New Year's Resolution

Day 57

I'm coming up on the two month mark with me Eee PC, and that conveniently syncs up pretty close with the start of 2009. I have a personal resolution to help ring in the new year, but I thought I could make one for the Eee as well - and that is to play well with others.

Well, other computers anyways. I never had much luck getting my Eee to find network printers at work, and I've never even bothered to set up a home network. Counting the Eee, and the soon-to-be acquired Dell from my Mom's office (I was volunteered to set up two new computers for her and that is my commission) I have six machines at my disposal and I think it's time I figure out how to make them all work together.

My ultimate goal is to get a multi-player first person shooter game up and running. I skipped many classes during college to play Half-Life with buddies in the dorms, and I'd like to recreate that in the basement with my assortment of computers. Linux and the gaming world have a love-hate relationship, so this may be an unattainable goal, but aren't all new year's resolutions?

Get Around Flash Videos that Crash Firefox

Day 48

I blogged on day 24 the woes of watching flash videos with Firefox. Every third video or so will cause Firefox (and sometimes the entire Eee) to freeze for about a minute before presenting a pop up asking if you want to terminate the program. Conveniently, when Firefox restarts it asks if you'd like to restore tabs from the previous session. I could live with this if I didn't have to wait for the error message - it feels like forever when you're anxiously waiting to Barry Maniroll yourself.


Here's a simple workaround. Instead of starting Firefox by double clicking on the icon or choosing it from the launch menu, open it using the console. In easy mode, press ctrl+alt+t, or in advanced mode select it from launch-->applications-->systems (I actually have it added to my desktop for quick access). Simply type "Firefox" and hit enter. You can even add a web address in the console to save a step once Firefox is open.

The advantage to this is that if/when a flash video freezes, you don't have to wait for the termination message to display. Simply close the console, and Firefox will terminate. When you reload it, it will ask if you want to continue from where you left off.

This doesn't fix the Linux/Flash problem, but using the console does make it a bit more tolerable.

Link is Down Message

This is a follow-up to a previous post, Strange Icons.
I'm still having occasional sightings of this mysterious wifi icon. While I don't have the answer to what it's all about and why it appears, I have some new findings I thought I'd share. The other day I decided to look around the Eee in easy mode. I was hardwired in, and I immediately spotted a familiar icon. It was just like the mystery icon I had been noticing in advanced mode, only without the red warning symbol. Strange. Why would it appear when I was successfully connected through my wireless router?

The next time the strange icon appeared, I checked the network connection tab. There was a strange status message - "Link is down." What link? And if it is down, why could I still surf the web?

I think I can safely say the icon is not an indicator or government monitoring or that my Eee has developed self awareness, but I'm still not sure what it means. If I can still connect to the Internet, it can't be that big of a deal.

I should instead be worrying that Christmas is in less than a week and I haven't gone shopping yet.

How to Record Skype Conversations

Day 42

I remember using AIM in late 1999 for voice chat. Sure, it was a beta feature - there was some serious delay and the quality was sub par - but the feature was available none the less. So when I first fired up Skype, I didn't see what all the hype was about. I soon learned the true potential is hidden behind skype credits ,which gives the caller the ability to call ordinary phone numbers.

It's just over 2 cents a minute to call anywhere in the US, so I thought it was worth experimenting with. I purchased $10 in Skype credits and punched in my wife's cell number. Since Skype ships with the Asus Eee, I figured there would be no problems, and I was correct. The connection was clear with only occasional digital distortion.

But there's really no need to spend my credits calling my wife when my own cell phone does the trick. Instead, I wanted to see the potential in using Skype for podcasting. Phone interviews are a great way to keep a podcast interesting - if you can get a quality recording.

While recording Skype conversations in Windows is fairly easy, there are not many resources available for doing so in Linux. Googling the topic brought up many pages, but few solid answers. There were a handful of tutorials for setting up Audacity to take the Skype signal, but they were either too difficult to follow, or led to dead ends in the program settings. One tutorial gave suggestions for recording through the command line, which was a concept I simply couldn't grasp. There was even a website that detailed how to connect two laptops with a series of patch cords going to and from the microphone and headphone jacks. All these "solutions" almost made me give up on recording a Skype conversation. Until I found Skype Call Recorder.

