Can I possibly destroy any more hardware?

Posted on August 21, 2007 by Trick

In the last 30 days, I’ve killed so much hardware it’s not even funny anymore.

  • Zen Micro died today. After my first look it was grim. Put it back together tonight and surprisingly enough, it actually partially works. I even once got it to power on to the recovery screen. I also managed to crash Banshee with it once (that’s good sign!) But the touchpad is completely fried. This is bad. However, I think that my selection of tool was adequate for the task :)
    • A replacement may well be on it’s way…
  • Nokia 770 is on the fritz. Been dealing with multiple issues:
    • Battery doesn’t seem to be physically stable anymore. I find my N770 turned off sometimes, and sometimes even a small wiggle of the battery does it.
    • Hasn’t been powering on all the time. Usually takes me ten minutes of futzing with it to make it come alive, and even then it crashes a lot at first. This seems to have steadied off a bit, if such a thing is possible.
    • Did I mention crashing? Yes, lots of crashing. Applications dying, particularly Opera. Kernel panics. Lost my maemopad database the other day, and my backup had puked the night before so I lost some important notes.
  • Lost a hard drive, likely related to moving. Was a nice WD SATA 160 gig from a RAID1 setup. Thank goodness for Linux MD support being awesome and handling this properly, you’ve saved me oh-so-many times over the years.
    • Neat fact: I installed that hard drive nearly two years ago. That’s probably the longest I’ve ever had a hard running data drive last. Much better than the WD 60 gig drives I used to have to buy every six months!
  • My stupid onboard IDE controller is on the fritz. I swear, it has a timeout of 8 hours, and then it dies, and I have to reboot. Fortunately that just means that I loose my optical drives. Unfortunately for me, it means that I lose my temper at midnight when I’m in the middle of a good movie, half asleep, and the movie quits. Don’t mess with me that late at night.
  • Laptop is finally giving in again. I blame this on the travels. The LCD backlight won’t stay on for more than a few seconds. So it’s pretty much become an incoming SSH only box. As a matter of fact, I haven’t actually used it for anything in two weeks.
  • Camera is dying. I’d blame this on the travels, but this is actually because I dropped it^W^W^W it’s getting old. Seems that some days the zoom motor just refuses to move. 2003 was a great year for digital cameras, but it isn’t anymore.

So with that, send me your hardware folks, and I promise — I’ll send it back in pieces!

Oh and I’ve broken other things…I’ve smashed this…and I’ve run the cat out the window! (Eddie Izzard joke) (you should laugh)

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Death to the Zen Micro

Posted on August 20, 2007 by Trick

So yesterday I was quite convinced that I was going to make it down to see the Chicago Air and Water Show, hoping I could see the Thunderbirds.  Well lets just say that we got water alright.  I stood out in the rain for well over an hour hoping to see something, but it turns out that they cancelled much (if not all of it).  I came home soaked to the bone, but I had been smart enough to put all the electronics in my bad inside a spare plastic bag — or had I?

Last night I was unpacking my bag and found my Creative Zen Micro down at the bottom of the bag.  It was a sad sight.  I might as well have just gone for a swim in the lake while I was at it, because it was dripping, and I could see water inside the screen.  Tonight, with the help of this handy article at hardwarezone.com, I took it apart and found what I expected — pools of water inside the device. I’m hopeful that I can pull the ole “let it dry, reassemble and it’ll work” game, but I’m doubtful.

Does anyone have an old/spare MTP device that they’d be willing to donate or provide cheaply so I can work on MTP stuff for Banshee?  I’m going to comb eBay of course, but would be happy to take one off someone’s hands if they have a spare.  I don’t really have the cash or need these days to buy anything new.  If you have one, drop me a line!

In the mean time, I guess I’ll just have to write really clean code for Banshee that works perfectly, right? ;)

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Diamondcard rocks!

Posted on July 30, 2007 by Trick

I’ve been travelling for the last two weeks and have been trying (oh so hard) to get internet calling set up properly on my laptop.  The router in the flat I’m staying in is a POS, and is giving me a very hard time, so I have yet to make a proper phone call other than just testing.  However in the mean time, I’ve discovered Diamondcard as it is the recommended service for PC-to-Phone calling in Ekiga.

