• Koss SB49 computer headset (headphones + microphone): The microphone died.  Well, it doesn’t seem fully dead but on many devices it is so quiet that it’s basically useless.  Fortunately, Koss has a lifetime “no questions asked” repair or replacement warranty.  You ship it to them on your own dime and include $6 for return shipping.  They take care of the rest.  Hopefully, this will go out today and I’ll get it back sometime early in the new year.

• Western Digital Caviar Blue 640GB hard drive: After the hassles I had with Windows 7 on my new Lenovo PC, I wasn’t expecting any further trouble for a while.  Unfortunately, one night last week my wife and I head a high pitched, very grating noise.  I finally tracked it down to my computer.  I hoped it was a fan but it wasn’t – it was the hard drive.  I shut down the machine and when I tried rebooting, it wouldn’t boot back into Windows.  So, the drive is shot.  I contacted Lenovo about it and they’re sending me a new drive, which should arrive tomorrow.  I’m always nervous about single drives being shipped.  Hopefully, it’ll work as intended.  I really don’t want to spend any more time fiddling with this computer.

• Verilux 26W compact fluorescent light bulbs. These are great.  I ordered them over the summer.  They’re 26W, which, in terms of light output, is approximately equivalent to 150W incandescent bulbs.  However, rather than being a sickly yellow color, these are very clean white light – 6500K to be exact.  While the bulbs themselves are great, I’ve had a bunch of problems with the delivery.
  When I first ordered them, one of the 2 bulbs in the double pack arrived broken.  The company sent me a replacement, which arrived intact.  However, one of my original bulbs just burned out, well shy of the 10,000 hours they’re supposed to last.  So, I contacted the company about it and they sent me a replacement but it had the wrong connection type.  So, they sent me a double pack (very nice) of the correct connection.  However, when these arrived, they were both broken.
  The customer service rep I’ve been dealing with has been great – very helpful and very apologetic about the various problems that have occurred.  After I received the broken bulbs she said she would send me two packs of bulbs (that’s 4 bulbs) because of the all the hassle I’ve gone through and that she would personally package them herself to make sure they arrived intact.  A lot of companies would probably have just stopped responding to my emails but Verilux obviously puts a strong emphasis on customer service and it shows.

Update (12/23/09): I just received the bulbs.  None of them were broken.  Sweet.  I am all stocked up on these bulbs for a while.

My wife took the headphones to the post office, so they’re on their way back to Koss.

Update (12/24/09): I received the hard drive today from Lenovo.  I don’t think I’ll have time to deal with it for a few days, though.

Update (12/26/09): According to USPS delivery confirmation, my headphones were delivered to Koss today.  I wonder how long it’ll take for them to come back to me.

Update (01/05/10): I received the new hard drive on Christmas Eve but didn’t have time to deal with it until December 28th or so.  The new hard drive was partitioned but not formatted.  Since there wasn’t already a Windows installation on it, my upgrade version of Win 7 wouldn’t let me activate it.  So, I did the old double install trick.  I just shut the machine off and ran the installer again.  It detected the Windows installation I had just installed and let me activate it using my key for the upgrade media.  This only added like 20 minutes to the whole operation.

With the OS installed, I set up my awesome dual SATA HDD dock to copy data over from the hard drives that I pulled from our old machine.  So far, I’ve only copied over the really important stuff: photos, videos, and music.  Our documents and other stuff will come later.

Last night, I started preparing to send the defunct drive back to Lenovo.  I used Eraser to securely delete all the files on the data partition.  We basically only had family photos and music on there but they don’t need to see all that stuff.  Interestingly, the drive behaved itself and didn’t produce any grinding noises.  However, when I tried to delete things off the OS partition, it acted strangely, sometimes taking an extraordinarily long period of time to delete a single file.  So, I’m confident that the drive is not healthy and needs to be replaced.

Today, I boxed up the drive and stuck on the shipping label they sent me.  Now I just need to get it to Fed Ex or have them come and pick it up.

Update (01/11/10): I sent off the hard drive on the 5th or 6th.  I’m still waiting for my headphones.  In the meantime, I’ve gone back to using my old Sony MDR-D11 headphones.  They’re very compact for closed circumaural headphones, they sound pretty good, and they’re pretty comfortable.  They’re a little muddier than the Koss model I’m getting repaired and, of course, they don’t have a microphone.  Hopefully, I’ll get the Koss phones back soon – I’ve missed being able to use them for Skype conversations.