SCR is a simple-to-use addon for Skype. When a call is placed, it saves the recording as a stereo mp3 track. The convenient thing is that the caller is recorded on the left speaker track and the callee is on the right making it extremely easy to edit (If you want to know how to edit this using Audacity, leave a comment, and I'll post a quick how-to).

Skype Call Recorder can be downloaded here as a .deb package that is specifically for the Eee, so there should be no problems installing. There weren't any for me. Just click on the link and let the Eee do the hard part.

Skype Call Recorder is great for podcasting and recording phone interviews.

Problems with Shell Console

Day 41

I was trying to work through some command line tutorials and the console kept messing with the text I was entering. Every few minutes it would start entering text with space between each letter so that it l o o k e d l i k e t h i s. Needless to say, my console commands didn't work very well.

I have no idea why this was happening, and that only added to the frustration. The only way to fix the problem was to close the shell and then open a new one.

Day 40

My thirty-something year old cousin asked me to drop by her house today to help set up a digital photo frame that she bought someone for Christmas. I had a few minutes to kill between holiday errands and when I told her I'd be there, so I hit up a Dunkin Donuts drive-thru and found an unencrypted wifi signal coming from a hotel nearby.

I don't know if it's related or not, but the first site I went to (Twitter - I actually just got back in to using this site. Follow me if you'd like!) brought up a certificate expiration warning, and so did Gmail and Digg. It was then that I noticed the clock in the corner of the screen was off by about 5 hours. Strange. I figured something wasn't set up right with the hotel's signal.

Tonight when I fired up Firefox I again got the same warnings. It at least reminded me to reset the clock. When I opened the clock menu, I found the reason for all the confusion. My Eee thought it was 2018.

I don't know what caused my Eee PC to age ten years in the course of a day, but I'm going to assume it had something to do with connecting to an unsecure wireless signal... Unless it happens again. Then I'll have to find something else to blame.


And on a somewhat related note - My cousin was excited to see me walk in with the Eee. She told me she bought one for her 14 year old son for Christmas. When I asked if it was loaded with Windows or Linux, she guessed Windows. I'm half hoping that it's really Xandros - it'll give me the opportunity to go over there and spread the good word to a new generation.

How to Make USB Christmas Lights

Day 39


I spent all day pulling the decorations out of the basement and making the house look festive. We had no ornament casualties this year, but we did have two sets of lights that were only half working.

A few hours after I threw them out, I got an idea. I dug a set out of the trash and plugged it in. After spotting a section that was still working, I unplugged and cut the section off the rest of the string. My goal - to make Christmas lights for my Eee PC.

Step 1 - Cut the lights
The lights actually had three wires. one was connected to each bulb on the string, and I needed one of the others to complete the circuit. The third must have been a ground or something, so I simply removed it. I spliced both ends of the wires and twisted the two on one end together so all I would need to do is connect a power source to the other end.

Step 2 - Test the circuit
I had 8 lights in my string. I know that a USB port only sends out 5 volts of power, so before trying it on my laptop, I pressed the two wires against the terminals on a 9 volt battery. They lit up, but it was quite dim, so I knew I needed to shorten my string if it were to light up on the Eee. I cut it in half.

Step 3 - Connecting the USB.
I dug up a USB cord for an old printer that is no longer functioning and cut it about 8 inches from the connector. There were fours wires inside - red, black, green, blue. The green and blue are for data transfer, so they were useless. I stripped the red and black and connected them to the ends of my lights. Just to be safe, I wound some electrical tape around all the exposed wires before connecting them to the Eee.

They aren't the brightest, but I now have some yule-tide bling for my laptop. I was thinking about picking up a toggle switch so I could turn them on and off, but I'd love it even more if I could find the console command to stop power to the USB port. I Googled it, but didn't have much luck. Either way, USB lights are a quick and easy project for nerds caught up in the holiday spirit.