Dustin's Blog

…the future for KDE technologies on mobile platforms certainly looks bright.”

I really beg to differ.

(via OSNews)

One of the things that makes the Mac great is how easily it can find network resources. Apple calls this technology Bonjour but in reality it’s a combination of a number of different protocols talked about at http://www.zeroconf.org/. Avahi is in basic terms an open source implementation of Bonjour and with it you can advertise services that a Linux server provides on your local network. I use Avahi to advertise the netatalk/afp service running on my home Linux system. By doing so, my Linux system shows up immediately in the Finder Window of all of my Macs in the house.

The only “problem” I had was that my Linux system would show up with an icon that looked like an Apple display. I wanted to appear in my Finder window as a little bit closer to reality. By default OS X is aware of all of Apple’s products and can display the appropriate icon for any product it finds. In my setup I’m happy with my Linux system appearing as an older style of PowerMac. With a bit of effort you can cause OS X to show any custom made icon you want.

This blog post explains the process and this comment describes the various device types you can specify.

Here’s something a lot of Linux users probably overlook. If you manually create a partition or file system on a new hard drive but you want mount during each boot you should mount the drive based on its label instead of it’s device name. This will prevent the system from mounting a drive in the wrong place if you ever switch cables around or move the drive to a different machine.

Labeling a partition is simple, just use e2label /dev/ “” where is the device and partition you wish to label and is what you want to label the partition with. For example, if you added a second hard drive to your system and created one large partition, you would probably label the drive with the following command

e2label /dev/sdb1 "NewDrive"

To mount this drive on boot, edit your /etc/fstab file as root with your favorite editor. Add a new line at the bottom with, based on the example above, the following:

LABEL=NEWDRIVE /mountpoint defaults 0 0

You can use the other entries in the file as a template. Use ‘man fstab’ and ‘man e2label’ to learn more about how to use e2label.

As pointed out by this article on Slashdot.org a good number of Linux based tablets are also on their way and set to compete with Apple’s iPad. Of the mentioned tablets I think Android based ones hold the most potential simply because Android was designed from the ground up around the idea of touch input.

The other interesting thing, as always, are the comments on the Slashdot post. I just can’t help but feel the majority of tech savvy people simply don’t understand what the iPad is and why it will be a success. According to a large number of the tech savvy, people want a device they can tinker with, install whatever they choose on and is open. Anything else is evil and you’re dumb if you don’t agree. What they tend to forget is there is a large market of people who just don’t care about openness. They just want a device that works without the need to tinker.

My wife isn’t someone who wants to tinker. She wants results. As a tech savvy person myself, it took me a number of years before I fully understood why turning on the TV, stereo, selecting the right input, turning on the DVD player and selecting the right remote for each device in order to watch a movie simply wasn’t acceptable to her. It had to be simpler. The entire setup was so simple in my mind and I had complete control over the system, it all seemed perfect to me. Getting everything turned on so we could watch a movie together seemed like a small accomplishment each and every time. To her it was a complete chore. The answer, in the end, was a Logitech Harmony remote. One button turns on the needed equipment, automatically selects the correct input and the one remote then correctly controls each device without further work. Turning it all off is equally easy. Today I’d never give up that remote because of how it simplified the entire process.

My point is that eventually, getting things done becomes more important than openness or the ability to tinker. I’m more than willing to give some of that up for a more pleasurable experience. I think Android based devices, including phones and tablets, will be successful, but in the area of tablets the iPad will lead because it provides solutions with the least amount of resistance.

I’ve just released the first version of netaman. A very simplistic script that automatically configures a Ubuntu Server 9.10 system as a Mac OS X 10.4+ compatible AFP server. Read more about it at http://blog.dustinrue.com/netaman.

This doesn’t surprise me too much but I’m curious how this number would change if you included all open source software.

75% of Linux Code Written by Paid Developers

I’ve been trying for a while now to find a reasonably priced way to play video files that live on my computers on our TV or projector with acceptable quality while still being easy to use. Finding a solution has proven more difficult than I initially thought. I could never really find anything that gave me everything I wanted without some major compromise and didn’t cost a lot in terms of price or time spent configuring. I simply want to be able to take a file from the computer and play it on my TV or projector on a device that feels integrated with the rest of my setup.

Enter Western Digital’s WD TV Live. The WD TV Live does exactly what I want and does it in a tiny and silent, remote controlled package. It is able to stream virtually every common video or audio format in use today from a network share or from a locally attached USB drive. As an added bonus, it can also access YouTube, Pandora, Flickr as well as a couple of other online services. You can read more about the WD TV Live at http://www.wdtvlive.com/products/wdtv_live#highlights.

