Mythbuntu - the media centre? "it does what it says on the tin"

The PC in my front room was originally a Windows Media Centre (MCE) PC from HP. A few years ago I upgraded the RAM to 2gb and dropped in a dual core processor. Hp insisted the machine could not be upgraded to a dual core and that I needed to purchase a new machine at £1000 plus. However I knew the motherboard would accept the x2 chip but the bios would not. After a bit of reading around I found a way to re-flash the bios, remove the HP fudge and put on the original BIOS upgrade to support dual core. I located a seller and bought the chip for £100. Chip arrived, it was installed and was recognised by the BIOS and then by Windows. Because I had altered my internal hardware I was on the phone late one night to M$ to get a new code to reactivate Windows. I have to admit since moving to Linux that I really am glad that I don't have to do the activation rubbish any more. In principle I can understand why they M$ went down this route but working in the enterprise it was such a pain having to phone up.

Anyway, this machine last year had removed and opensuse 11 installed. I decided I didn't like this on a desktop (its on my server) so I put on Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) which has worked okay although I really wanted to make use of the DVR facility as I have a DVB (freeview) card in the machine. I tried MythTV which was installed via apt-get but it insisted on not working correctly with the DVB card. The remote did not work but the DVB card worked with other software such as kaffeine or ME-tv. So while I was troubleshooting I downloaded a mythbuntu 8.10 ISO - AMD x64 version to give this a go.

My troubleshooting was a waste of time, I burnt the ISO to CD, rebooted and reinstalled Mythbuntu over the top of my machine. I figured I could rebuild the original quickly if needed.

After some initial set up, it recognised my MCE remote control, the DVB card and works brilliantly. I can search the freeview EPG for keywords, genre or channel list. It will record, pause and rewind TV. It saved me £150 purchasing a decent DVR and will be useful for the nominal time I watch TV. Further I can add plugins for weather, stream music or view RSS feeds - something MCE could do but was very clunky.

My original MCE set up impressed me to bits, the way the menus worked, the EPG, being able to play music whilst watching a slide show. I extended the system to stream tv online, allow me to schedule programme recordings through the web and I automated a process to convert the recorded video to DIVX for offline viewing.

The thing I hated was the EPG was prone to crash out, you would then lose your channels which in turn would stop your recordings. It would crash out each time it updated and no matter what fixes I put in place to back up the EPG refresh the MCE services periodically it was a waste of time. I was looking to Vista but this had the same issues so I blew MCE and the idea out of the window.

However, it was a colleague of mine that introduced me to mythbuntu and it was only a year later (today) that I actually installed it. If I think of all of the lost time trying to fix MCE, through installing Mythbuntu would have saved these for more important things.

Its early days for Myth andI will post more as and when I use it of my experiences but initial impressions are "it does what it says on the tin"

So do you touch or point?

I have now had my nokia 5800 for 3 weeks but it has been an up road struggle.

I have always enjoyed touch screen phones where my first was a p800. Before this I had a catalogue of touch pdas such as the psion 5,7 , the palm v, the handspring visor, hp jornada 629, compaq ipaq, hp jornada phone/pda so I have some experience when it comes to tapping a screen.

I got an iphone last year shortly after they came out in the uk to see if I would like it. For me, this felt like a heavy weight boxing game as I hadn't had an apple device before, I have big expectations from mobile devices as I am a heavy user and there was a question if the iphone could cope with me. Lets just say it was short lived and after 2 months it was back on eBay.

I loved the interface, the web browsing was perfect and it was great to type on. I hated the closed environment where you were locked into Itunes and the Apple way of doing things. With my other devices such as Windows Mobile or Symbian I am somewhat free of this and can choose my own route on how I want to accomplish things. I jailbroke my iphone, installed a web server with php, ssh server and ftp server so I could shuttle files forwards and backwards. The only other issue I had was Linux where I would have to connect both the PC and iphone to a wireless network, ssh onto the iphone then mount the iphone filesystem over ssh in order to copy files onto it. Sounds great technically but a total headache in reality. I eventually got rid of the iphone after it decided to wipe my data from its disk even though itunes knew it had several gigabytes of "other data", but could not access it. Only a reflash would fix this issue and this is when it was packed up and flogged on ebay.

