Ryan Homan

Just noticed this morning that the Gentoo Team released the latest installer codenamed “Secret Sauce”. It is a full livecd installer with more hardware support and supports GNOME 2.16.2, KDE 3.5.5, Xfce 4.4, Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.3, OpenOffice.org 2.1.0, and the 2.6.19 Linux kernel while running the livecd. They have even made improvements to the GUI installer so those of you who might have been intimidated by the command line install in 2005 can install it quicker and easier now. I haven’t yet tried it out yet, but I’m currently downloading the image as I write this. I hope to find this release even better than the last and that more people continue to support the Gentoo team.

Well I was able to get a Nintendo Wii last week. I knew a guy that worked at Best Buy and he told me they had shipments come in and I had him pick me one up. I just got it hooked up this weekend, but only had a chance to create a Mii and play a game or 2 of tennis. I still need to buy a 2nd controller set, the HD cable, and a game or too. I’m also debating with my conscience whether I was to mod it and just make copies of games that I rent. I’m also tossing around the idea of getting a gamefly account and doing it that way. I’ll probably use the Wii for about a month before I decide what I’m gonna do about the games.

Well let me first start off and say that I almost forgot how much fun it is getting parts and working on a laptop. I will probably never replace a backlight on a laptop for anyone else ever again after this experience though. Not only did I have to replace the backlight but I also had a bad invertor so I replaced that as well. It took over 3 weeks to get the 2 parts I needed. I ordered the backlight from ccfldirect.com and got the inverter off of ebay.

My advice to anyone who wants to replace a backlight is to have lots of patience. I, myself, do not have much patience so this was quite a task to put together. First off, the backlight is very fragile and great care must be taken when soldering the wires onto the end. Also, before soldering, make sure you know how much clearance there is for the solder. The space I was working with was so small I could barely get enough solder on it to hold it on. After many tries, it stuck and I started the reassembly process. The backlight has a small spot at the bottom of the LCD that it must reside but also has a reflector that must be along the backside to prevent light loss. It is very difficult to get all these parts back into their spot while also be very careful not to break the bulb. Once you get the backlight assembly installed, it is now just lots of pieces and very small screws to complete the process.

So after about 3 hours of working with this, the moment of truth was waiting. Would the panel still light up? I had been trying it often while installing the bulb in the backlight assembly, but I was worried I might have knocked the solder joints loose was trying to fit everything back together, but fortunately it worked when I turned it on. It was a great success to complete the project, but not that worthwhile for business work especially when the customer wants it back ASAP. Hope this information may be of use to any of you would wants to replace a backlight. It is not an impossible task, but just takes time and patience.

I just learned this week how to change the default login page to a custom page that you can design. The instructions are as follows.
Open domcfg.nsf on the server you want to change the login page on. Edit the document and point it to the database that will contain the new login page (it can be in domcfg.nsf as well). Specify the form name that will be the login page and it should now take affect. Make sure you leave the fields username and password on the new form, but other than that use whatever customizations you want. If you have questions, let me know.

I just finished getting dompdf setup and working to convert html docs from Lotus Domino into usuable pdfs. I did run along a few roadblocks along the way though. First off though, I’d like to say that installing and setting it up was a piece of cake. All it required was putting the files on the php server and changing a few parameters in the config. Then I call the script from a url such as
/dompdf/dompdf.php?input_file=test1.html
where the input file is the html that needs to become a pdf. One snag that held me up for a little while was that I was getting a fatal error like this:
Call to a member function get_cellmap() on a non-object table_cell_frame_reflower.cls.php
This was caused by poorly constructed html and after cleaning up the html a little, it processed the file correctly. It appears to mostly support the CSS 2.1 standard and as long as the formatting of the html is in good shape you should have no problems.

Heres a link to the project so Rich Waters is happy. sourceforge.net/projects/dompdf/

I was able to convince my new employer to let me try out connecting my home asterisk phone system to an extension at the office so people can dial my house direct as if it was an extension. I will have an extension that will ring though my asterisk system and to my home phones. I’m looking forward to seeing how it works and will let you know what I think once I get it all setup.

