Now seriously, what the hell? They’re using a fading scale to indicate the uses? So I suppose “Multiple Computers” is vaguely recommended? And “Streaming Music” seems to be slightly recommended? I suppose the usage icon on the far right is downright not recommended, but can’t we just get an honest do or don’t from the usage guide?

And then the marketing team seems to have their own rating system which is not explained anywhere and is completely unhelpful. Ok, so “High Performance” is rated N++! Are you kidding me? What the hell is a “N”, and what does a plus sign indicate? What would “N–” mean?

The back of the box should be a case study in a marketing class on what not to do!

A quick tech tip… there are actually TWO WRT54G2 models floating around on shelves. DO NOT buy the one that has this silly thing on the back of the box, it actually has less onboard memory than the other model. But they both cost the same.

But I just upgraded to Windows 7, and now my WMP is working fine!

So now I have Microsoft’s new tagline for their advertisements they are plastering all over hell and back: “Windows 7: You can play music now!”

1. check permissions on your .ssh directory and authorized_keys file

2. make sure /etc/ssh/sshd_config allows authorized_key connections, although this is almost always on by default

And still no luck; it turns out I had to upgrade my key from RSA to DSA!

So, use “ssh-keygen -r dsa” and use the key it provides, that did the trick for me.

Here are the steps I need to take to fix them:

1) Press the power button to turn the unit off.
2) Disconnect the RF coax cable from the back of the unit.
3) Unplug the unit’s power cord from the wall.
4) Reconnect the RF coax cable to the back of the unit.
5) Wait at least one minute.
6) Plug the unit’s power cord back in and allow it to boot up.
7) Enjoy flawless ReplayTV operation.

I had problems getting the DVD bootup to go into graphical mode, it kept showing an error that it couldn’t start X, and would continue with text mode. Of course, this is less than ideal since the text mode doesn’t have all the nice install options (not sure why) so I needed to figure it out.

The easy solution was to remove one of the cards and try again! This did the trick, and now I have Fed11 nicely running on the one card powering two monitors. Another thing to note is that I had to install Nvidia’s linux drivers. Also note, that if you run “yum update” after installing those drivers, you will need to re-install them one more time since yum will overwrite their functions.

My next step is to plug in the 2nd card and see if it is recognized properly and I can get 3 monitors going in independent configurations…

[Update] I added the second card after the fact, and now have 3 monitors hooked up nicely with no problems!

I had php scripts failing and generating “500″ errors on the browser because they were running too long, or sometimes because a large file was being uploaded. I spent time playing with php.ini variables, only to find out that PHP wasn’t processing some of them!

Using phpinfo(), I noticed that the vars were not being set via php.ini, which I had set properly when it was compiled, ala:

'./configure --with-apxs2=/opt/apache2/bin/apxs --with-mysql=/opt/mysql --with-zlib --with-config-file-path=/etc/php.ini --with-curl=/usr/lib64 --with-pear=/usr/share/pear --libdir=lib64 --with-pdo-mysql --with-gettext --enable-bcmath --with-oci8=instantclient,/home/instantclient10_1' '--enable-sigchild --with-pdo-oci=instantclient,/home/instantclient10_1,10.1.0.5'

I didn’t want to risk affecting the system by re-installing PHP, so instead I found the workaround was to create a .htaccess file that contained:

php_value upload_max_filesize 8M
php_value max_execution_time 600


and this did the trick! So hopefully that helps anyone who is running this version of php and encountered this problem.

One of the first problems I had was I wanted to get the google screensaver working. I downloaded Picassa and that includes the screensaver app, but I was not seeing it as an option on my windows control panel screensaver section!

Turns out you need to:

Go to C:\Windows\SysWOW64 folder, copy the file
GPhoto.scr and paste it in to the C:\Windows\System32 folder.

Now it works great! Now if only google will adapt it to allow arrow controls to go back/forward through the photos.

One more note… if you using windows media player to play music, you’ll need to go into tools->options and check the “allow screensaver during playback” box to have the screensaver work when music is playing.

