Archive for category Gadgets
From G1 to Motorola Milestone with Android 2.0
Motorola Milestone (Droid, if you're in the US)
In the beginning there was HTC, and lo, they created a phone and named it G1. And it did sell.
Now Motorola have created a sibling to the G1, the Motorola Milestone (Droid if you’re stateside) and not only is it more slimline than it’s G1 brethren, it also comes with Android 2.0!
First thing I noticed about the Milestone is the phone and slider feel rock solid. The arc slider on the G1 was spring loaded and felt like it would loosen after a while (which it never did) but the Milestone slider needs a good shove all the way to click in place, this I like.
Todays Science Experiment: Disassembling an iPod battery (or: How To Burn Your House Down)
Having finally managed to get my iPod Classic open, I replaced its aging battery for a spiffy new one. Upon reading the label on the old battery, it said: Do NOT disassemble.
Well, that’s fighting talk where I come from, and if Apple said not to do it, I’m doing it!
Here we have the freshly plucked (well, torn) battery:
The pristine, non-violated, battery.
Using a Cyberlink remote with the new Boxee Beta
Having recently installed the new Boxee Beta, which is (by the way) amazing, I decided to take the plunge and try to get my cheapo Cyberlink (USB) remote control (shown below) working with it, but properly.
Boxee and the Acer Aspire Revo
Having tried XBMC on my Acer Aspire Revo, I thought I’d give Boxee a try. I’d heard such good things about it that it would have been rude of me to ignore it, and I have to say: I really do like it. Technically it’s not available for Karmic (Ubuntu 9.10) but thankfully it can easily be botched to work fine in 9.10.
The first thing to do is head over to the Boxee site and sign up with them: Boxee.tv. The reason for this is that Boxee is part XBMC, part social media. Boxee is based on XBMC but it has several useful addons that allow you to rate/favourite your media and recommend media to friends. All this is done via the Boxee website, hence the signup. Once you’ve signed up, you can go to the downloads page and see instructions on how to install Boxee by adding the Jaunty repo. And this is where you hit a snag. Boxee won’t install as it requires packages that aren’t in the Karmic, or Boxee, repo. So, to botch it, we grab some .deb files that are from Jaunty/other repos.
Installing Ubuntu 9.10 and XBMC on the Acer Aspire Revo
Acer Aspire Revo
I recently bought an Acer Aspire Revo with the idea of turning it in to a media center. I decided to install Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) and use XBMC (Xbox Media Center) as a front end. Here’s how I did it:
First I installed Ubuntu 9.10 to a USB stick. I did this using the USB Startup Disc Creator app which is installed, by default, with Ubuntu. It’s under System > Administration. I just pointed it to the ISO of 9.10, it detected my USB stick and off it went. So, with Ubuntu on my USB I popped the USB in to the Revo and booted it up.
Sony Reader PRS-505 in Linux – REVIEW
I know there are plenty of PRS-505 reviews out there on the interwebz, but the vast majority don’t mention if/how the 505 plays well with Linux. That’ll be the focus of my review. For the record I’m using Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty).
PRS-505
First things first, the 505 is teeny! The 505 comes with a nice suede-feeling cover, the 505 in the cover is a touch smaller (in height) than a DVD/video-game case and a hairs breadth thinner.
TIP: you can click any of the photos in this review to get larger photos.
The sliver of white and green is the edge of an Xbox 360 video-game case.
In the box, you get the 505, the snazzy brown cover (which uses magnetism to stay closed), a USB cable (to also charge it with) and a couple of CD’s, both geared towards Windows users although one CD has some old public domain classics on there for you to read. The CD’s aren’t necessary anyway, one is a cataloging app (which I’ll come to the Linux equivalent in a moment) and the device mounts as a USB storage device. The 505 has have internal memory for storing books on, but it also accepts Sony, and SD, cards.
Creating an iPod playlist in Amarok
The one thing I love about mp3 players is that you can just stick it on random and it’s like having your own jukebox. But what about when you want to play only certain songs? Or play only those certain songs on random?
Well, that’s when you need a playlist. Amarok does it’s own playlists, but that’s to create a playlist of songs that are on your hard drive. This tutorial is on how to create a playlist for your iPod using the songs that are on your iPod.
First things first (I’m assuming you already have songs on your iPod and you’ve used Amarok to do this) connect your iPod to the PC (it should auto-mount, most new distros recognise iPods) and load up Amarok. Click the DEVICES tab (down the left side of the screen) then click the CONNECT button at the top left of the window:
You should now see a list of all the songs, and albums, that are on your iPod. At the top of that list are two red folders, Podcasts and Playlists.
uShare + Xbox 360 = media streaming goodness
I have an old Xbox (with modchip) that I FTP video to, and use as a media player, but I decided to try and get streaming media working between Ubuntu and my shiny Xbox 360. Wow, what a to-do! It’s not exactly rocket science to get it working, but it took a lot of trial and error, Googling, and other smart peoples blog posts, before I finally got it working. Here’s how I (eventually!) did it:
First, install uShare. You can get it from the Ubuntu repos. As of writing, it’s at version 1.1a
Ok, now to configure uShare using sudo, so:
sudo gedit /etc/ushare.conf
You need to find the following entries, and make sure they look like this:
USHARE_PORT=49200
USHARE_DIR=/path/to/your/media
ENABLE_XBOX=yes
DANGER! DANGER! You must make sure there are no spaces in those entries (before, or after, the equals) and the ‘yes’ MUST be in lower case. No, I’m not kidding. I had ENABLE_XBOX as ‘YES’ and it just would not work until I changed it to ‘yes’. Also, complex names in the USHARE_DIR seems to make it show ‘No videos found’. Rename the directory, or copy your files to another directory. It might be the use of a space that causes this, not sure.
