Monthly Archives: January 2005

A Day in Marin, In Pictures

Salmon Swimming UpstreamI just created a new gallery of Carmen and my Day in Marin in my brainwagon photo gallery. We marched around Muir Beach for a short walk, did a few mile loop at Muir Woods, and ended up searching for (and finding) a geocache on Mt. Tamalpais. Terrific day, but I’m worn out, so podcasting will have to wait for tomorrow morning.

By the way, how beautiful is this view? Or this one?

We also saw six salmon swimming in the stream, the best picture of which is probably this one. I haven’t seen salmon in the wild in a long time. Very cool.

Vacation Day!

I could spend the day stewing over my laptop, my broken ipod, the mixer, or going to the store to buy a new microphone or maybe even a new laptop. Or I could hop in the car and go off to Muir Beach with my wife instead.

Hmmm.

It doesn’t seem like a hard question when I write it down.

Back with beach pictures later.

Curious Laptop Behavior

The mystery deepens. I had a couple of mysterious crashes while using Fedora Core 3, and when I installed FreeBSD 5.3, tried a kernel recompile which resulted in mysterious and unreproduceable segmentation faults in the compile. Usually such things indicate poor hardware, but both systems used a version of gcc that I don’t completely trust, so I decided to try 4.10. Interestingly enough, I had a hard reboot while recompiling the kernel for it. I think it might be that my laptop gets too hot and resets, as it only appears to happen when the laptop is significantly stressed.

Oh, and as an aside, 4.10 seems to have problems with the sis0 network controller, issuing only watchdog timeout errors. Sigh.

Not sure what I’m gonna do about this. I’ll ponder it all for another day.

Making some headway in Halflife 2 anyway. But Striders are a bitch.

Fickle Operating System of the Day

Powered by FreeBSD!After a bit of frustration with the sound quality on Linux, I decided to go back to ground I’m more familiar with me: I installed FreeBSD 5.3 onto the laptop. Curiously enough, FreeBSD has a project similar to the aforementioned ndiswrapper: called Project Evil. Surprisingly (somewhat) to me, it appears to work as well. I’m typing this on the newly installed FreeBSD as we speak. Curiously enough, I am having some difficulty with the sound using FreeBSD as well, but I have yet to do real tests. I’ll keep you all posted on how it works out.

Podcasts stalled by crappy sound

I’m mostly satisfied with running Fedora Core 3, but I’m having some difficulty getting rid of the crackly, popping sound that you heard in my last podcast. I’ve tried disabling apm, acpi, added no-hlt to the boot, disabled dma on the hard drive, and still the crackling badness remains. If anyone has any information which might be of help, try dropping dropping me an email.

lspci lists the sound controller as:

00:06.0 Multimedia audio controller: ALi Corporation M5451 PCI AC-Link Controller Audio Device (rev 02)

/proc/asound/version contains:

Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver Version 1.0.6 (Sun Aug 15 07:17:53 2004 UTC).
Compiled on Nov 18 2004 for kernel 2.6.9-1.681_FC3.

I thank you for any help in advance, as do my listener(s).

Brainwagon Radio: A Minor Revolt, Linux on the Laptop

my desktop!Wherein your host describes his pique with Windows XP and describes his installation of Fedora Core 3 onto his laptop, followed by his recording of a podcast using the new software setup. Links from the show:

  • I chose Fedora Core for my Linux variant. It works rather well, and has the most polished installation of any Linux distribution I tried.
  • The ndiswrapper project allows you to use Windows network drivers on Linux. This allowed me to use my Belkin F5D7010 card (an 802.11g card) which would have otherwise been unsupported. Seems to work fine, even without the kernel compile they recommend.
  • You can get audacity packages prebuilt for Fedora Core 3 from Dag’s repository. I also installed mplayer from his packages, as well as some other packages.
  • Can anyone tell me of a cheaper bluetooth GPS than the Delorme Bluelogger?

Quality note: The sound is a bit crackly, which appears to not be a problem with the microphone. It may actually be a software issue. I’m looking into it.

Free! Free from the shackles of Microsoft!

Now, back to playing Halflife 2 on my other box which still runs WinXP.

I’ve had it!

I have finally decided to take the plunge: my laptop is now running Linux instead of Windows XP.

I got tired of trying to debug the mysteriously long boot times, purchasing yet another update to Norton’s Anti Virus, and generally just being mystified at how slow a 2 ghz laptop could act.

This morning (in fact, right now, as I type this) I’m running Fedora Core 3 on it. It’s not without its problems (as yet, I’ve been unable to get my Belkin 54g card working with it) but overall I’m fairly happy. It even works with my scanner and my cheapy IBM webcam.

Here is to lowering my cost of ownership.

Whew! Back!

After an 11 hour drive from Portland back home, I’ve got the laptop in front of me, the Tivo playing all the shows I missed, the quilt my mom made for me on the couch, and it’s time to relax.

Expect more blogging tomorrow.

Sidekick II

Sidekick IIMy wife got the new Sidekick II as her present to herself this year. I must admit: it’s nice. It’s got a nicer keyboard, nicer controls and a decent camera. It also includes support for Yahoo! Messenger as well as AOL Instant Messenger right out of the box.

If you like to leverage things open with screw drivers, you can read this article about downloading unapproved applications or even developing new ones.

Bridging San Francisco Bay

Another small video of some interest: Bridging San Francisco Bay, an industrial film created by U.S. Steel Co. to crow about the construction of the Bay Bridge between Oakland and San Francisco. The construction of a replacement span between Yerba Buena island and the Oakland shore is currently underway: it is interesting to see how bridge building has changed since those earlier times. The key difference: safety gear.

Happy New Years!

Welcome to 2005! Hope everyone has had a pleasant holiday and is ready to get back to the serious work that we all have: namely surfing the web and listening to my brainwagon radio podcasts. 🙂 We are back to traditional brainwagon blue, no more christmas decorations.

I’m still a couple of days away from getting my new podcast setup finalized, but rest assured, I should be back shortly with new episodes, better quality, but the same old ranting that you’ve come to expect.

Hope everyone is safe and happy.