MP5 Video Player

Due to a limited budget, I have to look for good tech deals on the cheap. I would love to get an iPod Touch, but they are up there in price and I can’t justify spending that much. Therefore, I purchased an MP5 video player off eBay with some extra holiday money. It came from Hong Kong and was supposed to be able to play a variety of different ‘web’ formats. For under $40 I decided I didn’t have much to lose.

The first unit I received was defective and couldn’t really play anything. The replacement player they sent is awesome. It is an 8GB unit (expandable to 12GB with SD card), can display 260K of color, has a screen resolution of 400×240 at 3”, and fits perfectly in my palm. While it does play a variety of video formats, you have to be very careful of what codecs the video uses as well as the bitrate.

I became educated very quickly on how these two items work together. Just to make things simple, I now run all my video through the viDrop (wickly awesome and free) conversion program and use a modified ‘Generic Rockchip 400×240 High’ preset configuration. It re-encodes the video at the proper resolution using the XVID codec, mirrors the video’s original FPS, and uses a bitrate of 600.

A good thing to remember when re-encoding for this player – always try to use original video with a higher resolution and higher bitrate than what your end product will have (it will look way better after conversion than going the other direction).

So far the video has ranged from very good to stunning. While I mostly use my player to watch Revision3 shows when I take walks at work, it also plays MP3 files, can display text, has a voice recorder, has a radio tuner, and can be used as a picture viewer.

Home Webserver Guide

I recently set up my home server again. I haven’t had it fully functional in quite some time as I’ve playing around with different software packages. This time around I decided to use The Uniform Server as my core and I have been very impressed. I collected a good list of links to the articles I followed to get everything running. Basically this is how it went in a step-by-step fashion:

• Signed up for a free DynDNS account and domain
• Bought an easy to remember dot com domain name at GoDaddy
• Forwarded my GoDaddy domain to my DynDNS domain
• Got my Windows XP server machine ready for use
• Assigned a static IP address to my XP machine on my home network
• Forwarded the right ports on my router to my webserver
• Opened up the right ports on my XP machine’s firewall
• Downloaded and installed DynDNS’s dynamic IP updater client
• Setup and secured The Uniform Server software to host my site
• Completed database setup and WordPress install for blogging

In addition to this, I wanted some advanced functionality. I set up Windows remote desktop so I can access the server from anywhere I have an internet connection. To secure this feature, I also installed OpenSSH. I didn’t realize until later that the SSH software also allowed me to run a secured FTP server for file transfers between machines. Sweet! For those interested, here are the articles I used to accomplish all this:

http://tinyurl.com/27l9t6 (Domain Name)

http://tinyurl.com/5mohge (Router/Firewall)

http://tinyurl.com/av55ub (The Uniform Server)

http://tinyurl.com/a9cnt (WordPress)

http://tinyurl.com/6y6ym (Remote Desktop)

http://tinyurl.com/d67p63 (OpenSSH Setup)

http://tinyurl.com/bgr5f (OpenSSH SFTP)

IIS Remote Desktop Connection

My basement network wiring is now functional thanks to a bunch of DIY cabling and a small switch I bought off eBay. This let me get my home server PC up and running. I think I will host another website from it. I have always used a VNC product to connect to my webserver in the past, but this time I decided to try Windows remote connection.

I found a great article by Tony Northrup on how to accomplish this task. It easily guides you through setting up the IIS components, changing the web TCP port (if you so desire), router forwarding, firewall exception reminder, and how to connect to a remote desktop. I ran right through it and had my remote connection up and running in no time. Now I can securly access my home server from anywhere the internets are.

Laptop Puppy Linux

I have an old laptop that is used for couch surfing and Facebook updating. It can run Windows XP (very slowly) and Xubuntu is just a bit smoother. These both take forever to boot up though as they easily max out the laptop’s components.

I have been searching here and there for a lightweight linux distro that would recognize my wireless card and respond promptly with the hardware I have. After a few failed attempts with other distros, I reluctantly downloaded the latest (4.1.2) Puppy Linux release and was pleasantly surprised.

The live CD booted up quickly (after a few general system questions) and blew me away when I easily configured my wireless card to hook up to my network. The card’s lights did not turn on, but the connection worked none-the-less. This was a first for me.