Update (01/11/10 #2): I received the headphones this afternoon.  As it turns out, they didn’t repair my old headphones; they simply sent me new ones.  This isn’t surprising at all to me.  In any case, it looks like I’m back in business.  The headphones sound good and the microphone works again.  I’m not thrilled that it cost me about $12 to get $30 headphones replaced, but it’s better than having to buy a brand new pair, so I can’t complain too much.

So, (knock on wood) it looks like I’ve got everything resolved.  My headset was replaced, my hard drive was replaced, and my light bulbs were replaced.  Hopefully, it will be a while before I have to deal with any further customer service people.  I can’t complain about any of the interactions with customer service reps or about the outcome of those interactions.  Everyone was pleasant and helpful but dealing with this stuff takes time and mental energy, not to mention the period of down time during which you’re without the item you bought and have grown to rely upon.

While I thought this would be a great gift, I was a little concerned that it wouldn’t work on the university’s wireless network in our on-campus apartment.  Sure enough, when I tried to set it up yesterday I couldn’t get it to work.  Any time a new device tries to connect to the university’s wireless network the DHCP server assigns it a temporary local IP address and redirects it to a registration web page.  Unfortunately, the Eye-Fi isn’t really a network adapter so you can’t use it to browse the web.  Thus, you can’t visit the registration page in order to register it for use on the network.

After the automatic setup procedure didn’t work I jotted down the card’s MAC address (which is easy to determine using the included software) and emailed the IT people on campus to ask if they could manually add the card’s MAC address to the list of MAC addresses the DHCP server will supply with IP addresses.  They were very helpful and responded that they had added the card’s MAC address as I had asked.

So, now it appears that I’m all set. I spent some time this afternoon getting it set up and I’ve successfully uploaded 5 or 6 pictures and one video using the device. All in all, it’s pretty nice. Hopefully, using this card will simplify the process of getting pictures from the camera to the computer but only time will tell if the device lives up to its promise.

If the card I got my wife works out well, I’ll seriously consider buying the Eye-Fi Pro, which permits you to upload RAW files as well as JPGs and videos.  In addition, it enables you to set up an ad-hoc connection with your PC so you can bypass local wireless networks and upload pictures directly from your card to your computer.  This type of functionality typically costs much more than either the Eye-Fi Pro’s street price of $100 or its MSRP of $150.

However, upon rebooting, I was greeted with a message that Windows Explorer had crashed.  I tried restarting Explorer but it crashed again.  I tried rebooting a couple more times but to no avail.

So far, each crash has been one of two types:

Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: Explorer.EXE
Application Version: 6.1.7600.16404
Application Timestamp: 4a765771
Fault Module Name: ntdll.dll
Fault Module Version: 6.1.7600.16385
Fault Module Timestamp: 4a5be02b
Exception Code: c000041d
Exception Offset: 000000000003d8db
OS Version: 6.1.7600.2.0.0.256.4
Locale ID: 1033

or

Problem Event Name: InPageCoFire
Error Status Code: c000009c
Faulting Media Type: 00000003
Damaged File Name: SyncCenter.dll
OS Version: 6.1.7600.2.0.0.256.4
Locale ID: 1033

The second one has been more prevalent by far.  Generally, if the first one is observed, it occurs first thing after a reboot.  All subsequent crashes are of the second type.  So, I searched for this information online.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to locate any information on this particular type of error.  A search of “Windows 7″ + InPageCoFire + SyncCenter.dll returns no hits on Google.  However, I did find some general advice, suggesting that reverting to an older known-good restore point could help.

So, I got out the install DVD and used it to go back to an earlier restore point.  I noticed that there was a restore point from early this morning, just prior to a critical update having been installed. I figured this must of have caused the problem so surely, reverting to the restore point prior to the update would fix it.  Unfortunately, it did not.

I tried reverting to an even earlier restore point.  That still didn’t help.  So, I tried running the built-in memory diagnostics.  That didn’t appear to produce any errors but I can’t be sure because it’s supposed to give you a report once you restart the machine and log in to Windows.  I can never get far enough to see the report.

I just downloaded memtest86+ and I’m running that right now.  My current expectation, however, is that there are no problems with the memory.  Rather, I expect that somehow SyncCenter.dll (and possibly ntdll.dll)  got corrupted.  I don’t know how to fix that.  I had a similar problem back in Windows 95 with some corrupted DLLs.  I ended up solving the problem by copying the affected DLLs from a friend’s computer.  However, I don’t know if I’ll be able to take that approach this time because I can’t even use Windows Explorer.  Perhaps I could use a Linux Live CD and the necessary DLLs on a USB drive to make the switch.

