I am happy to read the chapters and implement the things I learn all day every day; this kind of behaviour is a much more natural learning experience for me. Memorising tables, commands and state diagrams is not. Nor is playing dodge-ball with the sometimes extremely “Cisco-ified” questions wherein a slight misunderstanding of the wording can get you thinking in the wrong direction and ultimately missing the entire point of the question. This kind of misdirection in questions is the absolute worst way for me to incorrectly answer a question. It makes me feel cheated and contempt toward Cisco. Of course the cynical side of me would say that they have to do something to make the exams difficult, albeit the methods they use aren’t genuine. Single-word differences between two command syntaxes isn’t exactly testing the knowledge you would expect a CCNP-level technician to possess. The command interface on every Cisco device is interactive and has tab completion at a bare minimum, so as long as you know the first 3-5 letters of every command you wish to use, you can TAB-complete your entire 6,000 line configuration. Disingenuous. That’s a good word to describe this kind of exam question trickery.

Anyway, I should stop procrastinating on my blog and get back to it.

Once you pair the watch via Bluetooth with your Android or iOS based smart phone you can then load a multitude of apps onto the watch to let it interface with your smart phone – and through your smart phone, the internet at large. Out of the box, the watch will support incoming Caller ID, e-mail (Gmail or any IMAP email account), calendar alerts, Facebook messages, Twitter, weather alerts, and silent vibrating alarm and timer. The list of possible uses for the phone is much larger than this, however, with the accelerometer and connection to the internet via smartphone it is possible to create many unique interactive experiences.

The project aimed to raise $100,000 over 40 days – the response, however, was phenomenal. The initial $100,000 was raised during the first two hours of the project page being live. As it currently stands, eight days later the amount pledge is $2,900,000 – that’s $2.9 million dollars. This is despite similar products already being available, e.g. Sony’s SmartWatch, the Imwatch, and others. This is because despite the Pebble not being first to market, it is smartest to market. I would say this is due to two important factors: first, the Pebble is going to provide an open API for developers using a standard gcc toolchain, meaning that anyone can develop for the Pebble without paying any licence fees or investing anything at all into the platform. Secondly, the Pebble makes use of e-ink display technology to give an estimated seven day battery life, which is a far better option than competing products which last for a day at most. Although this limits the display to monochrome, the physical size limitation of such a device does not lend itself to high quality graphical output even if the display were a high pixel density colour display – it would be like trying to squeeze modern smartphone apps onto an old Nokia mobile phone; or like printing postage stamps with 500 dpi resolution.

The project is due to deliver a final product around September. Needless to say I am very excited and will have trouble waiting that long!

I enjoy using small and light laptops because I believe this type of machine properly fits the purpose of a laptop. Anything larger than 14 inches diagonal screen size and the corresponding laptop body will no longer fit on the average lap. The term ‘desktop replacements’ seems like an oxymoron to me; what’s the point of a laptop that lives 90% of its life on a desk, tethered to power because the battery only lasts two hours?

Anyway, enough proselytizing. This post is about my new laptop which I have become enamored with, to say the least.

As you can see the shape of the system bears a striking resemblance to that of the MacBook Air. However, the main difference is that the Apple offering is less industrial-looking. The Air has a matte finish to its brushed aluminium lid whereas the Zenbook has a more polished look.

Inside the colour is more ‘gunmetal grey’ (one of my favorite colours) than the more silver-looking aluminium of Apple products.

The laptop weighs just over a kilogram and measures just 18 millimetres at its thickest point. Connectivity consists of a USB2, a USB3, SD/MMC card slot, headphone/microphone in/out, micro-HDMI and mini-VGA. The top of the range version sports an Intel Core i7 2677M, 4Gb DDR3, 256Gb SSD, 802.11a/b/g/n and Bluetooth 3.0. Battery life as tested by Engadget is approximately 8 hours with WiFi enabled.

I have installed Windows 7 Home Premium on mine and it is very nice to use. I intend upon replacing my Lenovo T410 work-provided laptop with my Zenbook. Fortunately my employer is very big on the current trend of ‘Bring Your Own Device’ whereby most of the corporate software stack can be accessed through Citrix XenApp. In terms of functionality it’s basically X window forwarding except it works on all operating systems (sidenote: checking my e-mail in Microsoft Outlook on my Google Android handset is probably one of the most ‘haha, this is so dumb but cool’ technology exercises I have recently undertaken).

