Happy fun playground

I was able to successfully install my copy of DeLorme Topo USA inside my Windows XP virtual machine in VMWare Fusion on my mac. I was able to export all my map data from my last machine, and imported it no problem. I’ve got all my routes and data from all my bike rides from last year, and am ready to start planning this year’s Middlesex Century route.

I had to enable 3D graphics in order to get the 3D DirectX 9 view to work. VMWare says this is experimental, and that I don’t have the correct features in my graphics card, but it seems to work anyway. I won’t mind if it crashes once in a while. I usually keep the 3D mode off until I need to examine a way around a mountain.

I’m very happy with it running, this is the fastest I’ve seen this program move.

Guess who has a new Honda? 244 horsepower, five speed, stability control, 4 wheel anti-lock disc brakes… tires, windshield wipers… uh… power sliding rear doors, room for 8 passengers…

That’s right, its an Odyssey. A happy mini-van. It’s got a 6 disc mp3 playing CD player, with auxilliary mp3 player jack. It has all the basics, like air bags and cup holders everywhere (15 for 8 passengers), steering wheel controls for the radio and cruise control, power windows, built-in rear window sun shades, alarm, remote entry, fold down rear seat.

We didn’t get the advanced options – we didn’t want them. We don’t let our kids watch much TV at home, so we didn’t want DVD in the van. It would be nice to have GPS (I want a handheld for my bike, these are less than $200 now) and a sunroof, but you have to get leather seats, and my wife the vegetarian said that would be kind of hypocritical (we can’t eat the cow, but we can skin it and rub it on our ass).

The van has roof rails, but didn’t come with the cross beams. We can also get a tow hitch, but the Honda hitch is another $1500, but includes a transmission and oil cooler, and installation. As for roof racks, the Honda cross beams are $150, Thule or Yakima are $210, but I’m thinking of building my own. I’m thinking the raw parts will be less than $40, and will give us enough width (I’m thinking 7 feet, from mirror to mirror) for our current roof case (Sears xcargo) and 2 or maybe even 3 bikes. Thule bike racks are like $150 each, but I found on overstock.com you can get a set of two (unknown brand) for $65.

My wife has already made full use of the van. Carting kids around and filling the back with girl scout cookies. I gotta say I’m relieved, camping is so much easier when you can fit everything. We’ve already planned at least two camping trips this year. Eventually we’ll get the tow hitch and then a popup camper.

About a month ago I got a $100 coupon for a new phone with Verizon. I looked online then ventured out to the store to see what I could get. The chocolate was being promoted for $150 with a $50 rebate, so I got one basically for free. They programmed it, moved all my contacts and whatnot from my old phone over, and synced it with my bluetooth headset. So I left the store with a nice new deep red LG chocolate.

The phone has mostly the same capabilities as my old phone, but with a sleeker form factor. It does everything just a little better. The MP3 player works better, the camera is faster, the interface has more eye candy.

As far as MP3s and pictures goes, it still has issues. BUT, nothing I couldn’t fix with a perl script! The lowest volume for the Mp3 player was too loud for my little ears. The phone also caches ID3 tag info, only reads id3v1 tags, and doesn’t support long filenames. So, I wrote a script that reads an iTunes playlist, copies the files to a temp directory creating an MD5 hash based filename from the original name (with some salt sprinkled in to force filenames to change anytime I need to update existing tags). It also reads the id3v2 tags and pumps them into the id3v1 so the phone can read them, then uses mp3gain to force the lowering of the volume (just sets a “gain” tag – doesn’t actually change the amplitude of the sound). I then do an rsync to the memory card, and I’m a happy fellow with a 1 gig mp3 player built into my phone. The phone supports up to an 8gig micro sd card, but my wallet doesn’t.

As for images, I haven’t exactly figured out how it sorts them on the phone. In any case, I wrote an importer script that can read the phone images, or images from my digital camera – it assesses the date and time based on either the filename or the exif data, then renames the files to a sortable format, changes the modified times to match, and resizes the image if necessary. For the most part all these files are sorting in date order (with some weird anomolies) on the phone. I think it may look at the date accessed field, which is dumb.

