So the other day I was talking with my sister and she was lamenting the difficulties her husband was having dealing with Tech Support, both their Internet Service Provider and the maker of their router. Apparently they have some serious connectivity stability issues with their internet connection. The ISP tested the lines and claim there are no issues, and that the fault lies in the modem/router (btw the ISP provided modem/router didn't work for their home setup, specifically XBox Live).
So, that lead them to trying to deal with the suport people for the modem/router. Now, as we all know phone support for lots of major hardware manufacturers has been outsourced to, well other countries. So, this in itself lends to difficulty when trying to get anywhere with support, let alone the long wait times etc. So, in all of this I asked a couple of quick questions: What is the make/model of the modem/router? What is the current firmware installed?
The second question was after I had received an answer to the first and had checked the manufacturer web page and saw that there was a recent firmware update available. Noted that the update didn't list a fix for their specific issue, but figured it couldn't hurt. So, after they updated the firmware they had I think two dis-connects the rest of the evening, which I believe is better than before, but still not ideal.
So, my sister asks me: Why didn't any of the other support people suggest the firmware update (I'm paraphrasing there)? Good question, when it comes down to it. It's usually one of the first things I check when I start messing with a piece of hardware that has the ability to have firmware updates. Maybe they all assume that the user has already updated?? I don't know, but add that to the list of things to check when having problems.
Time will tell if it really helps them. In the meantime, I may have them see about having the ISP provided modem/router put into "Bridge Mode" and using a straight up router to do the routing, since the ISP provided modem doesn't have issues staying connected. It's a little "messier" of a solution, but then again, you've got two specific devices meant to do just what they are doing: one a modem, the other a router. (BTW when I've set up other people, this method is what I prefer to do as it gives a lot more control over what the router is capable of, and gives a plethora of choices in what to use as a router).
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Friday, October 29, 2010
Budget/Budget Touch
For the past few years I've held out on my PDA, a Sharp Zaraus SL5500, using it for basically two applications: Car Milage Calculator and Qashmoney. In that time I have kept my eye on the iPhone and the App Store looking for replacments for these two. The Car Milage Calculator was pretty simple, and actually many options out there both free and paid (I chose to go with one of the free which contains adds but takes care of the basics of tracking for me with graphs etc, but that isn't the subject of this posting). The replacement for Qashmoney on the other hand was harder to find. Yes, there were plenty of "Budget" software packages available, but they all took too much control from me, and I didn't want a lot of the fluff features they had.
I don't recall what caused me to search differently, but one day I did a search for budget envelope, or something along those lines. It was the results of that search that brought Budget Touch to my attention. After looking at the screen shots it looked like it had what I was looking for. Basically a way to have a "Parent" account that contained "Child" accounts where the "Child" accounts aren't really accounts as such, just symbolic accounts. Along with that it had the ability to transfer money from one envelope to another, which would work with my budgeting workflow of putting all my deposit into a main envelope, then divide it out bit by bit to the other envelopes. Liking what I saw so far I also noticed they had a sync with Desktop feature. This led me to their web page where I found that they have desktop versions of their Budget app for both PC and Mac, and they offered demo versions.
Wonderful!
So, I downloaded the demo of the Mac software (I was working on my Mac at the time). In the software I was quickly able to set up my accounts, and envelopes. And then did an initial input of all of the balance data from my Zaraus. Over the next couple of weeks I actually was doing a triple entry on all of my spending, pay, and transfers. First in my Zaraus in Qashmoney, then in Microsoft Money (which I keep as more of a checkbook register than a budget tool), then also in Budget on the Mac.
In playing with the software I found their "Pay Rules" feature which basically can be used to enter your pay amount, then it will automatically assign the different values to each envelope as set up in the rules. This feature basically automates what I was doing manually in Qashmoney from a spreadsheet I had created in Google Docs that did the breakdown of the pay to envelopes. Bonus!! This saves a good 10-15 minutes of entering/dividing the money up, though at first it seemed like it was better suited to someone on a salary with a set income, where with my hourly income the deposit amount could change from pay to pay. Then I noticed a field that could be used to enter a difference amount, so basically I set up a base pay setting, then subtract that amount from what is actually being deposited, and enter that difference into that field and it will calculate based on the total of the two. Anything left over after meeting all the budget items then is filtered into what I call my "Buffer Zone" which is basically an envelope that is used to cover if any of the other envelopes needs to temporarily go negative.
I was really starting to like using Budget on the Mac, and the trial was running out, so I checked pricing, which seemed pretty reasonable, and when I added it to the cart on their site, they were offering a discount on the PC version if purchased at the same time. Bonus, maybe I can switch my wife to using this rather than the spreadsheet I set up for her (which is kind of cumbersome admittedly) or at least get a synced copy on desktop software at home and at work. So, all of that coupled with having nearly saved enough to upgrade to an iPhone I decided to purchase the software.
After purchasing the software I realized that the sync with the PC version wasn't working yet (but did find in their forums that it is planned for release by the end of the year). That bummed me out as far as getting my wife switched to using it, and the Budget Touch on her iPod touch that I had bought for her birthday.
So, then I went to get my iPhone, which in the end ended up not happening (due to contract lengths/upgrade eligibility on the number I wanted to take with me.) This really had me down since I was looking forward to the iPhone as well as moving toward using the Budget Touch software (which had pretty good reviews and really was what drove my purchase of the desktop software). So, in the next few days after that I went to Craigslist and started searching for an iPod touch of my own to hold me over till I could upgrade to an iPhone. Found a good deal on one and purchased. After a couple days settling into use I used some of the iTunes credit I had been gifted a year or so ago and purchased the Budget Touch application.
