Category Archives: Info

Cool things to do and know.

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finally, an update on the HTPC

Finally, it’s done, and with fantastic results.

If you’ve been following along, you might remember that I was trying to build a low-end, low cost HTPC for my brother-in-law so he could watch downloaded content from his PC on his TV.  We put Ubuntu and MythTV on a really old PC I had laying around and it was a pain in the ass.  We got to the point where we were going to have to spend some coin on a VGA – TV converter… for around $70 at the local Fry’s.

At this point, I told him to think about getting an original Xbox and putting XMBC on it.  That’s exactly what he did.  He found an Xbox on Craiglist, with games, for under $100.   This past weekend, we did a softmod on it and installed XBMC and had it up and running in less than 30 minutes.  He was thrilled and his wife was also happy that she could play her MP3’s on it.  There was much rejoicing  and then we kicked each other’s asses on the boxing game he got.

So, this had a happy ending and I must say the latest releases of XBMC are superb.  I think one would be hard pressed trying to find something as robust.   We even had international streaming IPTV in matter of minutes, (it took a little while to find the files).

Important Links:

We had found another website with a stream pack, but I can’t find it now.

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Will my Tmobile Wing replace my iPod?

Actually, no, it won’t replace my iPod but it will see more time with me. If you’ve been reading along, I got a Tmobile Wing. I love it. I’ve been a Treo user, (from a 600 to a 650) and have been a Palm user since my first Palm V. So going to a Windows Mobile based phone is something different, but not so much so. In my other posts about my Mio c310x, you’ll see that the Mio runs Windows CE. Therefore, I already have some experience.

A couple of the things I like about my iPod is Podcasts and being able to listen to stuff in the car while in transit to and from work. Since my commute is roughly +/- 30 minutes, I typically take that time to listen to a language podcast or do some language lessons. If you’ve seen my other posts about that, you’ll learn that I am also trying to learn German.

But at my PC or my Mac at work, I love listening to live music. Live in the sense that I am listening to streaming music; Internet radio. There is some sort of connection I feel when I am listening to someone else “talking to me.” The iPod doesn’t let me have that connection that I get when I am listening to something online. I thought about getting the FM transmitter for my iPod but who the hell wants to listen to FM when I’ve been spoiled by satellite? *shudder*

I have also gotten into the habit of listening to German audio when I am in bed going to sleep. I’ve read about how the mind absorbs information and processes it while you sleep. I also read that listening to foreign languages often will subconsciously help you with word order and pronunciation. Could be snake oil, but what the heck. Since the iPod has a sleep timer, it was easy to set it to shut off after 30 minutes. But the lack of frequent updates of the Podcasts and the level I am at helped contribute to an amount of boredom with the content on my iPod. I started to listen to music and not practice my language skills.

Now, on the Wing, it has Windows Media Player on it. And I didn’t sign up for a data plan since it is WiFi enabled and I have at least two AP’s at any given time. I’ve found the data connection via WiFi to be more than satisfactory since many of the WAP or Mobile enabled sites I go to have way less ads on them so web browsing from the device is pretty good.

More importantly, WMP is great at streaming online content. I started off testing with my old standby’s and moved to the holy grail for me; 24 hour streaming German news. It works and it works well. I didn’t experience too much rebuffering and with the USB-style headset/headphones that came with the Wing, the audio was quite good.

I was really excited to go to bed, listening to “live” content and in German. It work so well. In fact, I dreamt that I was in Germany and was having a hard time understanding what people were saying. It was a great, lucid dream that I found very encouraging. One of the high points was that I was in the library and they were selling beer inside; what a great idea!

So, with the Wing, I have to say that I still like it. The only drawbacks I have encountered thus far is that it appears WM5 and WM6 are different enough that not all applications work or that I don’t know all the shortcuts yet. Being able to make SIP calls with my home Trixbox PBX is really slick.

No, the Wing will not replace my iPod… but I think for what each device does, they certainly compliment each other with what I want to do, and that results in a product that makes ME happy.

Streaming Online radio that makes me happy:

Mobile / WAP websites that make me happy:

Mind resources:

I’ll post more Wing/WM6 updates as I learn and come up with stuff.

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cool beans

I saw I got a mention over at the Earthlink blog about my new Tmobile Wing. Now, I feel I am on the hook for delivering some decent content. Shouldn’t be a problem since I have a lot to say about my new Wing. In a Nutshell, I love it.

