So this wonderful listener sends me this G1 he no longer uses which is hands down friggin awesome. Thanks JC. I popped my sim card in and I’m smart phoning away. This thing is great. So I see a lot of people posting their favorite apps and figured I would drop some of mine and also what did not work too well for me.

For starters, MythMote is friggin awesome. Not only to be able to control my mythbox from anywhere in the house; but to mess with the kids. Hearing them shout “Daddy! Something is wrong with the tv again!” Is priceless. Worth every penny of free I spent. Setup on the mythtv end was a snap. Thanks for the hints Pat!

Sipdroid, a softphone, connected without a problem to the Asterisk box allowing me to make calls both to the meetme room and out through Broadvoice. Setup again was pretty straight forward and the first call I made to the wife great.

I wanted a running/walking tracker so I pulled two down. GPS Walk/Run Tracker and Run GPS Trainer lite. I took the GPS Walk/Run Tracker for a spin today on a run. It showed an analog speedometer indicating whether you were walking, running or cheating and a number for how fast you were going. When finished it told me the stats but I don’t think they were accurate. For starters it told me I walked for 20 minutes when I know it was over 25. It also said I did 0.803 miles when I know for a fact a quarter of that was a .5 mile walk. So I question the accuracy. Next time I will try the Run GPS Trainer lite. I fired that up just to take a look and I really liked what I saw. It had a google map at the top and a lot of information on the screen for tracking.

Game-wise I have found Robo Defense and Dungeon Wonder very fun. I recommend trying out both.

Finally I will make mention of Phone Flix. Now I am not interested in watching movies from the phone but I am excited that I can manage my netflix queue whenever I want. This way I don’t have to worry about trying to remember this awesome movie I just have to see.

There are many more apps tickling my fancy but that is enough for now.

Last week my oldest, Paige (11), somehow tanked her Koala system to the point that it would not even boot into stage1 GRUB. I was perplexed at what she had done but figured, all right, let’s wipe and re-install. I fired up my System76, dropped in a flash card and wrote Koala netbook remix to the flash and off I went; for about 30 minutes. After repeated reboots and two more unetbootin creations, nothing I would do allowed me to boot the install.

I had a copy of the latest Mint iso on the system having ventured the idea of installing that on Paige’s eeePC last time and figured this time I would give it a go. A few minutes later I was in installing Mint and boy was she happy afterwards. She claimed this was the best distro she has used yet.

The wife’ gnome desktop borked somehow, I suspect Avery’s little fingers somehow did something; but maybe not. This is the second time something went squirrely after she was started using the system pretty heavily. I don’t think it was the configuration or anything because even a new profile would not work. Thus, I settled for installing Mint there.

The wife seems pretty happy so far. While Mint is not light years different from Ubuntu standard, it is a very polished interface and comes with a fantastic set of default packages requiring almost no additional work on my part: And that is a great thing.

Me, I am going to stick with Debian on the Meso, Arch on the Desktop, and Ubuntu on my laptop and work workstation with slackware and centos on the servers. But it is nice to have a varied collection of distros in constant use.

This past week I have gravitated to using Google-Chrome and Chromium more and more and I have to say I am loving it. Everything just works, and works rather snappy. The biggest contention I have with web browsing would be the results of Flash being a friggin hog and tending to crash the browser. I have not noticed as many problems with Flash under Chrom(e|ium). No slow downs, mouse interactions work, and multiple flash elements on a page do not destroy the performance.

I installed Chrome on my wife’s eeePC and she is just loving it. That is where she spends all her time now. “Amazing” she says! She confessed the other night to absolutely loving Google-Chrome.

What can I say? Google has done a bang up job with this browser. I am even using it more and more at work! My only gripe, originally, was with newly created tabs spawning next to the current tab I was in. I had been accustomed to the tabs spawning at the end of the tab row. There is a plugin to alter this behavior called tabby. What tabby does is move the newly created tab to the end of the tab row after it is created. The effect is noticeable as you see a bit of “jumpiness” in the tab bar. Not that distracting and you eventually begin to ignore. But, I must admit that I can see the benefit of tabs spawning next to the current one and I am tempted to go back to this behavior.

The latest builds of Firefox 3.6 seem to default to this behavior. To fix it you have to go into about:config and set browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent to false. Chances are you will get warnings that this may violate your warranty. I never knew there was a warranty for Firefox. Anyway, be aware that this warning has a checkbox that says don’t show me this warning anymore. If you don’t click it you will get that message every time you start Firefox.

Happy browsing!

So Linc posts about his VMware woes, and I too have experienced some mysterious issues these past couple of weeks, primarily with my Asterisk image. The asterisk server would mysteriously shut down with no warnings and nothing coherent I can see in the log files. To top it off, I had my main server image go haywire requiring a reboot on Monday and then it was just down the other morning. Again, no indication as to the problem has yet been discovered.

