In the time since, it’s gone from vanity project to an essential part of the way I get things done.

On the other hand, it was still running Windows XP, and I’ve become more and more nervous about the security risks associated therein.  I had a machine get infected here about a month and a half ago via an infected banner ad, and while MSE was kind enough to throw a pop-up message about the worm, it did so AFTER the infection instead of blocking it and then letting me know.

To be fair, it was a box I’d been pretty lazy about setting stuff up on, so I was actually browsing the web from Internet Explorer.  I honestly should have known better, but I figured IE8.0 was safer these days.

Anyway, so, Windows XP was something I was starting to consider an unacceptable risk, and I wasn’t going to put a newer version of Windows on a 1.33GHz Celeron, and one thing and another colluded to get me to give Ubuntu a swing.

So, for the first time ever, I used a Bittorrent client to download a linux distribution.

This is my third time giving Linux a try.  The first time was in 1993 or so when my computer was a 33Mhz 386 thrown together out of scavenged parts, the second time was in 1997 when I actually built a 90 MHz Pentium for the sole purpose of running Linux.  Neither of those lasted very long, because while the operating system itself was quite sound, there was a shortage of applications you could run on it, and of course gaming was out of the question.

Still, 13 years is a long time and I’d heard a lot of good things about Ubuntu.

I’m going to come right out and say it: Ubuntu represents a huge step forwards.  It’s reasonably user-friendly, recognized most of my hardware without prompting, and having it on my download box makes me feel much more secure about things.

That said, I did have some headaches setting it up, mostly because it really wanted to try to make my life easier.

See, the Intel motherboard I’m using has a SiS video chipset, which is pretty much an abomination before the eyes of Man And God, and Ubuntu picked this up and tried to use SiS specific video drivers, which are terrible and which meant that if I tried to set the resolution above 800×600 I got these scrolling staticy vertical lines all over the leftmost quarter of the screen.

The workaround I found for this online is to use the generic “VESA” drivers, which don’t allow for hardware accelerated video but are otherwise a better choice.

Of course, one little flaw with Ubuntu is that there’s no way to force the video driver via the graphical interface; you need to do it by manually editing xorg.conf, and modern versions of Ubuntu don’t WRITE an xorg.conf because they have an awful lot of faith in their automatic hardware lookup and driver selection.

So, I had to find out how to get the video subsystem to create an xorg.conf, and then I had to figure out how to get Ubuntu to boot into terminal mode because I couldn’t do it with X Windows running, and blah blah blah tearing my hair out but eventually it came together and I had a working Ubuntu box.

So life is reasonably good, and I’m finding that there are quite passable Linux alternatives to Windows or OSX applications, so I can understand how people can use this on a day-to-day basis.

I even got a little sticker for the front of it to display my new uh commitment to open source software and, y’know, FREEDOM.

You can’t read it, but it says “Powered by Ubuntu” underneath the little logo.

Time to go get myself some suspenders.

Anyway.

In a fit of insanity the other night, I decided that I would succumb to the omnipresent pestering by iTunes to enable the “Genius” feature, and let it crawl through my music library, no doubt uploading my most intimate secrets to impeccably designed aluminum-clad servers at Infinite Loop.  It was only able to identify about 3000 out of 8000 songs, by the way, a ratio which allows me to level a certain degree of smugness in the vague direction of Northern California.

That done, and a rather long re-sync of my iPod complete, I have been putting it through its paces.

It is, and this I say with ultimate grudgingness, fecking brilliant.

One of the biggest problems with a big music library is this:  Stuff gets lost.  Playlists are a pain to set up and setting your player to “random all” results in a hell of a lot of skipping tracks.

Genius lets you pick a song that you know you want to listen to, and then goes off and finds a bunch of songs that it thinks will go well with it.  When pointed at my first test case, Rick Astley’s magnum opus, it cheerfully provided me a set of 25 songs that read like a K-Tel “Best Love Songs of the Eighties” compilation; when pointed at my favorite Kotoko song, it pulled out a set of Kotoko, Hirano Aya, Dream, Hamasaki Ayumi, and Ohtsuka Ai.

The point is, most of the songs it was finding were songs that were lost in the limbo of “not in any playlist”, that I was rather in danger of forgetting that I had, and that were surprisingly close to being what I was in the mood for.

It’s the first feature, outside of the “iPod ecosystem”, that actually stands out as a compelling reason to use an iPod over any of the alternatives, other than the little problem that there are no serious alternatives any more.

Now I just need to figure out how to get it to recognize the 5,000 songs that it’s clueless about.

