Dustin’s Blog

By now you have probably heard about the digital tv switchover deadline in February of 2009. In case you haven’t, head on over to http://www.dtv.gov/ to get the long story. The short story is that analog TV signals will be turned off as of February 17, 2009. If you get your TV using an antenna, then there is something you need to do to get ready. You can either buy a new TV with an ATSC tuner in it already or you can purchase a government subsidized digital to analog converter box. To get your $40 coupon head over to https://www.dtv2009.gov/.

Last friday I received my coupon in the mail. The coupon comes in the form of a prepaid credit card and you can use it at any store that sells approved converter boxes. I took mine over to Best Buy and picked up their Insignia branded converter box. This box is fairly basic providing one digital input, one RF output and a composite video output but the box is proving to be quite up to the task. The composite output allows you to get stereo sound (surround sound in fact) from the device and an improved picture over the RF connection. It also offers just the current program and the next program on it’s very simple program guide.

Now you might be thinking there is nothing wrong with the current system and that just couldn’t be further from the truth. Even though your old analog TV isn’t digital, the picture will be virtually perfect and in some cases better than you’d get if you had dish or cable. Audio too will be improved and if you have a surround sound system then any show that uses surround sound will be available to you in surround sound as well.

While the analog to digital switch over is a bit of a hassle the quality improvement is very much worth it. If you have any old TVs that are still in good shape and you don’t want to buy a new one then I strongly recommend going the converter route.

A while back I saw a post on digg.com that talked about some new software that was currently in an invite only beta test called Dropbox. Dropbox allows you to synchronize folders between computers and if you watch the video over at their site I think you’ll be impressed.

But as I said, it’s invite only. So what is a guy to do right now? Well believe it or not Microsoft actually has something very similar and it too works with both Windows and Mac. Now if we’re to believe everything the the Dropbox video shows us, Foldershare isn’t quite as robust but it is free and and more importantly it is available now. Check it out at http://www.foldershare.com/

In my previous entry I mention my Super Smash Bros. Brawl testing and one of the other tests I wanted to do involved determining how much data is required to play a four way game. My home network setup is a bit involved yet I couldn’t find a way to route the Wii through a device that I could measure network usage with.

To make a long story short, I found that you can configure your Mac’s wireless to “create network” and unlike a Windows PC that would setup an adhoc network, the Mac will act like a normal wireless access point or wireless router. This was fantastic because the Wii will not join an adhoc network. With my Mac set to create a new network I was able to join my Wii to it and determine that a four way game in Brawl requires at least 10KB/s of network traffic in both directions.

I’ve been using my Mac Mini as what I’d call my “primary computer” almost from the moment I received it. While I have a laptop that I can use around the house or travel with, I use the Mac because it is so quiet, it’s hooked up to a 22″ screen and because I enjoy the OS X experience. Over the months I’ve managed to find a few software titles that help me get things done.

• iTerm - Nice terminal app that more closely resembles my favorite Windows SSH client, putty. Has tabs, etc
• Firefox - Who doesn’t know what Firefox is?
• Thunderbird - Mail just can’t compete with the speed of Thunderbird for IMAP accounts
• Gamepedia - I play games and I like to track them. There are other software options available, even some more generic but I just like this one
• Adium - Adium is a multi-protocol chat client using the same libraries as Pidgin
• Vienna - Great RSS reader
• Things - Simple way to track…things
• Mythfrontend - MythTV is my DVR of choice and I need a way to access it on the Mac, this it!
• Integrity - This is a simple link checker for OS X, similar to Xenu’s Link Sleuth. Xenu’s Link Sleuth is superior however.
• MacTheRipper - Best DVD ripping tool I’ve found for the Mac
• NeoOffice - This is currently the only way to run OpenOffice “natively” on the Mac. It’s slow but gets the job done
• Remote Desktop Connection - Sometimes you need to access a Windows machine. I use this primarily to connect to my XP VMWare guest running on my Linux server for web site testing
• Macfuse/SSHFS - Nearly identical to fuse and sshfs for Linux
• Transmission and Azureus - One bittorrent client just isn’t enough
• VLC - Great multi-platform video player. Perian is able to install many of the same codecs VLC will play but I have soft spot for VLC

I am in the process of setting up a box for someone and I thought I’d document the software RAID portion of it a little bit, in case it is helpful to anyone else.