Then I got to see just how it works. But first, I had to sync with the desktop software, which was up to date as I had been using it along side Qashmoney. The sync went smoothly, and in no time I had data on the iPod to play with and see if this would really work as a replacement for Qashmoney.
Over all, I like the functionality, it is really the best replacement I could find for the iPod/iPhone. There are some things I would change, but I can live with them. (The main one being that every main account when you are in the account shows all envelopes from all accounts) The ability to on the go have a view of what my balances in each envelope is, and add debits as well is great. Add to that easy sync with the desktop when I get to the desktop rather than manually entering (which I did with Qashmoney to Microsoft Money and still have to do between Budget and Money for now at least) and I have a solution that saves me time and enables me to keep on budget.
So, I haven't picked up my Zaraus in quite a while, and really don't see me doing so, as the iPod touch has replaced it and soo much more. Especially with the addition of Budget Touch and the Budget desktop software. Now if they can hurry up and get syncing with Windows working I might be able to help my wife streamline her budget process.
I don't recall what caused me to search differently, but one day I did a search for budget envelope, or something along those lines. It was the results of that search that brought Budget Touch to my attention. After looking at the screen shots it looked like it had what I was looking for. Basically a way to have a "Parent" account that contained "Child" accounts where the "Child" accounts aren't really accounts as such, just symbolic accounts. Along with that it had the ability to transfer money from one envelope to another, which would work with my budgeting workflow of putting all my deposit into a main envelope, then divide it out bit by bit to the other envelopes. Liking what I saw so far I also noticed they had a sync with Desktop feature. This led me to their web page where I found that they have desktop versions of their Budget app for both PC and Mac, and they offered demo versions.
Wonderful!
So, I downloaded the demo of the Mac software (I was working on my Mac at the time). In the software I was quickly able to set up my accounts, and envelopes. And then did an initial input of all of the balance data from my Zaraus. Over the next couple of weeks I actually was doing a triple entry on all of my spending, pay, and transfers. First in my Zaraus in Qashmoney, then in Microsoft Money (which I keep as more of a checkbook register than a budget tool), then also in Budget on the Mac.
In playing with the software I found their "Pay Rules" feature which basically can be used to enter your pay amount, then it will automatically assign the different values to each envelope as set up in the rules. This feature basically automates what I was doing manually in Qashmoney from a spreadsheet I had created in Google Docs that did the breakdown of the pay to envelopes. Bonus!! This saves a good 10-15 minutes of entering/dividing the money up, though at first it seemed like it was better suited to someone on a salary with a set income, where with my hourly income the deposit amount could change from pay to pay. Then I noticed a field that could be used to enter a difference amount, so basically I set up a base pay setting, then subtract that amount from what is actually being deposited, and enter that difference into that field and it will calculate based on the total of the two. Anything left over after meeting all the budget items then is filtered into what I call my "Buffer Zone" which is basically an envelope that is used to cover if any of the other envelopes needs to temporarily go negative.
I was really starting to like using Budget on the Mac, and the trial was running out, so I checked pricing, which seemed pretty reasonable, and when I added it to the cart on their site, they were offering a discount on the PC version if purchased at the same time. Bonus, maybe I can switch my wife to using this rather than the spreadsheet I set up for her (which is kind of cumbersome admittedly) or at least get a synced copy on desktop software at home and at work. So, all of that coupled with having nearly saved enough to upgrade to an iPhone I decided to purchase the software.
After purchasing the software I realized that the sync with the PC version wasn't working yet (but did find in their forums that it is planned for release by the end of the year). That bummed me out as far as getting my wife switched to using it, and the Budget Touch on her iPod touch that I had bought for her birthday.
So, then I went to get my iPhone, which in the end ended up not happening (due to contract lengths/upgrade eligibility on the number I wanted to take with me.) This really had me down since I was looking forward to the iPhone as well as moving toward using the Budget Touch software (which had pretty good reviews and really was what drove my purchase of the desktop software). So, in the next few days after that I went to Craigslist and started searching for an iPod touch of my own to hold me over till I could upgrade to an iPhone. Found a good deal on one and purchased. After a couple days settling into use I used some of the iTunes credit I had been gifted a year or so ago and purchased the Budget Touch application.
Then I got to see just how it works. But first, I had to sync with the desktop software, which was up to date as I had been using it along side Qashmoney. The sync went smoothly, and in no time I had data on the iPod to play with and see if this would really work as a replacement for Qashmoney.
Over all, I like the functionality, it is really the best replacement I could find for the iPod/iPhone. There are some things I would change, but I can live with them. (The main one being that every main account when you are in the account shows all envelopes from all accounts) The ability to on the go have a view of what my balances in each envelope is, and add debits as well is great. Add to that easy sync with the desktop when I get to the desktop rather than manually entering (which I did with Qashmoney to Microsoft Money and still have to do between Budget and Money for now at least) and I have a solution that saves me time and enables me to keep on budget.
So, I haven't picked up my Zaraus in quite a while, and really don't see me doing so, as the iPod touch has replaced it and soo much more. Especially with the addition of Budget Touch and the Budget desktop software. Now if they can hurry up and get syncing with Windows working I might be able to help my wife streamline her budget process.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Come on people, reboot/reload
This post is more of a rant.