I’m not sure why they let that happen, I’m hoping they just didn’t pay attention and it will be back up soon. Maybe I should just call Sourabh!

Domain Name: ONTOK.COM
Created on: 20-May-05
Expires on: 20-May-09
Last Updated on: 20-May-08

Administrative Contact:
niyogi, sourabh  niyogi@mit.edu
humdaq, inc.
55 Grove St
Somerville, Massachusetts 02144
United States
6177641078      Fax –

The laptop has a little switch on the top of the keyboard that turns wireless on/off, and usually when you turn it off and back on, the computer will recognize the wifi hardware and it can find networks. But in this case, it wasn’t working, and no wifi networks were begin discovered.

After an hour of trying all sorts of things like checking out network settings, etc, it turns out it we had to use a function key (F1) to toggle between different Bluetooth/LAN/WAN settings! We had to choose the setting of Bluetooth and LAN to get this working. Apparently adding the Bluetooth device switched this setting, and the only way to get it back is to use this poorly labelled function key. Live and learn.

I had googled around to try and find help on this, but nothing pertinent showed up — so hopefully this post can help someone who has this problem in the future!

• a NFS file server for other UNIX systems
• a Samba file server for Windows systems
• a LDAP server for keeping a single location of contacts
• an Apache web server for an internal website of links and other information (photos, etc)
• a Slimserver daemon that provides support to my Squeezebox
• a MediaTomb server that provides support to my DLINK DSM-520
• an internal Domain Name Server (DNS)

and more!

I use this setup to hold all my digital photos, audio (mp3) files, and I’m now in the process of scanning in my DVD library. So let me take a moment to say “Just say NO to piracy!”

I personally have found it to be cost effective to buy used CDs or DVDs and scan them in to get good quality recordings, and all my media stays only on my local server that is inaccessible from the Internet. Aside from the legal issues, who wants to clog up their Internet connection with unnecessary traffic for others?

I’ll pass along some things I found while building my setup. I never went the iTunes route because I’ve always used mp3 players that were smaller and cheaper than the iPod. Plus, I want to use a generic format like mp3 and not be limited by what I can play it on. With mp3 I can play all my music on my computer, laptop, stereo (through Slimdevices Squeezebox) or even my DSM-520. It is simple enough to get your CDs into mp3 files so I won’t go into that.

Next, the video portion. I chose the DSM-520 because I wanted a cheap box that had no moving parts (i.e., no hard drive) that would talk nicely to my fileserver. Well, it turns out that it doesn’t just look for a fileserver using something like Samba — it requires a UPnP type server to be running. DLINK gives you one, but it is for Windows, and you can’t really have a Windows box on all the time to that purpose. At least, not reliably Seriously, I have linux boxes that have been up for 450 days with no problems. I can’t let a Windows box go for 3 weeks before all hell breaks loose.

So, I looked around for some UPnP server software I could use and chose MediaTomb which I could easily add using Yum. It is simple enough to run, and lets me add video/photos/music that puts references of those files into a MediaTomb database.

Now you need to scan your DVDs into your library! There are various free packages (like handbrake) which I looked at, but in the end I settled on CloneDVDMobile which is by SlySoft, a great little company that I’ve used for their AnyDVD software which allows me to watch my DVDs on my PC (believe it or not, some DVDs refuse to play nice on a PC).

When you use this software, you are given a whole slew of formats to choose from. I used the generic DivX one that produces AVI files. Most DVDs will offer me the 852×480 resolution, and I max out the quality which goes to 25-29 usually. I use 2-pass deinterlacing and prefer saving it as one big file.

The AVI files it produces look great on my win media player, and I had some trouble figuring out how to make it look nice on my DSM-520, and after much hair pulling it turned out that I just had to alter the aspect ratio in the DSM-520’s settings screen to 16:9 and then it was perfect!

So now I can kick back on my couch and flip through all my DVD titles and watch anything I want with a touch of a button!

Of course now my wife says, “There’s nothing here to watch! It’s all The Matrix and James Bond!”

So now I need to scan in a bunch of Julia Roberts movies.