zen.org Communal Weblog

Out of suspicion, I tried putting our ISP’s nameservers at the top of my /etc/resolv.conf. Then I repeated some steps I’d just done—checking for new mail, visiting a particular site—and they were much much faster. This means I either misconfigured my Zaurus when I set it up to take over nameservice for our network, or something about it just makes it be slow responding.

I’ll be hopeful and review how I configured maradns; perhaps it just needs a tweak?

I just received my daily OED etymology fix:

welk: To lose freshness or greenness; to become flaccid or dry; to wilt, wither, fade.

I thought of only one thing: Lawrence Welk, when I was growing up. Certainly seems to match…

P.S. Definition is of course Copyright © Oxford University Press 2004.

I got a spam about a training kit (DVD, guide, and audio tape) for how to teach kids in cultures of poverty. Then in big letters in the middle of the message it told me if I ordered it soon it would save me $40, at only $355.00!

A 5-hour expert training session on learning to teach kids in impoverished nations is probably worth the money, but the paradox of spending nearly $400 to figure out how to help those in need cracked me up. Put on top of this how under-funded many schools are, regardless of the country they’re in, and you wonder where the money could come from. Certainly not most teachers’ salaries.

After a little effort, our box can now play MPEGs properly! Until now there was always a problem with them: audio was never in sync with video, making it unusable. AVIs were fine, but MPEGs divided up between the Hauppauge PVR-350 card for video and our normal audio out. After I’d seen others make mention of using xine for MythTV, I thought I’d finally give it a shot. (I’ve used xine and VideoLAN, aka VLC, for playing mpegs under Linux, but not yet like this.) In only a few steps, it worked!

I first had to download xine itself, and use

rpm -Uvh libxine1-1.0.1cvs-050527.i686.rpm xine-ui-0.99.3cvs-050603.i586.rpm

to install the packages; those copies are regular nightly builds. In the MythTV front-end, I went through Setup to Video to Player Settings, and changed it from running mplayer to instead do

xine -pfhq --no-splash --audio-driver oss %s


Next, I created the ~/.xine directory and put these lines into the file ~/.xine/config:

audio.volume.mixer_volume:60
audio.synchronization.force_rate:44100
audio.device.alsa_front_device:default

Those values came from a forum or blog post somewhere, but I never wrote down the origin and Google doesn’t appear to have it. I’ll certainly attribute them to the source once I find out who it was. 🙂 The config file will be used by xine, and those values will get pulled in then included in the auto-generated version that xine saves back out to the file.

Finally, to make xine honor commands from the remote control I had to edit ~/.mythtv/lircrc and insert the xine entries from Peter Baumgartner’s blog. His are based on Jarod Wilson’s guide, with additions for xine. Continuing the trend, I adjusted mine to have the Stop button actually exit xine, not just stop it and show the xine banner:

begin
prog = xine
button = STOP
repeat = 3
# instead, make this quit
#config = Stop
config = Quit
end

I just had to restart the MythTV front-end (using the green button), and voila! I could use a .mpg file and it plays it all correctly; open up any part of a ripped DVD, and it looks right. Yahoo! Big step.

Now we can play Letter Factory™ for Patrick any time we want since we’ve got it ripped onto the box’s hard drive, instead of worrying about putting in the DVD all the time. 🙂 See? It just calls for the right motivation…

During lunch, three year-old Patrick posed a new question. “Want to hear a joke, Dad?”

“Sure!”

“Okay,” he said with obvious build-up, “why does a bee like to go into a drink?” His eyes glittered with anticipation.

“Umm, because they’re thirsty?”

“No!” he announced. “Because it turns green!!” A grin and giggling followed the punch line.

I didn’t get it, and if pressed (why you’d do this I don’t know) he probably didn’t either. But that doesn’t matter—his brain has recently processed the proper telling of a joke. Synapses continue to fire up there in a display as spectacular as fireworks over Boston on the Fourth of July.

Today I experienced (am still, sorta) my first migraine headache. The morning started with a splitting headache. Not enough to incapacitate, though—able to make some muffins for breakfast, make tea, that sort of thing. But after breakfast it started getting worse. The headache became stronger, and then came the nausea. (We’ve ruled out the possibility that I’m pregnant.)

I lost my breakfast and gave up on any chance I’d be able to do anything today other than stay lying down. I took some aspirin, which is supposed to help, but it didn’t make a big difference for me this morning. I dropped some Solpedine this afternoon, which perhaps only coincidentally seems to have reduced some of the throbbing.

