Category Archives: Tech

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More Tmobile Wing, things

Before I begin, I would like to send some complaints to my friend Brown who not only helped me tune up my rear derailleur on my bike in preparation of this weeks Muddy Buddy, but he also gave me a bottle of wine he made several years ago; it’s excellent! This is only the second home-made wine I’ve had and this is indeed, a special treat.

I couldn’t resist the pun. I’m seeing a fair amount of traffic to my site over my posts about the Tmobile Wing. As I said, I love it. I mean it. There are some annoyances with it, but nothing out of the ordinary (compared with WinXP for example). I think I’ve done quite a lot with it.

Tonight, I succeeded in overclocking it to 260Mhz, (stock speed is 200Mhz). For me the difference is so much but I do like that the menus and the screen change / refresh happens more smoothly when you open the slider. I’ve gotten into turning off the WiFI and Bluetooth is if am not using it. The Comm Manager is pretty easy to access and use so I think that will help the battery life while it is being over clocked. And I say succeeded since when I first tried it, I was getting some weird blank screens and someone posted instructions for a manual install of the overclocking app and it worked great.

Continue reading →

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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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    innovation, what a show…

    The other night, I was watching TV in the bed with the kids and Mel Brooke’s History of the World Part I came on. This is a classic movie, if for no other reason it shows Mel’s genius. The part we watched was the Spanish Inquisition with Mel as Torquemada.

    But the Inquisition’s here and it’s here to-
    “Hey Torquemada, walk this way.”
    “I just got back from the Auto-de-fe.”
    “Auto-de-fe? What’s an Auto-de-fe?”
    “It’s what you oughtn’t to do but you do anyway.”

    The remainder of the movie isn’t for kids, so we changed the station. But I can’t help but watch something like that and think about how great that movie was and the care and the thought that went into that. The next day, I was listening to the radio and Lola from the Kinks came on. It is a cold day when you hear a modern song like Lola. What makes it so great? If we were going to talk for an hour or so with a couple of beers, I could probably make my point and convince you that it’s one of the greatest songs, but if I have to explain it here, then you probably wouldn’t get it. Anyways, that’s just an aside.

    So, at work, I’ve been thinking about Innovation. If you have seen my blog before, you might be aware that I like technology. There are so many things I think are cool to play with and have integrated them into mine and my family’s life. Sometimes, my wife gets frustrated when things don’t work 100% but I wonder what my kids will be like when they are my age. Will they be rushing out to get the latest tech toys or will they try to build their own? Who knows, but I do like to encourage their innovator spirit.

    At work, I was writing a document on innovation and some of the challenges our company faces. I referred to an article that Guy Kawasaki wrote for one of recent issues of Entrepreneur magazine. His article really gave me food for thought. One of the most important points that I’ve been wrestling with is that you should make products that make your customers happy.

    The best example I can come up with and it really drives it home for me is my wife. We have a Trixbox PBX at home. I love it. But, it doesn’t work 100% of the time; it works 99.9% of the time. And we have to dial “9” to call outside. Me, I’m willing to put up with it. Or rather, it just doesn’t seem like an issue at all for me, but for my wife… it’s a pain in the ass. “Why doesn’t our phone work like everyone else’s?” Heaven forbid if my Mother-in-law tries to use our phone. They ain’t happy!

    Until I read Guy’s article, I thought that they were missing the point of having the “wonderful technology” in their lives making things better for them. Nope, I missed it. If the technology makes them happy, then we have a winner. I have a Roku Soundbridge; hands down one of the best and coolest things I ever bought myself. However, my wife is just as happy plugging her iPod Shuffle into the stereo. Her Shuffle, makes her happy.

    I get it, now I understand. But there has to be some sort of middle ground, don’t you think? A product can’t be 100% fool-proof and work 100% of the time, can it? Does that mean it has to be simple or just work good? I don’t have the answers yet, but this has been what’s been inside my thoughts as of late. Somewhere in this conundrum, lies the secret sauce.