I can't count the number of times someone has come up to me saying their computer is doing something weird, and a reboot has brought it back to working normally. PC, MAC, Linux, you name it I've seen reboots or reloads take care of it.
Case in point. Had a user come up to me saying that Word was giving them a date in it's auto-complete feature that was off from time to time. Sometimes as much as a couple of days. I looked at the computer (a MAC btw) and sure enough Word was putting in a date from several days ago (specifically about 4). So, I thought lets see what happens with a reboot, but before that, lets just try completely exiting out of Word and re-opening it. Sure enough, that brought the date current. So, my guess is that when Word starts it pulls some of those variables from the system and caches them for use while it is open. And exiting out of just the document doesn't actually exit out of Word on a MAC. So, this user needs to get in the practice (if they want to continue using this feature and it remain accurate) of at least exiting out of Word at the end of every day to re-open fresh the next day.
I can't count the number of times someone has come up to me saying their computer is doing something weird, and a reboot has brought it back to working normally. PC, MAC, Linux, you name it I've seen reboots or reloads take care of it.
Case in point. Had a user come up to me saying that Word was giving them a date in it's auto-complete feature that was off from time to time. Sometimes as much as a couple of days. I looked at the computer (a MAC btw) and sure enough Word was putting in a date from several days ago (specifically about 4). So, I thought lets see what happens with a reboot, but before that, lets just try completely exiting out of Word and re-opening it. Sure enough, that brought the date current. So, my guess is that when Word starts it pulls some of those variables from the system and caches them for use while it is open. And exiting out of just the document doesn't actually exit out of Word on a MAC. So, this user needs to get in the practice (if they want to continue using this feature and it remain accurate) of at least exiting out of Word at the end of every day to re-open fresh the next day.
Friday, October 8, 2010
Synergy+
In one of my readings on Slashdot I read about a solution posed for an issue using a free software package called Synergy.
The concept intrigued me in that at work my main computer is a MacBook Pro, but I still have a PC under my desk that I access either through RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) or via the KVM (Keyboard Video Mouse) switch at my desk. In looking at this software it appeared I could control either without having to use the special KVM command or RDP connection. The downside (if you want to call it that) is that the PC would need it's own dedicated monitor for this to work.
So, I had a monitor under my desk that was sitting idle, and since it was a smaller/older model nobody was seeking to use it anywhere else, I decided to use it to try the software out. Took some time and organizing cables but I managed. Then installed the software on the PC. Since this would be a secondary system it would be set up as a "Client" in the software, and the MacBook Pro would act as the "Server." I didn't realize at first when I downloaded the OS X I didn't realize it only installs scripts that need called from the terminal. This would have been ok for me long term I guess, but at the time I didn't feel like messing with it, or spending a lot of time trying to figure out the syntax for the scripts. This in turn lead me to their Frequently Asked Questions page, which lead to their Related Products page, which linked to QSynergy which adds a unified graphical interface to the software that is available on OS X, Linux and Windows.
I chose to only use QSynergy on the MacBook and use Synergy's software on the PC since I already had it installed there. After installing QSynergy on the Mac, I went through the configuration, and set up the PC desktop to be to the Left of the Mac, then started the server. I already had configured the PC to connect to the Mac as the server and the link came up. Unfortunately, I had been connected to the PC via RDP, which had the screen locked and Synergy was actually connecting to the RDP session, even after disconnecting RDP, the display was black and I was unable to control. This puzzled me for a little while and I tried various settings in the server software to try to resolve it. In the end to resolve this I had to use the KVM to recontrol the PC and get the system out of the "locked" state. After that, I switched back to the Mac and moving the mouse to the left is just like having another display connected in a multi display configuration, except it is connected to a completely different computer.
Right off I did have some issue with my Spaces when switching between them the Keyboard didn't always follow, but after removing some settings I had put in place (when the screen stayed black) everything behaved as expected.
Overall, so far I'm really enjoying using this software to keep a windows desktop just a short mouse movement away for administrative stuff, as well as working with software that works best on PC. I've shown the software to a couple of co-workers and they commented on how responsive it was, it's hare to really even notice that the mouse and keyboard aren't physically connected to the "Client" machine. There are some things to keep in mind that I have noticed.
The concept intrigued me in that at work my main computer is a MacBook Pro, but I still have a PC under my desk that I access either through RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) or via the KVM (Keyboard Video Mouse) switch at my desk. In looking at this software it appeared I could control either without having to use the special KVM command or RDP connection. The downside (if you want to call it that) is that the PC would need it's own dedicated monitor for this to work.
So, I had a monitor under my desk that was sitting idle, and since it was a smaller/older model nobody was seeking to use it anywhere else, I decided to use it to try the software out. Took some time and organizing cables but I managed. Then installed the software on the PC. Since this would be a secondary system it would be set up as a "Client" in the software, and the MacBook Pro would act as the "Server." I didn't realize at first when I downloaded the OS X I didn't realize it only installs scripts that need called from the terminal. This would have been ok for me long term I guess, but at the time I didn't feel like messing with it, or spending a lot of time trying to figure out the syntax for the scripts. This in turn lead me to their Frequently Asked Questions page, which lead to their Related Products page, which linked to QSynergy which adds a unified graphical interface to the software that is available on OS X, Linux and Windows.