At first I tried to use Ubuntu 11.10 on this system. It worked OK but wasn’t suitable for use as a full-time work laptop replacement because of the various issues leading me to doubt the reliability of the system as a whole. As mentioned there are a few issues with Ubuntu 11.10 currently:

• Can’t easily suspend/hibernate: requires tweaking with a custom powerdown script which I can’t get working, although reportedly it does work fine.
• Bluetooth support not available until kernel 3.2.
• Some models have a ‘Sentelic’ touchpad, which is not supported by any drivers at present for multi-touch etc. Other models have an ‘Elantech’ touchpad which is fully supported. You can’t tell which you’re buying until you open it up. I have a ‘Sentelic’ model.
• Currently power consumption on all Sandy Bridge CPUs is poor with kernel 3.0.x and 3.1.x; reportedly fixed in 3.2.x though currently there are workarounds which make the system somewhat unstable.

Unfortunately the lack of Bluetooth and poor touchpad support is a killer. In the office it’s not such a big deal but while I am out on site and needing to connect a USB-to-serial adapter to access the console of networking devices, I can choose to either have a mouse plugged in or my phone or the provided USB-to-Ethernet adapter. When working away from the office on unfamiliar network equipment, it’s typically essential to have at least a console and ethernet or console and mouse.

The performance of the system is very good. This is the first computer I have owned with a solid state drive and I am impressed. I have seen other computers with them but never really used them for an extended period of time to really appreciate how fast an SSD can do things. Now whenever I am using any other computer it seems like I am waiting for far too long for anything to happen.

With Windows the battery life is pretty good. Windows usually reports about 7 hours of life from a full charge, though I have never used the laptop continuously for that long on battery, I have seen a solid five hours out of it with two overnights periods of sleep. This may not be optimal, because I have installed Windows from scratch I can’t install most of the Asus utilities, including the “Instant-On” utility which I presume provides some power saving mechanism.

As compared to my last laptop; well, this one doesn’t compare. It is simply better in every way. Even the integrated graphics are better than the old nVidia graphics chip in my Dell. I experimented by playing Grand Theft Auto III on this laptop and it ran quite well.

The price I paid worked out to be around $1760 from a local retailer. They included a free Bluetooth mouse for some reason which I was quite happy with. Unfortunately for me and my insistence on buying the best version of this laptop I possibly could, paying that price meant I missed on on buying the next model down for around $660 cheaper – an i5 / 128Gb SSD model, which can be had on special at JB HiFi. It’s worth it though. With 256Gb I don’t really have to think about what I put on my system. I just know it’ll all fit.

Well, there’s the obvious things: lighting and ambience. I’ll be making use of several sets of disco lights: of what type I am as yet unsure, but I imagine they’ll be standard fare. At any rate, that kind of stuff is either simple (random) or complex (programmable); unfortunately I don’t have the equipment or the time to deal with the latter, so the former will have to do. As for ambience, I am also going to have a smoke machine running and probably set up a light-sensitive plasma ball as well.

Then, there are the not so obvious things: video and visualisations. Fortunately in this day and age of high-def YouTube, it is sometimes quite easy to obtain good quality music videos. I have a few and I’ll be putting them to good use, but being able to do so was a small effort in itself (which I’ll get to later). Visualisations are basically mathematic representations or interpretations of the music being played. You’ve probably seen one before, there are some basic ones that come with most media players. Most times you will probably see bars moving up and down or a wiggly-wavy line, these are very simple forms; then there are more elaborate interpretations such as projectM, some of which can produce quite stunning and interesting imagery.

My plan was to make use of projectM in conjunction with my home theatre PC. This would provide an excellent central place to display the visualisations and obviously as my home theatre speakers are already connected, it just makes sense. But what else? Normally in clubs and such (The Met is a great example), they have multiple screens set up doing this kind of thing … how could I do that too? Turns out, pretty easily. PulseAudio is an awesome piece of software for just this purpose. With the click of a few settings I was able to setup my HTPC as a multicasting audio server with my desktop and laptop computers receiving the multicast; now, with projectM running on all three systems, I am able to have an easy to organise multi-screen system which makes use of existing network cabling in my home. The projectM instances on each computer won’t be synchronised (unless I specify a list of presets, but there are literally thousands – maybe I will, but probably not), but I think that’s fine. If they’re all displaying different imagery it just adds to the experience in my opinion.

