Hardware

Saturday and Sunday were the first full days with my new Droid phone. I couldn't help but gloat a little with Brain about him having to wait till today to get his via FedEx. Of course, he got a much better price. I'm waiting for his Droid to finish charging to post this. Thus the Brothers Droid in the title.
Saturday, the first full day with the Droid, had the whole family in the car using the GPS to get Sam to a meetings for a school project. It worked fairly well. The destination was in a not yet completed housing development, so we got to the street, but not the house numbers. (Google Maps satalite view still showed about 3/4 of the houses there closer to holes in the ground than houses.)
I'm also working on getting my social networking status updates working. Ping.fm app is installed. Brightkite is install (and working really well with the GPS). Evernote for Android is still in beta, so lacks some features. I did not see an official Flickr app, so I'm thinking of which ones out there to try (or maybe just fall back to whatever ping.fm offers). And I already miss TimeTracker MX.
I did try (and appears failed) to navigate sending a couple of pictures from one of our stops (McDonald's Garden Center).
At a neighborhood party later in the day, I was able to impress a couple of people with pulling down a YouTube video that had been the topic of conversation. It streamed very nicely. Everyone seemed impressed with the phone.
Right now, I'm still waiting for my dear brother to end his self impossed lack of communication (his Droid is charging) where he refuses to call me or take my calls till he can do it on HIS Droid.
There's more I want to write about the Droid, but lunchtime is ending, and I really should get back to work.

I am sitting in the car waiting to pickup Sam after his Destination Imagination group's meeting. For grins, I went to the Android Market to see if there were any apps for Drupal sites and I found one.
After seeing the number of posts that Brian has done since getting his Blackberry Strom. Most of his posts have been of the photo + short description or comment variety. And that's less what I want to do (he does this type of post with enough frequency that it's a style, and one that works for him, I think).
Unfortunately, I tend to be way more wordier [ed note: to the point of being overly so, don't ya think?].

So, here is the first post I'm doing [ed: starting, as it's being finished on the PC after the fact] on the Droid phone.

As I mentioned in my holiday wrap up, Natalie had gifted me with an HP Mini 2133 netbook.

I had been thinking of getting myself either a netbook or an Internet tablet (not that either of those descriptions are really all that functional) for some time. Just something small carrying around the house, or to the coffee bar near work. I wasn't looking for anything killer. The only requirements I had was that it not break the bank (cost more than a laptop) and that it be capable of running Linux. And not be ugly.

Obviously, there were other things to consider.

While there may be better netbooks out in the marker (HP seemed to agree, having announced the 2140 at CES and I saw something about the future 2150 today), I might have decided to purchase the 2133 myself. The primary issue being the local availability and who I work for (EDS, an HP company).

When we opened gifts with Natalie's parents on 21 December, I plugged the Mini in and put it aside to give it a chance to charge. I was kind of surprised that the battery didn't take anywhere near as long as I expected to charge, or the box seemed to have already been opened. So after a while I turned it on, and immediately found myself logged into a desktop that didn't exactly look like it the default I was expecting. It seems that this was a returned unit, sold as new. Being the 2133 doesn't ship with recovery media (and that included the Linux version I was running) Natalie wanted to take it back and exchange it. We did, and this unit had all the factory seals still in place.

Repeat the setup and this time on boot, it takes me thought SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop's first boot setup. Of course something goes wrong and the install isn't 100% right. Small problems here and there. But it is working. WiFi works. Video looks nice. Not a whole lot of disk space, only a 4GB solid state drive, but for use at home, that's not a serious problem. My home network has some storage available.

And then, right before we travel up to Bristol, I let the SLED install do an update. I guess I should have read a little more on the Internet before doing that, and I should have waited till after we traveled.

First issue with doing the update was that the SLED 10 SP1 HP installed isn't exactly supported by Novel anymore. Second issue was that the 4GB ssd just didnt' have the space to download the patches that were available in one sitting. Third issue was that the updated that were done were kernel updates, and HP had provided customized modules for the WiFi card. This meant that when I get the kernel updates down, I didn't have the matching modules for the WiFi and lost the use of wireless network. And the final issue is that the unit only had 512MB, so everything was kind of slow, and a the small disk meant that I couldn't just throw more swap at it.

When we got back from Bristol, I did order an upgrade for the memory. At the same time, I ordered an 32GB solid state disk. I figured if I had to pull the keyboard off to change the memory, I might as well do the hard drive, too. (I later bought a USB enclosure for the 4GB drive off of eBay for $8.)

I had attempted to make an image of the HP install (patched and somewhat broken) prior to installing the new disk, hoping that I could salvage the install and put it back on the Mini. That didn't work. Seems there were some issues with copying a 4GB file over the network under the netboot I had setup. (I can now support booting off my home network).

That left me with a borked disk image I could not use. Off to the Internet to get an install of the new opensuse 11.1.

Currently, the Mini is running X under the vesa framebuffer, as I haven't worked on trying to get either the closed Chrome drivers, or the FOSS openchrome drivers working. I can't do 3D desktop effects. Video is a little choppy and some graphic things just don't work right. But I'm OK with that. I wasn't expecting a desktop replacement. I did get the WiFi working again using ndiswrapper and the windows XP dirvers for the Broadcom chipset. In my experience, SuSE had been pretty good in getting Dell and IBM laptops working right out of the install. So, this was the first time I had to do ndiswrappers myself.