I chose to only use QSynergy on the MacBook and use Synergy's software on the PC since I already had it installed there. After installing QSynergy on the Mac, I went through the configuration, and set up the PC desktop to be to the Left of the Mac, then started the server. I already had configured the PC to connect to the Mac as the server and the link came up. Unfortunately, I had been connected to the PC via RDP, which had the screen locked and Synergy was actually connecting to the RDP session, even after disconnecting RDP, the display was black and I was unable to control. This puzzled me for a little while and I tried various settings in the server software to try to resolve it. In the end to resolve this I had to use the KVM to recontrol the PC and get the system out of the "locked" state. After that, I switched back to the Mac and moving the mouse to the left is just like having another display connected in a multi display configuration, except it is connected to a completely different computer.
Right off I did have some issue with my Spaces when switching between them the Keyboard didn't always follow, but after removing some settings I had put in place (when the screen stayed black) everything behaved as expected.
Overall, so far I'm really enjoying using this software to keep a windows desktop just a short mouse movement away for administrative stuff, as well as working with software that works best on PC. I've shown the software to a couple of co-workers and they commented on how responsive it was, it's hare to really even notice that the mouse and keyboard aren't physically connected to the "Client" machine. There are some things to keep in mind that I have noticed.
- The Windows keys don't function over the connection
- (Alt)+(Tab) doesn't work over the connection
- Copy/Paste doesn't work across the connection
- Qsynergy doesn't run as a background service (ie if you exit the application window, it closes the connection so Minimize is your friend here)
- Each machine requires its own physical display
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Welcome.. Plus more..
Welcome to my new home for, well, technology related thoughts, accomplishments and reviews. I hope to make a regular appearance here with some sort of tidbit from my experiences Technology wise.
So, that being said, lets get to my first post.
So, with the new fall TV season's starting up this week, the past week has seen me paying some serious attention to my PVR setup. First a little background, then I'll get to the latest developments and where I plan on going from here moving forward.
The background:
Several years ago one of my wife's massage clients turned me toward a Linux based Video recording system that worked simular to a Tivo, but without the cost and with many more features. The software he was using and pointed me toward was known as KnoppMyth. The system intrigued me, and before long I was searching for a tv tuner that I could put into a system to get this up and running for myself. I eventually stumbled on a system that the owner no longer wanted (would cost more to fix than buying a new system) that had a tuner in it. I was able to use that tuner and after much tweaking in the system figured out the settings needed to make it work. Truth be told, if I wasn't such a geek I don't think I'd have stuck with it as long as I did with how long it took to get this "cheap" software tuner to work in Linux. However I did, and we started recording. I'm not sure what version of KnoppMyth this was, but eventually I upgraded to a newer version (R5F27) to get some better features, and had to re-tweak the upgrade to make it work yet again. We grew to love the features the system had introduced us to: commercial skipping, gaming (Emulation specifically), web interface for searching/scheduling recordings, not dealing with VHS tapes, just to name a few.
So, this system served us well for a time, with a 120 Gig drive, I eventually realized if we wanted to keep any of our recordings long term I'd need to seriously consider a larger drive. So, found a deal on a 250 Gig Drive and used some tech tools (I'll cover these in more detail in another post) to copy our data and settings from the smaller to larger drive, and got everything up and running with more storage space. About this time our first child was also getting around more and as curiosity would have it, we had to keep an eye out that she wouldn't turn the computer off as it was in our living room. This lead me to look further into setting up a frontend/backend setup where the system doing the recordings etc would be somewhere out of the way and somewhere it wouldn't get shut down, and then another system would serve as the viewing portion in our living room, where if it got shut down and we didn't notice it it wouldn't keep recordings from happening. As time moved on we started to find we were having some conflicts with what to record and when. So, I started looking to upgrade the system, this time with a "hardware" based tuner since prices had dropped since I first set the system up. The search turned to Ebay where I found a Hauppauge PVR-150 for around $20 (If I recall correctly). I snapped it up as it was supposed to be supported out of the box by KnoppMyth (ie no having to tweak with drivers/firmware etc). When I received it I attempted to use it in my production box first and it didn't come right up which confused me, so I pulled it to play with in a test system while my production box kept recording away as it had been. After some testing in a KnoppMyth test box as well as my Windows PC, in which it didn't work in either case, I took a closer look at the card and noticed that some of the surface mount components were missing/scratched off. Ebay auction was "as-is" so no recourse there. Back on the search, I found a PVR-500 card for around $40 shipped (on sale), however it did not come with the PCI mounting bracket. After some research I decided that the card connections looked close enough to those on the bad PVR-150 that I figured I could make it work even if I had to modify it slightly. Added benefit of this card is it has two hardware tuners built in, so it by itself could record two simultaneous programs by itself, and I still have the "software" based card as well. When the card arrived I first put it into test system and found it worked as expected. Big time Woohoo.
So, now we were able to record up to 3 shows at the same time, and the drive did get to the point where I realized it would be too small again. Found a good deal on a 500 Gig drive and made the purchase. That was several months ago, and I just never got around to doing the copy and making the switch, not until recently anyway.
Wow, I just realized that whole history could have made an entire post by itself, but think it's relevant enough to keep here so you know what all has been put into the system to date (though I do believe it skimmed over some of the more difficult parts, they took place so long ago I don't feel it would do justice to go into more detail from memory at this point.).