As for music videos, that was a little more difficult to figure out because I wasn’t aware if it was possible to do what I wanted. There were no media players that support projectM and video playback at the same time; and technically, there still isn’t, but I was able to use qmmp to achieve what I wanted. qmmp allows me to add audio and video files into the same playlist. When qmmp reaches a video title in the playlist it simply launches mplayer to handle the file. mplayer is a handy video utility: it plays pretty much everything and it’s also highly configurable; not having its own graphical front-end makes this a requirement. It was a pretty simple process of reading the mplayer man page, adding a few options to its configuration file and having it behave exactly how I want: on the HTPC television screen, projectM will be fullscreen until a movie is played, whereupon a fullscreen mplayer is launched over the top of the projectM display to play the video file which then automatically exits at the conclusion of the video, at which point the next song plays and the projectM visualisation is once again visible. Neat, huh?

So, I was able to configure qmmp, PulseAudio, projectM and mplayer in such a way that I can remotely control (via vnc, but other options seem viable) the music and video playback for my party. I’m happy!

• Users’ Windows PCs backing up automatically to their respective folder on the network
• These backups being automatically rsync’d with an external disk, for a true backup
• Reports on the status of the machine being made available to me at regular intervals

The first is turning out to be the most difficult. Initially I wanted to write a batch script that handled this for me and then configure it to run once a week using Task Scheduler in Windows. However, there are three different versions of Windows for me to contend with out of my five users, (XP, Vista, 7), so it wasn’t as straightforward as I thought it would be, with Vista and 7 including “Robocopy” out of the box, and XP not. However, we all know the most straightforward solution isn’t always the best one. Even with Robocopy, you cannot do incremental/differential file copies. You can coarsely say “all files changed after some date”, but it still copies everything in full.

Enter FTPSync, a nice little FTP tool which has a built-in differencing algorithm and allows full, incremental and differential backups. Its configuration is somewhat obscure, but nothing too difficult to understand with the help of their online documentation (which as it always happens, was actually down the first time I wanted to access it). After some initial tests on a small dataset, I think it will be most suitable for my purposes, for two reasons: (a) incremental/differential backups, saving time, and (b) it does this over FTP, which is the most CPU-efficient protocol for my underpowered file server.

Setting up the user home directories was pretty easy: just enable the [homes] share in your Samba configuration, and you’re away. Mine are actually redirected via symlinks to another disk, so you also have to add “symlinks = yes” to the [global] section of your config, or your home directories won’t appear as intended. The rsync configuration was also pretty straightforward, but I’ll include my backup script here for your reference:

There’s actually a lot of junk at the start of the script which I haven’t cleaned out yet (since changing from an rsync over SSH approach), but the important part, the part that does all the work, is the rsync call on line 28. The simple if construction checks the size of the data to be backed up, and then proceeds if below 200Gb, otherwise does nothing. The result of the script is e-mailed to me when it finishes. Also, I have created a little script which runs every now and then to collect the temperature of the hard disks, a df output or two, and some other info, which is also e-mailed to me periodically, just to keep an eye on things.

There is a version of the above script for each of the five users on my system, and they are all executed using roots cron daemon. As noted in the script, the rsync.pwd file must be owned by root for this to work.

1. Media Centre Musings: Part 1 – The Theory
2. Media Centre Musings: Part 2 – The Plan
3. Media Centre Musings: Part 3 – Third Time’s the Charm
4. Media Centre Musings: Part 4 – Starting Implementation
5. Media Centre Musings: Part 5 – Putting it all Together

Probably the most epic assembly of consumer electronics I’ve experienced, and still not quite finished.

After I picked up the television and the PS3 on Sunday last week, I went out and bought most of the components for my HTPC on Monday. I unfortunately couldn’t assemble it that day because every local PC store had conveniently run out of stock on the case I wanted, so I had to wait for that to be sent to me. It arrived on Wednesday, and I assembled the HTPC, which was pretty straightforward because building PCs is my thing.

The Antec Micro Fusion 350 is, as with all other Antec cases, a very solidly put together affair with all of the things you’d expect and Antec case to have. Even though its name denotes it as being the smaller in Fusion class of HTPC cases, it suffers no functionality or convenience loss, even incorporating Antec’s dual chamber design.

