Eric Covener’s Journal :: 2006

Marjories Gifts

(in General on 2006/12/24)

Come home soon honey

(only 90 minutes worth of work to transfer 25kilobytes 6 inches!)

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razr, linux, and bluetooth revisited

(in General on 2006/12/24)

You’d think setting up a system over a year later to accomplish this same task would go easier.

This time discovery seemed to be the issue, as opposed to getting the actual obex transfer to work.

I think the crucial part I was missing this ime was to use hciconfig to set the bluetooth interface into ISCAN mode, so the motorola could find it and push the file. Most of the tools I downloaded could only pull files from the phone, but the only files that can be pulled are those that were previously uploaded (meaning not pictures taken with the camera)

I only stumbled on that by finding /usr/bin/bluetooth-applet in bluez-gnome was the only tool that exposed anything like a “pair with me!!!” button, then observing the change in hciconfig output.

sudo hciconfig hci0 iscan kbluetoothd On the razr: Choose a picture, click the menu, choose copy, search for device

It would be much more sane for kbluetoothd to have some kind of config to tell it to be listening/broadcasting its presence.

for gnome-bluetooth on debian, I had to prepare my system like this:

sudo apt-get build-dep gnome-session
sudo apt-get install build-essential gob2 libgnomeui-dev python-gtk2-dev librsvg2-dev libopenobex1-dev

Checkinstall seemed to choke on whatever this package does during install — it tried to overwrrite /usr/bin/ld and some other scary things.

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LH-T9654S review / Oddities

(in General on 2006/12/22)

Marjorie bought me a new HTIB (home theater in a box) for christmas, and the thing is marvelous compared to my old DVP642 DVD player and Sams Club receiver/speakers.

There are however a few quirks. When I use the HDMI output, the only output the LH-T9654S scales to 1080i, lots of surfaces in several DVDs take on this swimming/swirling green hue. This is the really bizarre one, although google says this is not without precedent

Secondly, when using HDMI, lots of chapter changes or even playing with the DVD players own UI causes a very bizarre flicker / resolution change looking thing. This I am more likely to chalk up to my TV that is very finnicky about the resolutions it supports.

Third, the universal remote provided by Time Warner is unable to control any of the functions of the integrated DVD player / receiver — most unfortunately the volume.

-/-

My TV is a little peculiar in that it has a pretty poor scaler/deinterlacer, and the DVD player doesn’t scale up to 1080i unless it’s using the HDMI port. If I had a nicer TV I’d let him do all the work and not think twice.

edit: Returned due to above + AV synch issues (video leads sound, no way to tune for that direction)

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Speaker wire under transitional molding?

(in General on 2006/12/22)

So the little piece of metal between linoleum and carpet — do they make hollowed out ones that you can feed flat speaker wire through?

If I don’t see nails on the top of the metal, does that mean it’s glued?

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Spanish logs

(in General on 2006/12/21)

Pooping peasant popular in Spain

During the holiday season, pastry shops around Catalonia sell sweets shaped like feces, and on Christmas Eve Catalan children beat a hollow log, called the tio, packed with holiday gifts, singing a song that urges it to defecate presents out the other end.

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