Music Center Project

This has been kicking around in my head since i found three discarded Profusion/X music center devices. They ran a customized version of Red Hat and connected to a licensed music server to stream audio to stores in a mall. Gave one away but kept two to play with.



Obviously, the license had expired but the audio form factor of the case intrigued me and upon opening it up i found a Via mini-ITX board with a C3 533mhz processor, 128 mb of DDR ram and a 40 mb hard drive. May not seem promising but that board packs a lot of tech into a small space, there are 2 DDR ram slots, two USB 2.0 ports, 10/100 ethernet, onboard vga video, PS/2 for keyboard and mouse and 3 pci slots plus a front panel DVD drive. Not too shabby.



After rummaging around in the parts cabinet i came up with two 512mb DDR 400 sticks, a 200 gig IDE hard drive, a pci angle bracket and a ATI rage pro pci video card and a Packard Bell Fast Media remote plus the Cambridge Audio 2.1 speaker set. Unfortunately the pci angle card was not quite the right form factor but i was able to find one on eBay for $5. So for now we upgraded the ram and the hard drive and replaced the stock optical with a combo drive. Not that we will be burning cd's on this unit but it helps to be flexible. When the angle card arrives we can upgrade from the onboard video.

The system booted fine and we went to the BIOS to change the settings. First we assign 64mb to the onboard video, optimize the BIOS and do an 8X overclock of the C3 cpu resulting in a whopping 1Ghz of speed (while you can go above 8x the board locked up at boot). The board's BIOS is a wonder of flexibility with lots of settings. So now we have a 1gig pc with P3 performance - what to install?

We used to run XBMC on a revo so it was a first choice. Unfortunately the live CD does not run on such old hardware, in fact all the media distros we tried failed to initialize the x-windows GUI or failed to boot. Many are optimized for i686 and won't run on an i386 clone cpu. So we tried Microsoft Windows XP pro which did install but failed to install drivers for the network (which is realtek chip), the audio etc. It ran but slowly and hunting down XP drivers on the internet is always a frustrating experience. What about an older version of Ubuntu? So we haul out the 9.04 desktop 32 bit cd and it boots and installs perfectly. Video is not bad, internet works and so does the audio and USB. We remove some of the uneeded services and apps and get a reasonable performance, hey to even runs the GIMP and OO at 2002 speed. You could even use this as a desktop in a pinch, except no flash in the web browser.

The only problem here is that just about any media software won't run on the C3 cpu. The included movie player and the included rhythmbox audio player works but xbmc and vlc won't install. However, we set rhythmbox to run automatically at boot and have in inhale 3 gig of FLAC audio files from the network.

Next we attach the speakers and put it in shuffle mode. How does it sound? - Excellent as a near-field sound system in a small room. Quite pleasurable while working. It's like listening to 70's FM radio. In fact I am using this with singles from 70's/80's and who knew Alice Cooper, ELO, Deep Purple, et al could sound good? I should hook up the Roland monitors to test and then the Spherex 5.1 system to compare.

The suprising thing about audio is that you never know what might sound good for certain applications. I recently hooked up a pair on 1969 Dynaco A-25 speakers to a 20 watt amplifier and fed it from a original Sony walkman cassette. This is certainly not an 'audiophile grade' system but it sounded quite good. In fact i ended up listening to it all week, trying out different kinds of music and inputs. The conclusion was this system sounded best when fed early 80's and 90's funk from analog sources (not CD's!). Gap Band, Dee-Lite, Morris Day, etc all sounded very good in a small room at middle field distance.

Time for some lunch...

Upgrades:

• better video using a fast pci video card
• customize LIRC to use the packard bell remote
  
• replace default unbuntu window manager with a lighter one
  
• wireless
• replace current board with a modern mini-ITX or mini-ATX board?

Calibre Content Server

The Calibre content server is working fine on the home network. It is currently running on the macbook/win7 laptop. When a device with an OPDS-capable ereader software like Stanza is running the Get Books icon displays the calibre content server library and it is easy to download books to the device such as an iPad, iTouch or Android tablet. Once the course is over i may install a permanent content server using an old G4 macbook.

The problem is the work network. Devices cannot detect the content server when the laptop is running on the UWO wireless network. Devices just display 'Searching....'. This is a problem - you can't demonstrate how it will all work.