Or, I could just reinstall the OS.  When I installed the OS, I partitioned the 640GB drive into two partitions: 150GB for the OS and programs (on C:) and about 450GB for my data (on D:).  This would enable me to wipe the C drive and reinstall without requiring me to recopy all my data.  We’ll see.  If I end up having to spend much more time on this, I’m just going to wipe the drive and start over.

If anyone reading this has any suggestions on things I could try, please let me know in the comments.  Thanks!

UPDATE 1: According to this site, SyncCenter.dll is statically linked to ntdll.dll and won’t run properly if ntdll.dll is corrupt or missing.  So, maybe SyncCenter.dll is OK and the real problem is ntdll.dll.  I’ll have to see if I can find a way to replace this file.  Also, memtest86+ completed with no errors, so the problem doesn’t appear to be RAM-related.

UPDATE 2: After a bit more digging online, I found some references to problems with Windows Explorer crashing because of a weird interaction with Firefox.  I tried to uninstall Firefox but Windows Explorer crashed too rapidly for me to even open the Uninstall Programs window.  So, I booted into Safe Mode.  I was curious to see whether I still got the crashes.  I did.  Fortunately, in Safe Mode I managed to uninstall Firefox.  I rebooted into regular Windows, but much to my chagrin, Windows Explorer crashed again.

Earlier in the evening I had posted my problem on a Microsoft forum but I subsequently decided that all this troubleshooting was for the birds and that I should just go ahead and reinstall the OS.  The last time around, I had used my university’s site license to install Windows 7 Enterprise.  However, with the possibility that my problem was due to the corruption of a file, I wondered about how reliable it was to download a nearly 3GB ISO file via wireless, burn it on a DVD and then install it.  Fortunately, I had also bought a copy of Windows 7 Professional from Win741.com for $30 earlier this fall.  I paid a bit extra and had them send me a disc.  I decided I would use this disc to reinstall Windows 7 since it was a pressed DVD and is probably more reliable from a data integrity standpoint than a downloaded 3GB ISO image burned on a DVD.

The installation went fine.  A clean install seems to generally take 20-30 minutes, which I think is pretty reasonable for an operating system.  I used Ninite to install a bunch of software we use.  Importing all my music into iTunes was easy – I had spent some time cleaning up my iTunes library with my last install and since I had put all that data on my data partition, it was easy to import again.

Importing photos into Picasa looks like it’ll take a bit more work.  The photos themselves are no problem; the problem lies with the face recognition.  When I copied all our pictures over from the old hard drive, the face “groups” were preserved (in the .picasa.ini files in each folder containing photos) but the names associated with those groups were not.  So, I didn’t have to do any obnoxious manual sorting like I did when I first installed Picasa on our old machine but I did have to input names to go with those face groups or at least connect those face groups to contacts from my wife’s set of Gmail contacts.

This time around, it looks as though the face who were connected to Gmail contacts have had those connections preserved while it looks like I’ll need to reenter the names of people (mostly children) who weren’t in my wife’s contact list and whose names I had entered manually.  I’m going to let it crank over night and in the morning I’ll see what needs to be done.

In any case, I hope the curious case of the crashing Windows Explorer doesn’t rear its ugly head again.  Though, if it does, hopefully, by then I’ll have received a useful answer to the question I posted on the forum.

The first was taken using a zone plate, which I got ages ago but never used.  I got it last year at my birthday in a kit like this, which includes a device for holding photographic pinholes, the pinhole itself, and an adapter to make it fit my camera.  I had taken a few photos using the pinhole but never the zone plate.  I like the effect.  There are a couple of downsides to using either the pinhole or the zone plate, however.

First, these have incredibly narrow apertures, which means that, in order to get a correctly exposed image, you need a very long exposure or very high ISO setting.  I kept the ISO reasonably low but I used my tripod to give me the stability I needed for a long exposure.  I used a 1.3 second exposure, which, for a shot taken in the middle of the day, is really long.  This zone plate has f/56 (not 5.6, 56!), which is pretty wide for this type of device.  The pinhole I have is something like f/130, so it would require a much longer exposure.

Second, whereas taking photographs with traditional lenses is pretty forgiving when it comes to junk on your sensor, pinhole and zone plate photography is extremely unforgiving.  I had to do a bunch of spot removal in Lightroom to get rid of a bunch of ugly splotches on the image.  The image below is a 1:1 crop from an image I took of the same scene with the pinhole.  There are at least 4 spots that are clearly visible, though they vary in severity.  I had never noticed these spots before in shots taken using my normal lenses.  I guess if I want to do any more photography using my pinhole or zone plate, it’s probably time to have my sensor cleaned again.

