Automation Adventures

Of course, after finally breaking down last night and installing Codeweaver’s CrossOver Office to install iTunes, today I see this article in Linux Journal on how to use your iPod with Ubuntu.

The article shows a few options to sync music, and also explains how to sync photos and change the default application that’s opened when you plug in the iPod.

A worthwhile read, and something to try out tonight…

I came across this little gizmo the other day. I’m not quite sure what it is, as the makers decided they wouldn’t mark it as an alarm clock, or a radio, or anything like that. They marked it as a Chumby.

Apparently this is the next generation of alarm clocks/photo frames/whatchamacallits. It’s a small computer, with a screen about the size of an iPod screen, sound capabilities, and a “squeeze sensor”. It’s capable of doing “anything you can think of” – as of today the most popular widgets include a Digital Clock (imagine that!), a Flickr photo viewer, Google News, and a ShamuCam.

The product is not available to the general public, but the company (Chumby Industries) is asking for developers and crafters, and offering them beta-versions of the product. They’re shooting for a retail price of $150 or less – about the price of one of those glowing orbs. But it sure looks like the Chumby has much more to offer than an orb showing a few different colors.

Wired magazine has an article summing up the pros and cons of CableCard technology. CableCards are essential to the TiVo Series 3 (it sports 2 CableCard slots), and a recent federal appeals court ruling requires cable companies to support them.

In short:
Advantages:

• No cable box needed
• Can be sent through mail
• No need for kludges like an IR blaster

Disadvantages:

• One-way system (although CC 2.0 fixes that)

I’m curious to see when Charter… er.. SuddenLink starts to support CableCards…!

Slowly but surely I’m getting to a working Ubuntu workstation. Tonight I finally made some time to set up the VPN connection – thereby freeing myself from lugging a Windows laptop to and from work every day…

Instrumental in setting this up were two websites: PattonCentral (describing his experiences on setting up version 4.6 and 4.8 of the Cisco VPN Client), and popey.com, which is the actual step-by-step instructions (although they are for version 4.6 – version 4.8 doesn’t need the patching as described).

After that, starting the VPN client was simple, and by using the built-in Terminal Server Client I was able to access my work desktop computer. For the connection protocol: RDP works, but RDPv5 works better if you’re using lots of Windows keys.

Next step – bloody iPod synchronization (still haven’t quite figured out gtkPod…).

In the Google Talk blog, Lewis Lin announces that plans are underway to “explore interoperability” between Google Talk and Skype. The press release is here.

Since they seem to be in the exploratory stages, it may be some time before we actually see the product on the market. It will also be interesting to see how the interoperability is achieved, since Google Talk uses Jabber/XMPP, which is pretty open, and Skype uses a completely proprietary protocol. My guess is Skype will incorporate the Jabber/XMPP to allow to talk to Google Talk, and to any other client that uses the same protocol. That way, they don’t have to open up their internal protocol to their competitor Google (Skype being owned by eBay, Google developing their own payment system to compete with PayPal, etc.).