The hack i am testing now is to run a rogue wireless access point that is not connected to the internet. A standard linksys wireless router should enable the macbook to get an IP address from the linksys DHCP server and then running calibre should make it available on this wireless network which a device then connects to. Once on that wireless network the content server should be found.

Step 1 - configure the wireless Router

Had to run Fing (look@lan replacement) as the new firmware for the router doesn't display a very good dhcp clients table. Armed with the IP address i set up the linksys to be a dhcp server with an ip range of 192.168.1.20 to 192.168.1.30. We then unplug the cat 5 cable from the linksys to the network router so that it only serves ad hoc connections.

Step 2 - connect laptop to the wireless router

We set the macbook to connect to the LIAM network and lo it picks up the dhcp server and gets issued the IP address of 192.168.1.20 which is as it should be.

Step 3 - run the calibre content server

Done!

Step 4 - connect ipad to content server

Odd, iPad says unable to join LIAM network. It can see the network but refuses to connect. Ok , next we fire up the iTouch and change it's network to LIAM. It connects. We run Stanza and click Get Books. The calibre content server on macbook is listed and there are all the books! We select one and it downloads ok. I wonder if the iPad mac address is not in the allowed table, yes it was not so we add it. We run Stanza, click Get Books, Shared and success. We can now read the Saskatoon Star Phoenix articles we downloaded from the RSS feed in class today.

So the solution to uwo network problem is to bring in our own wireless device and run an ad hoc wireless network. We will test this tomorrow for saturday's THATcamp session.

Ebay Frustration

Ebay drives me crazy! A good principle for a merchant is 'don't get in the way of the customer'. I go to ebay to buy things. A simple idea - but here's where it gets frustrating.

I don't like auctions and rarely ever participate.

The reason is i got ripped off a couple of times when ebay started and it quickly was obvious that you have no recourse but to leave negative feedback on the seller who immediately puts negative feedback on you. Ebay is no help in resolving mis-representation, faulty merchandise or other problems on auctions from private sellers. The auction model is outdated as a the primary driver of ebay's business.

So 99% of the time i use the buy it now option from ebay stores.

I like stores because they are a business and if they wish to stay in business they have an incentive to keep the customer happy. As one Scot noted a long time ago:

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest." Adam Smith

I don't mind paying a bit more for the service. If things go wrong, i have found an ebay store is likely to work with you to fix the problem. For example, i purchased a Dell Precison 470 recently from Electronics Cafe on e-bay but it arrived with a dead motherboard. They cheerfully paid for the cost of a replacement system board.

Anyway, the problem is keeping track of stores. Ebay does a horrible job of it. Sure you can save sellers into a list but finding a particular store is a pain and trying to build up a list of favorite suppliers seems rather difficult.

I also like local suppliers

The shipping is less and why not support people in your area if the prices are competitive? So why can't i find all the local ebay stores that deal in computers or electronics?

Ebay works ok when you are looking for a particular item but as all grocery stores, bookstores and malls know - the longer your keep the customer in the store the more likely they are to buy something. If ebay made it easier for me to browse local suppliers who sell the kinds of stuff i like to buy then i would buy more. Maybe their tag line should be 'Ebay - Saving You Money'...

iPad, ePad and more

With the $100 price drop on old iPads we ordered the 16gig model from the Apple store for $369 and it arrived this week. The first step was to hool it up to the macbook and download all the useful free apps from the apple store. Our interest is in looking at the device as a publishing model so we downloaded all the ebook reader software such as Stanza, apple ebook reader, kobo, kindle etc. as well as newspaper and magazine apps like The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and the National Post as well as Wikipedia and some comic book readers. We also grabbed the Dropbox app for our online files and the Google app so we can access our Google docs files and our iGoogle desktop and Teamviewer, an excellent VNC type app that runs on all our machines.

The Teamviewer free app allows you to control your laptop or desktop from the iPad not not the reverse. Will have to investigate if the paid version allows the pc/laptop to control the iPad. It would have to translate mouse clicks on the computer to touches on the iPad so this may not be possible. I looked at the vga cable but it is expensive ($35!) and external video is an app function, not a function of the OS.