The most recent picture is my first foray into high dynamic range (HDR) photography.  I’ve been interested in this for a while but never really pursued it.  The point of HDR images is to make details visible in both the highlights and shadows of an image. Generally, both the camera sensor and any typical viewing medium (like a monitor or even printed photos) don’t have enough dynamic range to either properly capture or properly display details in both an image’s shadows and highlights.  There is just too much difference in brightness between the darkest parts and the lightest parts in a scene for the camera to capture everything or for it to all be faithfully reproduced on a monitor or print.  So some kind of workaround is necessary.

Due to the limitations of the camera’s sensor, capturing the details in both the highlights and shadows requires multiple images to be taken at different settings, a technique called exposure bracketing.  In the simplest case, exposure bracketing involves taking the following 3 photos: one that’s significantly underexposed (to capture details in the highlights), one that’s properly exposed, and one that’s significantly overexposed (to capture details in the shadows).  These images are then imported into a program on a computer that merges them to produce a composite image that has a much higher dynamic range than can be captured with a single exposure.  Unfortunately, this image also has a much higher dynamic range than can be displayed on a monitor or on a print, so another step is necessary.  This step is called tone mapping.

Tone mapping takes a HDR image that can’t be displayed and maps its brightness values back to a range of values that can be displayed.  When an image is captured, the darkest darks and the brightest brights are “clipped”, which means they’re simply cut off – detail in those areas is lost.  Taking multiple pictures of the same scene using different exposure settings gets back the data that was clipped.  Tone-mapping could simply clip the data again, however that would throw away the detail we want to preserve.  Instead, tone-mapping compresses the dynamic range, so that the details are preserved in both the highlights and shadows.  Modern tone mapping algorithms are actually quite a bit more complicated than simply compressing the dynamic range.  Rather, they operate on the data both globally and locally to try to maximize the extent to which details are visible in the image while simultaneously compressing the dynamic range to something that can be viewed on a monitor or print.  This often results in a very striking, though sometimes unnatural-looking image.

Yesterday I was looking through my to do list and I found a reminder to buy some software for making HDR before I graduate so I can take advantage of their (60%!!) educational discount.  Having just sold our exercise bike, I had some cash on-hand so I decided to go ahead and buy the software while I thought about it.  I bought Photomatix from HDRSoft for about $40 rather than the usual $100.  I remembered that I was out a month or two ago and for some reason decided to take some shots using exposure bracketing, so I looked through my Lightroom catalog and found a few sets of exposure bracketed images.  I picked the set that I liked best, exported it to Photomatix, created the HDR image, re-imported to Lightroom, fiddled a bit with saturation and noise reduction, and then exported from Lightroom to PixelPost.  Done.

Having a tripod makes HDR photography easier, so I’m looking forward to using my new tripod along with my new HDR software to produce some good looking images in the future.  Stay tuned.

Anyway, I have wanted a sturdy tripod for a while.  After a lot of looking, I decided that I wanted a ball head since I had grown tired of having to adjust two or three knobs in order to get my composition right.  I settled on the Manfrotto 322RC2. It seemed like it would allow incredibly fast composition changes and would be very comfortable to use.  So, that found its way onto my wish list.

By pooling together money I got for my birthday I was able to get the 322RC2 head with the Manfrotto 055XPROB tripod legs.  I haven’t had a lot of opportunities to use everything yet but so far I really like it.  The ball head is so nice.  It is super easy to change your composition, very quick, and it locks solidly into place.  The legs are big – if I extend the legs fully, the eyepiece of the camera is at eye level without raising the center column at all.  This is great because it maximizes stability and gives me some freedom to play around with shots that might require the camera to be above my eye level.

Shortly after I got my kit and put everything together I took a picture of my wife and me enjoying our nerdy lifestyle:

Of course, this picture isn’t going to win any photo contests – it’s just a fun way of documenting what our evenings sometimes look like.

Earlier this week, I needed to provide someone with a head shot of myself for a poster on my research work.  I couldn’t find anything suitable among the pictures in my collection since I’m normally the one behind the camera.  So, I needed to have one taken.  I decided to try taking one of myself using my tripod.  In addition to the tripod, I also used my Pentax Remote Control F to trigger the shutter.  I wanted the picture to have a background nicer than the curtains in our apartment or something such so I went down to the banks of the Charles River and set up the camera.  I had to experiment with the camera height in order to make sure that the banks of the river in the background didn’t line up with the middle of my head, which would have been distracting.  I also ended up using my circular polarizing filter control the appearance of the clouds.

