the Fire. The hook fastener dots stayed where they should (inside the lil zipper case), as did the loop fastener dots on the Fire, and the Fire reinstalled in the slightly more compact leather case w/o any problems.

Now, I have two different padded cases for the device, each of which work very well. Oh, the cost of the lil faux leather zipper case? $1.00, including the notepad, plus maybe $0.50 for the lil hook-and-loop dots used.

It’s coming together. So far, I use the Fire for

reading eBooks (of course)
watching videos (TV shows, movies)
listening to mp3s
browsing the web (light use)
reading and answering email (light use)
carpentry (!–the lil android bubble level app!)

And a few other things. I’ve not yet used it as I used to use my old Palm M500, for note taking, shopping and to-do lists, and as an addressbook simply because, while it is a small form factor, it’s not small enough to fit in any pockets except on one heavy winter coat I own. That might change if I find a convenient way to safely carry it around with me, but then again it might not. we’ll see.

UPDATE: “easy to make”? Way easy. Just now made another one from an old Saitek lighted stylus (dead batteries) for my (now dead) Palm M500. Removed the plastic point. Cut a thin strip of conductive foam padding. Folded the foam strip and sorta screwed it in where the tip once went. Cut a piece of aluminum tape and wrapped a small portion of the foam strip and the metal body of the stylus together and… new stylus for my capacitive touchscreen. Very nice. Smaller tip than any of the others so far, too, which makes hitting the lil tools icon all the easier.

🙂

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A Lil “Notahowto”

This is not a “How to” as much as it is a pointer about styli for capacitive touch screens. (Love the pun or don’t. I DGARA :-))

Love the Kindle Fire. I use it far, far too much. I’m almost back to the average numbers of books per week read that I indulged myself in for decades before I discovered the Internet in ’93, and I have watched more movies and obscure (mainly foreign) TV shows since Christmas than I care to count.

But I had a small bone to pick with the device. While I have relatively small hands (a curse when I was trying to play piano or guitar), using my fingers to navigate–and especially to type on the onscreen virtual keyboard–was something of a pain at times.

Enter the stylus I received with my matte-finish screen protector from HandHeldItems. Yes, it was the company’s low-end, throwaway stylus, but it worked a charm. Soon, though, I missed being able to store it easily. Oh, it had a lil thingy to plug into the headphone jack, but that was clearly sub-optimal. What to do?

A quick search on the web for “DIY Stylus for Kindle Fire” turned up a raft of possibilities, but the one that suggested using the conductive foam padding used in packing electronic parts seemed ideal, so… dig around in parts to find some that’s easily sacrificed, look around for some pens or other “stylus materials” that can be modified, a lil shade tree mechanicking and…

A couple of styli that work great for my purposes. One is from a nice, heafty-weight metal-bodied “gimme” pen that had a built in laser pointer with dead batteries. It offered a way to embed some conductive foam padding in the top of the pen, just above the clip, once the tiny lil laser pointer was removed. A sized Q-Tip holds the foam in place, jutting from the top of the pen, nicely rounded. Nice, sturdy clip. I even had an ink refill for the pen. Excellent stylus!

Another as a backup for the lil 2″ (though extensible to 3″) HandHeldItems throwaway stylus? Sure. A small metal screwdriver (removed the bit end), a piece of conductive foam padding secured with wire and live rubber tape and, voilà! Nice lil 2.5″ mini-stylus. Works just as well as the other two.

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‘Nother One

Yet another BritShow marathon on the Kindle Fire via the Amazon Prime trial: Torchwood.

Eval of season 1: not too shabby. A sort of British combo of The X-Files and Sanctuary with much lusher, more appealing settings–largely Cardiff, Wales–with more than a bit of the contemporary Dr. Who feel. Not as outstanding as Downton Abbey (a much, much different kind of show), but better fare than almost all the current offerings we get on cable TV.

Fun find.

