I repositioned the antenna rotator in my attic this past weekend. It’s got a full range of motion now instead of it hitting some attic joists, which is nice. I lost a couple of pounds in the 120-130 degree temps in my attic. Ah well, it’s all for the cause, eh?

I then hooked up the Magnavox Digital to Analog converter box between the antenna and the TV because it had a signal strength indicator. I then rotated the antenna for each channel that I was interested in in 20 degree increments and tested signal strengths. I then went back and tested the “strong ranges” of the antenna direction and fine tuned them.

I know what you are saying in that AtenntaWeb.org or TVFool.com has the information on direction of the broadcast stations, but surprisingly some of the directions were off a small bit, and for channel 46, it was way off.

CHANNEL / COMPASS DIRECTION / SIGNAL STRENGTH
———————————————————————-
– 2 / 220 / 20
– 5 / 240 / 30
– 8 / It doesn’t matter the direction because it’s always strong
– 11 / It doesn’t matter the direction because it’s always strong w signals in the 70s
– 46 / 340 / 19

I need to go back through some of the other channels and get signal strengths but I’m fairly pleased to get the major channels.

I needed to do a channel scan on my TV to have it pick up these “best” signal strengths. Unfortunately, you can’t “Add” a digital channel to my TV one at a time. I’d like to point the antenna and then add “46-1″. Nope. You can only Activate and deactivate the channels it has found. I’m not sure if this is because it is a “cheap” digital TV, or whether this is common.

To do the channel scan, I took the Magnavox converter out of the loop. I pointed my antenna rotor to the strongest position for Channel 2. Luckily Channel 5 is pointed in roughly the same direction as Channel 2. I then started the channel scan. Another unfortunate fact is that during the channel scan the TV is not telling me which channels it is scanning. It only tells me the percentage that it is complete. When I *guessed* it was about to scan Channel 46, I turned my rotator to point to 340 degrees and hoped for the best.

Sure enough, when I checked the channel listings, it had picked up Channel 2, Channel 5, and it got Channel 46 too! Success. I now need to go back and turn off the analog channels for the channels that I have HD signal for.

We were watching some sports on Channel 11 and the picture was amazing. I’m liking this over the air HD broadcast!

I had this problem solved several years ago … but of course I had forgotten it. I hope this helps someone else out.

I have Comcast Internet which has blocked port 25 in sending email, and now allows port 50. That port can change any day now, and without warning, no thanks to spammers. I upgraded my MEPIS Linux to version 8 last night and it went without a hitch. I was configuring Thunderbird for email and I could receive email, but not send. I knew that I needed to add a TCP port of 50 to Guarddog as you can see in this picture.

The second part I had forgotten. You have to go back to the PROTOCOL tab of Guarddog and go into the “User Defined” section to enable that protocol. Click the “Apply” button and all of a sudden Thunderbird is as happy as a clam.

I hope this helps someone else out on the Intertubes. That someone might be me, after I’ve forgotten this in a couple of months.

I’m on machine #2 of my house-wide upgrade to MEPIS 8.0 which is my Son’s desktop. He’s got some network card that reports itself as a “davicom semiconductor” card and the upgrade didn’t like it. No network access. I poked around and found the following commands that when executed as “su” solved my problem. Note to myself in the future that this may come in handy:

- rmmod tulip
- rmmod dmfe
- modprobe dmfe

My 9 year old son walked into my office yesterday. He was carrying his prized Lego Star Wars AT-TE Walker box and he asked me if I could open the box for him.

“Are you sure you want me to open that?” I say in a playful voice.
“Yes, just open the box Dad!” says he.
“I’m not sure I should open that box.” I say purposefully being annoying.

My son sighs and rolls his eyes. My annoying behavior is having the desired effect!

And then my 9 year old son says this:
“sudo Open My Lego box”

I was powerless. I had to obey his command. I was laughing full out while I did it, but I opened his Lego box.

I’m a proud dad.

I must say that I haven’t ever seen this one before. I’m transitioning from an XP Pro machine to a new Vista machine. I’m now trying to debug through a VCX and … this. What gives?!?!

