MP3 Players

So probably about a year ago my iPod screen cracked. I've replaced the battery in my iPod before so I thought I could just buy a screen and replace it. Well it did not turn out so well. I would try doing it again if I had to but in the process of trying to replace the screen I broke a piece off of the logic board which connects to the screen. So now I have a broken screen and a broken logic board. I figure it is probably not worth saving. So I started shopping for something new. I ended up deciding on an iRiver E100 depicted to the left. I have really enjoyed this mp3 player and it was cheap.

Pros
The player plays ogg, mp3 and I think some others but I do not really use the others. It also can display videos, and pictures. The model I got is the 4GB version, but also has a slot for a microSD card which supports up to 32GB. It has an FM radio and a rechargeable battery. It supports drag and drop music management so it works very well with Linux and it integrates very well with Banshee. One of my most favorite features is the stereo speakers on the back of the player. I don't even need headphones to listen to music and it makes it very easy to listen to music with a friend. Also the overall quality of music is very good.

Cons
It is a little slow, or unresponsive. You have to wait a second to click your next action. The FM radio requires that headphones be connected to listen, because they act as the antenna. I have not figured out how to create playlists using linux. The SD card storage and the internal storage do not get treated as continuous storage and are always separate. The screen resolution does not seem to be great, but I do not really use it for pictures or videos so that doesn't bother me.

Overall though I love it and would buy another one. I love the fact that I got a 4GB mp3 player with more features than an iPod nano for $70 instead of the nano that would have cost me about twice that. The only thing the nano does better is have a better screen, but I will give that up easily for the ogg support, speakers, FM radio, and drag and drop management.

hpodder

I wanted to post here about the podcast catching client that I use. First of all I am a banshee user and my mp3 player is an iRiver E100, which I love, but will hopefully go over that another time. My iRiver only has 4GB of storage and a microSD slot, but the two are treated seperately by the iRiver. So I do not have enough storage on my mp3 player to just sync up all of my music. I had was finding it difficult to keep my podcasts and music seperate in Banshee, so I just decided to have another program manage my podcasts, enter hpodder. I am not a command line guy by any means. I have a GUI and like using it, but I am not afraid of the terminal. So when I found hpodder I decided to give it a try and it works great. After installing if you go to a terminal and type

hpodder

it will update all of your podcasts. To add podcasts you find out the feed address and type in

hpodder add [url]

you can also tell it to only get a certain number of the most recent podcasts, you can only update certain podcasts. There are a good number of simple commands that give good functionality to the program, if you ever forget what the commands are typing

hpodder lscommands

will show you all of the commands. I think hpodder is in the debian repos, it can be installed by typing

sudo apt-get install hpodder

Give hpodder a try if you are in need of a podcatcher it is simple and very fast.

Thanks and God Bless,
Aaron

Not Really Technology Related

I found this site while starting a paper today and thought about how great it is then wanted to share it with all of you.

http://www.easybib.com/

you fill out some information and it creates the bibliography info for you. Even better you can type in the ISBN number of your book and it will give you the info to throw into your paper.

100% free

I know I know. You are welcome :P

Thanks and God bless,
Aaron

Network Manager Shared Internet Connection

Ok so I have been wanting to do this for a while and I finally found a site that had easy directions to create a shared internet connection using your wireless card.
http://bigbrovar.wordpress.com/2009/01/17/share-you-internet-wirelessly-on-ubuntu/

all the info I got came from this site but I wanted to share it here also.
1. install dnsmasq-base on an ubuntu based system.
This can be done by typing sudo apt-get install dnsmasq-base
2. make sure your computer is plugged into the internet
3. click on the network manager icon in your system tray and then click Create New Wireless Network...

4.Create whatever ssid you want and if you want security enable.

That was it for me. I was then able to get on another system and connect then browse.

Thanks and God bless,
Aaron

More Details AWN

I received a comment from a reader wanting to know more info about the dock I have installed on the bottom part of my screen. So I wanted to write a post about how I got the dock working.

So the wiki installation page for Avant Window Navigator (AWN) is http://wiki.awn-project.org/Installation This place is really good for getting it installed.

