I found the comic over at XKCD today describes my feelings on a certain issue rather well.

The last time I purchased a mobile telephone, I found myself actually having to search for and download a ‘ringtone’ that actually sounded like a normal telephone as the ‘ringtones’ included with the mobile were almost exclusively over-extravagant music jingles.

I am still plagued by a certain acquaintance (who shall remain nameless) who has an old Nokia which plays Johan Strauss’ Blue Danube in cringe-worthy monophonic tone.

XKCD comics are released under a Creative Commons by-nc-2.5 license.

Tags: annoyance, mobile phone, ringtones, xkcd

I first set up a MythTV system for my relatives a few years ago (at MythTV 0.19 IIRC) as a research system and soak-testing platform (you can’t beat free R&D testers). MythTV at the moment is great if you’ve got a technician available on call to support it but I couldn’t see myself deploying it to a customer yet. After all, MythTV at 0.21 is still billed as Alpha software and it would be rather silly to operationally deploy Alpha software The MythTV system consisted of a P4 based backend server with DVB encoder cards and a frontend machine in the lounge. Originally it ran on a SuSE based platform but this later changed to Ubuntu and then Mythbuntu based by the time 0.21 came around.

The original frontend was built on a Biostar barebones system which was styled as a ’shuttle’ PC. Unfortunately, while not all that loud, the combination of cooling fan and disk drive sound was perhaps a bit much for quiet living-room TV watching situation. Further, being a ‘full-size’ AMD Sempron based system with a 3.5″ IDE hard drive for the operating system and Geforce 5600 video, it was a bit power-hungry by modern standards. I’d have estimated that it would be drawing around 140 Watts in operation.

To remedy the situation, I first tried to convince my relatives that watching television would only rot their brains and that they should find an alternative pastime but to no avail. Instead I had to come up with a solution to replace the Biostar box.

I decided to go with a Mini-ITX solution and sourced a B-stock Epia EX1000 from ebay. The EX1000 is a fanless Mini-ITX board from VIA with a 1Ghz C7 processor and a CX700 chipset.

Obviously, a fanless motherboard would want a fanless case to go with it and after a bit of deliberation, I sourced a Morex T3310 from Lin-ITX in the UK. The Morex T3310 is based upon the earlier Morex T3300 which did have a fan. To facilitate fanless cooling on the T3310, large vents are cut in the sides and top of the case. The integrated 60W (12v supply) PSU sits uppermost in the case so heat rising from it leaves through the top vent without causing undue heating to the motherboard below.

Getting the case apart to fit the motherboard is a *little* tricky so I’ve documented it here. I must apologise for the quality of the pictures, I hadn’t intended to photograph the process and used the wrong camera settings.

Firstly, the plastic front panel which shrouds the USB ports and power/HDD LEDs must be removed. While the plastic isn’t unusually flimsy, you’ll want to take a bit of care during removal. Use only your fingers, do not attempt to force the panel off with tools.

Lever gently at either end to release the clips.

There is a third clip in between the two outer clips and adjacent to USB ports. This should come away when the nearest out clip is released.

The correct side of the case must now be unscrewed. This is helpfully referred to as the ‘left’ side of the case in the Morex instructions which fail to give a reference of looking from the front or back. As it happens you can identify the correct side to remove by looking through the meshes and finding the side which has the 2.5″ HDD carrier plate nearest it.

You only need to unscrew the two screws on this side. With the two screws out, you carefully pull the two sides apart from the bottom (screw end) of the case, the upper edges will then unclip from each other too.

This should leave you with the case open and ready to accept your mini-itx board.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: case, compact flash, epia, ex1000, fanless, frontend, installation, mini itx, morex, mythbuntu, mythtv, silent, t3300, t3310, via

The French have a bit of a historic problem with road traffic accidents which are actually attributable to speed (as opposed to other countries which just blame accidents on speed by default). It’s probably a symptom of their rather good quality rural roads which almost beg to be driven hard.

The trouble is with roads that good; you lose the perception of speed somewhat and before you know it, you’re out of shape on a bend and heading for some extremely substantial pines or worse.

As with many other country’s speeding campaigns, they’ve gone with the ’shock’ effect. I thought it reasonably effective but perhaps I’m becoming too used to the tactic as I was expecting a collision right from the beginning of the advert.

Last but not least, it’s 90kph on rural roads in France, about 55mph. The limit definitely exists for a reason and please try to remember that in the event of an accident, help may be futher away than you are accustomed to.

Update:

It occurred to me that I should have a little go at a translation of the captions for the benefit of those who do not read French.

The first caption reads roughly:

That day, it rolled too quickly

I’m not sure this isn’t just referring to the apparrent roll-over of the car, rather I suspect it is a synonym in French for driving (perhaps ‘wheels rolling’) which also refers to a roll over.

My reason for thinking this is that the second caption appears to a ‘punch-line’ for the first:

And rolled to him just a little too quickly

Presumably this gives clarity to the first statement, telling us that it refers not to the first car we see but the second car which is approaching the scene of the accident.

The final caption reads:

Always respect speed limits

My abilities in translating French are admittedly poor so if a native French speaker could add clarity in the comments section below, I’d be much obliged.

Tags: anti speeding, car crash, france, french, road safety, speeding

Here is another one of my ‘reminder-to-self’ fixes for my Ubuntu 8.04 machines.

I’ve installed Hardy on a good few machines now including Intel C2D/Nvidia chipset desktops and various laptops and discovered that, to my delight, the machines will go in and out of S3 suspend (suspend to ram) in just a few seconds.

There was just one problem which seemed universal though; the USB ports were not reinitializing correctly. It seemed that although the +5v power was coming back, they weren’t being polled for devices or data.

I stumbled across a partial solution by typing lsusb (in an attempt to poll connected devices). Sure enough, the USB data communication came back to life and I was able to use my devices as normal. Obviously, all I needed now was a way to make this happen automatically when the machine comes back out of S3.

User aidave on this post at ubuntuforums came up with a quick bit of hackery to make this happen which I have adapted here:

Fire up a terminal and issue:

cd /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d
sudo touch 98usb
sudo chmod +x 98usb
sudo nano 98usb

You should now have a blank file open in nano (in the console)

Cut and paste the following into nano:

#!/bin/sh

case “$1″ in
resume|thaw)
lsusb
;;
*)
;;
esac

It doesn’t fix the issue directly but it qulifies as a work around in that it wakes up the usb ports by polling the with the lsusb command as the machine resumes from ACPI S3 suspend.

Hopefully there will be a proper fix for the issue in a future Ubuntu Hardy patch.

Tags: 8.04, acpi, hardy, resume, s3, suspend, ubuntu, usb ports