What if it didn’t need to be that way? What if it could be truly useful to me? What would it take and what would it cost? To be honest, the price can stay the same if they give me these tools:

1. Web site administration – In the 21st century, I want a simple web site that I can log into and administer all of my phone functions. Vonage has had this *for-ev-er*! Need this or the deal is off and my home land line goes bye-bye.

2. Caller ID/Phone book – Yes, everyone has this, but I want to be able to administer the caller ID through a web interface. Because phone companies allow Caller ID spoofing, I want to be able to override the Caller ID. Instead of the caller ID showing “Merchant SVC” as an example, I should be able to set the caller ID to be “Dont Answer” or “FONEBOT” or “Jerkoid” or “POLITICIAN” or whatever I set. At the same time, “Cell Phone GA” becomes “Kevin Cully” when I call home from my cell phone. Right now I’m thinking “Boy, that phone number looks familiar. Should I take a chance and answer it?” Please help me manage the incoming calls.

3. Dump Calls – Google voice has this. Again this isn’t rocket science. I want to dump phonebots into the trash. Dump “PRIVATE” callers automatically into Voice Mail. Shouldn’t I be able to administer this myself?

4. Call routing/Simultaneous Ring – This should be included with any package above the basic package. This would have kept land lines in place with just this feature. Allow me to ring other phones (cell phones? Hmmm?) at the same time. This way my home phone would have kept being my main phone line with cell phones being supplemental.

5. Voicemail delivery options – Again Vonage, Skype, and Google Voice all have this. Give me the option to transcribe the voicemail and email it to me, or attach it as an WAV or MP3 file. So basic.

6. Video phones – I know this might have required DSL upgrades, but with a small subsidy of a hardware manufacturer, a video phone should be able to have a graphics chip that does massive compression on a video stream to allow it to happen over land lines. Grandma would *love* this feature. Once we have this on cell phones, land lines are even more dead than they are now.

Only #6 is difficult and/or expensive. These land line phone companies deserve to die because they failed to innovate and spent all of their time and energy on maintaining their monopoly and working with the government to keep it so. In the end, the land line will die but it didn’t need to be so.

Goodbye land lines. I wish I could say it was a pleasure to know you.

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!

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 contemplated doing all sorts of expensive solutions. Window AC unit was one, but it would be ugly, loud and my neighbors wouldn’t like it as my office faces the street. I’ve contemplated re-routing my upstairs AC into my office. The upstairs naturally runs more than the downstairs and that’d help.

I decided that the two 19″ CRTs were a major culprit however and I could replace them. I’ve been watching LCD monitor prices on Dealnews.com and prices were pretty stable for 20″ widescreen monitors, hovering right around $200. Sometimes more, sometimes less.

I decided to hop over to Walmart.com and see what they had to offer. They had an ACER 20″ widescreen AL2016WB monitor for $184. It was capable of 1680×1050 with a nice refresh rate and nice contrast ratio. I watched the price for a couple of days and it was stable (not dropping) so I ordered two of them. For $0.87 delivery to the door for each ($1.94 total), that’s pretty good. Dang if UPS wasn’t ringing my doorbell in just a couple of days. I was really shocked at how fast they arrived. I was expecting 10 business days. Good deal.

Well, the big test was to try it out on my MEPIS Linux based Toshiba laptop. I fully expected to plug the thing in, reboot and have a lovely display. Wasn’t to be. The monitor would blank out with a small window stating “Input Not Supported”. Of course my Toshiba Satellite laptop isn’t the best of laptops so when the external monitor is receiving the signal, the LCD on the laptop is disabled. Not a fun way to debug things. In my laptop I’ve got the Intel Mobile 945GM/GMS/940GML video card. I know it’s fairly capable as it was able to run my 1600×1200 CRT display. I’m hoping it’s able to run at 1680×1050 for the LCD monitor.

ALT+F6 gets me a text login prompt and I log in as root. I’ve tried a ton of things including 915resolution and running Xorg -configure followed by a Xorg -config /root/xorg.conf.new to try out what was autodetected by Xorg. No love.

I finally got in and started really playing with the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. I removed all of the references to the 1600×1200 resolutions in the Display sections. I added in lots of “1680×1050″ references in its place.

shutdown now -r got the laptop to reboot and … damn, it worked! Joy.

The only way I can explain it is that the laptop and LCD monitor aren’t really “talking” the way they should be so the laptop is guessing what video signal to send over. Because they weren’t talking, the laptop was sending over a 1600×1200 signal which the LCD monitor was rejecting but the laptop wasn’t listening, so we were at an impasse. I finally got the Intel Mobile card to send over the right signal and monitor was happy. I spent a couple of hours spanning a couple of weekend days on this. I searched all over the web. I hope this helps some other poor soul out.

