Do Something Every Day

I use the headphone jack multiple times a day, connecting my torch 9800 to the car stereo.  Over the past year, the connection has gotten flaky, eventually past the point of frustration.

It seems like a loose connection (when I fiddle with the cable, I sometimes get right and left audio), and I assumed it was the connection of the jack to the PCB inside the phone.  I was anxious to get my soldering iron hot, and void my (nonexistent) warranty.

Read more…

I’ve updated the FreeDOS USB boot image to now include the official FreeDOS 1.1 kernel, and command interpreter, now that it has been officially released.

FreeDOS USB Image: FreeDOS-1.1-USB-Boot.img.bz2

Size: 117652 bytes
SHA1: 7d8a3c73f9cfdc71611e3f7a5b7b134529179821

If you are looking for a FreeDOS 1.0 USB Boot Image, see my earlier post of the same title.

If you run in to trouble, take a look at the comments for 1.0 first, many will apply.  If that doesn’t solve your issue, leave a comment.

Ahhh... Much Better!

I created a quick greasemonkey script to enable viewing the stats on the Bell Canada branded Cellpipe 7130 modem:

Cellpipe 7130 VDSL Stats Display Greasemonkey Script

Also, I didn’t really like Bell’s logo all over the gear:

Replace Bell’s logo with TekSavvy’s on Cellpipe 7130 Greasemonkey Script

I signed up with Zip.Ca last July, and was able to rent 36 DVDs within the year.  I’ve been on the 1 DVD Unlimited plan for the whole time, and returned DVDs fairly quickly.  My total cost (taxes in) was $148.44, with an average DVD rental of $4.12.  This is actually more expensive than the 1 DVD plan (2/month), with an average DVD rental of $3.36.  I’ve averaged 3 DVDs/month, so it would still work out cheaper if I took the 1 DVD plan, and paid the extra $2.49+tx/DVD.

I didn’t find out about ZipRefill until the end of July, and I’ve now started using it.  I’m interested to see how this affects my average rentals this year.  I think I would need to average 3.7 DVDs/month or 44 DVDs/year to have this plan make sense.

I’ve been using FLAC to backup my CDs for some time, but due to the ubiquity of MP3, I frequently found myself transcoding a large number of these files for various devices.

I found a good number of scripts[1] for doing the conversion, and it seems to be  a bike shed everyone wants to chime in on.  What I found didn’t really handle modern multi-core processors, so I made some quick tweaks and thought I’d post my results.  There are two scripts:

mp3xcode:

#!/bin/bash

mkdir mp3
parallel mp3xcode_sub — *.flac

mp3xcode_sub:

#!/bin/bash

[ -r "$1" ] || { echo can not read file \”$1\” >&1 ; exit 1 ; } ;

FLAC=$1
MP3=”mp3/${FLAC%.flac}.mp3″

eval `metaflac –export-tags-to=- “$FLAC” | sed ‘s/=\(.*\)/=”\1″/’`

flac -dc “$FLAC” | lame –replaygain-accurate -v -V 2 –tt “$TITLE” \
–tn “$TRACKNUMBER” \
–tg “$GENRE” \
–ty “$DATE” \
–ta “$ARTIST” \
–tl “$ALBUM” \
–add-id3v2 \
- “$MP3″

This script seems to be a good way to do it. I’ve only tested this on linux.

On FreeBSD, there may be some tweaks required to not depend on bash.  Also, you’ll need to install the GNU parallel program (sysutils/parallel).

Having followed the http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSTuningGuide, when configuring ZFS, I was aware of the delicate nature of the kernel settings for ZFS on i386.  I recently upgraded my server to 4GB ECC from 2GB non-ECC and thought I’d like to take advantage of the extra ram, so I thought I’d play around with these options.

My current kernel config could not be simpler, ZFS-GENERIC:

include    GENERIC
ident    ZFS-GENERIC
options    KVA_PAGES=512

For this configuration I successfully used in /boot/loader.conf:

#Working options for ZFS-GENERIC 2GB RAM, KVA_PAGES=512
vm.kmem_size=”1536M”
vm.kmem_size_max=”1536M”
vfs.zfs.arc_max=”786M”

I thought it would be as simple as:

#Trial options for ZFS-GENERIC 4GB RAM, KVA_PAGES=512
vm.kmem_size=”2G”
vm.kmem_size_max=”2G”
vfs.zfs.arc_max=”1792M”

But, but to my chagrin, my system responded on boot up with a:

panic: kmem_suballoc: bad status return of 3

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The Patty Shack Oshawa

Good news for the New Year!  I’ve heard from Dave Hannah from the old Wing Shack in Whitby.

He’s launching a new venture, in Oshawa this time, called The Patty Shack.  Dave has combined the Wing Shack Wings with a burger that, in his words, is equally as good. Read more…

Over the weekend, I tried to order a pizza from Pizza Nova, using their 905-310-3300 number, but I consistently got a fast beep.  I re-dialed using their 416-439-0000 number, and was able to order my pizza fine. Whew!

I put a ticket in to voip.ms, and this is what they said:

It seems that the numbers with 310 exchange are special numbers and they are not reachable outside from the area they are linked, the test we have made indicates that the numbers are not reachable from our network.

We apologize for this inconvenience.

So, quick heads up: you can’t dial 310 numbers on voip.ms!

UPDATE (2011-04-12): 310 numbers seem to be working, see comments below.

SPA2102 ATA

I’m always looking at ways to run the house more economically.  I was already using TekSavvy for home phone, but my average bill was still around $40 then, and that was just for visual call waiting, and $0.03/minute long distance.  I was curious about switching to VoIP, and specifically, voip.ms, so I decided to give it a try.
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Oshawa is one of the best places in North America for over the air TV.  We get signals from the CN Tower, Hamilton, and many of the Buffalo stations.  Using the setup I’ll describe, I’m currently receiving 21 (or more) digital TV channels with no rotor, and many of them are HD!  Digital TV provides a crystal clear signal.  It provides a higher quality signal than Cable TV, particularly with the HD signals, as there is no compression applied to the channel.  Best of all, your monthly payments are reduced to $0!

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