In other areas, I’ve been importing the mobi or prc format of all the “read more than once” eBooks I’ve purchased from Baen Books over the past several years. *heh* I even discovered a couple I had meant to read but just hadn’t gotten to yet and downloaded the Kindle formats to read, even though I already had html formatted copies in an electronic “library”. In some ways it’s not quite as easy to read eBooks on the Fire as on a notebook or desktop, reading html formatted books in a web browser. For one thing, in my browser, I can simply set the text to scroll and only have to page forward when I reach the end of a chapter, instead of turning individual pages, as in a hardcopy or Kindle formatted book. But I don’t really miss that so much.

Setting the number of words per line (more or less) is a big plus for reading via the Kindle, as I usually read a couple of lines at as time. With a simple touch of my right thumb to the right side of the screen, the page “turns” and reading flow is smooth and fast, faster than page turns in hardcopy books. And while the Fire doesn’t use e-ink, I’ve not experienced eye strain while reading the 20+ books I’ve read on it in the past couple of weeks. All-in-all, the movies, TV shows, music, books have been very enjoyable to watch, listen to and read, and web browsing is at least Good Enough for minimal use. (I actually found some info the other day faster by dropping out of a video on the Fire and going to Opera Mobile than my Wonder Woman who was already on the web in her web browser on her notebook. Maybe I will get accustomed to the virtual keyboard yet. :-))

Oh, season 2 has generally been an improvement even over the relatively high standards of season 1. For one thing, the character of Owen Harper is much more appealing as a dead man (walking, talking, yadayada). Fun lines result all over the place.

Jack Harkness: “Why is it you agree with Owen all the time since he died?”

Ianto Jones: “I was raised to never speak ill of the dead.”

Good lines. (Well, very close to verbatim.)

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I Don’t Do Book Reviews, But I Do Rant

Really. Well, I do discuss some books with my Wonder Woman and sometimes other family members from time to time, but actually reviewing the books I read would cut too much into reading time to do it. 😉 And, frankly, the voices in my head have spent so much time over the last seven years escaping from my control and putting words down on this blog that I sometimes begrudge the time they’ve stolen from my reading.

But, just read another book Dead Wood by Dani Amore, on the Fire (really nice reading experience, BTW), and one thing really hit me. From my own limited experience with people in the “recording industry” in combination with a better understanding of how music (no, the real stuff) is made and just music knowledge in general, the portrayal of the dirty underbelly of the “music industry” is spot on.

And it’s not pretty. In fact, it’s just as ugly as the crap it churns out and feeds to the ever lower, most common denominator of society, dragging sense and sensibilities ever lower in a never-ending spiral into the sewer of faux “art”.

In case you’d missed it before, I have about two ounces of respect and appreciation (combined) for recording “artists” nowdays, and I reserve that respect and admiration for the very (very, VERY) few who deserve it. Clue: you’ll not find ’em on anyone’s Top 40 list. In fact, most of the increasingly brain dead public wouldn’t even recognize what real musicians produce as music, or if they did would in any way, shape, fashion or form be able to appreciate it, let alone grasp the least bit of it, since it would take a soul not completely seared by lapping up the toxic sewage common in the offerings of the contemporary “music” industry.

rant /off

BTW, How sweet it is to have all my fav recordings of all my fav artists and their performances available to stream to the Kindle Fire while WiFi-ed to any network. Combined with either some very nice ear buds or (the other really excessively nice Xmas present) the Grado headphones, it’s only about three orders of magnitude less enjoyable to listen to them than doing so live. That’s a plus, really. Sweet, sweet, sweet. *ahhh*

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Still Fire-ing Away

Just another Kindle Fire micro-mini update. So far: books, movies and music are the Big Deal, although I have found and installed several Android apps that are very cool, both in the Amazon app store and elsewhere.

Elsewhere? Yeh. Side loading Android apps is easy-peasy once two conditions are met: getting the things actually downloaded to the device and configuring the device to allow installation of apps obtained outside the Amazon app store. But more on that later.