Oh, well, it’s best if I get it off my chest.

I’ve been inside my PC a lot lately – actually, I’ve been inside most of our PCs a lot lately, but let’s keep this on the main one – trying to figure out the answer to problems that have vexed me.  Most of them are heat related.  I have an E6600 Core 2 Duo in my machine and it’s been running at 46 degrees idle / 71 degrees under load for as long as I’ve known how to find out the CPU temperature.  This is within specs… but it’s a little high.  It’s not usually recommended to run over 65 degrees for any length of time.

Celsius, of course, not Fahrenheit.

I’ve put this down to insufficient ventilation.  I’ve got a Sonata II case, which is designed to be quiet, so I’ve just kind of figured that quiet comes with the tradeoff of running hot.

So, lately, I’ve been researching stuff like aftermarket CPU coolers and thermal transfer paste and stuff that is really about one level of geeky past my norm, and I ran across a forum thread from someone else running a E6600 who was also getting mid-40s temperatures on idle and 70+ under load, and it was a thread with lots of good suggestions about thermal paste and coolers and so on.

And then there was a post in the thread that said, basically, “push down on your CPU cooler’s restraining pins harder”

I decided to try this.

I had to push rather harder than I felt safe, and when I did so, there was a sad little crunching sound.  I did not like this sound.  It was not the sort of sound you want to hear coming from a motherboard when you are applying force.

It was apparently the sound of the CPU cooler finally – after two years – being snapped into place.

Temps are now 40 degrees idle / 51 under heavy load.

I feel rather sheepish.

Stick with this post. The embarrassment comes near the end.

Despite my occasional dalliances with Apple-branded hardware, I remain at heart a bit of a tinkerer and like to have a PC that I’ve assembled myself.  I won’t lie – I bought Crysis solely to see how my system would stack up against it, and was actually pleasantly surprised when it recommended that I run in “high” settings at 1920×1200.

My PC is built around an ASUS P5B motherboard.  This isn’t a top-end motherboard these days but I have no complaints; it was rather decent when I bought it and I haven’t run into any limitations related to it.  Really, it’s been something that I put in the case and have since mostly ignored, except for a recent optimistic BIOS update to get it up to date.

We also have a server, an HP-branded mini-tower.  It’s not a bad PC, at that – it’s probably 3 years old and did quite nicely for my wife’s gaming needs before she migrated to laptops.

But, it’s running three hard drives and it seems to get pretty hot and the case only has one 80mm fan with no provisions for mounting another, so I decided that I would pop it open, figure out what motherboard it was built on, and then figure out if it was a proprietary motherboard or if it would fit in, say, a nice Antec Sonata III case with lots of room for fans.

I opened it, found that it was actually built around an ASUS motherboard, and started googling the model number.

Turns out, it’s a micro-ATX board and should work in just about any case.  Good.

Then I noticed a question about the board, which went something like

“If I want the RAM to run in dual-channel mode, do I need to put it in alternating slots like on the P5B?”

…and my ears perked up, because when I installed my motherboard, I put DIMMs in the first two slots and figured I was probably good.

A couple of minutes more googling and I realized that I had a) crippled myself when I installed my RAM and b) been running with it like this for the last two years.

I moved one of the DIMMs over from slot two to slot three, re-ran Vista’s performance checker thing, and my “Vista Performance Index” rating went from 5.0 to 5.5.

OK, OK, I will admit that that doesn’t sound like a HUGE jump in performance, but considering that I’d been living with it for ages and the fix was simply to move one stick of RAM one inch over, it’s pretty embarrassing.

In related news, Newegg had 8-port gigabit ethernet switches on sale for 25 bucks and turn out to stock a wide range of cat 6 cable in all lengths and hues, and, well, that’s the sort of combination that rather encourages one to swap out some old hubs and wiring with an eye to the future.

We don’t, to be honest, have that many gigabit devices, but everything that can run at that speed now does, and it is a glorious thing to watch files whip across the network at that kind of speed.

But that’s not really today’s topic.

Today I found an answer to a question that has been vexing me for some while.

That is to say: PCs generally have 5.1 surround capable audio these days; it seems like it’s built on to every $50 and up motherboard, and it also seems like 5.1 channel speaker systems are pretty common.

But: the layout of your average PC desk, or even my disturbing man-cave of a desk, means that all the speakers are in front of you, meaning that “positional” audio more or less goes out the window.  I spend a little too much time browsing flickr for pictures of PC setups, and I see an awful lot where the speakers are arranged in this elegant half-moon shape on the desk surrounding the monitor.