Imagine my surprise when my Meso battery would not charge. Recall that Linc had mentioned his Acer batter not charging for some reason a few episodes back on TLLTS. I had it plugged in at work yesterday and then all night last night. When I fired it up the battery was still dead. I have it on now and plugged in and it seems to be charging though, so I hope my issues are not the same as Linc. It’s at 15% now and climbing; maybe I am out of the woods.

Never-the-less, if you are having problems of late it’s probably Linc’s fault. Remember to remind him.

Won’t you join Klaatu in his multimedia quest? I noticed that the other day I failed to post some pertinent information regarding the multimedia sprint. Once again I failed Klaatu. I hope he can forgive me:

When: January 26th from 14:00-0600 Eastern Standard Time

Where: irc.binrev.net #media

What: Linux Multimedia “extra content” Sprint

Why: Linux multimedia users want raw materials, but there’s no reason every single Linux user should have to go out and do the same leg work as every other Linux user; let’s band together, find the free content, and share it in just a few easy-to-find and easy-to-download packages.

Hopefully that will vindicate me once more in his eyes. Klaatu is a harsh task master, that he is.

I come home from work Friday night to find the MythTV box running a browser looking up Thomas Jefferson on Wikipedia. My daughter was reading up on the President and decided to use the MythTV box instead of her eeePC. Back in the day we would have to pull the right encyclopaedia volume off the book shelf or get Mom or Dad to drive us to the Library for research. Kids these days have it so easy….

Well it is good to see that she is using the technology for purposes other than watching tv or catching up on anime episodes off Animefreak.tv. I must saying, watching full screen anime from Animefreak.tv is a wonderful experience on the mythbox. Why can it not be the same way for Hulu?

Back on January 8, 2010 Klaatu sent me a great email about a project he is kicking off on January 26, 2010 and I was remiss in playing the announcement on the show. Well, I am trying to get the word out now. So without further wordiness from me and in his own words:

Running the server without the fans is probably not a good idea since I could cook an egg on the box. Well. that has prompted me to only run the workstation when needed and rely more on the other systems I have. The biggest detriment was to my email filtering as I was relying on Thunderbird to shuffle my emails into their proper folders. It was finally time to get off my lazy butt and learn procmail. This was pretty darn easy to do and now my email gets filtered properly without the need of a client.

What am I going to do with my workstation now?

Say goodbye to my faithful workstation that has served me for a good 5 or so years. About a year ago it started giving me boot issues, would lock up with some regularity and was just ornary. Well, today was the final straw. I ripped it out of my rack and removed the hard drive. Slapped that in my the spare rack server I had over here for backup purposes and went at it.

Arch did not want to boot because it could not find the hard drive. Luckily there was a failsafe image on there. I suspect the regular arch image was tailored to the old hardware so the initrd system did not have the proper modules. Couple this with some knowledge of grub and I was golden.

This system has an ATI Rage XL and getting that configured and using something other than 800×600 was a chore. It made me realize I have no desire to use ati cards in the near future. While people may complain about nvidia, and I used the open nv driver, they work a hell of a lot better than any ATI card I have ever tried.

The biggest problem, though, were the four fans in this thing. The old Compaq server I had sounded like a jet taking off. This damn box sounds like a whole squadron. Did they have to make the fans so loud?

The horror, the horror.

Well Arch is running and I am back into my fluxbox. Hooray!

Wow! I’ve heard a bit about how good this game is for some time but man, am I blown away. This has got to be one of the most involving and exciting games I have played in a long time. Orginally released on the Super Nintendo, Chrono Trigger is an epic quest across time that has fantastic role playing elements combined with a terrific storyline. I cannot believe how awesome this game is.

Your main character starts off the morning with plans to visit the centennial festival. There you play some games and complete some mini-quests which actually alter the storyline a bit later on down the line depending on the choices you make. You meet up with you friend, a female mechanic who has created a teleporter. You are the first brave sole to take a try. Success compells another female companion who you hook up with to jump on in there but she gets kicked out of time and you have to go rescue her. Your quest continues through about 5 different eras in history each with links to one another. How this all ties together is just utterly fascinating. The character development is top notch.

There are so many twists and turns in this games and events that happen which just floor me. I don’t want to give any of the surprises away so I will say little more. Suffice to add that when it feels like the game might be reaching a climax you learn that you still have a long way to go.

The combat system is really cool. From the start you have the choice to use traditional turn based combat or ongoing combat. The latter has you making choices and attacking while the enemy is doing the same with no pause and no break, so you have to be on your toes. I suspect it was unique for its time and I have not played many other games that utilize this type of system. It’s almost Balder’s Gate in some ways, but you cannot pause the flow.

This game is an absolute must have for the DS. You can pick it up just about anywhere that sells older or used games. I recommend trying to find it new, but don’t pay more than $20. I saw it at Kmart for $19.99 unopened.

You can also find the rom on line for the snes emulator, but come on, you know you want to get it legitimately.

You hear so much about Zelda and Final Fantasy, it’s a shame a game like this never received the mainstream recongnition it deserved. Chrono Trigger is truly a treasure.

There is a sequel, Chrono Cross, for the Playstation.