Below is my favorite from the whole batch, which includes probably 2 good pictures and about 45 bad pictures.  I felt pretty silly standing there smiling at the camera and taking pictures of myself as people drove by on Memorial Dr. and as runners strode by on the running path but I’m pretty happy with the result and I’ll probably never see any of those people again, anyway.

I’m excited about the possibilities the tripod creates for me.  I’m looking forward to trying my hand at some high dynamic range photography.  While a tripod isn’t essential for these, it certainly makes things easier since HDR pictures require at least 2 source images that have to be properly aligned before combining them to create the final product.  Also, I’m looking forward to being able to photograph the city at night.  I have plenty of good pictures looking across the Charles at Boston but none of those I’ve taken at night have been acceptably sharp.  I’m hoping my new tripod will change that.

All in all, I’m very happy with the setup, which also includes a padded carrying bag and a separate strap for carrying the tripod without the bag.  Given how solidly these things are built, I expect to be using them for years to come and probably passing them on to my offspring.

I’d like to thank my parents and my parents-in-law for their generous gifts, which not only got me the tripod but also got me the remote control and circular polarizing filter at Christmas.  Thanks!

Yesterday, my wife went out to Target and came home with a headband for him. You can see a picture of him wearing it by clicking the link below.

I just checked my records and it shipped from Dell on September 5th, 2003.  We likely received it about a week later.  So, we’ve had it almost exactly 6 years.

Over the years, it has undergone quite a  few changes.  It’s a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 with a 800MHz front-side bus.  The processor, the motherboard, and the case are about the only components that are original but they have been a solid core around which to build.  A new graphics card required that I upgrade the power supply (now 500 W).  I expanded the RAM from 512MB to 1.5GB.  I’ve upgraded or swapped out hard drives a couple of times.  I’ve upgraded or swapped out optical drives a couple of times as well.  The floppy drive was replaced due to fatal dust intake but its replacement has also succumbed…

Despite the upgrades, the fact remains that it is a single core processor with an 800MHz FSB connecting to pretty slow RAM and it’s definitely showing its age in terms of performance.  When we finally retire it, it will likely find new life as a Linux machine for my daughter.  Until then, I expect it will continue to chug along like it has been doing almost uninterrupted for 6 years.  Thank you, Rechneer, you’ve served us well.

First the issues that motivated me to upgrade:

1) I wanted to use Netbeans 6.5.  This requires Subversion 1.5 or higher.  I had Ubuntu 7.10 installed and the package repository for that version contains only version 1.4 or something. I probably could have forced it to use a version from a different repository, but I didn’t know what the dependencies would be and this approach usually leads to a broken or less stable system.

2) We’ve been playing our music from iTunes on our Windows computer through our stereo via a USB FM transmitter.  The sound quality isn’t great and occasionally the reception is really dependent on where people are standing in the room – not ideal.  So, I copied all our music over to our MythTV machine with the idea that we could play all our music from it.  However, I couldn’t install the Songbird .deb file on 7.10 and I couldn’t get the regular version to play anything other than MP3s.  Since most of our tracks are (unencrypted) AAC, this is a problem.  By upgrading to a more recent version of Ubuntu, I hoped to solve this problem.

3) The fan on the graphics card I had been using (NVidia GeForce 5200) died due to excessive dust intake.  I wanted to replace it with a better card that has passive cooling (i.e. no fan but a good heat sink).

4) We started watching Hulu using this machine.  Under my old setup, the TV-out functionality had been handled by the MPEG-2 decoder on my Hauppauge PVR-350.  While this looks good for watching shows in MythTV, it’s pretty jerky if you try to watch other video.  So, I wanted to stop relying on my PVR-350 for TV-out and move it to the graphics card. I probably could have made this change without upgrading the software, but it’s just easier to let the installer auto-detect everything.  Also, some MythTV functions are not supported by the PVR-350 TV-out, so pressing certain buttons on the remote would cause the system to freeze or crash – not good.

The upgrade:

I ordered a new graphics card (NVidia GeForce 6200 4x AGP) and a new hard drive (320GB Western Digital EIDE) from GovConnection.  Let me say that I love GovConnection because I get a discount as well as free shipping due to my affiliation with MIT.  Plus, we have an account manager, so if I have any questions, I can send him an email or call him.  It’s great.  Anyway, I got a new hard drive because my preferred method of installing a new operating system is to take out the old drive and put it away for safe keeping, install the OS on the new drive, and then copy over any files I need.  This method works well if the installation takes too long and you need to use your computer again – just pop the old drive back in and you’re good to go.  This time around, I used an old drive I had put away for safe keeping from a previous OS installation (80GB Western Digital EIDE) as the boot drive and the new drive I ordered to store all my media.

