Vista grr

So I got my spiffy (and shiny) new Dell XPS M1130 laptop. (2.1Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4GB mem, 250gig HD, LED backlit 13″ monitor… and Vista.) Each time I started the machine, or resume from hibernation, my hard drive thrashes like crazy for about 20 minutes. You’d think with 4GB of memory, the hard drive would almost never need to be accessed except when loading programs. You’d be wrong. Welcome to SuperFetch. This is a program that runs in the background and pre-loads from disk into memory to allow for faster load times for frequently-used programs. Well, it keeps trying to preload my 8GB virtual machine file (that I use to run Linux concurrently with Vista). Hence the hard drive thrashing. I can sort of see the logic of using a pre-fetch device… on a desktop. A note to Microsoft: I use a laptop, and I like to be able to suspend and re-awaken my laptop in a hurry so that I do things like… I don’t know… move it? When all of that stuff is pre-loaded into memory, before the computer can sleep or suspend, it has to either unload it, or write it out to a temporary disk file. Double the hard disk use, double the memory use, half the convenience.

Thankfully, this demon was pretty easy to exorcise from Vista with the right incantations.

Garmin GPS makes some “interesting” routing choices

I’ve seen this too many times for it to be a fluke with one device or even model. The Garmin mobile gps devices make some insane decisions for routing from one place to another and I can’t decide whether it’s due to poor maps or a poor routing algorithm. Our family uses the StreetPilot c550 and HVA uses the nuvi series, and I’ve seen the same issue with both.

A good example is our most recent trip to Cleveland from Milan. A reasonable person (and Google) would take US23 south to either I80/90 or I475 to get to the turnpike. Our garmin directed us to get off US23 at Summerfield, take that to Sterns, to Lewis, to I-75, to I-280, and thence to the turnpike. For those not in the know, these are all two lane back roads and while possibly more direct, it would be MUCH slower than staying on the highway.
On our first trip to Cleveland, we had to pull into a residential street to get out the laptop and look up directions online, since our Garmin kept taking us around in circles AROUND our destination, without actually taking us TO our destination.

I’ve seen the same thing happen with the nuvi series, where crews have followed the gps onto rural, 2-lane roads that end up being more direct but much slower, or have gotten stuck in the loop-around route.

I’ve triple-checked the settings in several of the units and they are all clearly set to choose the fastest route with all obstacle avoidance turned off. The weird thing is that our StreetPilot has actually tried to route us a couple ways around Toledo on several different trips to Cleveland, with the same start and end points, and all settings the same.

I am curious if I would experience the same bugs with another manufacturer (TomTom, maybe), or if it is a deficiency in a shared routing algorithm.

Ambient Quadraphonic to 5.1 AC3 Recording

Here’s my new workflow:
1) Import both stereo tracks into Audacity
2) Create two new tracks (Center and LFE)
3) Raise and lower the tracks to the proper top-to-bottom order for AC3 (at least, the AC3 that is output by BeSweet and ac3enc) – FL, Center, FR, RL, RR, LFE
4) Go to Preferences -> Audio Files -> check “Use Custom Mix”
5) Export to wav file, use the default mapping
6) Open the wav in AC3Machine (part of BeSweet); disable all of the range, compression, and balancing controls; export to AC3.
(Note that AC3Machine is downloaded separately from BeSweet, but requires the command-line version of BS. Also, ac3enc is a “plugin” download for BS.)

One note in particular to the Zoom H2… the left/right assignment seems to be reversed in both the front and rear files.

Next, I’ll try to figure out the Dolby Digital CD thing, as well as making a simple dvd using the AC3 track.

