My media player – the Popcorn Hour A-100 – died about 6 weeks ago. I ended up requesting an RMA as it was under warranty and it just cam back, as good as … well … “can be expected”. In the interim, I was using my backup, the MViX 780. There were a few things about the MViX I liked but it’s older chipset means it didn’t like a number of the encodings used by my videos. One notable example was the H.264 files that I download each night with the NBC Nightly news from their podcast servers.

Before I get too far into this, I should not that the Popcorn Hour (PCH) is yet another “Network Media Tank” (NMT) so it shares a lot of its hardware and capabilities with a bunch of other media players. Also, the A-110 is now available and I would bet there will be a whole new crop over the next 12 months.

With the my PCH back, I decided to make it a bit more functional. I moved the nightly news download from the ReadyNas to the media player. I also added a more esthetic UI “skin”. I had to make some changes to the cron jobs (scheduled program execution). The PCH has three default schedules – hourly (at 30 minutes past the hour), daily (at 4AM), and weekly (on Sunday morning). I added my fetching of the NBC podcast into the daily schedule. Finally, I wanted to remove the PCH watermark that shows on on all screens but it appears that image file gets loaded before I have a chance to replace it.

The challenge with making any changes to the system files is that they get restored every time the PCH is rebooted. I had to find the a place that did not get reset and then find some file that was executed and add commands to reapply my changes to the system files. With a hard disk installed in the PCH, it persists between reboots and there is a “start up” file called start_app.sh file in the root of the hard disk. So, I store all of my customized files (cron.hourly, cron.daily, and cron.weekly) in a directory I called “SystemFiles” in the root of the internal hard disk and then added the following line to the start_app.sh file …

cp /opt/sybhttpd/localhost.drives/HARD_DISK/SystemFiles/cron.* /etc

Note: If you are on Windows and you create files for the PCH, you will have bad CRLF in your text files. You will need to find a way to create/edit files to be UNIX friendly and only have LF.

If you want a rich browser experience for you Sonos, SonosWeb is a good option. If you have all of your music on a ReadyNas, then the ReadyNas is a good place to install SonosWeb. I did this in about 15 minutes. I should admit that I have some Linux experience so I had a distinct advantage. Nearly all of the instructions are out on the web so very little of this post is original content, but at least it’s all in one place and it does have the necessary integration for the ReadyNas.

So here are the instructions …. peace of cake Continue reading ‘Install SonosWeb on your ReadyNas NV+’ »

Back in March I announced I was throwing in the towel on Linux as mu primary laptop operating system. It’s strange that 7 months have passed. Windows has not been perfect during that time but it has done its job. In a couple of days, Ubuntu 8.10 will be released. I cringe at the idea but I will one again make the attempt to use Linux as my primary operating system.

Two things have changed (and one has not) and one is new.

• First, Ubuntu 8.10 is reported to be even better at hardware compatibility.
• Second, OpenOffice is reported to have better MS Office compatibility. If a recent PowerPoint presentation is any indication, the compatibility still sucks. I can only hope the file I received was OO-2.x.
• Lest I forget, there is still no Blackberry support so no matter what I do, I will need a VMware image of the RIM software for the two or three times a year when I need to reset my device and for those occasions when I need a tethered modem.
• Lastly, there is a new challenge for Ubuntu – I need support for ActivClient. They have a client but they only report working with RHEL 3 and 4 as well as Suse 9.3 and 10. I will be running Ubuntu which is based on Debian.

So, in a few days, I will take my test machine and install Ubuntu 8.10. I’m not so stupid as using my real machine for the first attempt. Give me some credit !
So, the fact I will have a small VM image is telling. Linux is still not ready for the corporate world, if for no other reason that the Blackberry *is* for the corporate world. Still, I’m crazy enough to throw myself into the breach once more.

I still don’t have TV service and I plan to keep it that way for a while longer. One thing I have missed is the evening national news. I found the NBC Evening News has been made available as a podcast. That’s good, but I don’t like to leave my computers running at night so I’ve been left with watching for the update to appear in my feed reader (Google Reader) and then manually starting the download. The only “computer” that runs at night is my ReadyNAS which is performing backups and retrieving Linux builds etc. via BitTorrent.

I discovered that the video podcast is also available as a simple video download. The big difference is that the podcast assigns a unique file name to each day’s news whereas the video download has the same name all of the time. This gave me an idea. The ReadyNAS does not have a podcast client but it does have a lightweight version of Linux. I did some digging and found that it runs cron, as task scheduler. So, I setup to define a “task” that would download the evening news every night. It turned out to be simple one-line command …

wget -t 5 -nc -o /media/Daily/nbc-nightly-news.log
        -O /media/Daily/nbc-nightly-news.m4v 
        http://msnbcpod.rd.llnwd.net/e1/video/podcast/pdv_nn_netcast_m4v.m4v
Note: “/media/Daily” is the directory accessable to my video player.

Now, at one minute past one in the morning (“1 1 * * *” in crontab syntax) the ReadyNAS fetches the evening news. I get up every morning, and watch the evening news while enjoying my morning espresso. It’s not a bad way to start the day !

This morning, after Zen’s business, breakfast, and start of her first nap … and my checking email, reading blogs, and deciding how to survive the heat … I head a familiar bird. I had not seen it around since last fall. I quickly ran outside to see if indeed it was back. Sure enough it was circling the corn field, getting lower and lower. If it were not flying so quickly, you’d expect it was trying for land on the corn ! Continue reading ‘Big bird is back !’ »