With all of my searching for new info about MythTV, I came across a large list of plugins now available. If your running version .20 then all of these should work. First off are the main ones that are official plugins for MythTV that I recommend using to get the most from your system pending you meet all the hardware requirements.

• MythDVD - allows you to use your frontend as a DVD player and ripper
• MythGallery - provides support for an image gallery that can be displayed as a slideshow
• MythMusic - allows you to play your collection of musicin formats such as mp3, ogg, or even wma
• MythWeb -this provides a web interface to use your mythtv system with almost all features as long as you are running apache
• MythVideo - this plugins is used to interface with video not recorded by MythTV (divx movies, home videos, etc.)
• MythWeather - provides an up-to-date weather report whenever you need it for your location
• MythArchive - now included with version 0.20

Other official plugins that are commonly used, but I have yet to get much use from are listed below:

• MythNews - provides access to RSS feeds
• MythPhone - uses the mythtv interface to allow placing and receiving of phone calls with VOIP (Asterisk is a common implementation)
• MythBrowser -allows you to surf webpages from the mythtv interface
• MythControls - allows you to change your keybindings without having to exit mythtv
• MythFlix - provides an interface to you Netflix account
• MythGame - allows you to play rom based games with a built in emulator

There are also several unofficial plugins that I want to try when I get a chance. Some of them have great potential.

• TVWish - my favorite unofficial plugin - allows for you to have a text list of show titles and when the script is ran regularly, it will automatically schedule the shows when it gets the info from the listing site.
• MythMail - its a pop3 client to access mail
• MythRecipe - allows you to browse an internet db of recipes while playing your favorite mp3 in the background
• MythFM -allows you to listen to FM radio from the MythMusic interface with the radio receiver on your tuner card
• MythStream - provides streaming of audio and video to the fronend from websites and more
• MythCalendar - need I say more?
• MythTiVo - GUI for playing recorded shows from a networked TiVo (no updates for a while on this project though)

Well thats about all. That should keep you busy updating your MythTV box with all these plugins for a while. Be sure to comment about them if you’d like. If you would like more info on any of these plugins, visit ExtremeTech’s article on them.

I was reading up on mythtv the last few days and realized that even though I have been running it for the last year and half or so and keeping up-to-date on it that I was missing a lot of great things that have come about. One very cool thing I came across was using the MediaMVP from Hauppauge as a frontend. It only $90 from newegg and comes with a remote. The only downside is it may not play divx encoded video that well and also only supports s-video out as the best quality so no HD stuff with this thing. It also requires a little work to get it working with your mythtv setup. See this article from mythtv.org about it with the pros and cons. Now you might ask well what do you have to do to make it work as your frontend. Well, the people who work on the MediaMVP Media Center project at sourceforge have made life a lot easier. Just tftp the new firmware to the device and its hooked up and ready to go. I’m looking forward to possibly trying it out sometime.

Well I’ve been using notes 8 for a little over a week now. It has lots of many new features which I definitely liked using. I really liked the more user friendly buttons and functions and how it looks like most of the other apps I work with. I also liked the integrated sidebar with IM, calendar, and RSS. It was however quite a resource hog though even on a newer system. I was running it on a laptop with a 1.7 Pentium M with 1GB of memory, but it seemed extremely sluggish. It also frequently crashed or gave me error messages. I sent them all off to IBM, but it actually became so troublesome that I went back to 7.0.2 because of all the errors. I would like to give the folks at IBM credit for coming up with an up-to-date GUI and similar functionality to other apps, but for a beta, I thought it was missing some things. The speed is going to need greatly improved. I do not think systems with 512 MB of ram will be able to run it. I also feel they need to fix the many bugs I came across. Hopefully they will get it all taken care of and by launch date it will be as great of a product that it has been advertised as.

A guy I work with had his hard drive crash on his laptop. He had some valuable files on there. First we used a linux livecd of knoppix to recover some of the files. This was done by mounting it read only in linux and copying the data to the network. Some of the files were corrupt though. The next step taken was to purchase SpinRite 6.0 from grc at http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm and was able to recover even more files. This product is truely amazing. Try it out if you have files you can’t get off a bad hard drive. Its only $89 for 1 license. Please comment if you have any success stories with it or other recommendations.