In the above picture you can see pretty much everything: 96×16 LCD just visible on the front, 750Gb Western Digital ‘Green Power’ SATA disk in the foreground inside its own chamber, GeForce 9400GT graphics card and 2x2Gb Corsair TwinX memory in the mid-ground, and the CPU cooler and exhaust fans of the motherboard chamber in the background.

I installed the 9.10RC of Mythbuntu onto the server and was totally lost. I have never used MythTV before, so I really had no idea what I was doing. Thankfully it comes with a lot of sane defaults and most of the functionality worked with minimal setup. I copied all of my media from an external backup disk into the appropriate directories and then started configuring the remote and the LCD.

As mentioned, I’ve no experience with any of this, so I was starting from scratch in all regards. After I spent nearly a half day mucking around with the remote and the LCD, following guides designed for Mythbuntu 9.04, I had aquired enough knowledge to realise that my setup was actually fully functional but was not working because I had selected the wrong presets.

So, now the remote works, but it is a little clumsy in my mind. What buttons from the devices’ original remote do not exist on the Logitech remote are mapped via the softmenu keys which allows you to scroll through a list of functions and then choose what you want to do. The only criticism of the remote itself that I have is that it is very long and slender and the buttons are very hard to push. This means you nearly always need two hands to operate it because you can’t quite reach end-to-end and maintain a good enough grip to support the remote while pushing down the buttons at the extreme ends of the device at the same time. I will have to let loose the newbies to see if they can navigate the system without my assistance, and also to gather from them ideas on how to improve the control scheme. As of yet I have not implemented any direct control of the television from the PC and everything relies solely on the Logitech Harmony remote.

There’s little to say about the speakers and the receiver at this stage – the setup of both was very straightforward, although I did have a problem with the subwoofer not working initially. I took it back to Harvey Norman and they tested it on their demonstation system, where it worked perfectly fine. Confused, I assumed it must have been the cable, or worse, the subwoofer output of the receiver. Thankfully, the helpful sales guy at Harvey Norman gave me the high-quality cable from their demo system and told me to take it with me. “If it works with this cable,” he said as he handed it to me, “you can keep it. Just let me know.” It worked with the new cable.

There’s only been two things so far which my plan failed to account for: the S/PDIF output of the HTPC, and where to place the rear surround speakers. The latter was swimming in the back of my mind at various stages but I never put any solid thought into it. I solved the problem yesterday by going out and buying some universal satellite speaker stands which feel like they’re made from wrought iron. Thankfully though they are just perfect for mounting my speakers; the stands themselves are hollow so the speaker wiring can pass through to the bottom and leave the base unseen. As for the audio on the HTPC problem; the motherboard doesn’t have an onboard connector, only internal jumper pins. Currently I am passing the S/PDIF audio from the internal motherboard connector to the graphics card and through the HDMI cable to the television which then outputs it via optical cable to the receiver. However, in order to listen to music through the HTPC this requires the television to be turned on. Really not a great option considering the television draws about 265 watts of power when on. So I’ve ordered an S/PDIF dongle with both co-axial and optical connectors which should hopefully arrive soon, as when the XBox 360 gets here it’ll need the optical input on the receiver currently in use by the television.

This post is huge already. I think I will write up some reviews of all the components over the next few weeks to save novellising what I already have.

Here’s my working area during setup, the final setup, and the obligatory shot of me playing Team Fortress 2 on the setup. Not seen are the rear satellites just out of shot under the foreground.

1. Media Centre Musings: Part 1 – The Theory
2. Media Centre Musings: Part 2 – The Plan
3. Media Centre Musings: Part 3 – Third Time’s the Charm
4. Media Centre Musings: Part 4 – Starting Implementation
5. Media Centre Musings: Part 5 – Putting it all Together

So, I’ve spent the money buying all the things I previously talked about.

First, a small rant – you may skip past this to the “what did I actually buy?” section of the post if you prefer:

I thought things were working out OK; and they will in the end, but I have come accross some caveats of operation through either my own ignorance or mistake or through clever non-mentions of information by the sales person at Harvey Norman.

