George's blog

Fix my photo please!

For my graduation last year, my whole family went out to dinner and we have a great photo. Except for the lighting, that is. The grand concourse must have had some funny lights because the photo came out with a strong orange cast.

I don’t have a RAW capture, just this JPEG. If any of you knows how to adjust the color balance, I’d be incredibly grateful. Fixing it, teaching me how to fix it, or pointing me to a tutorial/book on how to fix it would all be appreciated.

Working again

I’m sure all of you devoted blog readers will be happy to hear that I started working again. You know, a real paid client and none of this book writing stuff. And tomorrow’s my birthday, so it’s all lining up.

Abit AN-M2HD Ubuntu Gutsy suspend

Here is how to get suspend working when you have the binary nVidia driver installed. Follow the instructions from here. They worked for me. Resume takes about 8 seconds.

Notes on a fresh install of XBMC for Linux on Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10

Here are some notes I took when re-installing Ubuntu on my ABIT AN-M2HD machine today. I mount remote drives into the local filesystem rather than using XMBC to do so, but either works.

XBMC Linux update + HDTV commentary

I’ve been puttering on the XBMC Linux box but I’m not very happy with it. I am using it as my primary video player these days, instead of the XBox, but I think I might be tempted to go back to the XBox more often if I had two ethernet cables under the TV (or an extra 100MB router). Suspend on my Linux box doesn’t work reliably, which means I keep having to get on the keyboard and fix things. XMBC crashes somewhat regularly, which means I need to get on the keyboard and fix things.

State of the MythTV / XBMC linux

The good news. Boobtube, the linux box under the TV, is running smoothly. It’s in a stereo cabinet so I was worried about heat buildup. I successfully backported the sensors and kernel from Ubuntu Gutsy, so I can tell you that right this minute the machine is at 48 degrees C, which is kind of warm, but it’s been transcoding videos all day long. Other times it’s running about 35 degrees C at idle. MythTV works well.

Abit AN-M2HD Ubuntu Feisty lm-sensors

Here’s my success at getting lm-sensors working on the Abit AN-M2HD motherboard in Ubuntu Feisty 7.04 with the nVidia 100.14.11 drivers. I’m assuming you have Feisty running fine, but without functioning lm-sensors, and have the nVidia drivers installed and working fine.

  • Follow the instructions here for pulling in the Ubuntu Gutsy kernel (2.6.22). (Note: Don’t follow his instructions for upgrading nVidia drivers).

Linux in da house

After helping my father and brother in the past few days remotely debug problems, I’ve realized how much I like being able to directly connect to a box and fix it, rather than read screens over a telephone. (NetMeeting is cool however).

So here’s a quick inventory of Linux boxen in our house:

  • durable: Our main server. Lives in the 2nd floor closet, hosts multimedia files, serves this web page, subversion repository, MythTV backend (with tuner), print server.

AN-M2HD won't boot from IDE HDD -- success story

Success booting:

  • CDROM on IDE
  • CDROM on USB
  • HDD on USB

No love from:

  • HDD on IDE (either of two drives I tried)

I was able to boot from CD and install Ubuntu onto the HDD, which was connected to IDE. But then the HDD would not boot from IDE. It would boot fine from USB.

MythTV hardware starts arriving; installing the remote control

Today, the motherboard, DVD drive, remote, and memory arrived. Over the weekend I got ready and prepped the case. I had to scrounge around today to find screws to install the motherboard since none were included.

Syndicate content