Now, I know here in the U.S we are about 10 years behind the rest of the world with cellular technology. We have no nationwide 3G network. However, my wife and I have been long-time Tmobile customers ever since we had a cell phone with Powertel. I saw the posting in November about Tmobile getting the huge FCC contract, which made little news here in the US but I think this is a pretty good thing for us Tmobile customers;

I’ll probably provide a more detailed review of the Wing but right now, I’m sort of riding high since I just made my first SIP call from the Wing, which is registering with my Trixbox here at home.

Tmobile now has a phone, which I believe at this point is only available in Seattle, that can make calls over WiFi or the GSM network. The Wing has a pretty robust WiFi setup so I was thinking how cool it would be to use SIP at home. I don’t really use Skype a whole lot so I haven’t tried it, (but it is on my list of things to do).  I’ll have to wait and see, but it appears that as long I am on my home WiFi setup, I can register via SIP to my SIP server and make and receive calls, (as long as I add my “extension” to the call hunt), via my Wing. I like that idea… it’s pretty cool, if you ask me.

If you are curious how I am making SIP calls from my Wing, I am using SJphone for Windows Mobile.  It’s free!

More to come…

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My new Tmobile WING

Lucky you, you got two posts in a night!

So, I got me a Tmobile Wing.   Holy Smokes, I love this phone.  I currently have a Treo 650 from work and the Wing smokes it entirely.  I have encountered a bit of a learning curve due to the fact I am going from Palm OS to WM6, but hey… something new to learn.   I’m putting it through its paces.  Since my Mio c310x is Windows CE and this is Windows Mobile 6, I’m not entirely lost and that’s partially why I like this phone so much.

I am going to continue to play and learn about it, and then I’ll create a more detailed post.  But I love it, and it’s a great phone in my opinion.

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Repair install XP without deinstalling IE7… wtf?

Okay, I am going to toot my own horn here, I think I figured out something NO ONE else has. I’ll explain that later, but suffice to say, I’m pretty jazzed right now.

Unbeknowst to me, and apparently MANY people who installed IE7 out there, aren’t aware that you MUST uninstall IE7 prior to doing a repair install on WinXP. This is truly a F*$&#d up thing. I didn’t know about it, did you? Now, don’t get me wrong. I consider myself to be a UNIX and OSX guy, but we do use WinXP at home since it is really fine for the family. I’ve never been one to jump on the “I hate Windows” bandwagon, since it works fine to me. In fact, when conducting interviews at work, one of the questions we ask is, “How do you feel about Windows and why?” I’ve made hiring decisions based on the applicants response. …  Okay, so I digress.

It’s true. If you need to do a repair installation of WinXP and you installed IE7, you must or should uninstall IE7 before you begin. I think it is a load of crap this isn’t made more public or in fact is an issue, but it is true:

Here’s my deal. Memorial Weekend, I bought a package deal from Fry’s for a CPU + Motherboard. What was attractive to me was that I can get a dual core Pentium and a Motherboard with and AGP slot for $80. Yes, I know everything is going to PCI-E, but last year I bought a killer AGP card that I’m not quite ready to give up. And I have a bunch of DDR memory (not DDR2). So, I went from an AMD XP2600+ (that was overclocked to a 3200+), to a Pentium D dual-core 2.8Ghz CPU. I get to use my old stuff and get the best of both worlds until I make the jump to a totally new system.

Surprisingly, after installing the new motherboard in my case, WinXP booted up and ran just fine. Usually, you have to do a repair install on a new motherboard, but for some reason, it didn’t which I found surprising since I went from a nforce chipset to a VIA chipset and to a AMD CPU to a Intel CPU.  However, we were getting random BSOD’s over some IRQ issue. I figured I should to my repair install of WinXP anyaway.

I got boned.

Check out Article 917964 from Microsoft:

Before you perform a repair installation of Microsoft Windows XP, you must uninstall Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 from the Windows XP-based computer. If you perform a repair installation of Windows XP when Internet Explorer 7 is still installed, Internet Explorer will not work after the repair is completed.

To resolve this issue, uninstall Internet Explorer 7 from the computer, and then install Internet Explorer 6. After Windows XP is repaired, you can reinstall Internet Explorer 7.

Thanks, Microsoft. I am usually okay with trying to figure this stuff out, but how the hell would I have known this? This is so utterly frustrating, I was losing sleep over this. I followed everything in this KB article to the letter and none of it worked.

Here’s what happened to me. I did my repair installation NOT KNOWING THIS and when it completed, I got the message that said something like;

This copy of windows is insecure. Click here to upgrade to Service Pack 2…

However, IE wasn’t working AT ALL. So when I tried to do Windows Update or Microsoft Update, nothing happened. If I clicked on the IE icon, I got some obscure error message about some dll not installed.

