I purchased a north American version of the Motofone F3 (Manufactured in Brazil), which operates on the 850/1900 Mhz GSM bands (used almost exclusively in North America) for $34 including S/H from dakmart.com. After plugging my SIM card in the phone it reported that it was on the AT-T network. My original Motofone F3 from India worked only on the 900/1800 bands, and wouldn't work on the AT&T network (or any other North American network).
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I was given the following 3 day access code for the wireless internet at the Gamboa Rain forest resort (at the panama canal):
username: 3day136
password: 6856670
However, the internet was turned on for everybody when I was there, so I didn't need to use it. If you find yourself at the Gamboa resort, feel free to use this code if needed, but please post a comment telling me that it's been used up so I can delete the post.
My encrypted home directory worked well with 8.04, I only had to make one change caused by the new xml format of the pam_mount.conf.xml file as follows:
<volume user="summetj" fstype="crypt" path="/dev/sda6" mountpoint="/home/summetj" options="cipher=aes" fskeycipher="aes-256-ecb" fskeypath="/home/summetj.key" />
After I installed 8.04 from scratch I had to mount the directory and chown the files to the new user.
I have used Myth to rip a large number of my DVD's to AVI files (using either the Excellent or Good setting). Now that I am starting to play back the movies, I have found something that is very troubling.
On many of the movies, the first 95% of the movie (e.g. 1:13 min of a 1:26 movie) plays flawlessly. However, near the end of the movie, the audio and video starts to speed up and get jerky. (Audio/video sync is also thrown off.)
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I have been having problems connecting to a wireless network that does not broadcast its SSID. (A so-called "hidden" network.) I am using an Intel IPW 2200 802.11b/g mini-pci wireless card that uses the ipw2200 wireless module.
I found that reloading the ipw2200 module before attempting to connect to the network fixed my problems (but only if I put a pause between the unload/load/connect sequence). I use wifi-radar to manage my wireless connections, and was able to call my unload/reload script using its "before" connection command.
The script is simply:
sudo rmmod ipw2200
sleep 1
sudo modprobe ipw2200
sleep 1
This does add two seconds to the connection time, but this is not a terrible penalty to pay as without the above pause the connection would usually only work about 25% of the time.
I am using an LCD monitor as the display for my MythTV box, connected via an analog RGB (a.k.a. VGA) cable. This allows me to use DPMS (Display Power Management Signaling) to turn the monitor on and off from the MythTV box.
Instructions for setting this up with MythTV are here , but I found that I had to make a few changes to get things to work correctly. I modified one line of the shell script as follows:
STATUS=$( xset -q | grep "Monitor is" | awk '{print $3}' )
I also had to modify my startup script to run irexec in daemon mode. Now my TV_POWER button toggles the power state of the monitor!
Compressive Sampling: Beating the Nyquist Limit for certain signals
Compressive Sampling is a new field of sensing theory that sidesteps the traditional Nyquist sampling limit. The Nyquist limit is an information theory result that says to perfectly capture a signal which is bandwidth limited at a certain frequency, X, you must take 2 times X samples per second. So for example, if you want to perfectly detect a 20Hz sine wave, you must take 40 samples a second. To perfectly represent audio that humans can hear (typically understood to be sounds in the 20-20,000Hz range) we must use 40,000 samples per second (40kHz). CD audio uses 44.1kHz, and professional audio systems typically sample at 48kHz a second. [Note that the number of samples per second has nothing to do with the quantization, or accuracy of the samples, so audio that is sampled at 20 bits per sample has more information (and less noise) than audio sampled at 16 bits per sample.] (Continued)