Now this version of AWN doesnt provide any applets which to me are the coolest part of the dock. You will need to install AWN trunk version for applets, but don't do that yet. :P

The trunk version has trouble keeping icons on the dock, so let me tell you what I did. First of all I installed the standard version that the wiki provides. I then put all of my icons that I wanted on the dock. I then removed that version of AWN and installed the AWN trunk version. Which directions can be found http://wiki.awn-project.org/DistributionGuides#Testing_Package_Archive. This will provide you with cools applets like file managers, menus, weather icons. All sorts of cool stuff.

Thank you Jason for reading the blog and posting comments. Keep up with the blog because once I am done with school I am planning on updating this more often. Just very busy trying to do school and work at the same time.

Thanks and God bless,
Aaron

More on the new laptop

as you can see from my screenshot in the previous post it looks very OS X like. As I have said before I think Apple does a great job designing their hardware and OS in regards to appearance. So I loaded the dock called AWN. I originally just loaded the regular AWN, but it didnt come with any applets that I really wanted. You can find a link to get AWN installed here. I wanted the applets though and found them difficult to install manually. I ended up finding a repo that had awn-trunk to install. I think you have to add the ppa.launchpad.net repo, sorry I dont have better walkthrough available for this. The thing I found though is that the original AWN didnt have any applets and the trunk version didnt allow me to add shortcuts. It would add the shortcut but it would delete is after my session ended. The work around I found for it was to set up and install AWN and configure the shortcuts I want to it. Then when I load AWN trunk it would have those shortcuts saved and I could then add my applets on top of it. I'll keep talking about how I configured everything more and more, but I know that AWN is a popular program and many people really love it. I think it still needs some work, but am very happy with how I have it configured. I think the dock is a great idea as it keeps my desktop very clean, and some information I used regularly at my fingertips. I would suggest using it or at least checking it out.

God Bless,
Aaron

Been a while

So I got caught up doing a lot of stuff and my fiance was in a bike wreck and required a lot of care for a while.

Anyways the big news from here is that I am now officially switched to Linux. My work provided me with a "new" laptop. New to me but used. I did some research ahead of time and realized that I could run everything I needed to run for work from Linux just as well as I could in Windows. The only thing I can't do is run Visual Studio C# Express for school. I figured I could load up a VM with no problem and run it from within there. So I was thinking about running Ubuntu since that is what I am most familiar with but after hearing so many good things about Linux Mint I decided to at least check it out before I set myself up with Ubuntu. After running the live CD I was very impressed with the look of it. Everything worked right away except for wireless which had a proprietary driver that installed very easily. As a lot of you might know the worst thing about Ubuntu is that is just looks awful because of the brownish orange theme. Linux Mint however looked great. I also felt very comfortable with Linux Mint because it is based from Ubuntu. I have come to love Linux Mint for many more reasons besides looks since then but I plan on leaving some of these for a future post so I can hopefully keep this blog a little more up to date.

Anyways I have been running linux now and loving it. I joined a LUG and have been thoroughly loving it also. I encourage anyone else even if you arent running linux to join their LUG if they are remotely interested. It has been a great networking opportunity and very informative also.

Here is also a screenshot of my new desktop.

Also thanks to my friend Joyce for commenting on here. It reminded me to keep this more up to date.

God Bless,
Aaron

LVM Update

So I was able to get the whole process worked out and everything was ready to go, but apparently right now there is a bug in ubuntu that is not allowing LVM to work properly. I will try again maybe next version

Also coming up I am getting a new laptop and will be running ubuntu as my primary desktop. I will surely keep everyone updated on my problems and moments of bliss that I run across.

Aaron

LVM

So I am working on adding a 320GB drive to my MythTV box. I already know how to add the drive and create the mountpoint for it. What I really want to do though is make the computer not know the difference between the two drives. If it runs out of space on one it will just start using the next. I have figured out to do this I will have to use LVM(logical volume management (I think)) to do this. I will post directions once I figure this out. I am getting close but havent had time to follow up on some of the research I did recently.

Thanks and God Bless
Aaron

Facebook Chat

So for all you Facebook people out there as you probably know they just added a chat feature to the site. Well my only complaint is that you can not yet connect to this network except signed in through the site. Well I found a way around this. I found a windows program called Bubbles. It is kind of like Prism that google recently released except I found it a little easier. It just runs a webpage as if it was a desktop application. I have not tried to see if this will run under wine, but it seems to be using IE6 to render the web pages even though it is not my default browser, so it may need IE6 installed under wine to run properly.

thanks and God Bless
Aaron