Category Archives: Tech

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The maps, man. it’s all about the maps

Okay, I’ve been reading up on this, so I think it will work. As you might have read, we went on a Florida vacation to Orlando. We are in Atlanta and drove our Eurovan down. I am also using my new Mio c310x and trying to put it through its paces. Yes, the maps are two years old, but come on… roads don’t change that often. Actually, the condo we rented was in a new neighborhood so it wasn’t on any maps, even Mapquest. However, Google! Earth did have an image of it. So I created two POI’s; one for the house itself and the intersection that was on the map. It worked well.

On the way down, we met up with my brother-in-law who we were sharing the rental with. So our caravan of, well.. vans, continued on down to Orlando. Traffic was really bad in Georgia due to the construction. It appeared they were repairing bridges but it took much longer than it should since it was stop and go for most of the ride in Georgia and traffic only reached the speed limit for a few minutes at a time. At one point, we put our faith in the GPS and took it off the highway. It was a nice diversion and we saw some of the small towns that are famous in Georgia. We got back on the highway near the Florida border and started making up for lost time.

 

Then, we saw some thick, black smoke up a ahead. The road was closed and we were about 3/4 of a mile from the actual closure. We could see firetrucks and other emergency vehicles. At one point, a flat-bed tow truck with sirens came racing up the side of the road with a back-hoe on it. The smoke died down and we were ready to get moving again. Then, more smoke on the other side of the road. The fire had jumped the highway somehow. We were parked on the highway for about 1.5 hours and everyone was walking around and talking. It was actually really nice. The weather was perfect in the mid 60’s and there was a pretty good breeze blowing. Plus, a fire always smells nice when there is just a little nip in the air. Someone said that they heard from their Mom that it was brush fire and an accident (unrelated apparently) that caused the road closure. Looking back, I wish I took more pictures since it was pretty cool. My brother-in-law took video.

In the second picture, you can see the blackened area that was burned. We drove by and could feel the heat from the fire. This was about one mile from the end of the Florida Turnpike; they waved us through and did not collect any toll. When all said and done, what should have been a seven hour trip took just a hair under 13.

The trip was great and we all had a wonderful time. We all enjoyed Disney and had a nice time puttering around the Orlando area.

While we were down there, I got the bright idea to start recording our tracks doing various things. This is the return trip from Orlando. Don’t worry, I edited the ending point so you couldn’t figure out where I live if you didn’t already know.

<br /> Sorry. If you’re seeing this, your browser doesn’t support IFRAMEs.<br /> You should upgrade to a more current browser.<br />

If this works, you should see Google! Map of our return trip above. I have a couple of other maps to add but it is late and I’ll just update this post probably tomorrow.

<br /> Sorry. If you’re seeing this, your browser doesn’t support IFRAMEs.<br /> You should upgrade to a more current browser.<br />

The above map is the very beginning and about the last 1/4 of our day there. We spent around 13 hours there and just the recorded tracks covered 6.5 miles. That’s a lot of walking. We estimate that we all walked over twelve miles over the course of the day with waiting in lines and what not. I think the line is broken up since I specified 300 data points in the route. By default, the Mio updates the route every one second and I think maybe for walking, it might make sense to change that to a higher number.

<br /> Sorry. If you’re seeing this, your browser doesn’t support IFRAMEs.<br /> You should upgrade to a more current browser.<br />

The above route is when we went to a place called the Mercado, which is now about to be demolished. It was a great place. In fact, it was one of the only places that I felt like no one was trying to get into my wallet. If you look at the northern end of the track, you can see where we went in and looked around only to find a ghost town. It was sad. This place was great. In the middle you can see where we played miniature golf. And near the bottom you can see where we had dinner and I walked around with the twins outside while the rest of the folks finished their meals. Again, the track must be broken up since the settings hit the 300 data point limit.

I really wanted to post these maps as a proof of concept. I think it worked okay. WordPress seems to have some indigestion around the iframes but that is something to tackle on another day.

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my mio c310x

I finally got a Mio c310x. Surely you’ve already heard about how hackable this GPS unit is and all the super slick things you can do with it. And hacking it was really easy.