I’m a bit of a command line junkie so it should come as no surprise then that I prefer to setup my software RAID sets using the command line tools available. The system in question this time is a newly installed CentOS 5 box. In this article I’ll concentrate on creating a mirrored set.

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I’m a little slow on adopting the latest Internet trends. I have no idea why but I seem to get stuck on last years hot item and then I never seem to hear about the latest and greatest until it has created a lot of buzz. I also have a tough time seeing the value in some of the new items until some very smart and crafty people put it to use in such a way that it really reveals the power of, well, whatever is the hot button item.

RSS is one of those things for me that just didn’t really catch my eye outside of using del.icio.us RSS feeds to keep my bookmarks in sync between my computers at work and at home. In reality, I’m not even using del.icio.us correctly. At any rate, the value of RSS has hit me like a ton of bricks.

I browse a number of newsish sites related to Nintendo, Apple/Mac, digg.com and a number of blogs. I visit these sites just to see what is new. For a long while I’ve used Firefox’s Live Bookmarks feature to keep up on sites that had RSS feeds but now it has just gotten out of hand. I have too many sites and blogs I like to check.

Enter Vienna for the Mac. This thing is spectacular. It looks great, it’s very fast and it allows me to group RSS feeds into any arbitrary group I wish. Apple/Mac feeds in one group and Nintendo feeds in another. Reading feeds is simplistic though I opted for the ‘condensed’ layout rather than the default ‘report’ layout. In the condensed layout it’s very much like using a Microsoft Outlook with mailboxes on the left, messages in the middle and the full message on the right. Now if I could just find a comparable program for Windows I’d have my new RSS fetish fully satisfied.

I managed to acquire Leopard for my Mac mini and have been putting it to use for almost a week now. Initially I was a bit underwhelmed, probably because of all the hype, but after spending some more time with it I’m really liking some of the changes put into it though I haven’t had a chance to really get to know all of the new features Leopard has to offer.

Right away I was put off by the color scheme. I was really liking the colors used in Tiger for selected menu items and the title bar on windows. The menu bar also being translucent doesn’t excite me and I’ll probably install this utility to disable the transparency, but I’ll give it some more time. The glass shelf dock looks fine to my eyes except for the odd shadow behind the icons. They are shadowed as if light is shining up through the glass shelf, it ends up creating an effect that just looks like a poorly drop shadowed image. It just looks wrong and would be much more pleasing if there was no shadow at all, or a very subtle shadow similar to how all windows in OS X are shadowed.
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I gave ZFS a shot yesterday and I am very impressed. Rather than ramble on about why ZFS is so great, do yourself the favor of simply going to the ZFS informational site and having a look. Watch the demos. Give OpenSolaris a try in VMware.

Visit the site at http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/

I’ve had the Mac mini for a few weeks now so I thought I’d write a bit my thoughts on the mini and OS X in general. There is a lot to like about the mini and OS X but there are also a few items I’ve come to dislike which I’ll discuss below.

The Mac mini is a tiny computer that looks great. I am personally not aware of any sort of PC that is this small, includes the same features AND looks good doing it. That said, aesthetics are in the eye of the beholder and are a matter of opinion. With that in mind I’ll try to steer clear of personal opinion and concentrate more on practicality and usability.

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Accessing the Linux command line is quite simple. I’ll describe the process as it is on a Ubuntu system but only because Ubuntu has the most market share of the Linux distros today. The concepts here carry over all most if not all other Linux distributions. One other thing I should point out is that the command line is sometimes referred to as the “console” or “terminal” and I may use those terms from time to time.

There are times that you’ll need to use the command line in order to get something done because there won’t be an appropriate GUI tool available or a GUI tool that is available doesn’t have a needed option. In these cases you can access the command line to get the job done.
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