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.)
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!
An Apple iPod Touch review, with special attention paid to use with Linux and open formats:
Pros:
Cons:
If your iPhone or iPod Touch is jailbroken, you can use the Installer.app to load and install many different applications. Below is the list of the applications that I found to be useful, fun or interesting:
If your iPhone is not jailbroken, you will not be able to add any of the above games until they are added to the apple store. You can always play web-based games found on AppSafari: http://www.appsafari.com
I bought 30 Phillips SPC 900 NC webcams because they claim to support up to 90fps and I have had good luck using linux with the PWC drivers in the past. Plugged into a generic Ubuntu 7.10 install, I found that 640×480 resolution was automatic, with 15fps. 320×240 worked at 30fps. (I tried 160×120 resolution, but wasn't able to get a speed faster than 26fps with that, so I'm doubtful of the 90fps claim from Philips, at least with the stock Ubuntu drivers.
This useful website looks to provide nice OpenCV support for this camera.
I have also archived the relevant files on my site, in case the above link goes down.
General info:
How to put an ipod touch into restore mode: Plug it into your computer, and turn on iTunes, then: hold the power and home buttons down until it resets. Release the power button, but keep the home button held until it enters recovery mode.
How to restore to a specific version of the firmware that you have downloaded to your computer: Use iTunes but instead of just clicking the "Restore" button, you hold the shift key down and then clicking the "Restore" button. This gives you a file selecton dialog that you can select a specific firmware file on your local hard drive. NOTE: You can also "upgrade" to a specific firmware version in the same way, but shift-clicking on the "Upgrade" button. At some points the difference between a Restore and an Upgrade is very important! (e.g. after jailbreaking a 1.1.1 and running OktoPrep, you should UPGRADE to 1.1.2, not restore!)
VERY IMPORTANT: Turn off "Auto-Lock" in the General->Auto Lock control panel!!! You will have to do this every time you upgrade/restore to a new firmware. Nothing messes up a firmware upgrade like the ipod locking halfway through it and turning off!
Here are a few guides that I found to be the most useful for jailbreaking/hacking the ipod Touch:
I'm running MythTV (Subversion Trunk) on a Ubuntu 7.10 box. After the daylight savings time changeover, my mythtv box had the correct time, but the Program Guide data was still off by an hour. Manually running a mythfilldatabase didn't fix it. After checking to make sure that my timezone xmltv settings were set to Auto, I decided to manually erase all of the program data from the database.
(After using mysql to connect to the database, I issued the "delete from program;" command to delete all of the program entries.)
Then I re-ran mythfilldatabase and everything was fixed. (I still don't understand why this didn't automatically fix itself when the ubuntu box changed it's timezone, as all of the program data is supposed to be stored under UTC…)
Lots of people have built human powered generators. I like this one for two reasons:
1. It's designed to harvest waste energy. (It helps your body stop your knee from swinging at the end of the forward swing, something your body uses energy to do anyways.)
2. The evaluation included serious medical studies to determine the amount of metabolic energy it "takes" from the human. (to get a watt of power, it increases the human's load by less than a watt. By comparison, a hand crank generator takes 6.4 watts from the human for each watt harvested)
Fixing a missing bluetooth icon, battery charge indicator, and update notifier in Ubuntu
For the last week my battery indicator and bluetooth icons had been missing from my top panel in Ubuntu. When I did Bluetooth stuff the pop-up "speaker balloons" from the bluetooth applet would still appear at the corner of my screen, but the Bluetooth applet itself was "invisible". I finally figured out that what I was missing was a "Notification Area" for these applets to "live". Right-Clicking on the Panel, Selecting "Add to Panel" and then adding the "Notifcation Area" (from the Utilities category) fixed my problems. Indeed, I then found out that the Software Update notification icon had been trying to tell me about software updates, but I hadn't seen it, so I had to install several software updates!