Linux rocks but in this case, it’s got some ways to go. I’m about to try out the second monitor on my Winblows computer. We’ll see how that goes. Let me know if this helps you out any.

Dell deceived customers, judge says

The article isn’t well written, but the gist of the article is that Dell deceived people into purchasing extended warranties and service contracts that just didn’t deliver.   I never go for that stuff anyway, and you shouldn’t either.

There were a couple of times where I think I should have gotten the extended warranty but … when I think back on it, it would only matter if you believe in the warranty or service contract.  It’s never that easy.  Save your money.  Dell is still a good company for hardware, just don’t buy into extended contracts.

I’ve been doing more and more web design work and less Visual Foxpro work.  My favorite web tools are on Linux to be honest.  I love Quanta+ as an HTML and CSS editor.  I even like the FTP tools available on Linux where I use both Konqueror and gFTP to transfer files around.  So here I am, doing more work on my Linux laptop, craning my neck.  What am I going to do about it.

Today I had enough.  I removed my 19″ CRT monitor from my desktop and switched it back to single monitor.  My laptop won’t do dual monitor (stretching the desktop onto two monitors) but with the 4 desktops on my Linux, I don’t think I’ll miss it.   I had to edit my xorg.conf to add the 1600×1200 resolution to the file, and with a quick “CTRL+ALT+Backspace” to restart the graphical environment, the monitor fired up with tons of space on the desktop, plus three more just like it!  Happiness.

I’ve had to bump up the font size on a couple of screens but that’s hardly worth mentioning.  This monitor is also just slightly more blurry than an LCD screen is.  I’d love to get a couple of LCD monitors and the Matrox DualHead2Go appliance to get my modest laptop to be totally rocking.  Money is tight however.

My only real problem is that I look at this monitor and keep wanting to go to the wrong keyboard.  That should resolve itself in a day or two to retrain my brain.

Perhaps this is an opportunity.  Perhaps someone else will succeed where TVease failed.

They were fighting over the computer.  I had some (very) old laptops hanging around and I decided to slap Puppy Linux on one of them.  Just damn.  Every time I try Puppy, it is astounding.  Stupid name, great product.

This doorstop of a laptop once cost over $4,000 and now it just plain was sitting there gathering dust.  Puppy rocks on this thing.  The laptop is so old that it didn’t have a built in ethernet card in it.  A PCMCIA card (Netgear FA511) had just a bit of trouble with Puppy.  By probing it using “modprobe tulip” got the card identified.  A quick call to the DHCP server and we’re rocking along to the internet.

Astounding on how quick the thing is.  Starts up in under 30 seconds off of the HD, applications work as they should.  Awesome.

My REALbasic application that hits the Internet also works on it.  Kevin is happy.

For the printer, I checked Walmart to see what they carried.  There was a HP D1420 that was only $29 and got good reviews from the Linux crowd as Linux just talked to it just fine once plugged in.  Done deal.  We picked it up on the way Saturday morning.

Sure enough, Linux recognized it as soon as it was installed.  Test print was successful.  On to training my mother and father.  BTW, it was also my father’s 70th birthday.

They fired up the machine, logged in, clicked on the phone icon on the toolbar for the dialer.  The modem didn’t get the dial tone on the first try but did on the second.  I think I need to insert a pause somewhere.   Connected.  Thunderbird got their mail without a problem.  Firebird allowed them to browse the internet.  OpenOffice allowed them to read and create spreadsheets and documents without a hitch.

They’re surprised on how fast the computer starts up and shuts down.  I told them that it should stay fast over the years too.  Windows seems to slow down.  I’m not sure if that is solved with Vista.  Doubt it.

So, in conclusion, they love it.  They mention how great the computer is.  They’re glad to be off of NetZero and on Copper.net.  NetZero may have had a benefit of extra speed but it was eaten up by all of the advertizements.  My mother says that she doesn’t think that she needs broadband now either.  It’s plenty fast enough for what they are doing with their computer.

Mission accomplished.

Grandma is currently a NetZero subscriber for her Windows ME machine that we’re retiring.  NetZero doesn’t offer a Linux dial-up option so I signed Grandma up for http://copper.net.  Only $9.95 per month.  Easy setup too.  Modem stuff is done.

I transferred over the Thunderbird email directories and got that working under Ubuntu.  Trivial since I’ve done this many times.  Grandma’s almost ready to go live … except …

… except … that I was awoken last night with a thought.  Grandma’s old printer, which I don’t have here, feeds from a parallel port.   Her new computer doesn’t have a parallel port.  Only USB ports.  Dag nabbit!  No good deed goes unpunished.

So now, I have a decision to make: (1) new printer or (2) print server.  I’m not sure which will be cheaper and with less hassles?