Ryan Homan

Well, now that I’ve been actively listening to pandora on a regular basis and have integrated in into all of my systems throughout my house, I then get this nice email:

Hi, it’s Tim -

I hope this email finds you enjoying a great summer Pandora soundtrack.

I’m writing with some important news. Please forgive the lengthy email; it requires some explaining.

First, I want to let you know that we’ve reached a resolution to the calamitous Internet radio royalty ruling of 2007. After more than two precarious years, we are finally on safe ground with a long-term agreement for survivable royalty rates – thanks to the extraordinary efforts of our listeners who voiced an absolute avalanche of support for us on Capitol Hill. We are deeply thankful.

While we did the best we could to lower the rates, we are going to have to make an adjustment that will affect about 10% of our users who are our heaviest listeners. Specifically, we are going to begin limiting listening to 40 hours per month on the web. Because we have to pay royalty fees per song and per listener, it makes very heavy listeners hard to support on advertising alone. Most listeners will never hit this cap, but it seems that you might.

We hate the idea of capping anyone’s usage, so we’ve been working to devise an alternative for listeners like you. We’ve come up with two solutions and we hope that one of them will work for you:

• Your first option is to continue listening just as you have been and, if and when you reach the 40 hour limit in a given month, to pay just $0.99 for unlimited listening for the rest of that month. This isn’t a subscription. You can pay by credit card and your card will be charged for just that one month. You’ll be able to keep listening as much as you’d like for the remainder of the month. We hope this is relatively painless and affordable – the same price as a single song download.

• Your second option is to upgrade to our premium version called Pandora One. Pandora One costs $36 per year. In addition to unlimited monthly listening and no advertising, Pandora One offers very high quality 192 Kbps streams, an elegant desktop application that eliminates the need for a browser, personalized skins for the Pandora player, and a number of other features: http://www.pandora.com/pandora_one.

If neither of these options works for you, I hope you’ll keep listening to the free version – 40 hours each month will go a long way, especially if you’re really careful about hitting pause when you’re not listening. We’ll be sure to let you know if you start getting close to the limit, and we’ve created a counter you can access to see how many hours you’ve already used each month.

We’ll be implementing this change starting this month (July), I’d welcome your feedback and suggestions. The combination of our usage patterns and the “per song per listener” royalty cost creates a financial reality that we can’t ignore…but we very much want you to continue listening for years to come.

Please don’t hesitate to email me back with your thoughts.

Sincerely,

Tim Founder

Not that I have any problem supporting a great service like Pandora, but I’m kinda upset they just threw it on me like this. I will probably just continue to use the service and pay the $.99 cents whenever necessary, but I’m really hoping they improve the pro version so that maybe it supports offline usage and other devices. Let me know if you also received this message and what your thoughts are on it.

Not sure exactly what caused the error, but I had been using a original ATI remote wonder for years on my mythbox and most recently had been running mythbuntu 7.10 I decided to upgrade a few weeks ago to 8.0.4  and every since then, a few of the buttons had stopped working. I had helped a friend of mine setup a new mythbuntu machine about a month prior and we purchased the Windows Media Center remote for him and I must say that I really like that remote especially since it has a backlight. So with the issues I was having with my ati remote and the fact that my ati remote has been getting less effective over the years (buttons not working, range decrease, etc), I decided to also purchase the MCE remote for my system.  Except when I ran the very nice remote config from the MCC, my remote did nothing and I was getting errors with lirc. The error that I was getting with lirc was “No such file or directory”. Also when running irw, I was getting cannot connect: “No such file or directory”.

So I begin the troubleshooting process and began searching many posts on the web looking for ideas. There was not really any good solution that matched up with my problem so I just had to figure this one out on my own. From what I can tell, this only becomes an issue if you have upgraded from 7.1 to 8.0.4  and does not occur on new installs. I then tried to restart lirc by running /etc/init.d/lirc restart but that resulted in a fail stating unable to load module, check your hardware.conf

So I looked at my hardware.conf and after some trials, I determined  that this line: REMOTE_MODULES=”lirc_dev lirc_mceusb2″ was causing the error. I removed the lirc_dev module and rebooted my machine. When it came back up, everything worked great.