Not sure if this is 100% necessary, but several posts in other blogs have said that the ENABLE_XBOX option is a bit sporadic, so it’s best to hardwire uShare to force an Xbox compatible startup. So we need to edit another uShare file:
sudo gedit /etc/init.d/ushare
…and add this line at the beginning of the script (I put it after the comments):
USHARE_OPTIONS=-x
My PC has several eth options, I use eth1 for my original Xbox, so didn’t want to tinker with it, eth4 is for my router, so that left eth3. So to bring up eth3 (in my case):
sudo ifconfig eth3 192.168.3.1
Now we need to restart uShare using the init script:
sudo invoke-rc.d ushare restart
NOTE: do above command twice, I know it seems crazy, but the second time I run that command it gives me a warning, but it works fine. If I run the command only once, the 360 can’t connect to my PC. Might just be a quirk on my PC.
Also do the above init to refresh your file listing. You can enable the web interface if you want to refresh files, but the init command works just as good. Remember to run it twice though!
OK you’re done.
Turn on your Xbox 360, go to My Xbox, across to the Video Library, and click. You should, in the next screen, see ‘ushare’ at the bottom of the list. Click it, and it should connect to your share directory. Voila! If you have mp3’s in your share dir, then come out of the video library and go in to the music library, they are all using the one share directory.
Playing AVI/DivX/XviD seems to be a bit of a problem. But one poster on the internet came with the simplistic solution of just renaming .AVI files to .WMV. Works like a charm!
NOTE: The above might work even if you have a PS3 as there are no changes made on the 360, only in installing uShare and configuring it in Ubuntu.
A werewolf, a polar bear, an elephant, and a Tmobile G1
Well that’s an unusual mix of things, but all to be found right here!
Three new pieces of artwork, and one tech/geek review. Let’s start with the artwork:
[singlepic id=31 w=320 h=240 float=center]
American Werewolf
As you can no doubt guess, this was inspired by the werewolf design used in the ‘American Werewolf in London‘ movie.
[singlepic id=32 w=320 h=240 float=center]
Polar Bear
… and last, but not least:
[singlepic id=33 w=320 h=240 float=center]
Elephant
So, I’ve been kept busy lately. As ever, all (and more!) are for sale in both my Etsy, and Boundless Gallery, stores.
On the geek front, I’ve been busy playing with my T-mobile G1 (aka: Google phone). £200 for a phone, ouch! But honestly, it’s money well spent. I’ve never been so impressed by a mobile phone, the things it can do are just amazing. Read my review of it to see what I mean…
Also, keep an eye out for my work appearing on the front page of Boundless Gallery on Sunday (tomorrow). Seems that I’ve been chosen to appear in their ‘Discover an Artist‘ section. From Boundless:
You will be among the artists and galleries featured on our “Discover an Artist” section on Sunday, Feb 8, 2009.
Each day we select a total of fifty artists and galleries to randomly appear on the homepage in the “Discover an Artist” tab. Artists are displayed five at a time and change every time the page is loaded, so each artist appears in about 10% of homepage views.
These fifty artists are also shown with up to three of their works on our “Discover an Artist” page. The artists are listed in a random order which changes hourly throughout the day.
Banshee – King of all things iPod
Since converting to Ubuntu, and Gnome, it’s been fun trying out new apps to replace the trusty old KDE ones I used to use. The one thing I had been dreading, was trying to find a replacement for good ol’ Amarok. Well, the day finally came where I had to download my weekly podcasts and update my iPod Classic 80gb.
Initially I tried Rhythmbox, since that’s what came with Ubuntu. While initially it did seem to be a great tool for the job I just couldn’t get it to detect my iPod. Which is, to put it lightly, useless.
Next, I tried Exaile. No, not Exhale, Exaile! It looked almost identical to Amarok! I had high hopes for Exaile. It found my iPod, so far so good. But would it send anything to my iPod? Nope.
Back to the drawing board…
Having hunted around various places for a solution to my Exaile problem, I read about Banshee.
Banshee - King of media players, says me.
So it looks nothing like Amarok, but it most certainly does the job. Well, minus one thing: it has a bug in its podcast facilities. It will check podcasts, tell you when new ones are available, but it won’t download them. It starts the download, reaches about 20% (at most) then stops downloading the podcast. Various people have launched bug reports on this, so hopefully it’ll be fixed soon. Banshee detects my iPod instantly, and automatically mounts it – something that even Amarok didn’t do! You can even have it, like iTunes, automatically sync your iPod with your collection. Banshee uses several sources for finding covers for your music. It does seem a bit odd that I can’t give it some basic info and send it searching again, as it seems to be: ‘here’s my best guess, take it or leave it’. I put a cover image in the albums directory and call it cover.jpg – that seems to work.
My iPod is screaming like a Banshee, as is my Ubuntu install, so I’m happy!
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