I’ve had a hand-help GPS unit for a while now. I have a Garmin eTrex Venture. It’s okay and I sure used it a lot for Geocaching, but I’ve been really dying for a auto-based GPS unit. I had to travel to Dallas with a few people from work and a friend brought his Mio c310x he got on Black Friday 2006 for ~$150. I was so impressed with it. My sister-in-law had a Magellen c320 (I think) and I played with that a little when she first got it, but I liked the Mio and its internal, rechargeable battery.

Shortly after that, I heard Clark Howard talk about how useful a mobile auto-based GPS unit was and how cheaply they could be found for. He made a lot of sense! Taken from his website:

GPS units are cheap and easy to use

Do you remember when GPS units were something only the very wealthy could afford? A built-in unit was about $2,000 and a portable unit was about $800. Times have changed quite a bit. Clark recently bought a portable unit for less than $300 and it’s possible to find them for under $200. The more expensive units will tend to have the hard drive built-in to the unit, while the less expensive ones have an SD chip. And there are good and bad factors to both. But they are so simple to use and they have a memory of all of your addresses. These are hot gifts this holiday, so think about one for your loved one. Or wait even longer and they are sure to go down even more.

My wife finally gave me the go ahead to get it after I sold some old Directv receivers, so I went to Fry’s with the kids and picked one up. Of course they tried to sell me the 3-year extended warranty. When I stopped laughing I told them I wasn’t interested. I paid for it and got the kids in their seats and opened it up. It had a 75% charge out of the box and I used it to navigate me home.

I breifly took a look at the manual, but I’m a touchy-feely sort of guy so I’ve been playing with it six ways to Sunday. It isn’t perfect and now that I’ve played with it for some time, I am very happy with it. I don’t know if any other > $200 GPS units come close but I am very happy with it.

Out of the box, you can play MP3’s with it. Hoo-hum. The software that came with it reminds me of the old Sony software they had for mini-disks; not very useful. But there are hacks out there you can really have a lot of fun with.

The best way to move files back and forth is with Microsoft’s ActiveSync which is for PDA’s running Windows CE. This works flawlessly. Couple this with an external card reader, (the Mio is usb 1.1), and you can be rocking and rolling in no time.

One of the negatives you’ll hear about the Mio is that the maps are just over two years old. Still, I haven’t had any problems yet getting around Atlanta and North Georgia. The maps have been good without any real big noticeable problems.

I put the included suction-cup mount in our van and use the Mio on my lap or the passenger seat when I am in the other car. It picks up the GPS signals really good. I can even get a lock inside the house. I don’t quite understand it, but I like it. It makes it easy for planning routes beforehand.

An SD card is key for having any fun with this unit. You can put the unlocking script on the SD card and you can backup and export your track logs. I am able to import my track logs into Google Earth. That’s pretty cool if you ask me. I’ve always liked so see where I went overlayed on the Google! maps.

Once you hack your Mio c310x you can do any of the following:

  • Play movies
  • Add voices
  • Edit and plan POI’s on your PC
  • Play games
  • Install TomTom or other nav software
    • The general opinion is that MioMap is better than TomTom
  • Use ActiveSync
  • Access the Windows CE environment
  • Change skins

It is just a fun thing to tinker around with. My sister-in-law just ordered one from Frys.com for $189 plus tax (free shipping). I’ll help her get it all set up.

One of the coolest things that I like is that iG0 released a beta application that will allow you to edit/import/export/sync via ActiveSync POI’s (points-of-interest). My sister-in-law and I are both Realtors so this will be very handy when showing properties.

Here’s a list of the links I have used to make it this far:

I forgot one very important link:

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moment of truth for the cheap-o htpc

Well, I was going to my bro-in-laws house and I was going to bring the PC I was working on for him. I put a PCI video card in the PC that had, (what I thought), was RCA/Composite video out. When we hooked up the PC to his TV it was clear something wasn’t right. We could make out the boot up sequence on the TV but the sync was off. A quick web search suggested we needed an adapter of some sort.

