Android phone updated to 2.3.3 via XP machine

was not too bad; only had to remove the battery from the phone once to reset.

Had to install my phone vendor's software to run the update;  there was no linux version I could easily find; so used an old XP laptop.  Is very old, does not even have usb 2.0, so any data transfer is slow.

took about half an hour.

it did fail the first time, leaving my phone in a sad "emergency mode" state.  Instructions on screen were simple enough:

unplug, remove the battery, and try again.

worked the second time.

notes:

• icons are now more colourful!
• my apps, bookmarks and contacts survived
• home screens did get shuffled, needed to reset them

Installed the new XOpup on a "bone" usb drive

Installed the new XOpup running on the OLPC XO 1.0.

This doggy bone USB key was on sale for 75% off:

 and here it is installed :

there were only pink ones left;  I suppose a white one would match better...

More Upgrades: F16 from F14

Ok, not such a good idea;

Hit a known bug: preupgrade from F14 is not good...

So had to re-install the OS ...

Minor complications:
This machine does not have any CD/DVD drive;
so working from USB keys.


Current Issues with my system:

0) SELinux seems problematic,  have disabled, need to work on this.

1) httpd did not restart, needed to manually configure
--> the new UI for system config service is missing this one...

2) mysqld did not restart: see  (1)

3) mythbackend did not restart:  May need to redo installation;
working on this.

notes:
all issues are working if I manually started the services as root, so the binaries updated fine with F16, it is just the startup/permissions/users that needs work.

shh, an AMD Fusion E-350 'upgrade' at home

or:
Retiring the Shuttle ... PC

A new quiet and low power system has replaced older hardware.  The new system is working great, not much faster but much quieter.

Details:


After a system failure, needed to repair an existing Linux system.

I could have tried to repair the motherboard, but I have done that twice before. 

Instead decided to retire the old board, and replace it with a modern passively cooled AMD E-350 one.

A direct motherboard, memory replacement  and power supply.  The power supply was still ok, but was an older one with a 20 pin connector, not a newer 24 pin.
The memory was also ok, but the new system uses DDR3 ram; older was only DDR2.


Fedora 14 update notes:

1) X on the new system is not quite perfect.
Since it is a very new system, only Fedora 15 or 16 has the latest drivers/kernel

Fedora 14 works well enough for now;
Planning to update to 16 when it goes gold anyway.
(next week?)

2) Network changed.  Using DHCP, and auto configuration of the network, I now have a new IP address.  No real surprise, but some of MythTV did not expect this. Needed to reconfigure.

3) older celeron was a 32 but kernel,  new system has more ram (8G), so added the  PAE kernel.

very simple

 yum install kernel-PAE.i686

4) sensors also are not working;
again will need to update Fedora with a new kernel before spending too much time on this.

Android + Toronto Public Library

Android working well with the Toronto Public Library:

Installed the ebook app, and the naxos music library;


both work great!

Android app inventor hello world!

playing with App Inventor a web based quick "point and click" gui for making simple apps;

not in git yet ;)

Android phone plays well with MythTV!

Have it working as a video client for my MythTV machine.
Needed to enable the UPnP setup on MythTV and installed two Android apps:

UPnPlay and MoboPlayer.

MoboPlayer was required for my phone, since the default video player did not support the MythTV video format. I got an initial error message about unsupported video format, and checked the very useful help file on UPnPlay.

Android Phone Week One

A car door ate our 'dumb phone' (crunch)
so now had the excuse to get a new one.
On that phone, we have a prepaid service here in Canada, so went out and picked up one of the most basic android phones:
So writing a few notes on this different technology.
Phone:
LG Optimus One with Google
Have turned off the carrier data access; use it as a voice phone + WiFi

---

Notes so far:

screen is a bit small, so I feel I have fat fingers ;)
Location based apps do not like having carrier data turned off;
Angry Birds is just playable ;)
Google Goggles is not that useful :(

Puppy 5.2.5 fits in old laptop's ram

have latest puppy linux up and running on the old XP laptop.

boots quick from CD, and then I can attach to VPN at work.

all fits in Ram!

specs:
  Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 Mobile CPU 1.40GHz

MemTotal:        1294984 kB
MemFree:          655896 kB

Underclocking at home

How slow can you go?

Go into your bios and find out!

I find an older dual core system can be slowed down to ~1.2 GHz, and still play YouTube and MythTV full screen quite well.

An older system, so not HD.

Cool!, My system does not overheat any more ;)

Toronto Archives on Fedora Linux with wine

looking at the city of Toronto archive, found they use a plugin:

using Firefox 3.6 running Wine on Fedora 14, the plugin installs and runs.

currently have to tell firefox to "open with firefox".

need to fix that.

sageMath Myth(TV) plot

here's a sagemath plot of disk usage from my MythTV:



generated to find out the show taking up the most space...

here's a bare sql query to show in text

select title, 
   sum(filesize) 
 from mythconverg.recorded 
   group by title 
   order by sum(filesize) desc ;

---

and my actual sage script:

import sys

##did not install MySQLdb into sage, only default location, so had to add
sys.path.append('/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/')

import MySQLdb 

print "MythTV File sizes"

import _mysql
db=_mysql.connect(host="localhost",user="myuser",passwd="mypassword",
                 db="mythconverg")

db.query(""" select  @rn:=@rn+1 rn, sum(filesize)/1024/1024 from (select @rn:=0)r, mythconverg.recorded  group by title order by sum(filesize) desc""")

r=db.store_result()
scatter_plot(r.fetch_row(0))

Interactive Geometry Software

Working great on linux: Fedora 14

Cinderella

Heisenprofile.pl for social networks.

heisenprofile: automated script to randomize profile information
(birthdate, location, home city, name?) around the "real" value.
and automatically keep social sites updated.

based on physics principle:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Uncertainty_principle

this on my todo list: perl, ruby, python or javascript?

Book: 30 Arduino Projects for the Evil Genius

Good first introduction to the arduino.

Initial install and a few basic projects.

Arduino Uno Box

just because it was there

Arduino blink

Arduino running the blink sketch:

Arduino the documentary

http://arduinothedocumentary.org/

Wordpress?

ok, trying out wordpress:

twongkee site.

different content (non google stuff ;)

XOpup-2 installed and running

updated my OLPC G1G1 XO 1.0

see if I can get same setups working;

notes:
needed to manually add symlinks to libvlc*
Sound works out of box!

streaming from MythTV files via vlc working great!

Sagemath valentine plot

only a day late ;)

def f(x,y):
    return x^2 + (y-(x^2)^(1/3))^2
    
P2=contour_plot(f,(-1,1),(-1,1.5),cmap='Reds_r')

P2.show()

sagemath on XO --> viewer=tachyon

sage math works on the XO, as long as you avoid java;

so need to use the tachyon viewer.

sage math

new toy of the week:

Sage Math: http://www.sagemath.org

if setup notebook as a server, can view graphs on wii !
(java does not work, but using tachyon output is great!)

OLPC XO-1 Puppy Blue Snowball

hello., testing 1,2,3

got the blue snowball running on the XO-1 with puppy.

default sound editor mhwaveedit working with alsa.

set input to hw:1,0