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|  I'm now able to hear the doorbell in my garage thanks to a pair of X10 devices. One device senses the AC voltage being applied to the doorbell and the other is a remote announce device. I used a small audio transformer (in series) with the 16V AC of the doorbell circuit. When the doorbell switch is pressed, the output side of the transformer produces a smal AC signal to the detector device. Now I can hear the doorbell in the garage, and I have a extra announce device that I can take around the house and plug it into any 120V outlet where I might be out of earshot of the front doorbell. | | |
| One step closer! I now have kubuntu running on an external USB drive. The initial instructions that I had would only work on an actual flash drive, and not an external USB. Thanks to the dd command on linux I was able to clone the flash drive partition to the USB disk. A separate dd command took care of the MBR and I'm now live with kubuntu. I like this distrubution, but I've found that many of these thumb drive distros lack some convieniences like audio drivers. My plan is to turn this drive into the mainstay development disk, and continue to experiment with Sidux as a side project. UPDATE: Unfortunately this disk does not boot on my old laptop (sigh!) | | |
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This Thanksgiving I've decided to (once and for all) learn how the stinkin' Linux kernel gets loaded. I've re-inherited an old (Circa 1998) Dell Laptop that my wife used to use. The bios does not support booting from USB and I've got this fetish about having a *single* external USB drive that carries my development environment. I've spent some time building bootable USB flash drives, but they just don't fit the bill. It's great that the drudgery of building a bootable flash drive has gone away with some great tools out there, but as a developer, I found them lacking. I came across Sidux Linux recently and it's pretty dang great, so I want a bootable USB drive running Sidux that also will boot on my *old* laptop also. That's a pretty tall order, and I'm not there yet. The puzzle get's more complicated because there are some distributions that *will* boot on my old laptop (Puppy Linux and MCN Live for example). Having used Linux for years now I have a passing familiarity with lilo and grub, but it was never intersting enough for me to really explore at a detailed level. After lots of experimentation I cam across Martin Purschke's rescue CD which is a wonderful and thorough example of the kernel boot process. I've been experimenting with quite a bit. More to follow ... | | |
| Well, after many (four at least) weeks I've finally upgraded my media box to SLES 10 SP1. This is not a problem unless you want to really use the computer for any modern media interaction (youtube anyone?). Through some great resources (outlined here) I can wrestle SLES 10 reluctantly into a state of utility. I'm a bit jaded by the product, and I'm not really jazzed about it currently. I *have* successfully been able to have SLES10 on all my development platforms including my laptop (still don't have wifi with SP1, however but I'm (guardedly) optimistic. The defining feature that was keeping SP1 from being my media disk was that I was not able to install tvtime, allowing video input on my system. So often these days I've become a software researcher not a software developer when I encounter problems. After some googling I found the magic bullet on how to compile tvtime from source. This is what I was looking for. I already had Pandora working, and youtube as well as DVD playback, but no video input. This completed my initial testing requirements for SP1.
Disclosure: This (unfortunately) is a retouched photo. Because tvtime does not play well with any Linux screenshot utility, the above image is a hack. The tvtime authors glibly proclaim that it's not their fault (sigh).
P.S. Still haven't forked over the twenty bucks to buy Window Blinds after the 30 day trial expired. Maybe when my stimulus package refund gets here :)
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| Ooooh such nerding that has occurred. Blogging has been on the backburner for no damn particular reason, except that I've a new laptop, and it's take a bit of time for me to get it configured. My Dell D800 completely died one Monday and was replaced by a Latitude D810 which I'm quite happy with. I've delayed the inevitable until 2008, but I finally migrated to Windows XP (what?). Strange as it may sound I never found a compelling reason to use XP on my home systems. I now have (gulp!) two systems at home that are using XP. A screenshot of my desktop show my spiffy new Window Blinds theme (from wincustomize.com):
I *finally* found the flat screen that won for price/performance for me. After way too much looking I settled on a Samsung 40". For the price I'm really quite satisified and the picture looks great hooked up to my laptop via VGA. After almost four months of shopping I'm done shopping. Quite a relief.
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