Now, the video card in this PC has VGA, DVI, and Composite on it. I assumed that the composite connection was an output, but from what I read on the Internet, it might actually be video out. I didn’t buy this card. It was sent to me by my Dad who sent me his old computer. I assumed it would just work.

So, my brother-in-law ran out to Radio Shack and we talked with a guy there who really knew something. He was very helpful but they didn’t have what we needed. He understood our mission; watch a German soccer match on the TV via a PC using MythTv without our wives fully understanding how much time and money we put into this without spending any money. I was trying to finish the installation of MythTV on this PC while there were two 2 1/2 years olds, two six year olds, and one 10 year old running around. It was tough.

My brother-in-law is German and signed up for this new service he’s very happy about:

The $64,000,000 question is how to watch the recorded videos on his TV. I think with this old PC I am working on, we are probably 95% of the way there. Although, at this point, I think it might be easy/cheapest to get an xbox and put XBMC on it.

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cisco 7960 and trixbox

I’ve been able to borrow a brand spankin’ new Cisco 7960 SIP phone to play around with with my Trixbox server. This appears to be a really nice phone with a lot of features and a quality product. The phone seems to be pre-provisioned with my company’s settings and I am trying to figure out a way to “unlock” it to use with my Trixbox server.

I would consider this an advanced topic for myself since I don’t often get a chance to get my hands on cool hardware like this. The Trixbox server has some tftp files pre-installed but nothing really specific or the required provisioning files for my situation. The Cisco phone wants to phone home to the preconfigured tftp server. Sniffing the traffic and spoofing DNS is trivial but still a lot of work that I don’t need to do if I can figure out how to unlock this thing. I did find these links that appear to be useful, at least initially.

Obviously, I need to get into the details, but as I do, I’ll post my results.

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another htpc update

What a pain in the ass. I’ve been working on this every night. I was finally able to get get Ubuntu installed on this PC by the method using Knoppix as described before. But I forget to add a regular user, (since root can’t log into gdm), and I still have some issues to work out with grub.

When the PC boots up, I get the grub menu, but it is like it doesn’t see the menu1st file. I don’t know if I missed a step or fumble-fingered something, but I can type in the various things to get it to boot up at the grub menu:

grub> root (hd0,0)

grub> kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1

grub> initrd /initrd.img

grub> boot

And it boots up fine. Regardless, I am upgrading Ubuntu 6.06 to 6.10 so it’s taking some time to update all the various packages. I have to make this newbie-proof since when I give this to my bro-in-law he’s a complete linux-newbie. Plus this has to pass the wife-approval-factor.

I was able to score an eval PCI wireless card for this project. Ubuntu sees it, but since I have a hardwire, I haven’t spent much time in trying to get it working. I’ll post more details about the card when I get a little further down this road.

But it is going well considering. I feel like I got a chance to get back into Linux after being away for a while. So it has been a fun and good experience.

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tech sundays

Today (and a little bit of yesterday) was good with my tech goodies. With the DST situation, my hacked Tivos were about to have some problems. Yesterday they flashed up a message that said something like:

DST is three weeks early and your Tivo will work just fine, but the time displayed will be an hour off and any manually added recordings will need to be adjusted.

At work, there has been a mad dash to update all the machines that are affected by the DST change. My FreeBSD and linux boxes are all okay. So, last night I found the following link for my Directv tivos:

Hot damn! This worked flawlessly. For those of you that don’t know, if you have a Directv Series II tivo and have hacked it, you can’t have it dial in for its updates… otherwise any downloaded updates will whack your hacks and you have to start all over again. So I, and many many people, can’t simply have the DTiVo dial in and get the updates. You’ll have to do it manually. This worked nicely.

While I was at it, I also upgraded “tivowebplus” to version 2.0 which is a release candidate. I actually had to “downgrade” to 1.3.0 from 1.3.1. I can tell already I need to reinstall hackman. That’s easy (if you have done it before).

I also have an update on my cheapo HTPC. The CDROM/IDE drive issue never worked out. But I did find this link to install Ubuntu via Knoppix. This worked good, but I must have foobarred the grub portion since I am getting kernel panics when booting. I’ll have to monkey with it later, but I did spend a good bit of time on it this weekend.

