I am on day 17 of my cleansing, 4 more days to go. I checked in today at weight watchers, down to 145.8 (an all-time low). In the last 17 days I’ve lost 9.2 lbs. I’ve got 4 days left, so I expect to lose another pound or two.

In preparation for next Monday (the first day off my cleansing) I’ve already bought a big package or dark chocolate M&Ms and some Hershey’s dark chocolate miniatures variety pack. I’m going to use the M&Ms to make a few banana breads, one for the family at home, and the other to bring to work. I’ll also get some good coffee to brew at work, which will set up Monday to be a fantastic day. The afternoon is jam packed with a Yankee Swap and then a department outing to a really good restaurant.

And moving on to technical stuff:

I was able to get my Ubuntu box to backup a DVD – but I cheated. I could not get DVD decrypter to detect the DVD burner under wine. And, DVD Shrink would run under wine, but ended up locking up and killing my master boot record! I think my problem with the drive detection may be that I installed wine before installing the DVD burner, might need to refresh some configurations or just re-install.

In any case, I was able to get DVD decrypter and DVD shrink to work fine inside my WinXP vmware virtual machine. I mounted a previously ripped ISO and used DVD shrink to shrink it, then DVD Decrypter to burn it. I then used DVD Decrypter to rip a DVD to image, then shrank and re-burned.

The ripping and burning are much faster on this 18x burner than on my 3 year old winxp notebook with a 2x drive. However, the shrinking is much slower, running in a virtual machine, and my processor is a AMD ~1ghz. My notebook is an Intel ~2.2ghz. I could speed things up a lot by buying double layer media – no shrinking needed. But, double layer media are still at least three times the cost – which makes some fairly expensive coasters. Might also be faster to re-author, splitting into two DVDs – not as much compression going on, but losing menus and fancy stuff.

I further soup-up-ified my workstation:

• Traded CD drives with my daughter’s computer, so I have a Lite-On 52x burner, she has the 50x reader. Couldn’t get Serpentine to work, so installed GnomeBaker – successfully burned a few audio cds (have to remember to set it to DAO mode).
• Installed the Adaptec USB2 PCI card (also out of my daughter’s computer – and reconfigured her on-board USB1.1 to work so that she could continue to use the USB 802.11b wireless). Now my iRiver and external hard drives go fasty!
• Connected my new 19″ Viewsonic (thanks Brent!) to my main video card (Nvidia 32M AGP)
• Installed a second video card, a Matrox 4meg PCI card – connected my Envision 17″
• Tweaked the bios and xorg.conf to allow dual video cards/monitors

I still need to connect my printer, which hasn’t worked so far. I have an HP 722C connected via parallel port to a dlink 704p router/print server. All of my windows machines can print to it, but have not been able to connect the linux box.

I also need a SD card reader, for now I’ll take my multi-reader home from work – but might buy another one for $10 at job lots.

Also, big thanks go out to my supporters: Carl for the hard drive, cd burner, keyboard and optical USB mouse. Ken for the non-working monitor, Brent for the working monitor. If you have any parts you would like to donate (not just get rid of) let me know!

Now that I’ve flashed the iRiver, and can mount it under Linux, I’ve produced my first all-linux podcast.

I went through all my normal steps, but instead of doing it them on my XP laptop, I did them on my Ubuntu desktop. Took a little configuring, but I was able to get all the sound settings correct, and was able to setup Audacity the same way I have it in XP. Also, my perl script for converting wav to MP3 with lame was almost a direct drag and drop from windows to linux. I also installed the linux version of ipodder, and was able to test the podcast feed. Read all about our podcast here.

Headphone wearing penguin borrowed from the Linux Australia Podcast Service

I took the daring step of manually updating the firmware on my church’s iRiver T30. This is the device we record all of our services with, and the produce the podcast from.

Out of the box (at least here in the US) this 1GB MP3 player is windows only, and even then pretty limited. When you plug it in it appears as a media device, not a drive letter – so no scripty copying things. This is called something like MTP. iRiver sells this same device in other parts of the world with UMS – which basically means that it looks like a generic storage device. The only advantage of MTP is that windows can sync DRM protected files.

It would appear that iRiver now supports the swapping of the two different firmwares, but when I tried their installer thing it didn’t work. So I followed these instructions instead (looks like that web site has been taken down, I grabbed a copy off google’s cache) – and it worked! It now appears as a drive letter in windows, and it appears as a mounted volume in Linux. YAY! I already have Audacity and Lame installed in Linux, so expect my next podcast to be produced sans-Microsoft!

Here is what the power supply looks like on my Ubuntu rig. I borrowed this 200w proprietary PS from a Compaq, they engineered it to fit just perfect in their own box, and had really short motherboard power leads. The only way to get it to reach was to jam in it sideways, and hold it on with duct tape. So, if anyone would like to donate a 200watt or better power supply, I’d be glad to take it!

And for those of you not following every awesome step I’m taking on my way to Linux-ville, my Ubuntu is now running wine with these windows apps: Photoshop, Internet Explorer (yuck, sorry, but great instructions here) and Terminal Server Client (this is actually a linux app, but connects to windows machines). And, I’ve also managed to get some other fancy things to work, which I won’t mention here (just a hint, it starts with a V and rhymes with VPN, great instructions here).

Also, I’ve been very happy with openoffice instead of MS office, and have found plenty of happy utilities to get my work done. Using esvn to connect to my subversion repository, gFTP, Gaim, ssh (built into shell), gedit (looking for suggestions for good text editors, would like the equivalent of textpad (maybe I’ll just install it now that I can get windows stuff to run!).

I’ve also been able to boost my resolution by manually editing xorg.conf – took a couple tries and needed to remember how to use VI to get back in to my nice drag and drop world. Right now I’m limited by the capabilities of my 17″ monitor, currently running 1152×864@75hz, and can go up to 1280×1024, but only at 60hz. My friend will hopefully loan me his old 19″, and my 32M video card should be plenty capable of filling it up (maybe 1600×1200?).

I managed to get another computer up and running last night. After a donation of a hard drive, a “borrowing” of a power supply and returning of an old monitor – a little assembly, a bit of duct tape (really – the power supply doesn’t fit), and a lot of watching installation bars…

I’ve got a fully functioning Ubuntu desktop! Not sure what I’m going to do with this, probably put it in my kitchen. I manually installed the java jre, so I can run a slideshow off bushelandapeck, and maybe my wife can play her runescape game. This would allow me to use our notebook to do all of my important computing (loading pictures and editing podcasts). I’m going to look and see if I can find Kodak camera support (or get a SD card reader) and iRiver t30 drivers – then I could really use this machine for everything!