The thing that Apple got right and set a bench mark was the touch interface. They have always been at the forefront of GUI interfaces with MAC OS X and carried this over to the iphone. I have to admit after years of using point and click interfaces on psion, palm and windows mobile with a stylus, it was both novel and practical to be able to use a finger and thumb to get things done.

I enjoyed my time using Palm PDAs such as the Handspring Visor because I loved the simplicity of Graffiti for the entering of text. This was carried over onto the Sony Ericsson UIQ phones such as the P800 - P990 (this was a total disaster) . However both UIQ and Palm have totally dried up in terms of current hardware and Windows Mobile is the old elephant on top of a mini and it just a fudge. Even with the current crop of phones such as the HTC Touch or Touch HD whilst the Flow interface masks most of the windows mobile junk underneath you still cannot get away from the legacy interface.

As I like symbian, I needed a phone then S60 was a good choice. I previously had an S80 device such as the Nokia 9500 which if used today is like putting a shoe to your ear. I upgraded to a N95 running S60 which got me used to this new OS and its limitation in time for me getting my Nokia E90. This to date is my favorite all in one device with a keyboard and whilst it does not have touch it is a great workhorse. Because Nokia have been slow to bring out further high end devices - the N95 8GB and N96 weren't really upgrades in terms of hardware I got a Samsung Innov8. In terms of spec 3G HSDPA, GPS, 8M Camera, WIFI 3" screem and 16GB on board all running under S60 then this is the dream phone. However the big mistake here is the compatibility with current Nokia S60 software that is free due to the certificates not being available. All About Symbian have recently discussed this on a podcast and have said that they are looking to developers to provide the correctly signed software so it runs under Samsung S60. This has been an issue since the phone came out in August 2008 and it is still not resolved. Needless to say this phone is now on ebay as I had enough of contacting suppliers just to ask when are they bringing out a version for the Innov8. This coupled with samsung#s reluctance to release firmware to fix annoying bugs was too much and this is when I began looking elsewhere.

So in summary, I now want a device that has a keyboard, is compatible with S60 and a touch screen. ........

Now enter from stage left the Nokia 5800XM aka Tube. I got mine from ebay which originally had been sourced from Hong Kong. The phone has already been reflashed by me with the new v11 firmware and the product code changed. Again, I cannot understand why Nokia insist on phase releasing firmware at different times and areas across the globe. Again, take a leaf out of Apple's book who just get on with it and release it worldwide at the same time. I understand Nokia have a huge catalogue of phones but why should I wait several months for something.......

Since having the phone it has been hard reset four times and now I can reinstall it under two hours. However it does refuse to boot with the memory card in so this has to be removed and inserted when the phone has booted. I know there is something on the memory card stopping it but cannot be bothered to fault find as I just want it to work and have a workaround. Also the Web Feeds within the browser have screwed up with no fix in sight other than to wipe the phone again. Luckily Google reader works quite well albeit the touch interface on the web browser sometimes finds you reaching for the hammer!

So do you touch or point? Well with S60v5 it is a question of both. Whilst it is S60 underneath and the menus and buttons have been resized so you can use your finger there is still a lot of work. The S60 browser might be able to show flash unlike the iphone, however it is both slow when zooming in and out with your finger and rendering a page. Thus when you try and move the page about the screen with your finger it frequently does not happen and will move when it is ready to catch up.

The onscreen keyboard is great but I miss the auto correct feature as on the iphone. It is also
annoying to have to keep rotating the phone to type on the full size qwerty keyboard. There are occasions you need to resort to using the stylus (point) that comes with the phone to select things or use the tip of your finger nail if you have any!

But looking past these small things that can be fixed in software upgrades it has a better camera, and can record video and is more open so I can do more with it. For example SymSMB allows me to both connect to Microsoft networks or share folders on the phone. This means I can hook up my linux laptop and copy my podcasts over wifi, access my pictures or MP3s all without a cable or pc suite. It will be great when they finally get the OTA updates working so finally the cables can be burned other than for charging.