Thankfully, everything else seemed to work. I could use Firefox and Thunderbird. But Windows Update was borked. I wanted to upgrade to SP2, but couldn’t. I read via Google Groups/Dejanews that someone in my same boat tried to install SP2 manually and ended up with a super foo-barred WinXP that wouldn’t boot at all. Then my wife called to give me an earful that Office 2003 wasn’t working. Now, the stakes have been raised.

So, I thought I should go ahead and restore from backup. I use Acronis to back up my main drive to a 300GB drive. Thankfully, I did it a couple of days ago. However, in this state, my other drives couldn’t be reactivated. And I had other issues.

  • If I tried to install IE7 I got errors saying it was for the SP2 version of WinXP
  • If I tried to install IE6 it said a newer version was installed.
  • If I wend to “Add/Remove Programs” it was blank.
  • Office didn’t work

So I couldn’t restore from the back up if I wanted to. However, I knew I had the images so if the worst case scenario happened, I could restore.

So, the only solution I could find was to format and reinstall. I’d hate to do that since it will be a lot of work and my wife is already frustrated. I sure wish I could get to work.

The big issue was that IE7 was for systems already with SP2, (now bear in mind that I already tried to uninstall IE7 via the mentioned ways in the above referenced article). I was stuck between IE6 and IE7.

Then I found a article about slipstreaming the install with SP2.

  • Slipstreaming Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Create Bootable CD

Maybe this would work. I followed the instructions and guess what? It worked! I got back into WinXP and everything looked great. Now, I was encouraged!

So now I reinstalled/repaired installed WinXP WITH SP2! But it wasn’t perfect. Windows Update and Microsoft Update were still spewing errors so I couldn’t update. If I tried Windows Update, I was met with this error message:

You receive a 0x80245003 error when you attempt to install updates from the Windows Update Web site?

    It would say files weren’t registered and you can select either to try to register them or get more info. I tried many of the fixes that were found on Google and none of them worked. Here’s Microsoft’s Article 919749 that explains more info:

    SYMPTOMS

    loadTOCNode(1, \’symptoms\’);You cannot install updates by using the Microsoft Windows Update Web site, and you may receive an error message that resembles the following:

    Error number:0x80245003. Windows Update has encountered an error and cannot display the requested page.

    The fix in that article did not work. This, however worked wonderfully. Here’s the link to this forum post:

    • Fix The 0x80245003 Error!!!!!

    Suggestion #2 got me going. I’ve just completed the rest of the updates since SP2’s release, so I think I am good to . After the first reboot, I had to repeat the above steps, but now everything looks okay after two additional IE7 updates.

    So, here’s a quick list of lessons learned:

    • Uninstall IE7 if you are going to do a repair install of WinXP
    • If you forget to uninstall IE7, your best best is to restore from back up and uninstall IE7.
    • Or make yourself a slipstreamed WinXP + SP2 installation disk.
    • Don’t forget searching DejaNews/Google Groups for useful info from the microsoft.* USENET newsgroups.

    I hope this helps.  Let me know how and if it worked for you and if you have any ideas or updates, let me know and I’ll try to keep this post updated.

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    trixbox update to 2.2, part II

    If you read my post last night regarding my upgrade to Trixbox 2.2, you’ll see that I was back up and running before going to bed.  It was late, and at first I thought that my upgrade went well, but I was a little disappointed to see that my UI didn’t look exactly like it did in the video.  Something didn’t look right, but I didn’t get any errors.  Upon a re-read of the forum, I realized that it looks like I upgraded the OS to the latest version, but not the UI and who knows what else.

    From the forums, it appears that there are a lot of successful installs, and the degree of success depends on exactly what version/build of Trixbox you were running.  For what ever reason, I have to run the following commands to get completely updated:

    1. yum clean
    2. yum make cache
    3. yum install -y tbm-GUIcore.noarch

    Now, everything looks like it should in as compared to the video on the Trixbox website.   I’ll do a reboot just to be safe.
    Alas, now I am getting errors when I try to load the packages list.  This is also reported in the above mentioned thread.

    Warning: fread(): Length parameter must be greater than 0. in /var/www/html/maint/includes/functions/genYumArray.php on line 21

    Warning: fread(): Length parameter must be greater than 0. in /var/www/html/maint/includes/functions/genYumArray.php on line 196

    A bug and fix were submitted.  Sure enough, I was missing three of the files on this page:

    That indeed, fixed it.

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    is that a chumby, or are you just glad to see me?

