Jaunty Jackalope Coming Soon

It seems like Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex just came out not long ago and here we are, just days away from the release of Jaunty Jackalope. Another upgrading cycle begins.

Now, although I'm quick to embrace new versions, I'll be doing my upgrades in steps. Since I have two computers currently running Ibex, I'll be upgrading the one that's used less first, hoping to avoid any major issues and it'll also let me explore the new items and get used to them before upgrading my XPS 1530 Dell laptop that is my primary work machine.

It'll be an interesting experience, no doubt.

Facebook Going Mobile

Those of you fortunate enough to own a Blackberry are well familiar with the portability and easy access of social networks on the platform. Access to MySpace and Facebook is easy and convenient and I know I have been looking for away to get similar access on my Windows Mobile device.

I think I might have finally found what I'm looking, at least in regards to Facebook.

While browsing around wm6software.net, I found a new Facebook application. After a bit more research it turns out it's a rip from the new 6.5 ROM, all done by the good chaps over at XDA-Developers.

So, is the application any good?

Well, essentially the application has five different tabs:

1. Home
2. Personal Profile
3. Friends
4. Mail
5. Phonebook

Home

The home tab contains the typical things you might see on your Facebook homepage. The newsfeed is present as are status updates and tagged photos. The home page will let you easily see what is going on with your friends.

Personal Profile

The profile tab has more of the personal stuff. The wall, for example, is found here, as is the info tab with all your personal info and your photo albums. From here you can also upload photos and videos to your albums. One drawback is that at this point it doesn't appear that you can actually update any of your personal information so you're still stuck with doing that online.

Friends

The friends tab of course contains an alphabetical list of all your friends and has a search function and a few basic filters.

Mail

The mail tab naturally contains the inbox, sent messages, notifications and requests. It allows you to easily read and compose new messages and handle incoming notifications and requests.

Phonebook

The phonebook tab is actually quite interesting. It allows you to call those contacts of yours that have phone numbers listed directly from the application itself. It's a pretty neat feature.

Summary

Overall, this early version (v0.14) does a lot of what you'd expect from a Facebook application. What I'd like to see in the future is an integration with the OS itself so that notifications are delivered when status updates happen and new messages come in.

Having used the app for just a few hours so far, it's a bit early to form a good opinion but so far, I like what I see. I'm looking forward to seeing future versions.

One thing I can say for sure is: if you use Windows Mobile phones and like Facebook, you need this application.

Use sudo without Password

Those of you that use Ubuntu with any regularity might have run into the very annoying instance of always having to enter the root password when running certain commands with sudo.

For me, I use a LAMPP server on my computer to test scripts and such locally and I installed the LAMPP control panel, a GUI, to make things a bit easier. LAMPPCP is one of those programs that requires the root password every single time you run it.

So, I had to find a way around it.

A word of caution: performing the below steps can screw some things up pretty nicely so be sure you know what you're doing before you jump right into this whole thing.

1. Open a terminal window.
2. Write "sudo nano /etc/sudoers" to open up the /etc/sudoers file.
3. Add the following at the bottom: "username ALL = NOPASSWD: ALL"
   
4. Save and exit.

If you do this right, you now have one less password to enter, especially if you're running this program through the start menu.


Sources:

• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=102758
• http://linux.byexamples.com/archives/315/how-to-shutdown-and-reboot-without-sudo-password/
• http://linuxtipstricks.wordpress.com/2009/03/21/how-to-change-sudo-to-not-ask-for-your-personal-password/
  

DirecTV2PC Success!

I mentioned in my previous post how I stumbled over DirecTV2PC while trying to get some of the media sharing functionality of the DirecTV receiver to work. Well, I have taken a bit of time to download and try it out and I have to say it works remarkably well.

In a nutshell, DirecTV2PC does the following: it connects to your Dish DVR (that is connected to your network) and allows you to view any of your recorded shows on your computer. Essentially, it gives you a remote version of your list of recordings that looks and behaves just like the DVR version. From there, you just pick the show you want to watch, relax in your lawn chair, bath tub or bed and enjoy the show.

The obvious question is this: does it work well?

The short answer is yes. It works very well.

To give you an idea of what's needed for it to work well, here's a quick description of my network. I'd say it's fairly typical. My DVR is connected by cable to my router. The computer this was tested on, a Dell XPS laptop, connects using wifi to the router and streams it this way. Very simple yet very functional.

I have tested both SD content and HD content and both work without noticable problems. I don't have a HD display on my laptop so I can't really say how well it would work on a real HD screen but with what I have, full screen playback works great with both SD and HD content.

As far as I am concerned, DirecTV2PC is a great little piece of software and I expect that I'll get quite a bit of use out of it.

Now, if I can just get the media sharing part with my computer to work, I'll be all set...

Oh, and no, DirecTV2PC does not work on Linux, at least not using Wine...from what I can tell, at least.

DirecTV

A little over a month ago, we decided to drop out local phone company as our phone carrier (we don't use local phone service anymore), Internet carrier (go wireless!) and TV provider, mostly because we were able to shave about $75 of our monthly bill in regards to these specific services.

I'm very happy with DirecTV and I'm especially enjoying their HD channels. This past week, I found something I hadn't known before: the HDDVR that I have is capable of showing media from the media server I run on one of my computers. Up to this point, I have primarily used this to listen to music and such on my PS3 but it was always an extra step. Being able to feed it directly to my DVR would be even better.

So, I've started exploring this "MediaShare" functionality of the DVR. As of yet, I have had no luck getting it to work with either Orb, TVersity or WMP but it's just a matter of time, I'm sure.

In the process of researching this, I also stumbled upon DirecTV2PC, which is a feature that allows you to view recorded shows on your PC while on your home network. What a great idea! So, I have now started the process of trying this out so let's see if I can get it to work. It would be really cool under Wine on Ubuntu but we'll see about that, I suppose.

Computer Failure

I saw it coming a long time ago and I guess I just hoped it never really would happen. Something has finally happened to my desktop computer and it won't boot past the memory test. In fact, it won't boot at all, Linux or XP.

Great.

Luckily, I don't use it a whole lot anymore but I still have a ton of stuff on it. So now it's time for tinkering again, I suppose. Take the thing apart, investigate and so on.

I sure hope it comes back to life...

Transformers 2 Trailer

For you Transformers fans out there, check out the Transformers 2 trailer