I was so impressed that I decided to install Puppy on my HD and boot time took approximately 1 minute – power button to desktop – very nice! Opening programs is very snappy and I couldn’t be happier. Thank you Puppy Linux! I can’t wait to hop on and cruise Digg stories and chat with my peeps in Facebook!

Motherboard Shocker

At the end of summer my house got a nice jolt of electricity from some nearby lightning. The surge made its way to my Foxconn P35A motherboard and it started to fail. It would shut down at odd times (not a heat issue) and was hard to bring back to life. It finally died a short time ago and I found another Foxconn mobo that fit my needs – the 45GMX.

During the process of problem solving the failing motherboard issue, I acquired a dual core E2200 processor. I decided to stick that in the new motherboard and completed the surgery last night. Everything went great and when I powered the system up, all I had to do was put the driver CD in the tray and everything loaded back up as normal. Thank the stars I didn’t have to do an OS reinstall!

I read the 45GMX has some good overclocking potential. With the great luck I had with the P35A  in this area, I can’t wait to start tinkering with the BIOS.

Fluxbox Screen Resolution

Now that I have my Fluxbox setup established, I turned my attention to the screen resolution because VirtualBox had it set to low (and didn’t offer any options to increase it). I wanted it the same size as my Windows XP  screen so I could switch between the large desktops and have it fill all of my monitor’s real estate. I know there is a way to modify the xorg.conf file, but I was hoping for something simpler. I found an Ubuntu forum post about using the following method:

/usr/share/applications/ Screen & Graphics (icon)

After you use your file manager to navigate to the applications folder, you click on the Screen & Graphics icon to bring up a  simple GUI. I manually chose a generic LCD that displayed at 1024×768. After I made my selection the system told me I had to reboot or something. I did that and was greeted by my new (larger) screen resolution after I logged in. Sweet!

VirtualBox Guest Additions – Build Essentials

I have been playing with VirtualBox and setting up a minimalist Ubuntu install with the Fluxbox window manager. I did a basic command line install off a live CD, so I ended up with a very small hard drive system foot print – perfect for adding whatever programs I wanted.

I also wanted to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions module to get the cool benefits of the seamless interface and mouse integration. When I tried to do this, I received some error message that the system needed the build and header files for my kernel. I first had to find out what kernel I was running and then I had to get the files. This is how I did it…

In a terminal, I ran the following command which told me I was running kernal 2.6.24-19-generic:

uname -r

I then ran the following command to install the needed files:

sudo aptitude install build-essential kernel-header-2.6.24-19-generic

After the data was downloaded and installed, I tried the Guest Additions again and everything went as smooth as butter. Now I can pop in to and out of my Ubuntu guest with ease.

Fluxbox Wallpaper Flicker

This is a reminder to myself… when setting the wallpaper on a Fluxbox managed Ubuntu system, I need to comment out (#) any line that sets the background to a solid color after my wallpaper line. I kept getting a wallpaper flicker (to black screen) at boot time after I added my image location line to the startup file (/home/ubuntu/.fluxbox/startup) like so:

fbsetbg -f /home/ubuntu/.fluxbox/backgrounds/debian1600.png

After examining my startup file again, I noticed that there was another command a few lines down from my wallpaper location that set the background color to black like so:

/usr/bin/fbsetroot -solid black

This black background line might have been inserted automagically when I tried to load the wallpaper without the proper program to do so. After the system alerted me to this error, I installed the Eterm package that was required and went about adjusting the startup file without really looking at it. It is now fixed and I have purdy wallpaper!

Ubuntu Firefox – No Flash Sound

I recently started playing with the Ubuntu desktop again and really like it. After the install my sound was working fine, but I noticed there was no audio during flash videos (e.g. YouTube, Diggnation, etc.). I started Googling the problem and found that a component was needed to fix the problem. I searched Synaptic for the latest and greatest release of the libflashsupport module, and (after installing it) I was able to enjoy goofy YouTube videos again in all their audio glory!

Blender Tidbits #1

I am working on the BSoD character animation tutorial and ran into something wierd. As I was shaping the face I noticed that the “skin” was sticking to one of the vertices even though it shouldn’t have been. I also noticed that there were two black lines sticking out of the model at two related vertex points. After further investigation, I found that there were double vertices (on top of each other) that were causing the problem. I selected all the vertices in EDIT MODE and hit the REM DOUBLE button under MESH TOOLS menu. After the doubles were removed, everything was corrected.