NeutralAxis

After a rough start, I’ve been successfully running XBMC Live on my Revo.  The instructions on Lifehacker.com either aren’t complete, or they glossed over problems they surely must have had since the software and hardware they used is identical to mine.  First the good news … DVD ISOs and VOBs play great, and that was my main goal.  The bad news is that MP3′s played too fast, and video files like avi, flv, wmv are playing way too fast.

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Dropbox, previously written about here, has a limitation that you can only have one account at a time.  But a workaround has been developed that lets you have as many open accounts as you want.

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XBMC, the media center program originally designed to run on the original Xbox video game system, has been running on an old Xbox of mine for the last year or so.  I find myself not using it as much as I’d like though because the machine’s a bit noisy and big to hide around the TV.  Other drawbacks are that it doesn’t allow for HD video, and downloading updates for it practically require a meeting in a dark alley and knowing the secret handshake.

A new article at Lifehacker.com has detailed how to install XBMC on a tiny, silent, Acer AspireRevo with HDMI output.  And given that its for a computer rather than a proprietary video game system, updates are readily available.  I gave it a try on my existing desktop computer with XBMC Live.

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Have you ever wanted to experiment with a different OS but were afraid to make the commitment?  Virtualization software is your answer.  Its easy, and free.  With it, you can install any OS (except MacOS) inside a working copy of any other OS.  (continue reading…)

Finally, I think I have my mail server working correctly so that I can send email notifications for system and blog events.  Up to this point, I never received any notification when comments were left on posts.  I used the procedure from this site for my exim4/Ubuntu setup.  Steps repeated after the jump.

[Update:  Yep, it works.  After a false alarm of it not working due to getting stuck in a spam filter, I now get an email to moderate posts from new users and when a comment is posted.] (continue reading…)

Just installing Ubuntu doesn’t really get you where you need to be for a good user experience.  The linked article below has some good tips and instructions for making sure you can play video and mp3, tweak the system, configure a firewall, etc.  The instructions are keyed to Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty” but most should work in the 8 series also. See below for some thoughts on their recommendations and additional notes to help get things done perhaps a little easier and answer a few questions that might arise.

9 Things You Need To Do/Install After Installing Ubuntu

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When I rip music, I do it twice.  Once in mp3 format for playback on an iPod and once in flac for playback on my local network via Roku Soundbridge players and the Firefly media server.  iTunes doesn’t support flac, so I can’t make iTunes playlists for those files.  I can, however, make them for the mp3 files which are named identically.  And with a little Linux program called “sed”, I can edit the iTunes library to make Firefly read it to work with the flac files. (continue reading…)

Thanks to Steve for helping me to get SSL installed and running.  After an unsuccessful attempt with his help last weekend, the problem dawned on me this morning as I was driving to work.  We had set the port 443 SSL virtualhost to the wrong DocumentRoot directory.  See previous posts about Virtualhost if you’re looking for more explanation.  Also, see the page here for part 1 of the SSL setup instructions followed for setting up a privately signed certificate,  and here for part 2, which we modified a bit for my purposes.  So far the only problem I’ve seen with SSL logins to WordPress is that the flash media uploader doesn’t work.  It reports an IO Error.

Google’s going to make an attempt to crawl a little deeper into our lives with their announcement of a new open-source operating system for PCs called Chrome OS.  With the exception of the login barrier between normal Gmail accounts and Gmail for domains, I’ve been very happy with all of Google’s offerings and look forward to seeing what they come up with. (continue reading…)

I got around to installing the WordPress 2.8 update and fail to understand why I have so many problems with normal one-click upgrades for this and plugins. (continue reading…)