Today I did something about that, and then I made discoveries.

First: My desk is surrounded by InterMetro shelving from the Container Store, and it’s wonderful stuff.  I’m sure that it’s sold by lots of stores and that the Container Store is probably way pricey, but I haven’t found a better source and so I keep winding up back in their clutches whenever I want to expand.

I had a bit of an epiphany.  They sell rails that are designed to go between two posts, and then you’re supposed to hang hooks on them and so forth.  I like the hooks a lot, by the way; the shelves around me have a good dozen+ hooks, mostly holding cables, you know, so I don’t have to walk five feet to the closet when I need a USB cable.

But, these same rails, if you buy ones that are longer than the distance between two posts, stick out a fair ways, and you can hang speakers – specifically, surround speakers – off them, as follows:

The whole desk now looks something like this:

Note that they stick out just far enough that I should be walking in to them on a regular basis.  I need to find a solution to that.

Anyway, I played X-Blades for a couple of hours, and then put the recent CG Appleseed movie in, and played the opening sequence.

In both cases I enjoyed wonderful discrete-channel surround audio, and life was good.

Then I had to go fiddling with forces man was not meant to understand, that is to say, iTunes.

See, I’m given to understand that Battlestar Galactica, a show I stopped watching when it got really depressing – and, yes, the show is about 99% of humanity being wiped out by nuclear holocaust, so when I say it got really depressing, I mean REALLY depressing (for the record about 2 episodes into season 3), anyway, to mangle a sentence further, I am given to understand that it ended recently and that the ending was quite satisfying.

So I figured that, in an effort to not be totally spoiled, I should catch up on it, and I dropped $24.95 on iTunes to download Season 3.

And, yes, I bought the SD versions because, well, they’ve announced Blu-ray versions of the whole series coming this summer.  If I bought HD versions now, I would feel guilt about upgrading to Blu-ray; this way, I can justify the upgrade a little easier.

Anyway.

Now, I downloaded them on our Mac mini, which is hooked up to the TV in the front room, but it would be impolite to take over the front room TV solely for my own purposes, so I was going to copy them locally and play them on my desktop, which would have taken HOURS over the wireless network, and then I had ANOTHER epiphany.

I remembered that iTunes has a library sharing feature.

Seriously, for me, that counts as an epiphany.

Anyway, I set the Mac mini to share its iTunes library, I opened iTunes on my desktop and told it to look for libraries, and there were all the episodes of Battlestar Galactica that I’d just bought.

It was nuts, I tell you.

Moving on, I  selected one and tried to play it, and I got video, and I got, uh, some vague sound effects, and some really garbled speech.

And I was awfully confused.

On a whim, I told Windows to use the sound hardware on my motherboard, instead of the X-fi sound card I have installed, and, for some reason that worked; I could play back the episodes and they sounded fine.

This did Not Seem Right.

It turned out that it was a multipart problem.

The first part of the problem is that iTunes is buggy as hell when it comes to audio.  These episodes all have 2.0 and 5.1 channel audio tracks embedded, but iTunes will only play back the 2.0 channel audio.  Again, by the way, if you have an AppleTV, apparently the 5.1 channel sound works.  Just when Jobs was starting to get on my good side with the whole HD rentals thing, too.

The second part of the problem is that the Creative drivers, as installed by default, see a stereo sound source and try to add pseudo-surround effects, and this was what was killing the audio in the Battlestar Galactica episodes.

Go figure, huh?

After telling the Creative drivers to stop trying to outsmart iTunes, it worked just fine.

Total time spent trying to figure out the audio problems: About an hour.

Total time spent watching Battlestar Galactica: About 45 minutes.

Sense of satisfaction: Rather substantial.

So, again, life is good.

First revelation:  We have a lot of music; right around 11500 audio tracks, and most of that represents actual physical CDs or iTunes/Amazon purchases; we’re pretty law-abiding folks.

The second revelation came when I synced the entire library to the iPod and set the thing to randomly play from the entire songs list.

I wound up skipping, I’d guess, two out of every three songs.  Some of that was based on mood, sure, and didn’t represent actual dislike of the song, but an awful lot of it was because it chose to play a song at me that I didn’t like, or that was a karaoke version, or that was some weird 20 second sample of BGM from a soundtrack.

So, I copied the entire library off the server onto my local PC, threw it into iTunes, and started doing a little pruning, and this has lead to some more revelations, some of them rather embarrassing.

