From: Lonnie Eaton
To: Morgan Collins
Subject: RE: Digital Conversion
Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 18:57:04 -0700

Hello; our company is going ahead with our digital conversion, even though we are not held to the Feb ’09 deadline; our engineering department says we will be digital and HD before the end of this year; I’m trying to hold them to their word!! The sooner the better, so we can at least see the college bowl games, NFL post-season and the start of NASCAR in all their digital/HD glory!

Thanks for watching;

Lonnie Eaton

Station Manager

509-574-4141

Nvidia drivers have previously required kernel headers, but not source. The new DKMS build system tells me that they now require source. I should have known better and not listened to it, but I spent I dunno how long trying to get a compiled kernel source tree to match my running system. After complaints about not being able to run under Xen, and misaligned struct_module and various other issues, I realised that I needed to apt-get install kernel-headers-2.6.27-2-generic, not kernel-headers-2.6.27-2. This is very important. Without the -generic bit, you don’t get a configured header tree, just a stock one. After realising this, I have had no problems with the development release. Everything works at lease as good as it did before, or better. The new X+nvidia drivers are WAY FASTER than on 8.04. My ATSC tuner is at least recognised now, but still isn’t really working.

It took me a bit to figure out how to turn off all the Debris and Spacejunk, and track down my favorite multimedia satellites. All I can say is… bad… fucking… ass…

In anycase, I have decided that it’s time for a new one. My choice? The Dell Studio 17″.

• Intel Core 2 Duo T8100, 2.1GHz, 800Mhz, 3M L2 Cache
• 3GB DDR2 RAM
• 17.0″ WLED 1920×1200 Display
• ATI MOBILITY RADEON HD 3650
• 250G 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive
• 8X Slot Load Burner
• Dell Wireless 1397 802.11g Half Mini Card
• Integrated High Definition Audio 2.0
• Integrated 2.0M Pixel Webcam
• 56 WHr 6-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery
• Dell Wireless 370 Bluetooth Module (2.0)
• Dell Wireless 5720 EV-DO Revision A

They are telling me that it’s going to be 3 weeks before it gets here. A co-worker of mine just ordered a laptop from Dell a month back, and they told him like 3 weeks too but it only took a week to show up on his doorstep, so I am hoping the same happens for me.

I am concerned about driver support in Linux. From what I can tell, the video card looks to be supported by the proprietary ATI(AMD) drivers. The last time I used an ATI card in linux was back before ATI was releasing drivers and the FOSS drivers were not mature.

There isn’t much information on the chipset for the wireless card or sound card. I am guessing the soundcard is supported by the Intel HD Audio driver for Linux. The wireless card will be some sort of Broadcom black box. Hopefully the b43 driver will work.

The internal bluetooth and EV-DO radio are less pressing. I have a USB dongle I can use until I get the internal one working. From what I have read about the EV-DO Radios, they are basically a chuck of programmable ROM and a radio. You have to flash the ROM in Windows for your carrier, and then you connect to it like a dumb modem. Since I don’t even have a plan right now, I’m not concerned about it.

So my device arrived and I realised that my rabbit ear antenna probably isn’t going to be work well. After a few scans with dvbscan, I am actually picking up everything except KIMA and FOX, according to antennaweb. Fox apparently isn’t broadcasting on ATSC yet ;/

A quick google search for HDTV antenna tells me not to waste my money on expensive internal antennas, that I should either get a good external UHF antenna or build one myself for cheap.

I looked locally for a DB4 or DB2 external antenna. I have an extra coax run from my roof, so this would have been idea. However, no one in town sells them apparently.

On to option B i guess. So I find two sites that describe how to build a custom DB2 antenna. The first describes how to make it out of coat hangers for less than $10. Upon reading, I already have everything needed except the matching transformer and spare metal coat hangers. In the comments, people talk about using romex… now that is something I have spare of. The second site describes pretty much the same design, only the demensions are a little off.. 7″ instead of 5 3/4″ between Vs and it’s build using a 2×4″ instead of a 2×1″, but is ment to include a deflector and a rotor.

Ultimately, I wind up using a spare piece of 3×1″ with 5 3/4″ spacing and romex. I got the matching transformer from Radio Shack, because I was sure they would have it. However it was $6! I found out later they have them at Bimart for $1.30.

After rescanning, I am now getting KIMA and much better signal on all the other transponders.

I’ll upload pictures when I get a chance.

I also picked up a USB Bluetooth Dongle. I spent some time trying to get my phone working to learn that my phone isn’t exporting a DUN service, only Voice and OBEX. Zolan has some expertise in this arena, so hopefully he will be able to assist me with the DUN portion.

The good news is that by way of obexftp ond gnokii I can now access my phone’s filesystem, contact list and calendaring!

Of course, this now means that I will be retiring my Microsoft Wireless Notebook Laser Mouse for a Wireless Bluetooth mouse so I only have to have one dongle sticking out the side of my laptop. Plus the Bluetooth dongle is so much smaller…

Well I finally got fed up with it and got myself a Motorola RAZR V3c. I like everything about it so far except that it’s not as easy to hack as I had first though. The tool for linux for P2K phones don’t seam to work with the CDMA RAZR’s, and the tools for Windows don’t seam to like accessing the device through vmware.

Minimally I need to access a native windows machine to upload a theme and seems, and then I can do the rest of what I need over bluetooth from my laptop in linux I think.

While I was waiting for the pimply teenager to scurry to the back I was looking around and I was reminded that at some point I was going to get a wireless mouse for my laptop.

There were a few options, but I didn’t really like any of what I saw. In fact, I wouldn’t have even really been seriously looking except for the fact that my USB corded mouse had just succum to death by electric shock a few days ago and I have been suffering with the built in touch pad every since.

In anycase, I picked up the Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 6000. I had some difficulties getting it working at first, and I still don’t have the Tilt Wheel working, but all of the other buttons work. I do have to load up usbmouse and plug it in before psmouse, but since it’s got a wireless dongle thing this isn’t too hard to remember.

The jury is still out on whether I like it or not.

Firefox is technically a GTK app, and I continue to use it sometimes as Konquerer does not work on all websites.

I am using Kmail for my personal email, and evolution for my work email. Why? Because I love offline imap, it’s the best of both worlds however IMAP in evolution was SLOW. Kmail leaves quite a bit to be desired as far as UI compared to Evolution, but I have yet to find any missing features.

I am really looking forward to KDE 4. I am hoping a few of the most annoying things about KDE will be resolved, as well as some more polish.