I opened up the case, vacuumed it out, installed the graphics card, installed the drives, cut my hand on a sharp edge of the case, and put the case back together.  I decided to do a clean install rather than a version upgrade because I would have needed to do 3 consecutive version upgrades to get to the most recent version (7.10 -> 8.04 -> 8.10 -> 9.04). Using the Mythbuntu 9.04 ISO I had burned earlier, I started up the installer.  Everything went smoothly until I got to the partitioner.  I learned to install Linux back in 2002-2003 on old versions of Debian so I’m most comfortable with the manual partitioner, however, I got momentarily tripped up while trying to partition the disk.  I made 2 swap partitions on the 80GB boot drive – one at the beginning and one at the end.  I made an ext3 partition in the middle with the remaining space.  Then, I formatted my 320GB drive using XFS (because it does really fast deletes on large files – necessary for a DVR).  I told the partitioner to mount this disk at /media, since it would be storing all my DVR recordings and music.  However, I got an error saying that I was trying to install a separate filesystem on /media and that it needed to be part of the root filesystem.  I couldn’t figure out what the problem was.  Finally, after maybe 20 minutes, I realized that Ubuntu uses the /media mount point to mount removable disks when they are plugged into the system.  So, I changed the mount point of my 320GB drive to /data and everything worked.  Lesson learned: Don’t try to create a partition and mount it at /media – that mount point is reserved by the operating system.

Once the partitioner has done its thing, the installer copies over all the files you need.  Mythbuntu installs XFCE by default since it is less resource intensive than KDE or Gnome.  It also basically takes care of almost everything you need that is related to MythTV.  In addition to installing and partially configuing MythTV, it installs MySQL and creates the appropriate user and database, it installs Apache2 and configures MythWeb to communicate with MySQL, it installs and configures LIRC with a little input from you.  You still have to do some configuration of your MythTV backend and frontend, though.  I had some recordings on my previous MythTV installation that I didn’t want to lose so I followed these instructions to migrate the recordings over into my new setup.  They worked perfectly!  Also, when the installer was setting up the remote control (LIRC), I didn’t see my particular remote in the list of options, so I picked the one that seemed closest.  I still had my config files from the old setup, so I figured I could just copy those over.  However, once I started up the MythTV frontend, I was shocked to find the remote already worked!  When I was setting up my tuner, the default was V4L something.  I picked that but it didn’t work.  So, I switched to the MPEG-2 ivtv tuner and that seems to work.  Lessonss learned: 1) if you have a PVR-350, don’t pick V4L as your tuner type.  2) if you have a PVR-350 do choose the generic Hauppauge remote when you’re asked to choose a remote – it’ll work without any further intervention.

The installer asks about how you want the video to be displayed.  I choose TV-out via S-Video.  After everything was setup and I rebooted the system, everything was displayed on my TV.  This was great but I also have an LCD monitor that I want to use for other tasks.  Unfortunately, I had a really hard time getting a picture back on my LCD monitor.  I didn’t want to edit any files manually because I didn’t know whether the settings were now automatically managed by some program since a lot has changed in Ubuntu since 2007.  So, I tried the display configuration utilities in XFCE – no dice.  I installed Gnome and tried its display configuration utilities – no dice.  I installed KDE and tried its display configuration utilities – no dice.  I tried the NVidia display utilities (in package “nvidia-settings”) – no dice.  In the end, I had to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf manually and fiddle with the nvidia settings utility.  It turns out that you need to set up 2 devices in the config file.  Since both displays are running off the same card with a single bus id, you need to specify a screen in each entry as well. Initially this didn’t work because I had set the S-Video port as screen 0 and the VGA port as screen 1.  These need to be reversed.  Then, you have to go into the NVidia utilities and enable the 2nd display (the TV), which, for some reason is disabled by default.  After some tweaking I got it all to work.  Lessons learned: 1) don’t be afraid to manually edit your xorg.conf file. 2) separate ports on a graphics card are accessed using two separate device entries in xorg.conf – both have the same busid entry but different screen numbers.