This phone will be a transition similar when I went from the 9500, to N95 to E90. I will be moving to the N97 where I am hoping this should do me as an E90 replacement. It has the keyboard, the camera, the capacity and the screen/interface.

If it will be the iphone killer, all I will say is - there is an opportunity but at the moment Nokia have a lot to fix and need to start innovating rather than following. Palm have recently done this with the pre - another contender of which I will be looking at

Lets hope they can remove the need to point and improve on the touch.

The next minute - I am not technical!

Well it is finally now official after several years of procrastinating I have finally made the jump and created my first post (this is my second) from my Nokia 5800 aka Tube. There are many times when one gets up and say today I will.... but that is as far as one usually gets where we find a multitude of reasons of why we should not do something rather than putting the energy into actually doing it.

I have been out of work since September last year after taking voluntary redundancy and as things globally have gotten worse I have been looking for "IT" work without much success. I have done the usual of posting my CV to several job boards, vigorously applying every week for jobs but no really no positive response. I get the occasional phone call from agencies seeing if I am available or following up applications I have made usually with a reason of why I am not suitable, I have switched Push email on my phone using IMAP IDLE with Profimail and jump each time I receive a mail hoping... However I believe it is times like these that you have to remain confident, continue looking but also remain actively doing things.

My passion as you have probably guessed is technology and people who know me will always say what has he got next, have you broken it or what are you looking at next. Since my early years I have always been interested in technology but still to this day I don't know really why. My brother was always into computers and had a Sinclair ZX81. I can remember him putting the motherboard in a proper keyboard and having the opportunity to play games such as 3D monster maze or pacman (represented by letters) on the machine. It was used on a 4 inch b&w TV and was fantastic, there was no sound, poor graphics but bloody good to play. I will never forget the time he showed me a program which produced sound on the ZX81. Those of you who know the equipment will recall how? as there was no speaker. To do this day all I can remember is that you recorded your voice to tape, stored it in the machine then it would try to modulate the TV picture in someway to recreate the sound. There were lots of lights flashing on the screen and we would turn up the TV volume and try and make out if it was our voice that we could hear.

Thereafter I had my own ZX spectrum where back then I would enter the log list of machine code programs in to the spectrum via a hex editor to produce 2 channel or more music, speed up the loading of software from tape or write simple demos but nothing what I would consider state of the art. It must have been around this time that I got urge to always push things to their limit. I had a break from computers for around a year until one Xmas where again my brother had an old Amstrad PPC512D with 1 x3.5" floppy drive, a CGA screen and would run on D batteries. This thing was considered a laptop but by today's affairs with MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices) it was big! I learned about msdos and the various commands of copy files, formatting disks etc and was a real introduction to command line. Also at the time I had an Atari ST of which an old friend helped me purchase. Again, I would do my usual of pushing my machine to its limits and always trying to find a way around things.

During my entry to university I used the Atari with a Hardware PC Emulator called supercharger which would allow me to run both the Atari and PC at the same time. I learned more about DOS and someone at Uni showed me about FTP, usenet, IP addresses, the JANET network and it is here where I interested in the Internet (1990 & 1991). At University in my second year our IT lab had HP UNIX workstations with 21" colour monitors, 32mb workstations & RISC processors running HP UNIX with X Windows. These machines were like heaven where it is only recently with Linux I have been able to find a comparison..... I could email, download, compile a program, print, write or run a script all at the same time and it just worked! I had my usual fun of locking the machines up but they certainly opened my mind to what a workstation could do.