For example:

Cardigans: First Band on the Moon.  I bought this album solely on the basis of hearing “Lovefool” on the radio, and it was also the first – and last – domestic CD I ever purchased that was $19.99, or $21.60 with CA state tax added.  I don’t think the recording companies even try to pull off that kind of pricing any more; this was back in 1996.

In retrospect, I’m thinking they deserved some of the pain that was coming in the form of Napster, etc.

“Lovefool” is the only track from the album that got kept and that actually made it on to my iPod.  So, yeah, poor CD purchase there, but not quite as bad as Dreams Come True’s “Magic”, which I bought unheard based solely on having really liked their “The Swinging Star” album.  I didn’t actually keep anything from “Magic”, and that was – by virtue of being an import – about 30 bucks.

I won’t go in to a whole, you know, list of albums that got dropped entirely or cut down to just one or two tracks, but the end result was an iPod with 8100 tracks on it, and I’m skipping a LOT less.

Of course, now I’m back to maintaining a local music library AND a music library on the server, but, eh, I’ll deal.  It’s better than allowing iTunes to have its way with the master library.

Which is to say, I had a page written on “I Have a Dream”, but it wasn’t going anywhere, so I scrapped it and started over with “Letter”

And since it’s due tomorrow, I turned off my desktop machine, which is full of distractions, and booted up my School Laptop, which does NOT have distractions on it.

And I wanted music, so I had my shiny new iPod sitting on the desk in front of me and I was trying to listen to it with the earbuds, which wasn’t working well because the cord’s really too short to sit back from.  My Grado headphones don’t actually fit in the iPod with its case on, so I can’t use them with it.

Then, I realized that, when buying the Apple Universal Dock, I had bought something that fit my iPod and had a Line Out jack, and I could run that, through a switchbox, into my normal PC speakers – Logitech X-540s, if you care – and then plug the Grados into the speaker pod and listen to them through that while controlling the whole mess with the remote control that came with the dock.

It was a total convergence-gasm.

Then I finished my paper, printed it, shut down the laptop, booted my desktop, and the iPod stopped playing and the remote control stopped working.

It turns out that, if I want to have the computer on, yet be using the iPod, docked, to play music, I need to eject it through iTunes and THEN I can use the remote control, which is dumb.

Also:

One of the things I got for Christmas was a Kingston DataTraveler 16GB flash drive, which is just stunningly tiny for something that holds that much data.

It’s turning out to be TOO tiny.  Too tiny as in, I think I probably left it at work, but if I didn’t leave it at work and DID bring it home, it’s sitting somewhere, USB plug retracted, being an unassuming 1.5″ by .5″ piece of black plastic in an apartment FULL of black surfaces.

This is, approximately, the third time in the last month that I’ve lost the thing.  I need to figure out some way to make it stand out a little more.

Also: Christ, could I have any more company-and-product names in one freaking post?

I think that Apple may have gotten us there a bit early.

Since purchasing a 120GB iPod classic, I’ve bought:

1) Belkin Clear Acrylia “remix” case.  I usually don’t buy Belkin products, ever since getting burned by a couple of their Flip KVMs, but this takes “protective” to a new level of paranoia; it completely encloses the iPod and protects the clickwheel, with openings only at the dock connector, headphone jack, and hold switch.

2) Sennheiser CX-300B earbuds, because the bundled iPod earbuds just don’t have enough bass and these were on sale at Amazon for a hair over 20 bucks, which I thought was a crazy good deal for something with the Sennheiser name on it.

3) An Apple Universal Dock with remote, etc.  I don’t want to think about the margin that Apple must make on these things; they are the most blatant example of the “Apple tax” that I have yet run in to.

4) A Griffin “PowerDuo” kit that came with a car charger, a wall charger, and a charge/sync cable.  The rather nice thing about this is that, since it’s actually a USB charger kit with an iPod cable bundled, I can use it to charge any USB device in the car or off the wall current.  I can stop leaving my Xbox 360 on to charge the controllers.

I did run in to the problem that, with the case on the iPod, it doesn’t fit in its dock adapter – or, for that matter, any of the six dock adapters bundled with the universal dock. The iPod fits in the dock just fine if I leave the dock adapter out, but the connector looks startlingly flimsy.

Fortunately, I found a solution, I thought, and then I had my hopes dashed, and then all was made right again.

See, Agent18 makes iPod cases that come with dock adapters.  Now, Agent18 cases don’t protect the click wheel, and I’d already bought a very decent case and didn’t want to replace it, BUT:

Agent18 will happily sell you two of their dock adapters for $5 shipped, which seemed a fair deal for something to relieve the stress on the dock connector.

