TechieM2's Blog

So my Entourage Edge was delivered last Friday morning as I was getting ready for work.
This is a device with a 9.7" E-Ink display on one side and a 10.1" Tablet LCD display on the other side.
The device runs Android.
I had time to unpack it, set it up, and let it charge a bit before I took it to work.
I had it plugged in most of the day at work and got used to the basic usage of the device.
Read on for my initial review and thoughts. Continue reading "Introduction to the Entourage Edge"

So here's the deal.
As with many geeks, my main computer has a fairly decent sound system (output to a 5.1 surround system that is linked to a 4.1 surround system).
Also, like many geeks, I tend to have a fair number of audio devices (laptops, media players, etc.)that I often or occasionally use along with my main system.
Along with these I have my MythTV system that I like to use as well.

The problem is, I cannot take full advantage of my speakers or headphones with all of these.
My speaker system is connected directly to my main machine.
The front audio channels are sent to a little 3 channel stereo mixer.
Also sent to this mixer is stereo audio from my MythTV box.
The last channel is a free stereo cable I generally connect to my laptop.
My headphones are plugged into the mixer.
This lets me listen to any of the devices with my headphones (and mix the signals to appropriate levels), but not with my speakers.
It also limits my headphones to only getting the front channels from my main machine.

What I would really like is a mixer I can properly use with everything, and use to output to both my headphones and my speakers.
This means the mixer needs to be able to output to at least 6 channels (to handle proper output to my 5.1 surround system, which I do not intend to replace anytime soon as they sound great and fit nicely in my room), as well as headphones (this is pretty much standard on mixers though).
It also needs to support multiple channels in so I can get the full 6 channel output from my machine, as well as stereo inputs from at least 2 other sources (more preferred).
The input from my machine could be done either via multiple stereo channels (single connector or split), or maybe SPDIF in (assuming the mixer can differentiate the channels from an SPDIF signal...I don't really know how SPDIF works).
Ideally the mixer would fit in a 4u rack space (my current mixer is in the 10u rack I have my machine/ups/etc. in).

Obviously it would need the ability to control the volumes of all the input and output channels independently so I can fully control the mix going to my headphones or to each part of the speaker system (front LR /rear LR/sub/center).
I really don't have a price requirement at this point.
My basic inclination is less than $1000 for what would be needed.

Does something like this exist?
Am I just crazy?
I find it hard to believe that nobody has wanted something like this before.
Maybe it already exists and I'm just looking at the wrong things.

I would appreciate any suggestions as to how to accomplish this.

I did a little review of the Caster game for Helios.
It is posted on his blog.

Go here to read it!

Mark II

I recently enabled the auto-blocking feature of PSAD on my firewall.
I decided that it would be interesting to see exactly what was being blocked without needing to manually look up every blocked IP from the PSAD status.
I wrote up a little perl script to parse the status and generate a report of the basic whois information for the currently blocked IP addresses.

I have it in my cron.hourly so I can see what has recently been blocked.

The script isn't very fancy, but it works and should be fairly easily customizable.
You can get the script here - parseblocks.pl


parseblocks.pl by Mark D. Montgomery II is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Current Features:
Generates a basic text logfile noting the current date and time.
Gives the total number of active blocks.
Lists each Blocked IP and gives the basic whois information for it.

Future Features (i.e. stuff I'd like to do):
Add the option to generate an html report as well as the text report.
Make the text report prettier.

Mark II

The VidMaster

I have been wanting to get a Mythtv system running for several years,
and in the last couple months finally got all the needed parts together.
Continue reading "The VidMaster"

So you may be wondering what my Lair looks like these days.
Well, here is a brief tour.
Enjoy!
Continue reading "Welcome to The Lair"

UPDATE Notice:
We have decided to hide the program window when the system is unlocked. So instead of 320x240 Unlock images I would like images to be used as the system wallpaper instead (i.e. corresponding to the same resolutions as the Locked images).
I am updating the appropriate parts of the post.
End UPDATE Notice:

We are currently nearing completion of the initial release of LatteLock, a new FOSS (GPL3) cross-platform net cafe system, which will be put into place in a local shop owned by my friend once it is ready.
The server component is a PHP/MySQL setup that controls the client app which will run on any platform it can be compiled for.
We are developing on Linux of course but will be compiling the client application for Windows as well.