The Latest Developments:
So, about 2 months ago (oh, no, more history) we had a branch fall which took out the cable line to our house. When Comcast came out to repair it (broke at the pole) the technician put on a filter which would allow us to get extended basic for a period of time until they finished doing their upgrade to "digital" for the extended basic programming. This in effect gave us twice the content to record and view. The 250 Gig drive filled QUICKLY, and in fact we ended up deleting some recordings without ever watching them. Then Comcast did their magic, and we are now back to our Basic BASIC cable, but still sitting there with not a lot of free drive space, and the upcoming fall season shows about to start.
So, about two weeks ago I decided to move up to the 500 Gig drive. As mentioned earlier I had had success before using some software tools, and I decided to go that route again, though I didn't remember exactly which tools I had used, I went with my tried and true route. Symantec Ghost was the tool I booted to first to "clone" the drive, settings, data and all. Well, the first attempt failed with errors. OK, lets try it with an option in the software to continue even when errors are encountered. Second attempt failed. Ok, something isn't right here, but can't put my finger on it exactly. So, I move on to another tool I had come across, probably about the time I did this before, (not sure which I had used before successfully) Clonezilla. So, I burn the bootable disk for Clonezilla and go through the process. Things were looking good and I had other tasks to do around the house so I let it run. After some time I came back and it failed as well. So, reboot and go back in and tell it to ignore errors/force the clone and walk away again. By the way this was over a Friday evening and part of Saturday during the day. Well, that also failed. At this point I took a closer look at the errors and used Google to research, looks like the drive has some physical errors on it that are causing the clones to fail. This isn't good, but the system will run as it is with the 250 Gig drive even with the errors, and I was running out of time in my window of no recordings. So, I put the 250 Gig drive back in and bring the system up so that we can continue on as before. This also gives some time to think through how move forward with moving to the larger drive.
Couple issues that stuck in mind as I contemplated where to go from where I was at. One, the drive has physical errors that are stopping duplication, how long till those errors cause problems with the system overall? How do I get things over to the drive seeing as all clone utilities fail with the physical errors, yet the system is able to run and appears to work fine? How long would the system hold up if I just used the 500 Gig drive as a data mount, keeping the 250 Gig as just the OS and utilities portion, which isn't good if the 250 Gig drive completely fails? These questions really had me wondering. So, in my research I looked further into how the tools Clonezilla uses to perform it's functions (really the benefit of Clonezilla is that it is a pretty wrapping on tools that are commonly available, and makes it easy to step through the process of using those tools). I decided that maybe it would be best to just create the file system on the new drive then copy the data over manually using other tools at my disposal in the operating system.
So, I burn a disk of GParted, another open source package that gives a nice GUI for functions that can be done from the command line, which is very simular in functionality to Partition Magic. Using GParted I created the partitions on the new drive and then found it (GParted) contained a "copy" feature. I used this copy feature and it copied over all of our recordings without a problem. This was good news, in that at least the recordings would be there, even if they were not accessible through the "recordings" menu in KnoppMyth. After it finished copying the recordings I decided to give a try copying the system partition, and after a time it came back with an error while copying. Not good. So after some research I found that I could try to use rsync (a Linux copy utility) to try manually copying the data. Gave that a try and it seemed to be taking a very long time so I stopped it. At this point I realized I messed up the command sequence and I was copying data to the location I was copying from (basically creating a loop which would have eventually filled the drive). So after cleaning up my mess, I started the process again, and rsync came back with errors, but said it was able to copy most everything. Woohoo!
At this point I need to get the system back up as soon as I can, so I pull the drives and switch which is Master/Slave so that I can make sure that the system will boot off of the new drive. Power it up and am greeted by "L 99 99 99 99 99 99..." filling the screen. Oh, No.. Off to my friend Google and look up ways to resolve. Lots of information out there, and lots that didn't pertain to me. So, I go to the KnoppMyth forums/wiki pages and start research. Found a couple of different fixes to try, one of which utilizes a rescue boot floppy, guess what, I didn't have one. After some more digging I found a post where a user was able to boot from the install cd for KnoppMyth, and mount the file system, edit some files and rebuild the boot record. Well, this is where I find my first problem, the file on the new drive isn't working, so I then mount the second drive and copy the file from there. After some tweaking, I was able to rebuild the boot record. Somewhere in there I also did another rsync copy of the old drive to the new drive in hopes it would fix it as well, but it didn't, but need to mention I did do that again and it came back and said there were files it was unable to copy (physical errors again). So, I reboot and the system comes up, but not fully, KnoppMyth frontend (the user interface for using the system) didn't come up. After some quick research I found what files were needed to get that back up and copy them from the old drive. For some reason these didn't copy right when doing the mass copy, but did with the smaller copy. So, now the system is up and appears to be running correctly, so I went upstairs and made sure that the Frontend system was also working correctly. It appeared to be and it was late so off to bed I went.
Fast forward a week to this past weekend when I got to thinking it would be nice to get closed captions working on the frontend system (they worked on the backend in the basement, but not in the living room), and also as I was looking at recording job options the "Encode for iPod" caught my eye again. This latest caught my attention as I was trying to figure out when I'd get time to watch shows that my wife wasn't interested in, and I can't watch them while our daughter is watching her shows.
