Tag Archives: Technology

Rare Linux bug and I go booooom

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In trying to get a $10 adapter cable to work on the laptop, I hit a rare Linux bug. And the system, she go booom. Wouldn’t boot in normal mode, nor in recovery mode. Same ‘small’ problem; pretty much couldn’t find the hard drive.

It was nothing to do with the cable per se.

Actually it was, bizzarely, claiming it couldn’t find Mimix. Which is a totally different operating system! I knew the (one and only) disk was there okay as it was a dual boot and Windows XP was fine. So it had to be something else.
Turns out “In the fstype tool there is a problem if the lower 16 bit of number of free inodes in a ext3 filesystem happens to match minix filesystem magic.

This will cause the system not to boot since ubuntu will attempt to mount the filesystem as a minix filesystem.”

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/archive/…p/t-95729.html

I got around it via these steps (safely recorded here – and elsewhere – if it happens again):

  1. Boot a Live CD of Ubuntu (5.1 ok)
  2. set root password (sudo passwd root)
  3. mount /dev/hda1 as /root
  4. cd /root then cd to (say) /tmp dir
  5. create a junk.txt and put some data in it
  6. save it, shutdown Ubuntu, remove live cd and reboot

And it worked.

Deconstructing “Breathe With Me Till Dawn”

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Two of my favourite songs are Judie Tzuke’s beautiful “Stay With Me Till Dawn” and Pink Floyd’s “Breathe” from Dark Side of the Moon.

So it was with great interest I discovered a mashup of the two. Mashups are not remixes per se, but are usually two or more songs intertwined. In this case it’s Floyd’s (original) music playing whilst Tzuke sings her (original) lyrics at the same time.

This means taking the original 1970s recordings and using a digital audio program like ACID or Garage Band to adjust them – or selected parts of them – to match up. This software can (time) stretch one without changing the pitch (key). Or adjust the pitch without the time. Or even beat-match; adjust the tempo of one song to match the other.

I’m sure this has serious concerns from a legal sense, but I’m looking at it from a musical and technology view.
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3 lounge room devices into 1

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I had a look at the stack of equipment in my TV room. It really needs to be rationalised! Amp, MC500 network media player, VCR, DVD, STB etc My ideal would be the Australian Z500 network DVD player with on-board STB and hard drive…which really turns it into a Home Theatre PC (HTPC). Dream land.

A HTPC would enable me to rationalise the MC500, DVD and VCR into the one box. I would keep the current external STB as I don’t like the idea of having to boot a PC just to watch TV. The HTPC would have a tuner card too; hence I could watch one, record another.

A tech mate is about to build his MythTV box; enabling him to build a very high quality HTPC using free and open source software. I’m following his adventures with interest.

Dreams of a Media Terminal

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At the moment I can’t get what I want. And it’s a bit frustrating as normally technology is ahead of my requirements, not behind. Normally it’s me looking at these cool new tech toys and going ‘neat, one day I’ll get one of those’

My annoyance is that convergence (of PCs and home entertainment systems) hasn’t taken off as fast as I would like.

If you want – in your lounge room – to watch digital TV plus record it to a hard drive, as well as play DVDs and watch any media files off your PC…you currently need 2 or 3 different boxes in the lounge. Of course, I want it to be one. And not a full blown Home Theatre PC.

The more I think about this, the more I realise I’m really after an X type solution. As in Xfree86 and X.org – a small, media terminal in the lounge room, with no moving parts, but controlling the powerful PC sitting in study.
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Finding local data for Google Earth

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I’m using Google Earth a fair bit. I’ve been fascinated with turning maps into 3D views since secondary school; when we learned how to create a height versus distance cross-section from a topology map.

Google Earth has the ability to cut and paste latitude & longitude co-ords directly in, which makes it quite easy to Go To a place of interest.
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How big is one minute of TV?

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In other words, how much disk space does it take?

I did some samples using a fast moving show. It was a standard definition recording, captured direct as the MEPG2 data. I then converted it to Raw, uncompressed frames, then did two MPEG4 compressions; one average quality, the other very good. Both used MP3 audio. The second figure is the percentage relative to the base MPEG2 recording.
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Digital TV to XviD : 30,000 foot view

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DVB (digital TV) recordings, as I’ve said before, are cool but fat. I squash them down to AVI files containing XviD (MPEG4) video and MP3 audio. Yes, THAT MP3. Still an excellent audio compression scheme.

One day I’m going to write a full on ‘how to’ but here’s a summary from 10,000 meters.

All software is for Windows. I think all are open source; they certainly are free. Doom9 has most of these applications.
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Video Conversion – Frame Serving 101

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Have really got into the video conversion is a big way over the last few months. Main reason is I bought a set top box for the PC. It can record both Standard and High Definition video. As an aside, I’ve previously commented on how Australia got this so wrong.

Anyway recording digital TV is cool. The pictures are wide screen, clear and literally DVD quality (even in Standard Def mode!). But they eat disk space at the rate of 3 to 4 GB per hour.

Digital TV (and DVDs) both use variations on the same compression scheme; the excellent MPEG2. A newer standard is MPEG4, with a common implementation called XviD. I can use XviD to squash down my recording to about 10% of their original size with only a slight loss in quality.

To make this go quicker, I’ve recently hit upon frame serving.
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Ouch – iTunes updates cause browser failures

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I may have mentioned that I use the free iTunes for Windows as my MP3 library and player.

If I did – and you installed it – this here is a note to say that the recent Version 5.0 seems to introduce an autostarting service that caused me – and others – mucho grief.

Called Apple Computer Bonjour it seems to not play with either Norton Internet Security or with http per se (https just fine). Result is that all Internet web sites won’t load, via Firefox or IE.

Apparently fixed in the ‘oops, sorry about that’ 5.01 release, where Bonjour is removed. I manually disabled 5.0 Bonjour in Services and the problem went away. But am still following advice of uninstalling 5.0 then installing 5.01.