Update: Saurik has released a VNC deamon for iphone and others have also gotten VNC to work so you can view ipone/ipad from another computer. Only problem is that it requires jailbreaking your device. I did this on the iphone but may or may not with the ipad. Just installed iOs 4.3 anyway...

We browsed the apple store for free books and downloaded a few classics but most of the books we want are sitting on our server in PDF and CHM and epub and djvu formats.

We read some epubs using the apple ebook reader and they were fine. But how to get our pdf's over? We though of using moving them to dropbox and trying the app but then remembered the Calibre to Stanza method we had used to get books into a first gen iTouch.

Running Calibe on the macbook and pointing it to the ebook network share allowed us to choose PDF books individually to import (and convert to epub) or to batch the process. We grabbed a few books and magazines to test out. Then we clicked the settings icon and choose Preferences, Sharing, Sharing over the net. This allows you to run a OPDS server catalog on localhost at port 8080. Once the server is started we goto the stanza client and click the Get Books icon dor Shared which displays a Book Sources dialog box. I typed in Calibre as the name with a URL of http://192.168.1.105:8080 (for the dhcp addr of the macbook) and it connects to display the books in calibre (on macbook).



You can browse by Newest, Title, Authors or Publishers. Clicking on the cover for a book displays a preview of the book and a Download button which transfer the epub to the Stanza library.

As test we bring in a .cbz comic book and some other types. And we convert the Kick-Ass DVD to an MP4 file to test out the video.

Update

Taking screenshots on the ipad is a breeze, press the home button and the power button together and the screen makes a camera clicking sound and then flashes white. The photos in .png are saved and can be viewed with the Photos app. To transfer them to your computer just plug in the iPad and iPhoto runs automatically and retrieves the photos. Select the ones you want and click Import Selected. You can then drag them out of iPhoto. Sweet. While i have not been a fan of iTunes in the past, it is now the cornerstone of the Apple digital world strategy and the integration of apps is impressive compared with the Windows world.

Tomorrow:

Compare originals on the mac with the epub converted copies on the ipad.

Stop Motion Movies with iLife

Liam wanted to make a stop-motion animation film. He usually just records on the flip cam and uploads direct to youtube. So we built 4 sets out of lego. If i had been smart i would have build the walls in the shape of a + and put it on a lazy susan so that 4 sets could be easily available.

Anyway, I put the camera on the gorilla pod and he shot a series of scenes for his first TV show called Droid Hospital. I fired up iPhoto and hooked up the camera to import the pictures and then launched iMovie to bring them in. It took a bit of fiddling to get the photos i wanted, the quick and and easy solution was to FLAG the photos and then to set IMovie to look for flagged pictures. I also added two google image shots of a real hospital.

It was no problem putting the images on the timeline. But then we got sidetracked as the director decided he didn't want to do the dialog but to have text bubbles with the comments, like an animate comic book. Well, imovie and iPhoto lack the ability to edit photos that way so we fired up Comic Life which is designed to make comic books or comic book movies.

There was no problem importing the photos from iPhoto and adding the comments in text bubbles but getting the pictures out seemed impossible. The Export function exports a whole page not just the image. I could use grab to capture the picture with text but that seemed a lot of effort. The other option was to bring the photos into iWork and add create a blank presentation slide for each picture. Add the text and the export the slides as a series of images. This works in keynote (and powerpoint too). It's a quick way of churning out a web site banner. In fact, in keynote you can add a transparent gif image to your banner as a logo and it will export out a nice png or jpg banner in any shape with gradients and the transparent logo. (powerpoint does not support transparent images but otherwise works the same). Again, this seemed a lot of work.

We decided to go back to imovie and to add the dialog to the scenes. This is fairly easy to do, you select a clip, click the mic icon, select the clip and it countdowns 3,2,1 and record. You do have to time the dialog so that it lasts only for that scene (each pic is a scene). A couple of takes for some and it was done. Then we added sound effects from the limited iLife sound effects library. It would be nice it there were low cost libraries to add sounds like Garageband jam packs.

Anyway, once the sounds and incidental music was added the movie was rendered down and uploaded to liam's account on youtube.

ToDo:

- Find some soap opera sound effects...cheezy organ riffs etc
- Find soap opera-ish theme music for the opening (The Days of The Week?)
- Get some HALO sounds/music samples for the Covenant set and maybe some Star Wars

I have all these so i could extract them myself but if someone has already done it...