The caveat I’m most interested in is this: as we all know, HDMI carries video and audio data compatible with DVI and PCM. So, alongside all the kerfuffle and marketing about how great HDMI is, I naturally assumed that the advancement and simplification of the home theatre system had come to a point where you could mostly plug everything into each other using only HDMI cables and not have to worry about anything else.

Well, I was wrong. My receiver (which I’ll talk about in more detail later on) has three HDMI inputs, and its manual proudly states it is “HDMI switching capable”; naturally I assumed I could simply plug my PS3, XBox360 and HTPC directly into the HDMI inputs with no other cables and have the receiver decode audio out to the surround speakers and pass the video onto the television. Seems pretty straight-forward, right? Not so!

Apparently the receiver I’ve purchased is capable of HDMI pass-through, but this is wholly and soully what it does. It passes it through without looking at it, at all. If I want to get my receiver to decode the audio from anything I plug in via HDMI (because this is the whole fucking point of the receiver and the surround speakers!) I have to connect both a HDMI for video and co-axial or optical audio cable from the device into the receiver.

Thankfully my receiver has three such inputs which will account for all of my devices and I can live happily ever after with the purchase of some additional cables. But fuck me! Is it just me, or is that ridiculous?

What did I actually buy?

In the end, my purchase planning worked. I ended up with everything I planned to buy at around the cost I was expecting to pay. Some things were cheaper than I expected but that was made up for by having to buy additional cabling.

• Television: Sharp LC46D77X, as planned.
• Games: I ended up buying a PS3 instead of a standalone BluRay player. I could have paid about $350-$400 for a standard player, or, what I did do in the end was pay $450 for a PS3 Slim 120Gb. I swore a few years ago never to buy anything Sony again, but what can I say? I really want to play GT5 when it comes out. I’ll also have an XBox 360 in a few weeks after my redemption with Sharp is processed. I’ve gone from owning no consoles to owning two-thirds of all the latest consoles. Great!
• Home Theatre Speakers: Onkyo TX-SR307 and JBL 5.1 “Simply Cinema” SCS-200.5 speakers. More on this later.
• HTPC: I went with the Pentium option. It was cheaper, after all.

How did I go from Yamaha to Onkyo and JBL? Well, that’s pretty much luck. I left hospital on Sunday, helped my dad with his new home theatre setup, and then headed to Harvey Norman to check out the sale that was ending that very day. Luckily for me, it was 30% off home theatre speakers. They had a few setups, none of which appeared to be particularly impressive (or if they were impressive, totally out of my price range) except two; the one I ended up buying and a Yamaha setup which was the model below what I wanted. The confusing part was the Yamaha setup with Klipsch speakers was $1500 versus the $1100 I paid for the Onkyo and JBLs – as I understand it, Onkyo and JBL are both better quality than Yamaha and Klipsch; the sales guy explained it was because the latter system had more overall power output. I am not terribly concerned with overall output as I live in a town house complex, so high volumes are a no-no anyway (as it stands, the total system output of my new system is something like 500 Watts, and previously a 125 Watt 5.1 computer speaker setup was sufficing). The marked price was $1200 but he dropped it to $1100 because he didn’t actually have them in stock on the day.

My current dilemma is trying to figure out the best way to connect them all together. Originally my plan with my new home theatre was to connect everything to everything else through the A/V receiver as explained above in my rant.

So I thought I could do all that with HDMI cables only. Apparently not: my A/V receiver will only pass-through HDMI directly without touching it. So any audio carried over HDMI will go straight to the TV stereo speakers and not to the surround sound where I want it.

OK, fine.

• First option: So, what I want to do is have all of the devices plug via HDMI into the A/V receiver and then have a seperate (S/PDIF, co-ax or optical) cable for the audio also plugging into the A/V receiver.
• Second option: Or, do I want to plug all of the HDMI cables straight into the television and only connect the audio cables from each device to the A/V receiver? Saves me buying another HDMI cable to go from A/V -> TV.
• Third option: OR! Do I want to plug all of the HDMI cables, carrying both audio and video, and ONLY the HDMI cables, into the TV, and then have a single audio cable from the TV’s optical audio out to the A/V receiver?

All three “should work”, but what’s the best way? I guess I’ll have to experiment when I actually get my receiver later in the week.

