Author: Roo

A Tale of Two iPods

So a while back I posted about my how my video iPod had stopped working.  My investigations pretty much pointed at the logic board being bad.  I do have a classic 512MB shuffle that I’ve been rocking, but I miss the display to figure out what album (or even sometimes artist) I’m listening to – also I had been using the video feature to watch transcoded TV shows from my MythTV PVR.

This had me surfing the apple refurb store and considering the $89 nano there since a replacement logic board will run somewhere around $90 (and I don’t get a warranty).  The local used market also was very tempting as video iPods seem to run around $100 – $120.

The usedottawa.com site seems to generally have the best local prices, but I really wanted to find one for less than $100.  As luck would have it, someone posted a black 30G video iPod for $60 the other day – I leapt on the opportunity.  I figured at this price, it was going to be a little banged up, but as long as it worked I could do a transplant.

My busted iPod is on the left, the used (but working) iPod on the right.  Note the scratch on the screen area and tape on the lower right side.  Generally the surface has been badly scratched up, this iPod has had a rough life.

Even the metal back shows serious signs of wear.  There is also gunk inside of the dock connector making the cable connection a bit tricky (I’m pretty sure if I clean out the gunk – it will be fine).

Even the side of this case is starting to bust apart (thus the tape).  I’m sort of amazed that this unit still works – it sort of restores my faith in the quality of the iPod devices.  While $60 might have sounded like a too good to be true deal, based on its condition I paid a fair price for it.

Well, next step is to strip both units down and do a little transplant surgery…

Fantastic Contraption

I ran into this flash based web game a while back, it sucked up a couple of nights while I compulsively played through the first 18 levels. I was going to post about it back then, but decided against it as there are plenty of other discussions about fantastic contraption out there already.

For the geek crowd, it should probably be renamed to fanatic compulsion.  Today I saw that two of my coworkers had just recently come across it (one of them with a physics background no less!) – they were both clearly trapped by this meme-like game.  Consider this posting a warning – it is a huge time suck.

The game allows users to save their contraptions, and share them with others via a link – so a little internet searching will find you solutions to view if you need hints.  As well, once you complete a level, you can see the solutions others have saved.  Pretty neat how 5 simple elements can be combined to create so many solutions.

Astute readers may notice that I’ve posted a Google Chrome screen capture.  This was actually taken running on Ubuntu using Wine.  Instructions came via LifeHacker, but be warned lots of things don’t work (like any https:// connections).  There is of course also CrossOver Chromium, but this is basically Wine linked to Chrome – so it suffers the same shortfalls.  I used Chrome here because for whatever reason, the flash engine included with the Wine setup is much faster than the one embedded in my Firefox (same machine).  I have more opinions on Chrome, but will save them for a future discussion.

Ubuntu and the default keyring

I run Ubuntu (Hardy at the moment) as my main desktop.  Overall its been a good experience.  The update mechanism has worked well even migrating from one release (Fiesty) to another via the update manager.  For the must have windows apps (iTunes) I run VMWare Player and a virtualized WindowsXP image.

I tend to suspend my desktop (vs. hibernate or full shutdown cycle) as it gives me nearly instant on access.  From time to time a kernel update will cause suspend to fail, the most spectacular being today when my machine would no longer complete its POST.  The solution was to disconnect the power cord for a minute and let the capacitors discharge (a little led on the mainboard went out after 30 seconds) and then it booted fine.

Look for Ubuntu 8.10 – Intrepid Ibex to be released in just over a week.  Linux isn’t for everyone, but as a developer its a nice desktop environment.

So I do regularly change my password, its a good habit to have.  In some cases, it makes sure that I at least once in a while log into the system I have access to – otherwise I might lose access to a remote system and not find out until I need to do that DNS update.

There is a facilty called the GNOME Keyring.  It hangs onto your access credentials so you’re not constantly entering passwords (for example, every time you re-open the email client).  Of course, the thing that holds onto your credentials, needs a password to keep that data safe – but you can link it to your login password.  How to do this is covered in the blog posting Automatically unlocking the default GNOME Keyring.

You may need to delete the previously stored keyring if your user password and your keyring password were not the same.

rm ~/.gnome2/keyrings/default.keyring

This is also the same sad procedure I was using to re-synchronize my keyring with my user password when it was time to change my password.  Very annoying that there didn’t seem to be a way to just change it.

Well, it turns out that there is.  The Seahorse application lets you do this.  I found the following blog posting by Ivan Torres that shows you how to do this.  Now changing the password is accomplished by Applications -> Accessories -> Passwords and Encryption Keys, then Edit->Preferences, select default and click on the Change Unlock Password button.

Easy right?  Well, not really.  As is, it works smoothly up to the point where you want to change your password – then its dig around until you remember (or figure out) how to change your password, or simply blow the keyring away and start over.  Ideally, it’d be nice to have a password change facility that did your user password and default keyring in one shot, and I hope it will be installed in /usr/bin/passwd.

Linux, you get what you pay for.