Finally, I had things mostly working.  I could start MythTV up on my TV screen and watch TV or a recorded show.  However, when I exited out of watching either live TV or a show, MythTV crashed.  I looked around online and found a group of people complaining about the same problem.  Fortunately, they had a solution: remove pulseaudio.  This fixes the problem but limits what your system can do.  So, if you reinstall pulseaudio, also mark libavcodec and libavutil for reinstallation.  This fixed the problem for others and it worked for me as well.  Lesson learned: if you install Mythbuntu 9.04, reinstall pulseaudio, libavcodec and libavutil to fix problems with MythTV crashing.

I think the upgrade has already accomplished most of what I set out to accomplish when I undertook this project.  MythTV works, the remote works, the MythTV features that I couldn’t use before (like fast forward) now work, watching shows on Hulu is now much smoother, I have Subversion 1.5 installed along with Netbeans 6.5.  There are still a couple of things on my to do list, however.  I haven’t installed Songbird yet, so I don’t know if we’ll be able to stop using the FM transmitter just yet.  Also, I am still having a problem with the wireless networking.  When I reboot, my wireless card doesn’t work.  I have to type >sudo ifup wlan0 to get the network to work.  Perhaps I need to put that in a startup script or something.  On the other hand, I have the wireless card in the bottom-most PCI slot in my computer.  The ethernet card, which is in the slot above it, is enabled when the machines boots.  Maybe if I just swap the cards’ slots, the wireless card will be enabled and the ethernet card disabled.  I’ll have to give that a try.

As a last note, working with old hardware is a pain.  This computer was bought in September of 2002, so it’s nearly 7 years old.  Nowadays, graphics cards almost exclusively use the PCIe interface; my computer uses AGP (4x AGP at that!).  Nowadays, many computers use serial ATA connections exclusively to connect to hard drives and optical drives; my computer uses exclusively IDE.  What I found in pricing components is that antiquated technology is more expensive than current technology.  That is, low-end AGP graphics cards are more expensive than low-end PCIe cards.  Similarly, all the good deals on hard drives are on SATA drives, not IDE.  In fact, the selection of IDE drives available at all is very small.  Hopefully, though, I won’t have to deal with this old hardware much longer.  I look forward to ultimately replacing this machine either with a more powerful MythTV box or with a Windows Media Center machine hopefully with CableCard tuners.

At the beginning of March we were back in Pittsburgh, where we’ll be moving once I graduate, and we started looking at houses in the hopes of ultimately buying one. Thinking about actually owning a house and getting to customize it in whatever ways we see fit really got me thinking about how we should set up all our electronics, including TV, DVD Player, Stereo, DVR, computers, and backup storage. Ideally, it would all work together and make things basically accessible all over the house.

Ok, so how do I start explaining my thoughts on this, since it involves so many different components? First, I guess I’ll start talking about the network. If possible, I’d like to avoid cables. Cables are the fastest and most robust solution but I don’t want to have to drill lots of holes and pull cable through the walls. Cable is also very inflexible – if my wife wants to rearrange our furniture, any jacks I had made for the cable might no longer suit the arrangement. Fortunately, 802.11n provides an alternative. It seems to have enough range and enough bandwidth to meet all of my needs for the foreseeable future. My work laptop supports 802.11a/b/g/n and we plan to replace our main desktop machine at some point in the next year, so we can get it configured to support 802.11n. Plus, practically all new computers either come with 802.11n networking built-in or they offer it as an upgrade. So, it shouldn’t be too hard or too expensive to create a home network based on 802.11n. In my limited research so far, this seems like the best router/access point for the job.

Next on the list is backup storage. Ever since it was announced, I’ve been interested in Windows Home Server (WHS). It’s now pretty mature and supports lots of great features. So, the plan is to have a WHS machine attached to one of the gigabit ethernet ports on the router. It’ll back up all our machines, provide a network print server, and store all our media (like pictures, home movies, and music). Having all our data in one place makes it easy to then do an offsite backup. There’s a JungleDisk client for WHS and I recently read about a new service called CrashPlan, which enables you to do offsite backups to other people’s computers. So, for example, I could backup our WHS machine to a computer at my parents’ house using CrashPlan and I wouldn’t have to pay per-gigabyte bandwidth and storage costs like I would if I backed up to Amazon using JungleDisk. Plus, I could “seed” the offsite backup by doing the first backup locally and then moving the computer to the offsite location. This would dramatically reduce the time necessary for the first backup (probably from weeks to hours). The upfront cost is higher and I would be responsible for any maintenance but it may be worth it, depending on how much stuff I find myself wanting to back up. While I initially thought it would be cool to build my own WHS machine, I’m now thinking that it might be better to get one of the dedicated WHS machines from HP. They are small, quiet, and have room for up to 4 SATA drives. Plus, the cost of the WHS license is included and you get some additional software that seems really useful. I think I’d have a hard time building a computer with a 4-bay hot-pluggable SATA backplane for less than $500 including the $100 WHS license. Those backplanes are like $100 by themselves!