That makes iPod-related purchase number 5), by the way.

I ordered them, and they arrived today, and I was gleeful to see that the iPod, in case, did fit in the Agent18 dock adapter, and then I tried plugging the iPod into the dock with the dock adapter installed and, well, it didn’t work.

See, the bottom of the dock adapter is thick enough that it prevents the dock connector on the iPod from mating with the dock.

After I realized this, I said an impolite thing, and then I got ready to stick the dock adapters in the closet and forget about them, and then I had a thought.

“Self,” I said, “you have two of these things, and they were cheap, and you’re about to stick them away and go back to using your iPod on the dock with no dock adapter so you’ll be eternally stressed about it until the day the dock actually DOES break and then you’ll be all like ‘well, I knew that was going to happen’ and stuff”.

And then I got out a box knife and – in a remarkable display of dexterity – managed to cut the bottom out of one of the dock adapters without actually injuring myself.

So now my iPod fits in its dock with the case on AND has a bit of extra support where it needs it, and all is good.

But seriously, looking at all the doohickies that I’ve wound up buying as a result of this single iPod purchase, I think that self-replication is already here, and it comes in a tasteful white box.

Oh, and I’m seriously considering 6), which is a self-installable iPod connector kit for our Mazda3 so I can route the signal through the internal stereo and do stuff like change tracks and playlists and volume from the steering wheel, which seems much safer than the alternatives.

I also managed to justify buying a new digital audio player, because after all I’ve done so much work with the media library recently and we had some money that had been sent to us by assorted relatives around Christmas and all.

So: We have 61GB of music and I wanted to get something to hold it all, so that pretty much means a hard disk based player.  They’re pretty stable these days, after all, right?  We’ve had a Creative Zen Xtra 30GB model for six years now and a Zen Vision M 60GB for about 3 years – both are still chugging along just fine and work with Windows Media Player, so my obvious course of action was to go out and buy whatever their latest model is and be happy.

They, uh,

they don’t have a hard disk based player any more.

In fact, it doesn’t seem like anyone does a hard disk based player that doesn’t also try to be some kind of uber media tablet…

…except Microsoft and Apple…

…and the Zune, last I checked, doesn’t display kanji without serious hacking.

In quiet desperation, hopeful that I had overlooked an option, I went to Fry’s and wandered their portable music player section for a bit.  They had nothing that fit my parameters, and the salesperson that glommed on to us while we were browsing was a bit of an ass about hard disk players.

I will paraphrase-quote him: “They have moving parts, so they break.  You want flash, because it’s solid state.  That means it doesn’t have moving parts.  So it won’t break.  Because the parts don’t move.”

I thanked him for his insight.

Actually, I said it more or less exactly like “thank you for your insightful observation”, which was being a bit of a jerk, but look, the guy deserved it.  Even my dear wife, who normally tries to act as a buffer between me-as-jerk and the rest-of-the-world-that-doesn’t-deserve-me-to-be-a-jerk-to-them, admitted that I wasn’t completely out of line.

So I didn’t buy a player from them, but I did note that they had 120GB iPods on sale for $228.97.

We left Fry’s and decided to try to give our local Best Buy a try.

They also had absolutely no hard drive players except the iPod and the Zune.

I gave in and decided on the iPod.

I felt dirty about it, mind you.

Problem was, the iPod at Best Buy was $250.  Fry’s is only 10 minutes away, so it would have added a 20 minute round trip to go back there and save $21, which wasn’t in itself a problem, but it would have meant re-interacting with the hard-drive-players-break-because-they-have-moving-parts-guy.

I flagged down a blue-shirt and asked if they’d price match, and he made this the little sucking-air-in-through-his-teeth-noise that implied impending disappointment.

Then he said “Well…” in that way, you know, the heavy emphasis on the L sound, like “wellllllllllllll”, you know the way, and he directed me to the customer service desk to “see what they could do for me.”

It turned out that what they could do, and what they were quite gleeful to do, was call Fry’s, ask them if they had any 120GB iPods in stock, and ask them how much they were, then – in an equally gleeful fashion – sell me one for $228.

Anyway, iTunes is slowly importing all our music as I type this, and it looks like it’s going to take about four more hours.

It is worth noting, at this point, that I went into my access rights for the music folder and set myself to read only before I did this.  iTunes will NOT be screwing up my ID3 tags again.

I expect I’ll be happy with the iPod.  It’s got room to grow in to, it displays kanji and displays the album art I so painstakingly tracked down, but, seriously, Creative, thanks for totally dropping the ball when you killed your HD line.