There are some isues with the device right now that are supposed to be cleared up in a soon to be released firmware update. It will play DVDs ripped to .iso format but doesn’t support menus, or even chapters, at all. This makes it nearly impossible to watch a TV series on DVD. The other issue the player currently has is with h264 files but oddly enough it is all in the name. A file with the extension .m4v will most likely have audio sync issues. Renaming the file to .mp4 will resolve the audio sync issue but will do nothing with the stuttering playback for all but the most basic of h264 encoded files. Incredibly, taking the same h264 file and putting it into mkv format will fix all of the issues and the file will play perfectly.

Despite these very easily fixed issues, this is the best device I’ve come across for playing videos at this price point. Yes, there are probably more capable devices available and there is certainly more capable software available (XBMC for one) but for the money, it’s hard to beat the WD TV Live. My next few blog posts will focus on how I’ve integrated the WDTV into my home network including how I’m encoding files for it using HandBrake, Linux and Automator in OS X.

My wife and I don’t watch a ton of TV but we do have a few TV series on DVD. Lately I’ve been taking the time to rip the DVDs to hard drive so we can travel with them more easily.

The problem of course is they take up a lot of space after awhile so I’ve started to compress some of them to the h264 format. I picked h264 because I like the quality and because newer Macs are able to decode h264 using hardware acceleration. One problem with the h264 format is that by itself it has no support chapter markers unlike say, the mkv container. To get around this, I wrote a couple of scripts. One of them determines how many chapters (episodes) are available on a disc and the other one does the encoding.

In order to put all of this to use you’ll need to have the HandBrakeCLI program installed on your computer. The HandBrake is site (http://handbrake.fr/) has information about how to get everything installed for your OS. This post assumes you are using Linux, Mac OS X or other UNIX like system.

Here is the script that retrieves the number of chapters on from a DVD that has been ripped to a hard drive. You’ll need to modify it for your environment. I called mine getchapters.sh but the name is arbitrary.

#!/bin/bash
HandBrakeCLI -i $1 -t 0 2>&1| grep "title 1 has" | grep chapters | awk '{print $
6}'

This script is called within another script that I called h264encode_episodic and looks like this

#!/bin/bash
chapters=`getchapters.sh $1`
if [ "$2" != "" ]; then
title=$2
else
title=$1
fi

for I in `seq 1 $chapters`
do
HandBrakeCLI -Z "High Profile" -i $1 -o ${title}E${I}.mp4 -c $I
done

Running this script in the same directory as the DVD iso or VIDEO_TS directory you will end up individual video files, one for each chapter or episode of your show. Here’s how it is called

h264encode_episodic Scrubs_S1D2.iso Scrubs_S1D2

Scrubs_S1D2.iso is the iso of the DVD I want to convert and Scrubs_S1D2 is part of how the resulting files will be named. The first episode will be named Scrubs_S1D2E1.mp4.

Linux is such a love/hate relationship for me and this post from Facebook about sums up the reason why. There is so much it can do and yet so much it can’t.

“I’ve been having this hankering to just run flat out Ubuntu on my laptop again. However, I have iTunes thanks to a bunch of free music I got from a Pepsi promo so many years ago, and I don’t exactly have money to get cd-r’s to burn it all to re-rip it. I’ve found some new toys for Ubuntu that I wasn’t aware of and they make me crave it more. Maybe I’ll just end up running Windows in a VM. I still need to have something that can print photos relatively easy.”

Recently I removed Fedora 10 from my Linux server at home and installed Ubuntu 9.10 Server. I did this partly because I was tired of finding packages that weren’t available on Fedora but were available in Ubuntu. Ironically I ended up trading one mess for another. Under Fedora I was compiling software that simply wasn’t available, but under Ubuntu I need to recompile the provided netatalk package in order to enable support for newer versions of OS X.

Netatalk is the Linux package for providing the native file sharing protocol to Macs and also provides better performance than Samba under most conditions. The missing feature in this case seems like quite the over site considering it makes the software virtually useless on networks with modern Macs as it prevents them from authenticating. Lucky for me, someone else has gone through the work of figuring out what it takes to get things working again.

The information is Debian/Ubuntu centric but you should be able to apply the same fix on other distributions. Here’s the link http://www.kremalicious.com/2008/06/ubuntu-as-mac-file-server-and-time-machine-volume/