I am requesting submissions of Image sets to include with the system to make it more interesting for others who download it and do not wish to create their own images.
Above is the current not-so-awesome logo I am using for it for now.

If I receive several sets I will make the one I like the best the default set included with the system.
All eligible sets will be offered in an archive separate from the main client and server downloads.
All included sets will be acknowledged in the documentation.
Continue reading "Calling Graphic Designers!"

So you may be wondering what a crazy geek like me carries around in his kit.
Well, read on for a tour of my Geek Kit!
Warning! Geekiness and Pictures ahead!
Continue reading "My Geek Kit"

I recently took on the task of converting our old family video tapes into DVDs.
To start out, I pulled out my old tv and tape recording scripts and fixed them up a bit (and made them work again...).
tvrec is designed for recording directly from my tv tuner.
taperec is designed for reading from the composite input on my tv tuner.

Both scripts record directly to 720x480 mpeg2 video with ac3 audio.
And yes, I know it's overkill but I like it. :P

The problem I then ran into was that the recordings were simply too big to fit on DVD.
I noticed that most of the available DVD creation programs don't re-encode videos down to fit on the disc.
This led me to searching around for a way to re-encode a video down to a specified filesize.

After reading around I decided that the best option was write another script to run the calculations and re-encode the video with the (hopefully) optimal video bitrate to get the desired filesize.
Thus was born resizevid.

The main issue I ran into with this was that you can't easily determine the size of the audio stream in order to determine the video stream size to use for calculations.
My work around is to rip the audio stream out with ffmpeg in order to get an accurate size to use.
This file is then deleted at the end of the script since it is not used.

The desired filesize and the audio stream filesize are used to determine the optimal new bitrate for the encoding.
The video is then re-encoded with the new video bitrate out to a new file.

The scripts are available in this archive.

I of course welcome any improvements.

Ok, so Carla Schroder just HAD to ask about our setups in her latest article here.

So, just what DOES this crazy geek's setup look like you may ask?

Well, welcome to the tour of my LAN.
Continue reading "Ph34r The Lan"

Yesterday was the second anniversary of my second kidney transplant.
Hooray for being alive!
Thanks bro!

I added a new article to the wiki: How To turn your laptop into a wired and virtual machine to wireless router

http://bit.ly/M2Bwo

For those who may be wondering, here's a short overview of how the church internet stream is setup.

The church router/firewall is running IceCast 2.3.2 to do the streaming.
It is using a fairly plain configuration defining the admin, source, and relay authentication information.

The server is fed from the PIII-866 that sits in the church balcony with the sound equipment.
The feed that goes to the building also goes to the line-in on the feeder box.

The box is running IDJC with Jack for controlling the stream.
There is a playlist currently consisting of a couple CC licensed albums from Jamendo, with a short feed introduction message mixed in every several songs.

During services, we switch IDJC from sending the playlist to the feed to sending the line-in stream to the feed.
During service parts we cannot legally broadcast (such as special music numbers that use a CD background), we switch it back to the playlist.

That pretty much covers the setup.
There's really not much to it.

So some of you may wonder how a crazy geek like me keeps in contact with everyone, so I figured I'd give you a little overview.
As you probably know, I am a Linux Geek and a Console Lover, so I'll cover my clients and integration methods after the main content.
Continue reading "How I communicate online"

So I figured I'd try out this newfangled Twitter thing.
Maybe I'll update it a little more often than the blog. :P


http://twitter.com/techiem2

Update:
On identi.ca now too. :P

http://identi.ca/techiem2