Over about 3 hours I nibbled away some toast and drank some water; we figured there’s a chance some kind of dehydration was contibuting to this. Finally after staying in bed for more than 9 hours, it’s subsiding a little. The head still gets an axe crashing through it when I glance too fast in a different direction, or I move in any way that involves my neck muscles working very hard. Weird.

What really helped was being able to listen to a bunch of podcasts on Elana’s iBook. I could just lie on my pillow, my eyes closed and a hand at my left temple, while listening to a variety of podcasts being played by the laptop. It’s quite similar in enjoyment to listening to books on tape. I have Donna Tart’s The Secret History, a long-standing favorite book, on a bunch of tapes. If this pain continues tomorrow, or it recurs soon, maybe I’ll consider using those tapes too.

A guy I worked with many years ago (not that many, but it feels both like 2 days ago and 20 years) regularly had to stay offline from his telecommuting because of intense migraine headaches. Maybe I’ll drop him a note for advice. 🙂

Of course I’m also curious about the role of my recent ophthalmic migraine in all of this. Over the last few years, perhaps every six months or so, I get hit by this funky vision thing where I see this bunch of bring strobing/flashing lights in my peripheral vision. Until now, there’s been no physical headache with it, just the unnverving vision of lights. (Hello X-Files.) But it was at most a week ago that I last had them; now this splitting headache, eyes sensitive to light, and vomiting. Hmm. We’ll see—I’m going to have a doctor make sure the ophthalmic problems aren’t evidence of anything funky with either retina.

I hope this goes away soon! You can only hack on so much code with your eyes closed…

My laptop, a Fujitsu Lifebook P-2046, was recently sent in for service because it wouldn’t consistently charge its batteries. After some testing, they found my AC adapter is at fault. They can send my laptop back with a new one, if I’d like—for €150 + 21% VAT to a total of €181.50. That’s about $229.00 US. Or, I could get one from a company in the US for $49 and figure out a way to get it to me here in Ireland.

I asked them to just send it back, please. Why is everything so blatantly overpriced?

A local ATM in Ireland accepted a foreign credit card for getting some cash. The receipt included 14 of the 16 digits for the card. Why so many?

Tonight Patrick was in the livingroom with his empty cup sitting on the table. He’d finished a half a glass of sparkling water (“bubbles”), and now decided he needed more. He told his Mom as much, but she knew he shouldn’t have any more and declined the request. Patrick made a couple of further demands, resorting to begging but still no luck. Disappointed, he stopped trying.

Well, until I entered the room.

“Dad,” he said to me, his eyes wider than should be possible, “I want some more bubbles.”

I looked over at his Mom questioningly, and she said, “No, Patrick, I told you that was enough for tonight.”

As I glanced back to Patrick, his face was the image of mischief brewing at a low temperature. “Daaaaaad,” he did in his best falsetto, like a kid in a classroom trying to cheat with his buddy at the next desk, “I want more bubbles.” The whispers were almost too quiet to hear. Almost.

I shook my head. “Noooooooooo,” I whispered back. We’re both within a couple of feet of Mom, who’s sitting right next to him on the couch.

“Patrick!” his Mom exclaimed. “You know I said you couldn’t, and now I caught you trying anyway!”

He gave a foolish grin and launched his head (gently) over into her side. “Mommm…”

So this is where it all starts, playing one against the other and trying to trip us up. This is going be a kick.

Today I followed some great instructions on how to put OpenZaurus on my Sharp Zaurus SL-5500. It worked like a charm! The Opie GUI is pretty slick, fast, and easy. And the initial image gives you a console window you can use to actually have a command prompt. 🙂

The plan is to try to make it take over DHCP & DNS services, at least, for our home network. Heh.

Update: So far so good. DHCP is working just fine, and maradns, the OpenZaurus choice instead of BIND, is nice and fast and slim for all DNS, including recursive lookups of random domains (i.e., Web traffic is behaving fine). Yippee! The little Zaurus is on my desk, doing most of the work of the 265MHz old box humming away in the corner. You could put hundreds of the Zaurus (Zauri?) in the space taken by the old server. And we’ll talk later about the power consumption dropping to 5 watts/2 amps, compared to the PC’s 230W power supply with spinning disks, whirring fans, and far more live motherboard circuits…