1. Media Centre Musings: Part 1 – The Theory
2. Media Centre Musings: Part 2 – The Plan
3. Media Centre Musings: Part 3 – Third Time’s the Charm
4. Media Centre Musings: Part 4 – Starting Implementation
5. Media Centre Musings: Part 5 – Putting it all Together

Introduction

As I am now living in my own place with people of my generation who understand my desire to have “everything now” (as most other late Generation X-ers and early Generation Y-ers will understand), I have decided that it is time to build myself a media centre for use in the lounge/common room.

The popularity of digital media management solutions has steadily risen over the past few years. Solutions based around commodity PC hardware and open-source operating systems have been around since 2002 at least, with commercial options such as TiVo being available for a few years beforehand.

Although TiVo has been available in America and surrounding countries for nearly 10 years now, it has only recently become avilable in countries such as Australia, Taiwan etc more recently. Thus contributing to the popularisation (amongst geeks at least) of free/open-source solutions such as the aforementioned MythTV.

Software

It is this software system, on top of my as always favourite Linux operating system that I will build my media centre solution. I have decided that using Arch will be ideal for a few reasons:

1. it’s fast. With my older hardware, this is important, especially when considering playback of HD content
2. I know how to use it.
3. I prefer some “under the hood” access – configuring everything from scratch, for me, is not a chore. I prefer it to having everything set to defaults like with Ubuntu/Mythbuntu. With either of those distributions, I’d end up changing all the defaults anyway.

Hardware

My hardware of choice is my ex-gaming PC, a veteran system by today’s standards which is over four years old now!

• AMD Athlon64 3400+ (2400Mhz)
• DFI LANParty UT nForce 250GB
• 2x512Mb Corsair Dual-Channel RAM
• Albatron nVidia GeForce 6800GT 256Mb
• Creative Sound Blaster Live! 5.1

Storage

Currently the system has about 480GB of storage spread across three seperate hard drives (the joys of incremental upgrades). However, due to the planned dual-role of this computer as media centre and secure backup/storage system, I will be buying some new drives and setting up a simple software RAID system of SATA disks. With the ridiculous cost of hard disk storage solutions these days, where off-the-shelf 1TB drives command an approximate cost of 16 cents per gigabyte, there will be no shortage of disk space.

For reasons of performance and reliability I will buy at least two identical drives (probably a pair of Western Digital 7200RPM ‘Green Power’ drives) and place them in a RAID1 configuration. Whether I will use the onboard RAID capabilities of the system board or an implementation in software (mdadm) is largely irrelevant in terms of performance as both rely on the CPU to perform RAID-related calculations. However, using the software solution will abstract the RAID functions from the hardware, which will eliminate the single point of failure. If the motherboard were to be replaced, I would effectively lose my RAID system, and all data with it. The underlying hardware is irrelevant in this scenario when using software RAID.

Video Capture

Finding the right video capture card isn’t going to be as easy as the rest of the hardware. While there is a lot of information (MythTV hardware wiki, OCAU MythTV Wiki) available about which are the best cards to buy, it is a matter of matching the exact cards which are known as fully working to those actually available for purchase.

For example, the Leadtek DTV-2000H is a well-rounded card which offers the features I require. However, there are two different revisions available, the ‘I’ revision and the ‘J’ revision. The former works flawlessly and the latter has intermittent problems and requires a lot more tweaking to get it to play nicely. Both cards use the same highly recommended chipset (Connextant 2388x) but apparently are different enough to cause problems (see the MythTV wiki entry for this card). This makes my choice a very difficult one as retailers generally aren’t too happy about having customers open boxes and inspect hardware version numbers prior to a purchase being made.

Remote Control

The only other hardware consideration I have is what remote control to use. Some of the available video capture cards come with their own, or I may buy another. It is an incidental cost in the grand scheme of things but adds so much functionality to the system. I do not want to have a keyboard and mouse hanging around in my loungeroom if I can avoid it, and indeed, I can. More to the point, though, a remote control with familiar buttons makes the system much more accessible to the non-technical people who will be using the system, and that increases the chances it’ll be used.

Conclusion

As this is only part one of my upcoming series of posts on the matter, you will have to wait a week or two until I’ve properly researched my hardware choices, made my purchases and begun the build. Rest assured though, I’ll do a full write-up!

File’s here: asound.conf

You can see it in action on a few previous posts. I’ll be posting all of my images like this from now on.