I’m also using the calendar more on this phone, and I’m using bitpim on the mac to sync the contacts and calendar via bluetooth. I also found in the mac developers kit where you can create your own phone profiles for iSync, so if I ever have time I’ll take a look at that.

Talking about bluetooth, but not the phone – I’ve been very happy with my Logitech wireless bluetooth laser mouse. It syncs with the mac no problem, has decent tracking on multiple surfaces, great battery life, no dumb usb dongle to futz with, and fits nicely in my notebook bag.

I managed to live with Ubuntu for over a year. I learned to do almost everything that I used to do in Windows, and the few apps that I couldn’t find replacements for I ran in Windows within VMWare. Of course, my Ubuntu rig was never fast (much faster than it would have been running Windows), but with a 1.2ghz AMD chip and only 768 megs of ram, it was time for me to find a replacement.

When I found out my buddy Tev was upgrading to a new Mac, I dove in and bought his old one. And by old I mean, only a 2ghz Intel Core Duo, 2GB ram, 160GB HD, DVD burner, 13″, 3+ hour battery MacBook. He gave me a great deal, and included two power supplies, two batteries, case, iLife and iWork.

With a fresh install of Leopard I had to fight some of the newbieness of a new system, but now I feel I’m fairly up to speed. My time with various flavors of linux and unix definitely helped make this system my own. I got some of my favorite open source apps installed (audacity, imagemagick, gimp) and even figured out how to compile some of the command line tools that I like (burp blowfish encryption, mp3gain, etc.)

My first real tasks were to collect all my MP3s and photos from all my portable hard drives, old computers, current computers etc. and then de-dup all this to have a final definitive collection of both. I used iTunes to import all my MP3s from the various sources. A few perl scripts helped find the most basic duplicate files, but then I moved to Dupin to do some serious work.

Photos were a lot more difficult. I needed to de-dup them before importing into iPhoto. So, again, a perl script to remove exact file duplicates. Then I slimmed it down with a mac app called Duplicate Image Detector. It was fairly easy to use, but only did the most basic duplicate finding. For advanced visual duplicate removal, the only tools I could find were for windows. No problem, I was able to move my existing vmware windows image from my Ubuntu box over, and it ran directly in Vmware fusion on the mac (I’ve also got Ubuntu running in a VM!). The best results I got, even though the program frequently crashed and just blinked itself out of existence, was with DupDetector.

So, now I’m at a point of actually using the computer to stay organized and be creative. I’m organizing photos, and trying to decide whether to use iPhoto to export to Picassa or Flickr (I’ve given up on rolling my own photo site). I’ve also bought some gear to start recording music again, so I’ve got to play around with Garage Band.

Of course, summer is just around the corner, so I’ll be busy biking and towing the kids about. I’ll have to compute in my spare time (but with 3+ hours of battery life maybe I’ll just bring the Mac along on my bike rides!).

We received our set of two $40 coupons from the government for our digital television converter boxes. We don’t have cable or dish or any kind of subscription TV at our house. We have a good old fashioned antenna on our roof. We live about 30 miles outside of Boston, and I always thought our reception (with the big antenna) was fairly good. For a while we had comcast basic cable, and our over the air reception actually gives us better picture quality.

In any case, in February of 2009, all standard analog over the air broadcasts will cease. So, everyone that has a TV that does not have a digital tuner will need a converter box. Even if you have cable or satellite, in some extreme emergency situations the only way you’ll be able to get a TV signal is over the air.

I took our coupons to Best Buy for the converter box. They have only one model there, an Insignia. I was expecting the box to be about the same price as the coupon ($40), but they are charging $60, so I had to pay $20 out of pocket. The only outputs on the box are composite video or RF (modulates to channel 3). I was really hoping for an s-video connection, so I only bought one unit in hopes that in the next few months (coupon expires in 90 days) a model with s-video will be available locally.

I brought the unit home and hooked it up – it found 21 digital channels off my antenna – and they all look crystal DVD clear! I thought that I would only get the same channels as before – but no! Because of the increased bandwidth, many networks are broadcasting multiple channels. PBS (GBH 44) has 4 channels all to itself, including one just for kids. There is also the Qubo network, which appears to be also just for kids that only broadcasts in digital.

• https://www.dtv2009.gov/