    I got a Chumby. When I first saw this thing on a friends desk, I was like, “what’s this goofy thing?” then when I got my hands on it, I was like, “holy geez, this is way cool!” I finally got this thing working at home. There is a “bug” where it freaks out if your router is doing anything besides 802.11b. Once I set my router to “b” it worked great.

    This is a great idea. You should read what this is all about. Taken from Chumby’s website:

    The chumby is a compact device that displays useful and entertaining information from the web: news, photos, music, celebrity gossip, weather, box scores, blogs — using your wireless internet connection. Always on, it shows — nonstop — what’s online that matters to you.

    Chumby

    I’ve been really big on taking the Internet experience out of the computer room into your living space, and this thing suits the bill.

    The widgets are all Flash-based… and i don’t know Flash… yet. But after playing with this thing for a day or two, I’m ready to learn. I got a lot of ideas for widgets that would really make this thing a necessity of life these days… at least for me.

    I got this from work, specifically the Earthlink Blogmaster, Dave, (thanks, Dave!). I saw it on his desk and asked him what it was. He passed it to me and sent me packing. I think this has a ton of potential for some really cool uses. Time to find a good book on Flash.

    Quick! Get me the number to the Patent Office!!!

    Lo and behold, Wikipedia to the rescue…

    This is what is on my Chumby, right now.

    EDIT: I created a page separate from this one since it was causing huge load times.  You can find it here:

    • What’s on my Chumby!
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    using a heart rate monitor (HRM) successfully….

    Man, I should be doing my real estate class or practicing my German, but since I was getting back to exercising after a couple month hiatus, I need to refresh myself and I can get on my soap box.

    I’ve had three different HRM’s over the years and I think that each one has been an improvment over the other. The first one I got, I got from Aldi’s for $20. Hey, I figure that it was worth $20 bucks to try it. I was hooked. There was a little learning curve as I learned about the watch and my own body. I was able to see improvements and I minimized my injuries and colds I would get when I pushed myself too hard.

    I lost the chest strap on the Aldi’s HRM, and I got a Polar A5. It was a step up but more designed for walkers. Still, I really enjoyed it. I liked being able to see how many calories I had burned on my workouts. My next watch I got on a good deal. I next got a Polar F6 and passed the A5 to my wife.

    The F6 was even more impressive since you could upload your data to Polar’s website and track your goals, Lose Weight Exercises, etc. Pretty cool!

    Now, using a HRM successfully depends on a strong beginning. The most confusing thing was trying to determine my base heart rate. The first two HRM’s said to simply take your age and subtract your age and multiply that times 60%, 70%, and 80% to get your zone. This is fine if you have never Lose Weight Exercised but this doesn’t take into account your level of fitness. I have been running for years and following this method I was barely breaking a sweat, It was apparent I needed a better way to determine my base HR. Now, you might want to know why the base HR is so important. Once you have your base then you can determine what zone you want to target:

    Target Zones

    60 – 70% of max HR Weight Loss, building endurance

    70 – 80% of max HR Weight Management, improve cardio fitness

    Like I said, the Age-Based formula is only good if you have been a couch potato for the last five years. If you have been doing anything… and I recommend this formula anyways, I recommend Karvonen formula. Basically, you take your heart rate in the morning as you are laying in bed for three mornings, average them together, use that number for the basic calculations and you can get dialed in to your personal fitness level.

    More details can be found here:

    It took me some trial and error to get it right, but I understand it now. In fact, I made a spreadsheet that I’ll share here for you to use to calculate your zones in both the traditional method and the Karvonen method. You can view the spreadsheet here:

    Finally, I was suprised at how well the Polar OwnZone works. I have used it and was suprised at how close it was to the results I got from the Karvonen formula. While the OwnZone might be a no-brainer if your unit supports it, I think it is still important to know the logic behind it.

    A HRM will let you maximize your Lose Weight Exercises and help you avoid getting hurt or getting sick. In the summer when I push myself on seven or eight mile runs, I would almost certainly get a little cold. A HRM and some L-Glutamine helped prevent that.

    Finally, let me close with a story that I think will illustrate why I think a HRM is important for people starting out running or cycling. One day, when I was on a long run in the summer, I caught up to a guy who was walking but wearing running gear. I passed him on my steady pace only to be passed by him while he was running much faster than I. Then, about two minutes later, I passed him again while he was walking. Then he passed me again running fast. This went on another four times until finally we ended up at the same red light.

    “I just started running!” he said. This novice runner didn’t have any concept of pace. He was heading down a path of injury or over excertion and didn’t know it. Typically, novice runners will go this route and get hurt or discouraged. A HRM takes the guesswork out and gives you a detailed view into how your body is doing regardless of your fitness level.