Here’s some other “advanced” ways to install Ubuntu:

I also got some “eval” networking gear from a person in my office. Therefore I think I might be able to help my brother-in-law with his networking issue and the ultimate location of this HTPC. More on that as I work on it and his situation.

I’ve been thinking what’s the best thing to do with the gear I got from the company. I really want to do an honest eval, but the challenge is trying to come up with real world situations. I’ll sleep on it and see what comes up in my head in the morning.

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part II on the el cheapo HTPC

Someone asked me what an HTPC was.

  • Home Theater PC

I would say it is something of a Holy Grail among the Home Theater crowd. If you have a nice HT setup, this might be something you could spend a ton of money on and hours of fiddling and fine tuning. It’s a mix between something that is powerful enough to output HD-type of content yet is whisper-quiet and gets spousal-approval. This can be tough to do and get all three of the major requirements. Some have used quite successfully an Apple Mac-Mini, for example.

But when you got little or no money to spend on it…

In my previous posts, I was telling you about the cheapo HTPC I was going to help my brother-in-law build. And I also wrote that the PC he gave me to work with as way too old to be useful. And in other post, I mentioned I had an old Dell 450 Mhz that I was planning to turn off.

I did turn it off the other night. It was running FreeBSD 5.4. I wanted to upgrade it to 6.X but could never get it to boot of the CDROM. After tinkering with it, I determined that the secondary IDE port on the motherboard was bad. So I cannibalized the old PC my bro-in-law gave me for the CDROM and last thing I did was leave it while it was installing Ubuntu. Later, I’ll continue installing linux on it.

So I started with that old Dell. As I mentioned above about the bad IDE interface, I put the CDROM as a slave on the primary IDE controller and the hard drive as the primary. I seem to remember something about why this isn’t a good idea and I keep on. Sure, the installation goes really slow. So slow that I decide to let it run overnight. This morning, I check in and it is still doing something. I don’t know what but the mouse is sluggish and the CD is spinning like mad. I can only assume it has something to do with both devices being on the same IDE channel.

I remove the CD and reboot and FreeBSD comes up like nothing had happened. What a headache. Actually, it really is just a minor annoyance since once it does install, I probably won’t need the CDROM again since everything is downloaded or shared via SMB. I’ll probably start the installation again tonight and let it run for who knows how long…

My dad sent me a webcam so we can share vids of the family. I’d rather play with that tonight. I got it working under my Mac pretty easily:

And I just installed the Logitech software from the website for my WinXP desktop.

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Update on low cost HTPC

Man, I was wrong. I’ll admit it. In a previous post, I mentioned how I was going to help my brother-in-law with building a very low cost HTPC. He had an old PC laying around. I didn’t know what speed it was but it was clear that it was maxed out with RAM, had no USB ports, and no AGP slot.

So, I put in another PCI video card I had that had RCA video out and took out the modem card and installed a NIC in it. It booted up fine into W2k. For a quick proof of concept, I booted off a Knoppix CD to see if the hard drive and other devices would be seen.

Now, I wasn’t paying attention, up to this boot to the boot messages, but Knoppix came up and said there was only 32MB free and I should make a swap space on the primary hard drive at least double my available RAM and it recommended between 60MB and 120MB. Hoo-boy. I then saw that it was an AMD K6 at 199Mhz. It also had a 4GB hard drive. This was going to be more trouble than it was worth.

I have a really old Dell that is 450Mhz. I just turned it off so maybe I’ll give this to him. I am now interested enough in continuing with this proof of concept as I have never played with MythTV. I still think a modded Xbox with XBMC might be the best way to go.

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ViaTalk, Trixbox, and your IVR

I set up a quick page on my ViaTalk setup. You can access the link via this page:

ViaTalk and Trixbox

Like I said before, this is a really slick setup. I have a different “time condition” for the weekend that will give the caller a chance to call our cell phones if we don’t answer the main line within 30 seconds. The trial and error paid off since I have a much better understanding of how it’s all glued together.