The apps I’ve found so far that have tickled my fancy (in a good way–getcher mind outa the gutter! ;-)) are Opera Mobile (of course! *heh*), BubbleLevel (amazing! Using the Kindle Fire as a level. Cool!</em>) and TeamViewer. While I’ve installed other apps over the last few days, these three have seen the most use to date. Pinch & Zoom work much better in Opera Mobile–Zoom and watch the page center in on the text or graphic you pinched to zoom without needing to manually adjust as with the Silk Browser. Nice, and just one of many browsing experience enhancements.

BubbleLevel? I have found myself walking around as I watch a movie or read a book. I catch something out of the corner of my eye. “Oh, that picture’s not level.” Pop open BubbleLevel and… level the pic. *heh* Sure, I could eyeball it level (it’s a knack), but why, when “there’s an app for that”? *heh*

And TeamViewer. Fun controlling one of my other computers from the Fire. That’s all. It’s just fun. Yeh, yeh, I know I’ll find it to actually be useful at some point (TeamViewer should be on every computer on a home network, IMO, and having it on the computers of remote family is even more useful), if only for accessing files and running apps on my desktop while I’m elsewhere… Oh, yes. That will be useful.

Now, as to dislikes concerning the Kindle Fire itself.

Few, but the biggest dislike is that Amazon didn’t include a USB data cable! (!?!) OK, so Amazon’s virtually giving the device away already, but not including a data cable? That goes beyond an annoyance and enters the verge of “This ticks me off” territory. How much easier it would be to sideload Android apps by dragging and dropping them from my desktop/laptop onto the Fire as opposed to emailing them as attachments and then downloading the attachments? Lots. But no, that will have to wait on my separately-ordered data cable, since none of my other USB cables has exactly the same micro-USB termination. *sigh* And even though I can email mobi files obtained elsewhere to the Fire (an eBook format the Fire can read) and have the Fire sync them, it’s a cumbersome process… and I have at least 100 of the things (only the ones worth reading more than once) to sync in.

Data cable a must-have. Amazon not including one with the Fire is irritating.

Now, side loading on the Fire: easy-peasy, even considering the irritation of having to kludge-net with an email attachment download. Oh, what’s with the email attachment download instead of a direct (browser) download of an Android app? I dunno. Silk seems to really, really, REALLY not want to download apps, and even with Opera Mobile it proved to be easier to download the apps to be side loaded on another computer, email the APZ APK* files to myself as an attachment and then download them to the Fire from the email. Weird, but not at all difficult. From there, if one has already enabled installing apps from “unknown” (as in “unknown”=”unavailable in Amazon’s app store *sigh*) sources all it takes is invoking the APZ file and bob’s your uncle.

Another lil note: I find that I have read most of the (10) books I’ve read on the Fire so far in landscape mode. Since I generally read a line or so at a time rather than one or two (or a few) words at a time, the longer lines afforded by reading in landscape mode are a better fit for my reading style.

*APZ-APK: while I’d like to claim “APZ” as a typo, anyone with half a brain would see that as a lame excuse. It was a brain fart (or Early Oldtimers’ Disease, take your pick *heh*). AMZ files are an Amazon mp3 downloader file, so I may have conflated the two format extensions somehow.

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Liking It

Ok, so typing on the Fire is still a bit of a PITA, but I’m able to manage short things like this. And while I got Silk working pretty well, Opera Mobile does seem more responsive, and it gives me more screen real estate for browsing. Nice.

UPDATE: Well, while I’m still getting used to the kybd, it’s juuuust workable. Opera Mobile is da bomb. Figured the tabs out. Lil different but workable. So very much slicker than the Silk browser. Now, that’s not so much a comment on the Silk browser which is about as good as, say, Chrome on the desktop. But for a mobile platform, Opera Mobile’s just been doing it longer than most and is just moire mature on the platform, I guess.

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Deconstructing “Zarkon”

…and other mildly compgeeky stuff.

Yes, Zarkon is the “desktop” (well, even though it’s a mini-tower, it’s on a desktop :-)) I refurbed recently with a new mobo and processor. I also decided that was the time to extract the very nice, older tech (IDE) DVDRW drive and put it in its own case, for use with certain applications on some computers lacking DVD drives. So, I ended up buying a Vantec NexStar DX enclosure from Newegg.