Ambient surround recording

I’ve been playing with quad-track recordings of ambient sounds (provided by mstock, using the Zoom H2), trying to convert them from a pair of stereo recordings (2 files with 2 tracks in each) to Dolby Digital/AC3 5.1 surround. Instructions were found here and here. I first used Wavewizard to combine the two wav files into one 4-track WaveFormatEX file. Then I used Wavosaur to add two more channels (the center and sub). Wavosaur is also a VST host, which allows me to use the H2-Zoo plugin to visually remix and balance the channels. Finally, I used BeSweet (and AC3Machine) to transcode the resulting .wav file to a .ac3 one (which can then be added as the audio track for a dvd.) But after playing both the wav file and ac3 file through my receiver (via XBMC), I realized that the tracks were not corresponding to the correct speakers.

Then I switched to the most recent beta version of Audacity, which can actually be used for all of the above steps except for the transcode to AC3. I’ve figured out that the multitrack wav uses the following track order:
RF, LF, RR, LR, Center, LFE
This is *not*, however, the order that AC3 uses. So if I want the surround audio for the dvd to play correctly, I’ve got to figure out that track order… later.

Server Rebuilt – Again

Since I’ve now discovered why ReplayTV has gone backrupt twice and is now going out of business (ie. horrible customer service, ludicrious business model, and general abuse of clients), I decided to take another crack at getting MythTV to work (again) at home. For some reason, the tuner will no longer change to any channel other than GAC, so I end up with hours of country music videos instead of Daily Show episodes. Thinking that it may be due to the old software on the computer, I’ve replaced the media hard drive (up to 250 GB from 40 GB) and re-installed the server software. Now, it doesn’t work at all, but at least the blog is restored and functional.

So now I’m trying some new stuff. Like embedding music/audio.

nameserver oops

Oops. I forgot that I had specifically registered jeffab.org as being a specific IP address so that I could run my own nameserver. So when the IP changed, the primary nameservers for .org domains were still pointing to the old one. Fixed that. Worked immediately. That took way too long to figure out.

blogware updates again

Time to upgrade again. I found that a lot of things that I wanted to do with the blog required newer versions than I had installed, so it’s upgrade time. (And the time is quickly approaching that I’ll need to do the same with the server itself. Sigh.)

patio computing and comcast-proof dns

So EJ clued me in to a nifty firmware upgrade for my WRT54G Linksys router that will allow, amongst other things, an adjustment in the output power from 28mW (the factory default) up to 256mW. I figured 128mW would be a good compromise, since my wireless signal didn’t quite reach to the patio, but I didn’t want to up the power so much that I started generating interference with other wireless items in the house. This worked pretty well, giving me just enough signal outside to be able to sit at the table under the umbrella (thanks Rod and Kristin!) and “go to work”.
One of the other nifty things about the firmware is that it has feature that will update dns tables hosted on zoneedit.com (a free dns provider) whenever my cablemodem’s IP changes (like when I lose power, comcast is down, or when I trip over the network cable.) Ironically, while I’m changing my dns over to zoneedit, lookups for jeffab.org are failing since ZE hasn’t yet initialized my service. Ah well… what do you want for free?

zzzt!

After several flickers, shudders, flashes, and beatings, the screen on my Apple PowerBook finally bit the big one. Fortunately, the external monitor connector still works, so I can still use the computer (which was an absolute necessity, for wedding invites and such). After some fingernail biting and hair pulling (very little of the latter, since there is less and less there to pull), I found Carbon Copy Cloner for OS X that makes a disk image out of the entire hard drive, which I saved to my indespensible firewire drive. Then I was able to use the same program to write the image from there onto my Powerbook loaner from the U. What I ended up with was a perfect duplicate of my laptop on the loaner. Shazaam! And thanks, Apple, for building an OS that Just Works. (ie. I started up the loaner afterwards with not so much as a “New Hardware Detected” or reboot. Try that on Windows!)

Downtime

Oops. My router froze up the other day… which meant that when I restarted it, my server had a new IP address on the local network, and the router had a new IP address from the cablemodem. So… everything was hosed. Had to use quite a bit of my hostmaster training from my job at the U to track down and fix all the DNS issues that popped up from it, but I got everything squared away yesterday. I really need to make the IP address of the server static in the house, but unfortunately, there is no way to make sure that my router keeps the same IP address from Comcast other than never rebooting it.