Well, the Closed captioning search lead me to CCExtractor, a free tool that reads through the original recording and creates a text (srt) file of the captions. So, I download the tool, and install it, but it errors out on me, and I eventually figure out the syntax needed to make it run and generate the file. After I've generated a caption file on the backend I went upstairs and verified that when viewing that recording captions are now working. WooHoo!! After that I created it as one of my user jobs with proper syntax, so that when I set to record a program, it is just a matter of checking one extra box and the Closed Captions will be extracted and usable on the frontend. After all that I was thinking last night about how things were set up between the frontend and backend, and how there might be differences. You see, with this system there are a couple of options for programs to use when viewing videos/recordings. The main two video players are ffmpeg and mplayer. So I was thinking perhaps the reason the captions were working on the backend but not the frontend were that they were using different video players and the one being used on the frontend just wasn't able to read the encoded captions (but was able to load the srt file of extracted captions). So, this morning I went through the settings and did find that the backend used ffmpeg and the frontend was set to use mplayer, so I changed the settings so the frontend is now using the ffmpeg. This change was not able to do away with the CCExtractor tool yet though.
Now in the middle of all of that I also, as mentioned, was looking at the "Encode to iPod" option. This really interested me in that we both have iPod touches, and in the future I plan on moving on to an iPhone. So, I started by looking into how this worked on the backend, and found the scripts used to create the file for the iPod. I wasn't 100% sure this would work as my version of KnoppMyth is rather old, actually from before the iPod touches had really hit the market, and at the time it was just the iPod video that the scripts were set up for. So after some searching on the KnoppMyth forums I found a user who had changed the scripts to make a file that looked good and worked well on his iPhone (I'm assuming a first or second generation iPhone as he stated he was running the 1.1.1 OS on the iPhone). Well I duplicated his settings in the myth2ipod script, but when I ran the script on a file I received errors for all my efforts. After more searching I found a "patch" that a user had applied to one of their setting files, but when I tried to run the patch according to instructions it failed, and no massaging the files helped any. After some time I started to look at the files to see what the contents were to see if I could manually patch it, and found that the file it was trying to patch was empty. So, I looked at the file sized for all the files in that directory and found they were all 0 bytes in size. Drat, now what. I started to think I'd be up the creek, having to whittle my paddle out of another system set up just to retrieve the files from, when I realized: The frontend system should have these files un-molested. So, off I went (over the network) and sure enough there they were full of script goodness. So, I copied the files over the network, and tried the script again, FAIL. Found even more files that were "missing" but not missing, so replaced them, this time it was only about half the files in the folder, but I replaced all of them anyway. Try again.. wait, what is this, it's working.. WooHoo! Oh, hold that excitement a little, lets wait till it is completely done, and actually on my iPod before I completely rejoice. So, an hour and a half later it's done encoding it, and now there is a file in the ipodfeed folder, looks good, just a little over 640 meg (hmm.. these could fit on a cd..) Into Itunes I go, subscribe to "Podcast", wait to download. Plug in iPod, transfer to iPod, play. Looks pretty good, nice. Now I can set up my shows to be encoded for the ipod, transfer them and watch my shows over my lunch break or even while our daughter is using the TV. WooHoo..
Moving Forward:
Ok, this post has been entirely longer than I had thought it would be, so this will hopefully be short, and I'm just going to bullet list it for you.
So, that being said, lets get to my first post.
So, with the new fall TV season's starting up this week, the past week has seen me paying some serious attention to my PVR setup. First a little background, then I'll get to the latest developments and where I plan on going from here moving forward.
The background:
Several years ago one of my wife's massage clients turned me toward a Linux based Video recording system that worked simular to a Tivo, but without the cost and with many more features. The software he was using and pointed me toward was known as KnoppMyth. The system intrigued me, and before long I was searching for a tv tuner that I could put into a system to get this up and running for myself. I eventually stumbled on a system that the owner no longer wanted (would cost more to fix than buying a new system) that had a tuner in it. I was able to use that tuner and after much tweaking in the system figured out the settings needed to make it work. Truth be told, if I wasn't such a geek I don't think I'd have stuck with it as long as I did with how long it took to get this "cheap" software tuner to work in Linux. However I did, and we started recording. I'm not sure what version of KnoppMyth this was, but eventually I upgraded to a newer version (R5F27) to get some better features, and had to re-tweak the upgrade to make it work yet again. We grew to love the features the system had introduced us to: commercial skipping, gaming (Emulation specifically), web interface for searching/scheduling recordings, not dealing with VHS tapes, just to name a few.
So, this system served us well for a time, with a 120 Gig drive, I eventually realized if we wanted to keep any of our recordings long term I'd need to seriously consider a larger drive. So, found a deal on a 250 Gig Drive and used some tech tools (I'll cover these in more detail in another post) to copy our data and settings from the smaller to larger drive, and got everything up and running with more storage space. About this time our first child was also getting around more and as curiosity would have it, we had to keep an eye out that she wouldn't turn the computer off as it was in our living room. This lead me to look further into setting up a frontend/backend setup where the system doing the recordings etc would be somewhere out of the way and somewhere it wouldn't get shut down, and then another system would serve as the viewing portion in our living room, where if it got shut down and we didn't notice it it wouldn't keep recordings from happening. As time moved on we started to find we were having some conflicts with what to record and when. So, I started looking to upgrade the system, this time with a "hardware" based tuner since prices had dropped since I first set the system up. The search turned to Ebay where I found a Hauppauge PVR-150 for around $20 (If I recall correctly). I snapped it up as it was supposed to be supported out of the box by KnoppMyth (ie no having to tweak with drivers/firmware etc). When I received it I attempted to use it in my production box first and it didn't come right up which confused me, so I pulled it to play with in a test system while my production box kept recording away as it had been. After some testing in a KnoppMyth test box as well as my Windows PC, in which it didn't work in either case, I took a closer look at the card and noticed that some of the surface mount components were missing/scratched off. Ebay auction was "as-is" so no recourse there. Back on the search, I found a PVR-500 card for around $40 shipped (on sale), however it did not come with the PCI mounting bracket. After some research I decided that the card connections looked close enough to those on the bad PVR-150 that I figured I could make it work even if I had to modify it slightly. Added benefit of this card is it has two hardware tuners built in, so it by itself could record two simultaneous programs by itself, and I still have the "software" based card as well. When the card arrived I first put it into test system and found it worked as expected. Big time Woohoo.