I wish I was there.  I can’t wait to hear of the excellent presentations, lessons learned, and comraderie found.

SW Fox Conference

If you haven’t listened to Chris and Bryan’s show, you gotta:

The Linux Action Show

My wife surprised me with a GPS system for my birthday last month, and I love it.  Georgia is a difficult state to navigate around.  Each of the older roads are named for where they go.   This means that the roads end up changing names every 5 miles or less.  For example, Roswell Rd. is the road that goes to the city of Roswell.  However, things get difficult when you are in Roswell, that same road is named Atlanta Hwy because … it leads back to Atlanta.  Of course the road just doesn’t end in Roswell but it keeps going, and keeps changing names.  You see my difficulty in driving in this city.

Along with the name change  issue, the road signs are miniscule and far off the road.  Forget it if it is night time, and you’re looking for a particular turn.  Add to that that the road signs have often been mangled by trucks taking too sharp of a corner, and you might as well give up.

My friend suggested that I check with Garmin to see if I get a free update to the maps, and I did!  Yeah Garmin!

I had to update my GPS software however and it only has software for Windows and Mac.  Small boo for Garmin.

They allow for the download of an EXE that is 2G in size and allow that to happen through the Firefox browser.  Yeah Garmin!

They require a downloader piece of software that wouldn’t work with Firefox, but did work through Internet Explorer.  Boo Garmin.

After downloading the software, I can run it from my network server, but it takes forever to extract.  Hmmm.

After validating my software with my Nuvi 350 GPS, it then says that I need more space on my C:\ drive and it doesn’t allow me to specify a different drive.  Boo Garmin.

It says that I need about 6G of space on my C:\ drive.  I clean and clean and risk instability, but I couldn’t get enough space.  My F:\ partition has enough space but that’s not an option for the software.  Boo Garmin.

My son’s computer normally boots to MEPIS Linux, but he’s also got the remnants of Windows and he’s got just enough space for this process; 9G free.  Whew.  Lucky!

After about 30 minutes of extracting the file over the network, and an hour of updates, I’ve got my new maps.  Yeah Garmin!

Dang, that was a long hard road to travel to get me to travel our long hard roads.  I’ll let you know if the maps are any better.  My old Nuvi thinks the road in front of my neighborhood is one way and likes to send me a crazy path.  I hope it’s better now.

I’ve been doing more web site designs lately. My clients will often give me hundreds of product images that I need to manipulate. I’ve got Thumbnailer on the Windows platform to do a lot of my processing.

However, I’ve taken to adding borders to the images. Typically I’m adding a white inner border, with a colored border that matches the web site color scheme. Thumbnailer doesn’t have this capability however. At least not the version that I’ve purchased.

After having enough, I finally stumbled upon the solution: MOGRIFY which is part of the ImageMagick suite of tools.

Here are some examples. To add a white border to the images:mogrify -border 10x10 -bordercolor '#FFFFFF' *.jpg
I will then add a thin yello border:mogrify -border 2x2 -bordercolor '#FFCC33' *.jpg

Here are some other variations that I haven’t tried just yet, but I found it on some other sites. What could go wrong?

To convert a set of images from PNG to JPG:mogrify -format jpeg -quality 85 *.png

To resize a set of images: mogrify -resize 500x375 -quality 80 +profile *.jpg

To force your image to a certain size with resizing:mogrify -geometry 400x200 *.jpg

I hope this post helps someone out. Let me know if you found it useful.

I normally don’t post political things on this blog, tending to keep this blog technical in nature but … my friend is running for congress!  How can I not post about it?!?

Kevin Ragsdale, FoxForward “Best Presenter” winner, is running for congress.  His top priority just happens to be my top priority for this election: our budget crisis.

I’ll be keeping my eye out to see what Kevin’s stance is on the Fair Tax legislation.  There’s nothing like bringing Trillions of dollars back into the US economy and giving power back to the people, like the Fair Tax.

Good luck Kevin!!!  Give ‘em heck!