When I built my first PC I was looking for an OS. In 1993 the only choices were OS/2, Windows or Deskview X. I tried Linux but I neither had the time or resource to learn about it and when I needed to run Ms Office back then I was severely limited. In 1994 I became a Windows 95 (aka Chicago) beta tester and at one point had linux, os/2, dos and windows 95 all on one machine. I event tried to boot windows 95 under an OS/2 Dos VM although could not get it working! As I was used to running several OSes at once I could not use OS/2 as it caned the machine when I ran Windows Apps, I could not stand DOS/WIN311 as it was a fudge (or elephant on top of a mini) and I couldn't get on with the interface restrictions so and I couldn't find anymore information about DeskView X - so Windows 95 seemed the choice. Although Windows 95 was not powerful enough for me. Typically I would use a wordprocessor for assignments and whilst we were writing and testing our code I would have to do screen shots. MS word at this time could not cope with me. I would take a typical screenshot in DOS - two colours and have to reduce the colour depth from 24 million colours to two so it could cope with the picture in word. When you have several of these it grinds to a halt. I tried MS Word for NT (a 32 bit app) as I thought more address space would be available for the application to run. It worked in Windows 95 just but was slow. When you include the fact I would use word indexing, contents, header formatting and frames Word would just collapse. Back then and still now I am of the opinion word is bad for long documents when you begin to use all of its features. I originally used to use Wordstar 4 in my pc emulator (remember CONTROL KK or CONTROL KB?) and would leave a blank page, print out my screenshot and physically glue it to the paper of my assignment. This worked, whereas word would grind to a halt. I found it is easy to use word for text editing than use a dedicated DTP (my first being Fleet street publisher on the atari) to do the layout.

Part of the beta testing program was also to test Office 95 which was better than word for NT and I loved the inline spell check. So it was windows 95 for the next few years until I discovered NT 4 workstation. This through my work took my to NT server, W2K, W2k3 and even had the opportunity to use IBM AIX and build two IBM RS6000 H70 for my company. Again, the latter is a great OS that just works even allowing you to resize disks online whilst people are using them - technology of which WINDOWS has only seen in the past few years whereas I am talking about this being available in 1997.

My next venture into Linux was 2006 where I tried to convert myself from my Windows blinkers to linux 100% but it failed because I was expecting too much. Because I had two mobile phones S60 and Windows mobile (private & work) I would exclusively sync with Outlook to PST folders. I would not keep anything on the exchange server purely using it as mailbox for email. Linux has never really had any good syncing clients and it wasn't until a year later after switching my XP desktop to lighter version that I made the switch to ubuntu. I chose this over Fedora or OpenSuse because I wanted something to work out of the box but would allow me to roll up my sleeves and get under the hood if I needed to. I decided to VMWARE my pc using VMConverter. I then ran ubuntu and my old pc under VMWARE for the next 18 months until I took redundancy. This in itself was an "age of discovery" as I had the best of both worlds where I gradually stopped using the full blown MS APPs and used Open Source alternatives such as OpenOffice, Firefox and openproj etc.... There were some issues with formatting in OpenOffice but as longs as I accepted I would never get 100% compatibility I could work with it. I never really switched off my vmware PC until I left work because of the syncing to outlook and still to this day it is a bug bear of which I will post another time.

Linux whichever flavour now runs on all of my machines as the default OS. I use opensuse 11 on my server as I find it is more suited for a file server. Things for example using YAST show more options and allow me to do more detailed things whereas Ubuntu hides them from the users. I know this is a generalistic view but I want to be able to set more detailed options inside of a GUI as it is usually quicker (not always) then CLI. Whereas I use ubuntu on my desktop and laptop as it has just the right level of configuratbility I need for a desktop OS. I also have a MID (mobile internet device) a nokia N810 which runs maemo linux which I use for browsing and other things where I don't want to boot a full PC. Lastly, there is the EEE PC which started the linux adventure off at home. This is now running Easy Peasy Linux (ubuntu) which is used as a device midway between my laptop and N810.

My laptop is a Dell Inspiron 1525 with upgrade hard drive to 320gb and upgrade ram to 3gb. Vista lasted two days and was wiped off after installing ubuntu. I run VMWARE of XP and W2k when needed as I use MS Money but have not found a decent Linux alternative. I have tried GNU CASH etc... but cannot get on with them.

Lastly, my data is in the cloud where I use this for my diary/contacts/email. I don't use google calendar and contacts as it has a long way to go. But as mentioned earlier I will blog about this sometime later because whilst it is a bug bear, mobile tech is still a passion for me.

In conclusion, I still laugh at a comment in an interview that I had where I was told I did not come over as technical.

However I will let you decide what you think.