Diamondcard not only has a gateway for PC-to-Phone calling, but they also provide an international calling card service that you can dial to from most any country in the world.  The rates for the US are incredible – 1.7 cents/minute.  I talked with my family last night (bragging about le tour) for an hour — and it costed me all of $1.

I’m looking forward to getting PC-to-Phone set up properly, but regardless I have to recommend Diamondcard if you’re looking for a calling card + IP Phone service.  Thanks to the cool crew at Diamondcard!

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paris et le tour!

Posted on July 29, 2007 by Trick

So as a part of me taking a crazy vacation, I made it to Paris (for a whopping 24 hours) with one goal: The Tour de France!

Photos to make anyone who wasn’t there jealous:

BreakawayContador!Eiffel Tower

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GUADEC followup

Posted on July 24, 2007 by Trick

Wowzers, what a great time! Was intending to write about each day individually, but that’s certainly out of the question now. GUADEC was a great experience and I’m hooked on the community! A big thanks to everyone who helped put GUADEC ’07 together.

My favorite bits:

  • Staying at the hostel. It was a helluva long walk and really sucked on the rainy days, but it was a new experience. Forced random strangers to hang out and I met some cool people. Wish I would’ve gotten the names of the two guys running the hostel; they were very laid back.
  • There were some killer keynotes; most importantly:
    • Alex’s presentation of PyroDesktop. I don’t take much stock in the comments of folks who don’t like this technology. It’s something we’ve never seen before, and I think the coolest part is the potential to draw a new crowd of developers to the desktop! Alex, Chris & company: keep up the good work!
    • Havoc and Bryan’s presentation of the Gnome Online Desktop. Super sweet guys. Everyone loves integration. Now, lets see it happen!
    • Doc Searls’ closing keynote. Doc is a funny man. “Now bend over and give me some content!”
  • And my favorite sessions:
    • Larry’s presentation of F-Spot and the next wave of development. F-Spot rocks!
    • Telepathy and Tubes. You’ve heard the raves of others; I don’t need to spell it out here.
    • Joe’s presentation on Beagle and metadata joyfulness. Joe is a funny man.
    • Kudos to Jimmy K for holding his own during his talk on the new main menu development.
    • The Geodata standards project — creating a totally free database of mapping information.  Cool!
  • The Walkabout.  What a great bar.

Many thanks to all the folks who made going out and drinking absolutely hilarious, including Gabriel, Aaron, Michael, Aiden, Rodney, Toms, any anyone else I’ve missed!

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Going to Paris!

Posted on July 19, 2007 by Trick

This is mostly to brag to my siblings, if they haven’t heard yet…

I will be taking the Eurostar train from London on the 28th down to Paris, France.  Will stay the night, and then the next morning get up to watch the final stage of the Tour de France.  How cool is that?!

Any of my fellow free software hackers know a decent cheap place to stay a night in/around Paris?

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GUADEC Core Day 1

Posted on July 18, 2007 by Trick

Wowzers, what a day!

  • Jono’s talk was excellent.
  • Video taped the morning sessions in Recital; the F-Spot presentation was great. Larry is working on some sweet ass stuff. Sync’ing our photos online — integration with web services — I think a common theme is emerging!
  • Hacked on libgphoto2-sharp and Banshee. Frustrated like no other. gPhoto doesn’t have any magic support for the lame underlying case-sensitive-insensitive FAT32 filesystem. I guess I kinda figured this would Just Work. I’ve been fighting with this for six months and sure enough, I just need to hack 50 lines of code.
  • Telepathy: it’s tubular, dude!
  • Too many metas: Joe, thank you for taking care of my metadata. You need to publish what you want from us software hackers so we can help take our desktop to the next generation.
  • Havoc’s presentation was great. Full integration of Gnome and the web will make our desktop as useful as possible. Web services are all the rage these days and we’re all dying for that One Way To Link Them All…and I think this is the right approach. Bind our online lives with an online desktop and you’ll get my Mom to switch to Linux.
  • To compliment Havoc’s talk (not just because Gabriel is awesome) but Gabriel is right: we need a Free Service License. Havoc mentioned it, and Gabriel has already been thinking of it for a week.
  • Been meeting a bunch of people; particularly many of the Novell hackers I’ve heard of and met online several times.
  • Went and drank the free beer, and the nice cheap doubles of Southern Comfort…on an empty stomach. Ended up back at the hostel relaxing and eating a really nasty fish ‘n chips.  No, that’s not proper british fish ‘n chips…it was deep fried with french fries.  So greasy it made me nearly sick this morning…

