Ursus Pacificus

I bought a Sony Dash. I gave it a chance. I worked my way through the tedious process of setting it up, particularly getting it to pick up photos from my own web server… Tried out some widgets… cursed the clock, because, out of nowhere, it decided I lived in California, but not in any setting I had access to… I realized that I couldn’t listen to my in-home Icecast-based “Internet Radio Station”, and finally gave up. The Dash went back to Best Buy.

What was wrong with the Dash?

Touch screen… I can’t speak for anyone else… I mean.. Maybe I’m not “capacitive” enough to make the capacitive touch screen work with a light touch, but… I found I had to kind of mash the thing to get it to work… This is a problem, because the “easel-stand-angle-thing” doesn’t lend the Dash to being pushed around. Press on screen hard enough to get a reaction, and the thing falls over. Grr.

Touch screen again… this may, actually be a software issue, but when I press a button, I want to know, right now, that you know I pressed the button, even if it’ll take you a second or two to actually do what I want done. If I can’t have tactile feedback, I need something else… an audible click, or a simple animation or something… something that acknowledges the command.

The “Sony Layer”… The Sony Dash is basically a Chumby One, running in a “container” under the supervision of a layer of Sony software. The Sony layer has a look and feel somewhat similar to what one finds on the PSP, and the PS3… but there’s something lacking on the Dash… I don’t know if it’s that the hardware can’t live up to the dreams of the software people, or if the software was rushed out… Dunno… but this reminds me of when Sony first introduced the “VAIO” line of PCs… It was essentially an attempt to “lock in” customers, and it failed. The Dash seems to try to take something open and simple (the Chumby), slather on a gooey opaque coating of piano-black, and call it a Sony.

Oh, and no battery. Duh. Here’s a giant pallet of stupid. Sony, one of the pioneers of Lithium-ion battery technology… didn’t think to put a battery in this thing.

For $200, I’m not impressed. I’d just as soon get another iPod touch and a cheap speaker-dock. … or a real Chumby for half the price.

First show to use the new “Mm-hmm-Prompter”… A rousing success methinks! Still a few kinks to work out, but mostly awesome!

…if I do say so myself…

which I do.

The GF and I are in DC this weekend. Tomorrow, we’re heading to the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center, then going to he main building on The Mall on Sunday, where we’re going to see Neil Buzz and Mike chat about Apollo 11. Sweet.

I had originally planned to make this stop back in October on the VisionQuest, but this is groovy, too!

Gonna shoot vids and pix and so on…

More later.

Sad news from the geeky trenches. Richard “rick752″ Petnel, maintainer of the most popular filter for AdBlockPlus has died at age 56, after a stroke.

I know, I know…. Mr. OpenSourceGuy… Mr. LinuxFiend… bought an ultra-closed Mac.

Well, given the choice… Mac or MS Windows… Mac.

I still have piles of Linux machines, and I dig them enormously. …but I have to say that I have found the Free and Open-Source Software available for Non-Linear Video Editing to be … sub-optimal. I was a booster for Cinelerra for a long time, and I’d jump back over in a second if I could get it to work reliably… but… I’ve wanted to do some significant video editing for a long time. I have hours of footage from my VisionQuest I need to edit. I have been unable to do it reliably under Linux.

So… FinalCut on a Mac or something else on MS Windows. FinalCut on a Mac.

The video NewsUndies have been recorded and edited on my Mac.

Do I love the Mac the way Mac lovers say I will? No. The UI is, in many respects, maddening. I’ve had a lot of trouble getting camcorders to work right with iMovie and FCE4.

I’m not convinced that “It just works” really works.

I find that generally, on generic hardware, Linux “just works” a lot better than Mac does.

But… for video… it’s working out OK for now.

The iPod Touch is an intriguing gadget.

On the plus side, the WiFi management is fantastic, battery management is pretty spiffy, sound quality is quite good. The multi-touch interface is mostly pretty amazing (although skin moisture, humidity, touch pressure and other factors seem to impact its effectiveness). The accelerometer thing is pretty spiffy. The display is sharp and it handles pretty well for a handheld.

On the minus side, it is an Apple product, so it’s a “closed” device. It’s a very closed device. It’s so closed, it can’t be used at all until it is activated on Windows or Mac machine with iTunes installed. It has no means of playing ogg/vorbis audio files, or installing anything on the Touch that Apple doesn’t approve.

There is a way around this closedness. It’s called “jailbreaking”. I haven’t done it to mine yet, because I’m a little spooked. I’ve bricked a couple other “embedded systems” trying to do something other than what was intended by the manufacturer, and I’ve decided I’m not ready to risk that with the Touch yet.