So, now we were able to record up to 3 shows at the same time, and the drive did get to the point where I realized it would be too small again. Found a good deal on a 500 Gig drive and made the purchase. That was several months ago, and I just never got around to doing the copy and making the switch, not until recently anyway.
Wow, I just realized that whole history could have made an entire post by itself, but think it's relevant enough to keep here so you know what all has been put into the system to date (though I do believe it skimmed over some of the more difficult parts, they took place so long ago I don't feel it would do justice to go into more detail from memory at this point.).
The Latest Developments:
So, about 2 months ago (oh, no, more history) we had a branch fall which took out the cable line to our house. When Comcast came out to repair it (broke at the pole) the technician put on a filter which would allow us to get extended basic for a period of time until they finished doing their upgrade to "digital" for the extended basic programming. This in effect gave us twice the content to record and view. The 250 Gig drive filled QUICKLY, and in fact we ended up deleting some recordings without ever watching them. Then Comcast did their magic, and we are now back to our Basic BASIC cable, but still sitting there with not a lot of free drive space, and the upcoming fall season shows about to start.
So, about two weeks ago I decided to move up to the 500 Gig drive. As mentioned earlier I had had success before using some software tools, and I decided to go that route again, though I didn't remember exactly which tools I had used, I went with my tried and true route. Symantec Ghost was the tool I booted to first to "clone" the drive, settings, data and all. Well, the first attempt failed with errors. OK, lets try it with an option in the software to continue even when errors are encountered. Second attempt failed. Ok, something isn't right here, but can't put my finger on it exactly. So, I move on to another tool I had come across, probably about the time I did this before, (not sure which I had used before successfully) Clonezilla. So, I burn the bootable disk for Clonezilla and go through the process. Things were looking good and I had other tasks to do around the house so I let it run. After some time I came back and it failed as well. So, reboot and go back in and tell it to ignore errors/force the clone and walk away again. By the way this was over a Friday evening and part of Saturday during the day. Well, that also failed. At this point I took a closer look at the errors and used Google to research, looks like the drive has some physical errors on it that are causing the clones to fail. This isn't good, but the system will run as it is with the 250 Gig drive even with the errors, and I was running out of time in my window of no recordings. So, I put the 250 Gig drive back in and bring the system up so that we can continue on as before. This also gives some time to think through how move forward with moving to the larger drive.
Couple issues that stuck in mind as I contemplated where to go from where I was at. One, the drive has physical errors that are stopping duplication, how long till those errors cause problems with the system overall? How do I get things over to the drive seeing as all clone utilities fail with the physical errors, yet the system is able to run and appears to work fine? How long would the system hold up if I just used the 500 Gig drive as a data mount, keeping the 250 Gig as just the OS and utilities portion, which isn't good if the 250 Gig drive completely fails? These questions really had me wondering. So, in my research I looked further into how the tools Clonezilla uses to perform it's functions (really the benefit of Clonezilla is that it is a pretty wrapping on tools that are commonly available, and makes it easy to step through the process of using those tools). I decided that maybe it would be best to just create the file system on the new drive then copy the data over manually using other tools at my disposal in the operating system.
So, I burn a disk of GParted, another open source package that gives a nice GUI for functions that can be done from the command line, which is very simular in functionality to Partition Magic. Using GParted I created the partitions on the new drive and then found it (GParted) contained a "copy" feature. I used this copy feature and it copied over all of our recordings without a problem. This was good news, in that at least the recordings would be there, even if they were not accessible through the "recordings" menu in KnoppMyth. After it finished copying the recordings I decided to give a try copying the system partition, and after a time it came back with an error while copying. Not good. So after some research I found that I could try to use rsync (a Linux copy utility) to try manually copying the data. Gave that a try and it seemed to be taking a very long time so I stopped it. At this point I realized I messed up the command sequence and I was copying data to the location I was copying from (basically creating a loop which would have eventually filled the drive). So after cleaning up my mess, I started the process again, and rsync came back with errors, but said it was able to copy most everything. Woohoo!
At this point I need to get the system back up as soon as I can, so I pull the drives and switch which is Master/Slave so that I can make sure that the system will boot off of the new drive. Power it up and am greeted by "L 99 99 99 99 99 99..." filling the screen. Oh, No.. Off to my friend Google and look up ways to resolve. Lots of information out there, and lots that didn't pertain to me. So, I go to the KnoppMyth forums/wiki pages and start research. Found a couple of different fixes to try, one of which utilizes a rescue boot floppy, guess what, I didn't have one. After some more digging I found a post where a user was able to boot from the install cd for KnoppMyth, and mount the file system, edit some files and rebuild the boot record. Well, this is where I find my first problem, the file on the new drive isn't working, so I then mount the second drive and copy the file from there. After some tweaking, I was able to rebuild the boot record. Somewhere in there I also did another rsync copy of the old drive to the new drive in hopes it would fix it as well, but it didn't, but need to mention I did do that again and it came back and said there were files it was unable to copy (physical errors again). So, I reboot and the system comes up, but not fully, KnoppMyth frontend (the user interface for using the system) didn't come up. After some quick research I found what files were needed to get that back up and copy them from the old drive. For some reason these didn't copy right when doing the mass copy, but did with the smaller copy. So, now the system is up and appears to be running correctly, so I went upstairs and made sure that the Frontend system was also working correctly. It appeared to be and it was late so off to bed I went.
