Home Automation, Linux, X10, TiVo, iPods and other technology around the home
Today is the official release of Firefox 3.6, at 9:30AM Pacific Time (12:30PM Eastern). There are some early bird links available around the web, amongst which the Kabatology blog.
If you’d rather wait for the official release, don’t just twiddle your thumbs: watch this 2 minute video about the new features in 3.6:
Last Saturday my iPod froze up. After applying the reset (Hold on, Hold off, press and hold Menu and Select at the same time), the screen displayed the Sad iPod Icon. Fearing my podcast and audio book listening days were not over but put on indefinite hiatus, I drove home and entered the URL the iPod displayed: http://www.apple.com/support/ipod.
The results there were less than encouraging: try and reconnect your iPod to the computer (sorry, problem didn’t occur while connecting to the computer), or send it in for repairs. Well, we’re talking an almost 4 year old iPod here, so any repairs would probably cost more than the iPod is worth (heck the shipping cost is probably more than it’s worth…!). So I decided to use Google to see if anyone had an alternative solution.
This leads me to a Digg article, that pointed to an article “How To Fix an Ipod with the Sad iPod Icon” on Spilling Coffee. The basic solution boils down to:
The idea is that the hard disk connector can come lose enough not to make connection anymore, but still be attached enough that a good bang will snap it back into place.
So with a heavy heart and closed eyes I banged my iPod on the desk and performed another reset. Lo and behold, the menu appeared! And faster than it had done on previous resets!! Thanks Tom Coffee!
Warning: banging your iPod on your desk may cause damage to desk, iPod, or anything else in the vicinity. It worked for me, but it may not work for you. Banging your iPod is a serious form of Apple fan-dom…
Recently I switched to Carbonite on two machines at home. After installing the software and starting the backup, I noticed that frequently something would be accessing the floppy drive (or at least trying). Googling around a little bit revealed that this was one of Carbonite’s “features”.
The two suggestions that kept coming up during my search were:
There is a third option: disable the floppy drive in Windows.
If you open My Computer, you’ll see something similar to this:
Notice the 3 1/2 Floppy – that’s the one making all the noise. But not for long!
Right-click on the icon, and select Properties from the drop-down menu. Click on the Hardware tab and select the Floppy disk drive.
Click on the Properties button.
On the bottom of the screen is a drop-down box. Click on the drop-down arrow and change the selection to “Do not use this device (disable)”. Click OK.
Click OK on the screen with the 3 1/2 inch Floppy properties, and
return to the My Computer screen. Your Floppy Drive A: should be gone,
and with it the seeking Carbonite tries to do on it!
Christmas weekend Foursquare started with the private beta for their Blackberry client. There are about a 1000 beta testers at this time, according to Foursquare.
The current beta is geared towards trackball Blackberries – the Storm is working, but the app is not using all of the options a Storm has (touchscreen, tilt functionality, etc). The final version will be using the full Storm functionality according to Foursquare.
There are several enormous benefits for Blackberry users. I found the mobile site at times very frustrating:
The mobile app will show you on check-in what venues are closest. If none match, you can search for a venue by name. I don’t think the beta has the option to add a venue yet.
When one of your friends checks in, you get an alert from the Foursquare app (provided it’s running in the background). It shows the venue name, friend and any shout, and allows you to pull up more info or close the alert.
The new app looks like it’s taking care of some of the problems (logging in!) and adds new functionality (the alert), but still needs to address some of the location check-in hassles. I’m looking forward to the final version, especially if that version has specific Storm support.
At our company we’re using Symantec Backup Exec to back up all our servers, including some Linux machines. I set up a newer Ubuntu install (9.04) on VMWare, and was pretty confident I would be able to get the backup working (using the Legacy agent). Well, that was not as easy as it seemed…
I followed the instructions on installing the legacy agent. After some tweaking here and there, the server was now showing up in the list of legacy agents on the Backup Exec server. However, every time I tried to pull up information on the server, Backup Exec returned an error, saying the server refused connections and may be running out of available network connections. Nonsense. But something was not right apparently.
Googling around for instructions, and suspecting a firewall or security setting, I tried tweaking access to the ports Backup Exec is using. No effect. Then I hit upon something: luckily I had an older Ubuntu server running with the legacy Backup Exec client, and could compare settings. It turns out that Ubuntu installs a host file with the following content:
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.1.1 fqdn.domain.com fqdn
Why is there a difference in the third tuple? On the older server, both lines referred to 127.0.0.1. I decided to change the 2nd line on the newer server to 127.0.0.1 and reboot. After giving everything some time to publicize itself on the network, it appeared and asked for the credentials to use for the new server. I selected the correct user, and to my astonishment, the complete directory structure appeared.
I don’t know why there are two different entries for the local machine, but it definitely broke the legacy Backup Exec client. Now I can only hope I never have use our backups…!
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