What’s nice is that the iTunes and App stores have no-cost content, like NPR podcasts and apps like TouchTerm and WiFinder. What’s a drag is that there is very limited configurability and no access to a terminal/console.

I got the iPod Touch, in part because it’s a really handy WiFi handheld… and even more handy gadget than a “netbook”, like an eee-PC or an Acer Aspire one, but it’s also more limited. The on-screen keyboard is kinda slow and clunky. It works a lot better with the Touch flipped over on its side.

All in all, it’s a pretty neat gadget. I’ve been able to catch up on a bunch of NPR shows I’ve been missing out on. It lets me grab mail and Slashdot pretty quickly. Mostly, I see it as a handy ninja web gadget that also plays free podcasts. I’m not going to go and spend a bunch of money on money on music on iTunes. Why not? Because I can’t do anything with the music, other than play it on an iPod. I’m sticking with CDs for now.

Ursuspacificus.net now has an image gallery (finally). It’s Gallery2 (software website here) and can be found athttp://www.ursuspacificus.net/imgal/.

As of right now, I have almost 200 pictures from Chaco Canyon uploaded, and am uploading Meteor Crater photos as I write this.

I don’t have any captions up yet… those will come in time, as will the rest of the LCVQ stills.

Please be patient

So… the Linksys NSLU-2 (which I have a few of) is a pretty cool thing… great for dull things you don’t want to burn a whole lot of electricity on… like in-home DNS and DHCP…

Then there’s the Eee-PC… Also mighty bitchin’ I have 2 and use them quite a bit.

Then… there’s the Ace Aspire ONE (of which I have 3)… great little low-power desktops (and laptops)

But THIS!!! Golly! The BeagleBoard is a single-board computer with a 600 MHz CPU, video out, sound, USB, Ethernet… the list goes on… for… are you sitting down?… $149.

Oh, and the best part?! Open Source. That’s right… you can download the design drawings, buy the components and make your own BeagleBoard (but probably not for $149).

What could a machine like this do?! Well, it could be a RobotRadio server (with the attachment of a simple USB disk)… or a webserver… or.. it could make an awesome PC for the car… FrogPad next to the shifter and an LCD in the dash… awwwwww yeah!… make your own Chumby…. An Internet Radio BoomBox… Simple PCs for the kiddies… or the kithcen… you could run a home theatre off it (with all the fancy DSP stuff and the HDMI output)… why… the possibilities are virtually endless…

Tempting… very tempting….

So I’ve been on the road now for two weeks… stayed in a bunch of hotels.

I’ve found that about 60% of them have either broken, misconfigured or turned-off DHCP. I have been unable to get IP addresses upon connecting to the hotel’s network.

To make matters worse, the people manning the front desk at the hotel have no idea what a DHCP server is, and have no one to call, other than the manager of the hotel, and chances are, the manager has no idea what’s going on either. I was told the problem was with my computer. No.

Wireless is a cheap and easy for hotels to deploy… especially in a pre-existing property… but for a new property, I say put in wired (100Base-T… Cat5e… like that), and if you want, provide wireless as a convenience.

Wi-Fi is OK as a convenience, particularly in a wide-open space, such as a coffee shop or a park, but for a location with lots of obstructions between the user and the access point, Wi-Fi is sketchy, and should not be the primary means of connection.

Nowadays, people are, more and more, depending on hotels to have reliable access to the Internet. What’s more, it’s important to have a means of escalating technical issues to competent personnel, who will be able to take action and correct problems. The “It works for me” answer is insufficient.

Further, if there is any sort of “Windows-only” stuff going on on these networks, that’s just crap. Kinda like “whites-only”… y’know?

For the rest of this trip, I’m going to make a point of testing the Wi-Fi before I register, rather than after.

If you run a hotel property in New Orleans, Orlando or Washington, DC… I’m on my way. Be ready.

Hi…

Well, this may seem a little obscure, or at least geeky… but the box that UrsusPacificus was hosted on when I rolled out my Wordpress implementation has been supplanted. Charlene is my new web host. She’s an AMD Athlon64 X2 with 2GB of RAM in a dull little Micro Center “PowerSpec” micro ATX case. The “system disk” is a 2GB CF card, and the website is living on a software RAID1 composed of 2 old PATA HDDs I had lying around (with PATA-to-SATA adapters).

So, for about $230, with a little old hardware I had lying around, I was able to put together a webserver.

How cool is that?!

My camera’s up at the house, so I have no exciting pictures to show. Sorry.

…and, yes, I’m really digging deep in the list of Andy Griffith Show characters for hostnames.