Like it. Nice heavy gauge aluminum, minimal plastic, very well designed. Installing the drive was “do-it-in-my-sleep” easy-peasy. Plugged the thing in, turned it on, plugged in the USB cable (to one of my 13 USB ports–*heh*), and it just worked. Next up will be installing some software to a netbook. Yeh, I know I could place the installation files on a flash drive and do it that way, but I just don’t want to, and now I don’t have to. I’ve been meaning to do something like this for quite some time, but just hadn’t. Inertia, I suppose. With streaming media and most of my installs of software (and music and videos) coming from downloads, I’ve used the drive less and less over time, so having it transmogrified into an external drive won’t impact my use of this computer much, if at all, and now I’ve actually gained functionality.

Win-win, IMO.

OTOH, so far, an attempt to turn an “old” netbook into a barebones HTPC has been unsuccessful. Failed at the point of video out to TV via a piece of equipment that should work, but doesn’t. On two different notebooks. Oh, well. At least this works like a champ–better, even, than the Hauppaugge card in Zarkon:

Funny thing (or not), the software that came with the tuner was unable to find any TV channels to tune, either OTA or via cable. The lack of tunable OTA channels was no surprise, since that’s why we have cable TV. *heh* WMC, however, found (and tuned in) all we can normally tune (the ones we pay for:-)) and six others (that we do not;-)). Of course we won’t watch the ones it’ll tune that we aren’t paying for.

Good lil tuner.

Update: the failure of the VGA-to-TV equipment was a documentation failure. Following the included instructions for setting a pair of DIP switches scrambled the signal to garbage. Since there are only two switches, the possible combinations were few (especially since I already knew that the setting the documentation mandated did not work *heh*), and I was able to effect a workable setting on my second try. Still not a decent HTPC solution, since the lil netbook’s wimpy processor and sparse memory caused WMC to be extremely slllloooooowwww. Still, all parts–including the WMC-enabled USB dongle and remote–work, for very sluggish values of “work”. 🙂 Now, I just need to assemble another, more capable box to use for an HTPC connected to that TV.

‘nother Update:

Ah feels muchly better now, Ah does. *heh* Zarkon’s new (faster, double-sized, better-matched to the processor) memory came in today. Popped it in ‘n’ booted him up. Sweetness. Happy campers have nothin’ on me.

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Lil Things to Be Thankful For

So, my fav “Big Box Computer” went belly up about six weeks ago. Mobo issues. Yes, motherboard. Trust me, I am (have been, was; whatev’) a professional; I know these things. *heh*

So, the question was, “Buy identical mobo or a minor-to-moderate upgrade?”

You know what I chose. But why not go all out and upgrade to a mobo/cpu/memory combo like Son&Heir’s (really fast) i7 quad core, 16GB Barn Burner Christmas Build of a year ago? Well, for one thing, I don’t really need that kind of power. A little boost? Nice. Supercomputer? Notsomuch. *heh*

So, after waffling and wavering and deferring (heck, procrastinating) for more than a month, I finally ordered a nicely-featured mobo and a dual core AMD Athlon II that is significantly faster than the Athlon dual core I’ve retired (a lil epoxy, some gold-washed chain and it’ll make a nice keychain fob). Not a big boost in capability, but Good Enough for my uses–web browsing, image manipulation, editing/watching videos, writing, editing, playing music, etc.

So, I broke one of my own rules (don’t do computer work when my eyes are propped open by toothpicks) and popped the mobo/cpu, etc., together last night, booted the thing and…

Win7 found all the hardware and loaded “Good Enough” drivers. I loaded the driver disk from the mobo manufacturer (MSI this time; I like Asus a lot, but just decided to go with this) and had better drivers in no time flat.

Played around a bit, then finally (after the “a bit” turned into a couple of hours and it was past 3:00) shut it down and sawed some “Z’s”.

Booted this a.m. and Win7 told me that I needed to validate my Windows install, since I’d changed hardware. Clicked the lil button. Validated. Bob’s your uncle.