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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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    Time to upgrade Trixbox to 2.2 tonight

    I’ve mentioned recently that Trixbox released their final 2.2 version. I’m running 2.1 and have been enjoying a great amount of success with that version. If it ain’t broke, do I need to fix it? I’ve always been on the bleeding edge of things so my gut says yeah, I need to upgrade. It’s a real problem for me. I always need to try the latest firmware, software, version of whatever I have. Sometimes it has gotten me into trouble, (with my wife), but it will just gnaw away at me until I do something about. That’s the case with the recent release of Trixbox 2.2. I’ve been watching the forums and I believe tonight is the night to make the jump.

    (gawd, I hate that Rhapsody’s Comcast client takes FOREVER to load; don’t they know I am trying to stuff while listening to some ‘tunes!?!?!?)

    So, anyways, here’s what’s new in 2.2:

    Some of the things I like is the “dashboard” that is the first thing you’d see when logging as ‘admin.’ The UI looks pretty sweet. On my existing system, I catch a memory leak from time to time that affects my system’s performance, so I like being able to see that sort of info on the front page. The Web UI to administrate the network will help a lot of people who may not know how to configure network interfaces. My setup isn’t typical for most home users. You can read about it here.

    The update instructions can be found in the Trixbox forums:

    You can NOT run trixbox-update.sh to upgrade to 2.2!!!

    Upgrade via the package manager by installing tbm-GUICore or by running yum update at the command line.

    I picked the “yum update” route. Man, I wished I made a backup before I started. I had to update 177 packages at 225MB.

    You see, here’s my problem. I can really only work on this stuff at home when everyone is in bed. It’s already midnight and if the family wakes up to an inoperable phone system, we might as well put in the order for a new land line; shudder! But, the downloads are flying by, this may not be too bad. Might be time to refresh my Vodka. In case you are interested, I use VNC to admin my boxes from my WinXP system upstairs; the UNIX and Linux boxes are in the basement.

    While this is continuing to download, I feel like we finally have a chance to talk. You know what pisses me off? Here’s a list (unrelated to the the actual update):

    • People who don’t put shopping cars back into the cart coral at supermarket parking lots. You are one lazy mo-fo.
    • People talking on cell phones in high speed, high density traffic. Get a headset, dumbass.
    • News reporters (on TV) who use their hands too much when giving a report. By the way, does it really make a story more interesting if you are standing outside of closed office of something you are doing the piece about? Lame.

    I could go on, but the downloads are almost finished. Let me refresh my drink while it finishes up. Oh man, 385 packages are now being updated! How painless will this be??? The updates are done. I am going to make the assumption that I need to reboot. I hope it comes back up!

    It came up, but if I went to a web browser, it looked like the older version. What did I miss? If I go to Asterisk menu, I am getting MySQL errors like the password is wrong. However, if I go to the “Asterisk Info” page, it appears with the UI seen in the video.

    [nativecode=Access denied for user 'asteriskuser'@'localhost' (using password: YES)] ** mysql://asteriskuser:XXXXXXXXXX@localhost/asterisk

    This requires more investigation! I had changed the default password when I initially set all of this up, but I can’t remember what the original password was for the user.

    I couldn’t find it anywhere on the web and I couldn’t log it, so I tried installing phpwebadmin, specifically tbm-phpmyadmin.noarch. I was able to reset the password to the one I had specified in:

    • /etc/asterisk/manager.conf

    I rebooted once I reset the password. After the reboot, I was able to call out okay, but it was too late to try calling in, (and risk waking up the boss). So far so good.

    I had installed Munin manually last go around, but now when I tried to access it via the TB interface, I got a spewload of errors. Small potatoes. I’ll worry about it later.

    I’m wiped out so off to bed… and more later as I delve into this project.

    EDIT: Part II of this can be found here: Trixbox Upgrade part II

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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!