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    flexing the ol’ wordpress muscle

    I don’t know very much about wordpress, but I know enough to be dangerous.  I’ve been wrestling with making my blog perform a little better and I haven’t really nailed it down yet.  I got a message from a friend today that my site was coming up blank and indeed it was.  If I was logged in as admin, everything looked fine, but if I wasn’t the site did come up blank.  I had a conflicting setting between wp-cache and another plugin trying to get get some additional performance.

    If you search on the interwebs, you’ll find several people have their “Top 10 WP Plugins” and for the most part, everyone has their favorites.  But, there are a core group that everyone uses.  Once I nail down the performance issues and I am sure they are not related to the plugins, I’ll publish my list, too.

    Today was a good day.  I broke my fishing pole a couple of weeks ago, (I’ve been taking the kids fishing at the lake in our ‘hood), and I got a really nice on on clearance at the Sports Authority.   It was $4!  You can’t beat that with a stick.  We also went to a neighborhood block party and had a nice time with all the neighbors.  It was a nice way to spend the Saturday.

    If the weather holds up tomorrow, I’ll try to take the kids fishing again

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    POI’s on my mio c310x

    Update 240407: Be sure to check out some updated instructions in this earlier post: POI’s on the Mio c310x, part II! Both ways work, it’s up to you!

    My sister-in-law recently bought a Mio c310x from Frys.com; they have them for $189 free shipping, (until supplies last). It’s different enough from her old(er) Garmin, there is a steep learning curve. I guess if you get used to one UI, then it might make it more challenging to learn a new one. I was over at her house tonight trying to show her how to input POI’s, Points of Interest, into her Mio via the PC. It was a little challenging since I began to forget how I set it up and by the time I got it going we had to leave. So I promised her I would write something up. This should help you get up and running for adding your POI’s quickly and painlessly. First, you need some things before you begin:

    (Leah, if you are reading this, you are already past this point. You got everything you need!)

    By the way, I should mention that as Realtors, I am keeping that sort of functionality in mind. The overall goal is to make a list of properties or addresses and visit each one in the most efficient manner. Oh, and this is all Windows based. So far, I haven’t seen any way to do this on a Mac.

    I’m not going to get into the how-to’s to install ActiveSync or the rest of the software. Here’s what you need to do once you get all the mentioned software installed.

    1. If you haven’t already created and save a POI on the c310x itself. You need to do so. the iGo software looks for a specific database file that doesn’t exist until you do. Simply go into the “Map View” or similar (depends on what skin you are using), and find an address. If you are in the Map view, you should automatically get the bottom menu that pops up and says, “Save POI.” If you save it, you will have your iGo.db file that we need to have initially on your device.
    2. Fire up Google Earth. Select “My Places” and select “Add” and choose “Folder.” Name the folder something useful. In my example, I named my folder “List of POIs.” Next, in “Search” box, make sure the “Fly To” tab is selected. Enter your address here.

    3. As Google Earth zooms in, you should see your address in the lower pane in the “Search” box. You can click and drag that entry into the folder you made in step 2. Repeat for the other addresses you want.

    4. Next, you need to export the folder to a file you can read into the iGo POI Explorer.
      1. Right click on your folder from Step 2 above.
      2. Choose “Save As” and pick a place and a name where you can find it and remember what it was called.
      3. You are done with Google Earth… for now. Close it up.
    5. Next, connect your Mio and have it connect with ActiveSync. I would suggest have it connected for the next steps.
    6. Fire up the iGo POI explorer program. If you haven’t gotten it setup yet, go to Tools -> Options and make it look like the following:

    7. Next, import the file you made in Step 4.
      1. In iGo POI Explorer choose File -> Import -> POI’s from File. In the “Files of Types” menu from the Import window, choose “Google Earth KMZ file (*.kmz)”:

      2. The folder now should appear outside the “iGO POI Database.” Drap it into the top level “iGO POI Database so it appears with your other POI’s. After you do this, it should show up in the main tree and all of your addresses you entered are shown as coordinates. Pretty slick if you ask me:

    8. Now, I found I need to restart my Mio twice. How you restart it twice is up to you, but I don’t see the changes unless I do. So, after the second restart, fire up Mio Map. Choose your favorite method of looking at the Map or Cockpit and check out your POI’s:

      display_6.jpg

      display_7.jpg

    9. Notice how the address are ranking from closest to furthest. At this point you can just choose to “route to” the next closest POI. You can set up a “route” if you want. But this should get you going.

    Perhaps in my next post, I’ll continue about setting up a route with the various POI’s. I hope you found this helpful.