After restarting my steam client tonight, I got the new Team Fortress 2 update with the new map, Goldrush and the medic achievements. I thought it would take a while to download, but I was able to get 250kbs download speed. Can’t wait to play with the new updates

Well, I have successfully completed my 2nd Lotusphere as of about a week ago. Overall, it was a success. This being my second year, I knew a little bit more how things work, and got to go to a few more things this year. Also, I didn’t spend that much time in the product showcase so I didn’t have a million emails and voicemails from all these vendors I will never work with, but I ended up with 5 or 6 new t-shirts. I also was able to utilize my evenings a little better this year, and had plans almost every night. I feel like I learned quite a few things, some of which I’ve already used in one of my projects, and I really want to start using a framework for helping with development. I was also impressed with IBM’s commitment to Lotus and what they are planning to do in the future. They are really putting a great deal of resources in making their products work better by using all the technology we have today. Just some resources that I wanted to point out. I really like what Nathan Freeman did with his hair. Check out his blog at http://www.lotus911.com/nathan/escape.nsf Also, Rich Waters framework, Ext.nd is coming along well and is great for those who want to web enable their apps extremely quickly. Check out his work at http://www.rich-waters.com/blog/ Well thats all for now, and I look forward to what Lotus surprises us with next year.

Here are a few options to optimize playback so you do not use 100% cpu. I have found these too dramatically help performance on my systems. You may need to tweak a few of these to your liking depending on your system setup.

First off, the biggest thing to turn on is XvMC.

• Edit your /etc/X11/XvMCConfig and make sure you change your line to libXvMCNVIDIA_dynamic.so.1
• Make sure that file exists (updatedb and use locate)
• In the mythfrontend setup, choose use Standard XvMC – if its running, your OSD should change to b/w

The next things are to manually edit your xorg.conf with nvidia optimizations.

• Option “NVAGP” “1″ in your device section, also try “2″ – helps with prebuffering pauses
• Option “UseEvents” “True” in the device section as well
• Also use BOB or linear blend for deinterlacing

With these changes, you should have your HD playback running with about half the cpu it did prior to turning these settings on, try tweaking with other settings and let me know if you have anymore from your own experiences that may be helpful.

[UPDATE] Please note that these steps are not all relevant now that they have implemented profiles for making this easier. I will write up more on these new profiles soon, but for now, look for the page with the CPU +, CPU –, normal, etc and try out different ones to see what fits you best. I will go more in depth in a new post on how to customize one of these profiles soon.

See link here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314458

I finally took a leap and got rid of my old 98 Ford Contour. It had been a good little car, but was costing me a lot to maintain. I happened to be at a dealer looking at a Nissan Altima, but they were unable to get pricing where I wanted. Then it came up that they have a 2001 Lincoln LS loaded and in good shape. They gave me a great deal on it so I purchased it instead. It doesn’t get great gas mileage, but it is an awesome car. I will include a picture and some more specs later.

Just saw that schedules direct hit their second milestone and those of you who signed up for the 3 month plan at $15 now gets 6 months for that price. The next goal is to get enough members to get the pricing down to $20 a year. Good Luck and thanks for all the hard work guys. Without it, my MythTV box would be useless.

I learned from my boss today that in the Notes User Group Meeting in Cincinnati yesterday, it was brought up that running an SSL cert on your domino server will cause about a 25% performance decrease and since we have been seeing some performance issues, we are now looking to offload that to either our router or some other way. I personally attended the Notes User Group in Columbus yesterday and I would have to say the I was a little disappointed in the turnout of only about 10 people, but the presentations were very good. We had a presentation of ProcessIt by Teamwork Solutions, a IBM rep talking about Notes 8 and composite apps, and finally Rich Waters showing off Ext.nd and what they done recently and I would have to say that the framework is making great process and I look forward to seeing what those guys come up with in the near future.  Hopefully a stable release so I can use it in my production apps at work. Right now I can only play with it in test mode.

Well even though I’m not a fan of the big ten network, I jumped aboard so I could watch the Ohio State Buckeyes first home football game on TV. Originally I had planned to switch to DirecTv whom I had scheduled to come out the Sat morning of the game, but then on Thursday a few days before, my cable company, Insight picked up the station so I decided to cancel the DirecTv and stay with Insight for the time being. I’m now fighting with Insight to enable the serial port on the Digital Set Top box, a motorola DCT-2224 so I can change the channels with MythTv, but they refuse. I think I’ll probably end up going the IR emitter way even though its not that reliable.