Chromium on Ubuntu

I’ve previously mentioned that I’ve toyed with Chrome a bit, both on Windows and I’ve tried out the various ways to make it run under Linux.  The Windows experience isn’t bad, but the Linux story was pretty unusable/uninteresting.

A slashdot post went by that mentioned the new 2.0 version of Chrome and indicated that a Linux build was available, but also mentioned how usable it was.  I had to try it out.  If you’re interested here is what you need to do.

Start at the PPA (personal package archive) for Ubuntu Chromium.  It will instruct you to add a line to your /etc/apt/sources.list file.  Since I’m running Intrepid Ibex I added the following:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main

Then you need to add the key if you want to avoid the warnings about an untrusted source.  Execute this command line:

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 5a9bf3bb4e5e17b5

Then update your apt-cache:

sudo apt-get update

Followed by installing chromium itself:

sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

Its still very early. Tabs don’t currently work, https seems broken in some way, no flash support, crashes, etc. On the bright side – it is native Linux and now that you’ve hooked yourself up to the PPA you should get regular refreshes as part of the system update process.  There is lots that is working – Google Reader for example, and my favorite Chrome feature the omnibar seems to be working well too.

Oh yeah, Happy St. Patrick’s Day.
ubuntuchromium

iPod earbuds disassembled

img_0769

The other day my iPod ‘stock’ earbuds stopped working correctly.  At first I thought it might be something wrong with my ear, since the volume on the right side was so much lower than the left.  I swapped the buds around and the low volume followed – so it wasn’t my ears.  Next worry was that my iPod had gotten sick, but a quick check with another set of headphones and I knew I was ok.

While the stock iPod headphones aren’t anything special, I’ve grown to like them.  They are actually well matched to the iPod itself which I find to have background hiss when used with better headphones.  Most of my listening is done at about 1/3 volume anyways – I did enough damage to my hearing as a teenager, I like to pretend I’m smarter now.

Of course I had to take them apart to fix them.  Initially I had no idea how to open them up, searching around found me this posting on taking the older style apart.  It wasn’t until today that I found this video – but I had already figured it out myself.  In the picture above, you can see the two parts.  A little pressure with your thumb nail on the  joint and it will pop apart nicely.

Once I had them apart – I tested them to see if the problem was still there, so I could poke at the wires to see what was wrong.  They worked fine – no fiddling required.  So I simply popped the earbud back together and its been working normally since.  I suspect that the two wires had gotten twisted and were rubbing causing a short, but who knows.

Sometimes things just need to be taken apart and put back together.

Time to upgrade the server

img_0858The server that hosts lowtek.ca sits in a dusty corner of my furnace room.  There are lots of good reasons to not host your own web presence, but if you are stubborn like I am you might find this interesting.

The current hardware is an AMD Athlon XP 1800+ that I bought back in 2001 – I remember it cost me a bit more than $1700 at the time. This used to be my desktop until I upgraded to a much quieter (and slightly faster) refurbished machine a couple of years ago.  For the most part I’ve been avoiding buying new hardware to avoid the steep price depreciation.

Last week the server machine shut itself off, two days in a row.  There wasn’t much data in the logs, but poking around I’m fairly convinced that the CPU was overheating.  The sensor data claims a 23C swing in reported temperatures (55C-78C).  Either way, the machine is now unreliable in my mind and I need the server to be reliable.

While I was tempted to go the refurbished route, as I can pick up a reasonably capable system for about $100 – I really wanted to avoid getting in the same mess in a few years.  So after some amount of searching, I settled on the following components:

Total works out to under $200.  I can reuse a case (or steal one from a friend) and the drives I have already.  I do plan to measure the power consumption of my new system vs. the existing one, I’m hopeful I will get results similar to this claim of 41watts.

My thinking here is that by buying new, I’m going to have a more reliable system for longer.  The energy savings are a sensible investment over a few years, thus both the Atom CPU and 80Plus power supply make sense.  Less heat (again the Atom) should mean easier cooling, and again hopefully longer life.