Soooo much nicer than the crap so many folks had to put up with when they changed hardware on an XP machine. I know. I talked to M$ tons of times for these folks whose Windows installs stopped working on them (cos they just couldn’t get through all the hoops, it seems, or were intimidated by the process).

So, thankful this was such an easy micro-mini-upgrade/fix. I needed one of those right now.

Update: Well, “easy fix” until… no boot last night. No, seriously: nothing, nada, zilch, a big zero with the rim kicked off. Not even fans stirring. Hmmm… Lots of stuff later (just followed a typical diagnostic tree), a screwdriver jumping the power switch pins on the mobo started the power supply. Attached hard drive, etc., and booted to Windows. Powered down and added another hard drive. It balked, giving a memory error. Swapped memory out. Booted just fine.

So, two problems: poor mobo/power switch connection and a bad memory module. Been fine since, as I have added peripherals in one at a time. Almost completely “rebuilt” now and working PDG.

It’s always (well, usually) the little things. One of Pournelle’s laws is that 80% of computer problems are bad connections, but that was formulated before Windows, I think. *heh*

Oh, and THAT reminds me of a problem recently with the sound on someone else’s computer. It took fixing

  1. A corrupted Windows Update process (so I could block updates to drivers)
  2. .NET Framework (on a Vista computer, no less *sigh*) and
  3. COMPLETELY uninstalling the “right” sound drivers–both the one Windows found (it was a Windows Update that “updated” a working driver into oblivion) and the one the computer manufacturer INSISTED would fix the issue, and yes that meant digging Registry references out and nuking them manually, AND
  4. MANUALLY editing the Registry in a way, urm, not recommended by Microsoft to effect some permission changes Vista did NOT want to allow

to get sound working on the computer.

Yes, it really took all four of those things. Really. Oh, and fixing the .NET Framework components? Nothing more than discovering that EVERYTHING on the computer had been set to be denied permissions invoking .NET. *sigh* Then? Reset ALL those permissions.

Thankful that wasn’t one of my computers… 🙂

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Puppy, Slacking Off

Readers (all both of you) here may recall my fondness for Puppy Linux. The new “standard” Puppy, version 5.2.8 is Ubuntu-compatible, but still the same lean Puppy that loads from a CD or flash drive and runs in RAM. Very slick. The ONLY thing to hold against it is that it doesn’t do palm check on my touchpad on this lil lappy when I have a mouse plugged in. But seriously, that’s the only negative I can think of. Update: *sigh* I feel like such an idiot. It was right in front of my face… just in a different place than where I was looking. Turned the touchpad off. No complaints whatsoever, now. 🙂

Newer? Puppy 5.3, “Slack Puppy” based on Slackware. Notalotadiff, really, except for repositories and a couple of cool utilities (the Frisbee network setup applet is no better or worse than the usual Puppy network setup utility, but it’s as easy, which is to say, super easy-peasy). One thing I just noticed that I might end up down-checking 5.3 for is strangely lower volume levels. I may just have to fiddle with something. (Yep. Adjusted things via the Alsa setup wizard. All fine, now.)

Very nice is the simplest Flash setup of any ‘nix distro I’ve used to date. When I specified I wanted to install Opera, Puppy offered to install Flash, installed it and… that’s all.

Anywho, ‘s’cool. I think I’ll put this version on a flash drive like I have with Puppy 5.2.8 so I can carry a “computer” around in my shirt pocket. Any computer that will boot from a flash drive can then have a customized Puppy, with my saved files, needed apps, etc., right there. Yeh, yeh, I have a bunch of stuff “in the cloud,” but sometimes, it’s really, really handy to be able to have another OS to boot someone’s computer to, and keeping all MY files (and activities) segregated–and back in my pocket when I leave–can be a very, very Good Thing.

BTW, here’s a screenshot from my flashdrive Puppy 5.2.8:

Further Update: Another neat version: Puppy “Racy” 5.1.111. Pretty cool initial setup wizard making the already simple Puppy setup even easier. I do NOT like the absence of some repositories (particularly the Ubuntu repositories) in the default installation menu. Notaproblem, really, but just a lil flaw in an otherwise superb build.