Windows - still stupid after all these years

Now that i am using Windows 7 a lot more for work i am so upset in how useless it is for common tasks. We all knew that file operations were pretty much broken in previous versions, it took forever to do any meaningful stuff with lots of file and it tied up your machine, sort of like working on a beige mac running system 7.

So today i finally got around to do some file maintenance. I attached a 1 terabyte LaCie Quadro external hard disk to the macbook pro using firewire 800 and proceeded to copy about 25 gig of files from the mac to the windows partition. Most of the time was spend figuring out which files to move, the actual 1-5 gig copy operations were complete before i could decide on the next group.

Now i boot the macbook into Windows 7 (boot camp). The external fw800 windows partition shows up. It is a simple task to copy the 25 gig worth of files from the external drive to another external drive hooked up (also a LaCie but firewire 400 formatted for windows). How long do you think this operation would take? I think i spend about 30 minutes last time i did it on Linux (in fairness the linux box has an e-sata connection).

Well, it's been 10 minutes and Windows is still thinking about the copy operation, it actually hasn't even started yet! And the copy dialog box estimates 16 hours! It says 'discovered' 5,764 items and then sits and sits and sits.

In fairness the previous osx copy was between laptop hard drive and external hard disk and this is from external hard disk to external hard disk but 16 hours?

When i do similar file operations on the windows 7 desktop it is slow and ties up the machine. How can that be on a dual 3.2 ghz xeon box with 4 cores? Obviously it is not hyperthreaded - why?

Update

It's 10:15 am the next day and 1,700 files still to be copied, says 9 hours to go! It finally completed this afternoon. I am now moving some files around on the external drive connected to the win 7 pc and every so often it has to re-read the directory from the drive. There is a green progress bar across the top of the file manager and it takes a couple of minutes to read the directory of the 1tb external. No wonder file operations take so long.

The Android Reading Device

UPDATE: Installing Apps

Took a while to figure out how to do this without using the Android market. Since the wireless is still having problems (although i connected ok at work - must be my 3 WAP's confusing it), i wanted to download and install apps directly.

These are known as non-market apps and all you have to do is:

- Click settings, application, unknown sources to allow install of non-market apps
- Click settings, application, development and turn on USB debugging (i don't think this is needed to install apk files that you copy to the card, but is needed to run an installer application on the desktop that will install apk files to the device, if this is what you want)
- download the .apk files and copy them to the internal SD card or the external SD card
- after copying unplug the USB cable
- run APKinstaller app and it displays all the apps in the downloads directory (if the usb cable is plugged it find no files!)

An cheapo Android tablet came my way so the idea is to see how effective it is as a reading device. I had tried the iPod touch but the screen is a bit small.

This is a 7" 800x480 screen with a ARM 700mhz cpu running Android 2.1 (similar to many models available under names like epad, apad, irobot etc). Nothing fancy but it has a 1.3 mp camera, 2 usb ports, cell, wireless b/g, speaker, earphone and a micro SD slot (32gig max). Only problem is the wireless if flaky, it finds my WAP's but fails to hold a connection.

Anyway we are not interested in this for the internet but as a reader. The idea is to find a device that will allow us to test out various ebook apps and ebook formats. The device came with an ebook app called Shelves that did a decent job with .epub files but failed to open others and not so good at PDF's.

Following apps were downloaded and copied to the SD card:

• Aldiko_Book_Reader_1.2.6
• Droid Comic Viewer
• FBReaderJ-0.7.17
• kindle
• kobo
• Laputa Book Reader
• Wattpad_1.9.4
• zthMoonReader
• PDF_Viewer_0.2.8
• Adobe_Reader_9.0.2
• beamreader-v120

The .apk files were transferred via USB cable to the SD card on the device along with a smattering of ebooks in epub, mobi, pdf, cbr and other formats. On the tablet APKinstaller was used to install the apps.

Our test document is 20,000 Leagues under the Sea in cbr, fb2,lrf,mobi,pdf,pdb, djvu and rtf formats. So here is a quick first impressions tour:

Adobe Reader

It displays all the PDF files in a nice list but when you click on one it returns the error message 'invalid path' . Not obvious how to change directories to the other card. Not so good.

Beamreader

Loads and allows us to browse for folders and a nice list of all the PDF files. It crashed on 20000 Leagues Under the Sea but opened the other books ok.

