The Linux Action Show

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.

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.

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!

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.

When I want to read a blog entry in an external browser such as Firefox, it wouldn’t open the browser if it wasn’t running. If Firefox was running, it’d open the blog entry in a new tab, just fine and dandy.

The solution was simple. Just put this into the ‘Settings / Configure Akregator’ under the ‘Browser’ settings of the “For External Browsing” command:
firefox %u

Simple. Akregator rocks.

I purchased some songs the other day for my son from Amazon.com.  No problem whatsoever.

Walmart is another story.  I’m running Linux, and evidently this is a problem.  Walmart wants me to update my computer to a more modern version of Windows.  I’m sorry, I can’t do that.  Or should I say, I’m unwilling to do that.  FAIL.  I’m happy to purchase a song for $0.99 (and cheaper) if it is DRM free.  I don’t want hassles.  I just want to listen to my music.  I don’t get it.

Napster is just plain confusing.  I have to sign up before I can figure out what music they have?  I can’t shop around to find music I want to purchase before signing up?  FAIL.

Does anyone have any other great DRM free music sites?  I’m liking this freedom and I have my wallet ready and open.

While I’m on this kick, why aren’t artists offering albums and songs directly from their web site?  It seems natural to purchase an album directly from the artist.  I’d love to know that they’re getting a greater slice of the pie.  How come the Internet isn’t more of a disruptive influence between artists and record companies and the money that in the darkness binds them?!?

Sigh.  We’ve come so far, and we have so far left to go.

I’m hoping that I have found a good solution.  There is a plugin that makes updating of Wordpress sites easy to do.  Well, in steps the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin.  Very nice.  I’m not using the Automatic feature.  I’m stepping through the Upgrade process, but it is painless.  Painless, I tell you!

If you have a Wordpress blog, get this plugin.  My thanks to Keith Dsouza and TechieBuzz.com for helping out and keeping the bad guys at bay.

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.