It works well enough, though I don't know what would happen without the NetworkMananger. If I move to or just try out WindowMaker or Enlightenment on the Mini, I'm not sure how I'm going to manage the wireless.

I don't think the laptop has Bluetooth. And I haven't gotten it working yet using my phone as a modem (which I did get working under 10.3 over the summer on an older IBM laptop). But with free WiFi at Bean There, I'm not sure how much I'll actually need to use a CDMA modem.

Yes, I know, I want to make it work, too. But as it seems I'm going to be forced into working from home more often to support my current project, WiFi is more than enough. And I'll figure out some way of getting the GPS hooked in. (Another thing I had working under 10.3 this summer.)

Overall, I like the install I have on the box. The webcam works, so I've used that for the Daily Photo a couple of times. The 4GB enclosure will be nice (once I get TrueCrypt going again) to use for moving things around. The 32GB disk seems roomy.

Overall, the HP Mini 2133 does what I expect it to do. And it looks fairly nice doing it.

Links to more information:

• HP Mini 2150 at Wired

• HP Mini 2140 at HP

• HP2133Guide.com

Why is it that everything has to fall apart and break all at the same time?

The end of August, the last DVD player I bought (a little over a year ago) started having issues with one of the DVD's we received from Netflix. This really isn't unusual, Disks coming from any rental operation are going to have issues from time to time. They are dirty, scratched or just plain weird. And some of the disks are sometimes slightly non-standard. I've even had that issue with at least one DVD we bought a few years ago. If the issue with the DVD is dirt, then the problem might also show up on the next DVD you pop into the player; transference of dirt from the disk to the lens.

Yes, it happens.

After cleaning the lens and trying the disk on another DVD player we have in the house (boy's Xbox), we found that the disk played fine. I then dropped another disk I had just watched on my computer in to the troubled DVD player and it had problems.

Looks like I killed another one. In the span of the last 10 years I have destroyed 3 DVD players, 3 DVD burners and a significant number of optical drives in FileNET jukeboxen.

On Labor Day, I went and bought a new DVD player for the living room. This one includes a DVD burner and a VHS drive. I'll talk more about that some other time.

Today, sitting in the living room, I noticed that the Ceiva picture frame was dark. This isn't normally a problem. More than likely, someone has knocked the power brick out of the outlet. So, I just ask Natalie to reach back over and plug it in, only it's not unplugged.

Looking at the frame, the power light is on. Looking at the network logs, it's been doing it's thing and talking to Ceiva every hour, looking for new pictures. Wonderful.

I remember hearing from Natalie that her mother's Ceiva did the same thing, went dark, while she was visiting. The unit ended up being replaced for something like $20. But that was a while ago.

When I went up to the Ceiva website, I understand how that happened. My mother-in-law was pushed into buying Ceiva's one year extended warranty. From looking at it now, it looks like they do not support doing that with my model anymore.

Natalie really likes having the Ceiva. And the one we did have was a couple of years old. I don't really feel bad about replacing it, as it is something we do actually use. But more on that later.

Let me end by saying that I WILL more than likely be taking the Cevia I have apart to looking at what I can do with it.

And now I have to wonder what is going to break next. Last time we went through one of these cycles, I think I burned a mouse, keyboard and monitor over the course of a month.

I have kind of lost track of time.
So, I folded clean laundry that had been piling up in the family room since Sam decided he needed to pour a school project "lava lamp" made of oil, salt, water and red food dye into a Hersey's novelty truck made of perforated metal. In his bedroom, on his bed, all over his comforter. He said that he had been planning for days, weeks possibly, before he choose to do this. There were actually a number of items that he was considering to pour the lava lamp into. The truck was the only one he could find. I wondered why I hadn't heard him scream when he "knocked" over the bottle. It was because he hadn't knocked it over. He poured it.
I think that was some time 2 weeks ago (it's all starting to run together).

Have you ever had to figure out how to clean up a non-Newtonian fluid, made of what really kind of amounts to water and corn flour? By non-Newtonian, I mean, it's liquid and it pours, but it also resists movement and sudden changes in force. Hit it, and you'll bounce off it. Go slow, it doesn't. Hit it with a hammer hard enough, the puddle shatters. <a href='http://www.google.com/search?q=oobleck' target='_blank'>Google oobleck</a>. That's really what it's called.
Try to push it, and it pushes back, or breaks into little clumps and "rolls" away, or it just fights you and makes it hard to clean up.
Mother's Day evening. I got to figure out how to do it (this time with Blue food coloring).
Seems the best way was to just put a paper towel over it. In a second or two, the towel is soaked, and the oobleck has kind of started to be powder. Brooms work good then.
At this point, I am expecting spills. Big messy spills. Spills that stain things. Spills that make really big messes.
Of course, then the ssh probe attacks get started, and then the router goes wonky.
Something killed the new router. I'm back on the old one. And I am surprised that the old one is even working, as the reason for the one was that I thought the old one had died.
Right now I'm starting to think there is either a problem with the cable company and their gear, or I've just been getting hammered by port scans. There was this one morning where Cox's permit person was out front measuring things while we were waiting to put the kids on the bus. Seems that there was a bad cable between the heads infront of my house. Maybe I should call them.
And thus begins the end of May. Hopefully, this year it doesn't try to kill me.