PDF Viewer

Runs and allows you to browse for files. No icon but nice large font. Crashes on 20000 Leagues under the Sea. Open other files ok. A bit slow on the pages and refreshes.

Aldiko

Nice display of book covers on a bookshelf. Good navigation control, finger swipes load the next page but not with a turn, it just slides in smoothly from the side. Lots of settings. Neat dictionary function.

Update: you can copy epub files to the eBooks/import folder on the SD card and then in Aldiko press settings, import and it imports the books to the library and displays them on the shelf.



Kindle

Needs the cell or wifi connection to login to your Amazon account. So no further until we solve the wireless problem. Would be useful to be able to read offline.

FBreader

Brings up an explanation screen of how it works. We have to press the Settings button to get the options menu. The library icon goes to the sd\Books folder we had created. We load the 20000 Leagues under the Sea and it works. The navigation is clunky we have to keep going to the setting button. For example the screen does not rotate automatically you have to do it manually and navigation is non-intuitive.

Kobo

Like Amazon you can't get anywhere without an internet connection. Not a fan of this type of design.

Laputa

Cute entry screen with tips. There are nags for the paid version. The bookshelf is empty save for the Bible. Clicking brings up a list of ebook sites like Manybooks, Gutenberg and Feedbooks. The main way to get books into a collection is to download, to get books on your card you have to click the Home icon to get to the top level and then click the settings button. This displays an Import icon that when clicked allows you to browse the internal card, not the micro SD card. I made a Books folder there but with only 2gig of storage this is not a viable option. We loaded in an Agatha Cristie to add to our library and then loaded the book to read. Next is a configuration screen for fonts, flip mode and sizes. One thing odd about Android is the scroll bars work the opposite of what you would think and they are very thin. With the bar at the top you scroll down but nothing happens, you have to scroll up. This seems non-intuitive. Nice quick page flips. Quite readable font. This program is an option especially if you download books.


Moon + Reader

Displays a list of all the files along with the file extensions, i like that! The icons are not good, each book gets a ? icon except the epub book. I think this means it cannot read the others (so why list them, bad design). Ah, if you click on an file format it does not understand, it actually loads it! So a .cbr file display the binary codes, sort of like loading a word .doc file in notepad! Ever worse, if you kill the app and then reload it remember the file you had open and re-opens it. Arrgh. Have to figure out how to close a file.


Wattpad

Requires you to connect to the internet before you can do anything. But if you click OK and then the settings button you get the menu. But there seems no way to import any books into your library. Also, when you click the back button it should return to the previous state, if i had the settings menu open and drill down to a setting and then go back, the menu should be there, not a blank screen forcing me to press the settings button again.

ThinkFree Office

Although not an ebook reader it is important to be able to take along reports and such. I was excited to see if give an icon to the djvu files but it could not open them. We open the .rtf version of 20,000 leagues under the sea. It runs for a while opening the file. Loading, loading, loading. We kill the operation. Interesting, when we go to load the .pdf version of @0,00 Leagues that crashed the other apps, it notes the 'page catalog is invalid' and ends the operation gracefully. Other pdf's load ok. It also does auto orientation and swipes. While a large app it does a credible job on pdf's. Will have to try it on some office files.

Droid Comic (ACV)

Awesome, the cbr files look fantastic. You do have to push the settings button to rotate and zoom but this may make a decent comic book reader.

Summary

Some apps good, others not so good. Android 2.1 suffers from some usability issues on a tablet probably due to it being a phone OS. It says things like 'Shut down your phone?". The finger controls are a bit rough, in particular scrolling is very error prone, swiping a finger to scroll the screen up and down loads an app by mistake most of the time. Larger scroll bars would help, i ended up using my iTouch stylus a lot. Will have to try Liam's extra Nintendo stylii. As to the LCD screen, fairly bright for apps and games but a bit annoying to read text for a long time. Does a cheap Android tablet replace a good ebook reader like the color Nook. No - it was 1/3 the price and it allows you to read your own books without being tethered to Amazon or Chapters. The problem with this device is the settings and exit buttons are the same, press on the left to access the settings in an app but press towards the right and the app exits. Since the button is incredibly small it is very easy to exit. Then again this is not an iPad!