Fast forward a week to this past weekend when I got to thinking it would be nice to get closed captions working on the frontend system (they worked on the backend in the basement, but not in the living room), and also as I was looking at recording job options the "Encode for iPod" caught my eye again. This latest caught my attention as I was trying to figure out when I'd get time to watch shows that my wife wasn't interested in, and I can't watch them while our daughter is watching her shows.
Well, the Closed captioning search lead me to CCExtractor, a free tool that reads through the original recording and creates a text (srt) file of the captions. So, I download the tool, and install it, but it errors out on me, and I eventually figure out the syntax needed to make it run and generate the file. After I've generated a caption file on the backend I went upstairs and verified that when viewing that recording captions are now working. WooHoo!! After that I created it as one of my user jobs with proper syntax, so that when I set to record a program, it is just a matter of checking one extra box and the Closed Captions will be extracted and usable on the frontend. After all that I was thinking last night about how things were set up between the frontend and backend, and how there might be differences. You see, with this system there are a couple of options for programs to use when viewing videos/recordings. The main two video players are ffmpeg and mplayer. So I was thinking perhaps the reason the captions were working on the backend but not the frontend were that they were using different video players and the one being used on the frontend just wasn't able to read the encoded captions (but was able to load the srt file of extracted captions). So, this morning I went through the settings and did find that the backend used ffmpeg and the frontend was set to use mplayer, so I changed the settings so the frontend is now using the ffmpeg. This change was not able to do away with the CCExtractor tool yet though.
Now in the middle of all of that I also, as mentioned, was looking at the "Encode to iPod" option. This really interested me in that we both have iPod touches, and in the future I plan on moving on to an iPhone. So, I started by looking into how this worked on the backend, and found the scripts used to create the file for the iPod. I wasn't 100% sure this would work as my version of KnoppMyth is rather old, actually from before the iPod touches had really hit the market, and at the time it was just the iPod video that the scripts were set up for. So after some searching on the KnoppMyth forums I found a user who had changed the scripts to make a file that looked good and worked well on his iPhone (I'm assuming a first or second generation iPhone as he stated he was running the 1.1.1 OS on the iPhone). Well I duplicated his settings in the myth2ipod script, but when I ran the script on a file I received errors for all my efforts. After more searching I found a "patch" that a user had applied to one of their setting files, but when I tried to run the patch according to instructions it failed, and no massaging the files helped any. After some time I started to look at the files to see what the contents were to see if I could manually patch it, and found that the file it was trying to patch was empty. So, I looked at the file sized for all the files in that directory and found they were all 0 bytes in size. Drat, now what. I started to think I'd be up the creek, having to whittle my paddle out of another system set up just to retrieve the files from, when I realized: The frontend system should have these files un-molested. So, off I went (over the network) and sure enough there they were full of script goodness. So, I copied the files over the network, and tried the script again, FAIL. Found even more files that were "missing" but not missing, so replaced them, this time it was only about half the files in the folder, but I replaced all of them anyway. Try again.. wait, what is this, it's working.. WooHoo! Oh, hold that excitement a little, lets wait till it is completely done, and actually on my iPod before I completely rejoice. So, an hour and a half later it's done encoding it, and now there is a file in the ipodfeed folder, looks good, just a little over 640 meg (hmm.. these could fit on a cd..) Into Itunes I go, subscribe to "Podcast", wait to download. Plug in iPod, transfer to iPod, play. Looks pretty good, nice. Now I can set up my shows to be encoded for the ipod, transfer them and watch my shows over my lunch break or even while our daughter is using the TV. WooHoo..
Moving Forward:
Ok, this post has been entirely longer than I had thought it would be, so this will hopefully be short, and I'm just going to bullet list it for you.
- New Frontend system (mini desktop that will be just slightly larger than say a VCR)
- Set frontend system to boot over network, so no need for power consuming hard drive
- Reformat the 250 Gig drive to hold Videos not recorded off tv (ie VHS converted files)
- Set up system that can be used separately to record VHS tapes for digital access
- Maybe upgrade to a newer version of KnoppMyth/LinHES
In Closing:
Let me first say I doubt very much all of my posts will be this lengthy, in fact I hope they are not. This post covered a long period of time invested in this system, but had background that I felt would help in understanding the overall picture. This post also just seemed to flow out as the excitement I have over getting these things working needed expressed in some manner.
If you would like more information on any part of this post to be covered in more detail in the future, be sure to comment and I'll see about creating specific posts which will cover those details. (IE if you are interested in a review of the system with a better list of features and maybe screen shots (if I can figure out a good quality way to do so) let me know.) I may cover some of the tools mentioned in more detail at some point anyway, but will do so sooner if anyone expresses any interest. I will probably also keep updates coming as I make changes to the system expressed in the "Moving Forward" section.
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