Still grumpy about libgphoto2.  Going to see about fixing it in libgphoto2-sharp, and then push the changes down to libgphoto2 proper.

GUADEC continues!

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GUADEC Warmup Day 2

Posted on July 18, 2007 by Trick

So I arrived in London around 6 AM; everything went quickly.  Plane ride was fun, albeit quite cozy. Took the paddington express train, which is super slick, jumped on the underground to Euston, and wandered around for a while until my train up to Birmingham. The train ride up was so much faster than I had expected — we don’t have quick, cheap trains like that in the US! By the way — if you want a fun bit of adventure when travelling…don’t bring a map of your destination city with you. Half the fun is wandering around (looking quite touristy with my huge bag) and trying to figure out where the heck I am. Then buy a map :)

I’ve been meeting up with a number of GNOME folks that I’ve known over the last year and a half online, and it’s been a great experience. It’s kinda cool to have a team of Banshee hackers and supporters all roaming around. So many ideas! The hacking itch needs to be scratched this week. Big time.

So rather than turn up and go to sessions, what did I do? I walked across town with a bunch of the guys and watched the big football match. It was a blast! I went thru about 3 sets of batteries taking pictures, which I’ll post soon. Lots of funny action shots of people missing the goal. Hilarity.

Then of course, went out and got some beers and the fixings for some good ‘ol homemade pizza. Brought it back to the hostel where we’re staying at and made some pizza! Thanks to Aiden for helping us out and making it a lot of fun. Combine that with some beers, and then meeting up with a few folks later at a bar, and it was a great evening.  Also managed to give away an Ubuntu live cd to one of the guys working at the hostel — he was quite curious about free software and wanted to give it a try.  We didn’t even have to try to “sell it” — he asked for it!

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Travelling – let the adventure begin!

Posted on July 18, 2007 by Trick

(I wrote this on Sunday, July 15th, 2007…but it seems I never saved it…so here’s the recap!)

The day has been quite interesting!  Points of interest:

  • If you see some Netflix movies on the ground, return them.  The subscriber will appreciate it.  I left two Netflix returns sitting on the top of my truck and drove away.  They’re probably sitting out in the road somewhere, smashed to bits.  D’oh!
  • I found parking, in a zone that won’t be street cleaned in the next few weeks, in less than five minutes.  Yes, it’s possible.  7600 N. Greenview — great parking!
  • So I had left a few more things to pack last minute than I had realized.  So I stuffed it in the back of my truck, found a parking space, and then transferred it all up to the cab (which actually locks).  It’s stuffed — drivers side included!  It is quite a sight to see.  Will post pictures.

…and the adventure begins!  Was plenty early for the flight and all went well.  More to come later!

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Passport!

Posted on July 13, 2007 by Trick

So I’ve been planning this trip to the UK for GUADEC as well as to visit the London office of my employer, and I fly on Sunday. I applied for my U.S. Passport a month ago, paid the rush fees, and I got it about two hours ago! I couldn’t be happier that this has worked out.

I’m completely astonished by this process. I’ve kept good details on what all it took, and I think these stories need to be told so that my fellow Americans can petition the proper authorities to get enough $$ in the State Department as to be able to provide this ever-increasingly-popular service of getting a passport. Expect a full report in the next few days as I collect my notes. I really wish I had stopped to collect email addresses of the folks I was in line with as to see whether they get their passport today. If you’ve been dealing with the passport fiasco here in the U.S. recently, please drop me a line as I’d be interested to hear your story!

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