I’ve also had ideas of having a computer in the kitchen. My wife sometimes finds recipes online and prints them out. It would be really convenient for her if she had a small touch-screen computer in the kitchen where she could pull up recipes, bookmark them or save them locally. It would also be cool if she could view videos, listen to music, or have occasional web chats from this machine while she’s busy in the kitchen. The HP TouchSmart series is too big and too expensive. Something like the Asus Eee Top seems to have both a better size and pricepoint. The Eee Top has 802.11n and a screen that could be used for watching 720p video, though I’m not sure if the integrated graphics is up to the challenge. Hopefully, Asus will release a new model based on the NVIDIA Ion platform with a dual core Atom processor. According to a recent Engadget article, there are a bunch of so-called nettops coming out in the next year that will be based on this combination. Hopefully, at least a couple of these new Ion + Atom 330 machines will have the built-in touch-screen, bluetooth (for a wireless keyboard), and a VESA mount. The ultimate would be if I had the computer mounted on one of the cupboard doors and I had a wireless keyboard built into the cabinetry like an under-the-counter pull-out cutting board. Sweet!

In part 2, I’ll look at the TV and DVR. This is an especially complicated issue because the proper solution is not independent of the service provider we choose for TV. I’m just starting to get knowledgeable about issues like CableCards and how they affect DVRs, etc. Hopefully, I’ll post part 2 soon.

So, at some point in the not-too-distant future I’d like to upgrade and I’ve been keeping my eye on what’s in the pipeline…

Fortunately, there is something great in the pipeline: Core i7 aka Nehalem.  With this chip, Intel is finally doing away with its antiquated front-side bus architecture and going with a 3-channel on-die memory controller.  This will prevent Intel CPUs from being chronically bandwidth starved any longer.  Plus, last I heard, Nehalem is 30% faster than Penryn cores at the same clock speed in scenarios in which the CPU is not bandwidth-limited.  Recently published benchmarks show that this processor is a beast and very well-suited for demanding media applications.

However, hardware is only one part of the equation.  The other part of the equation is the operating system.  I still haven’t used Vista at all, so I can’t comment on it from personal experience.  However, I know some people who like it and some people who hate it.  What is universally agreed upon, though,  is that it is a resource hog.  One of the main guiding principles in the development of Windows 7 seems to be keeping things lean.  Plus, first impressions of the Windows 7 pre-beta seem to be very positive.  So, I’m tempted to skip Vista altogether and wait for Windows 7.  This would be in keeping with my history of skipping alternate versions of Windows.  As an undergrad, I used NT 4 until I began using XP in grad school, totally skipping Windows 2000.

I would like to move to a 64-bit operating system with my next computer and it seems like driver support is getting good enough that this is becoming a possibility.  I’m hopeful that, with the introduction of Windows 7, the 32-bit version of the OS will sink further into the background and the Windows ecosystem will move more fully toward 64-bit.  I’d still like to be able to use some legacy peripherals but, if I have a beastly CPU and lots of RAM, I could easily run a 32-bit OS as a virtual machine to cover my legacy compatibility needs. I’ll probably also run Linux as a VM.

In the end, I’m left with the question of how long it will take for these things to emerge from the pipeline and whether I’m prepared to wait for them.  It appears that Nehalem will beat Windows 7 to market by a sizable margin.  I think the first Nehalem processors for desktop applications will become available at the end of this month.  However, it probably will take a while before affordable Core i7 systems are widely available.

The timeframe for the arrival of Windows 7, on the other hand, seems a bit less well-defined.  I’ve heard early 2010, late 2009, and summer 2009 as possible timeframes for the Windows 7 launch.  I definitely don’t expect to see it before summer 2009, which means it’s at least 8 months away.  However, it could be 12 months away or more.  Ideally, I think I’d like to get a new machine next spring or summer, but I could probably be pursuaded to wait a few more months in order to get Windows 7 rather than Vista.  On the other hand, at that point, Vista will be very mature and thoroughly tested on lots of different configurations, while Windows 7 will be brand new and will probably need to have some kinks worked out.

In any case, there is some seriously powerful hardware on its way and I’m looking forward to using it, whether it’s with Vista or Windows 7.