Saturday, December 29, 2007

Calendar-Geek
Ok, so here's the thing; I want to synchronize my Palm PDA with my Google Calendar.
I can sync my palm to my PC with the built-in software that comes with the standard Ubuntu install. The trick is synchronizing that with Google Calendar.
The default calendaring application in Ubuntu is Evolution, and that's where my palm stuff gets synchronized to. So I needed to find a way to get Evolution sync'd with Google. There's a service called scheduleworld that can act as a central repository to synchronize with a variety of platforms, including Google, so I signed up for a free account. But how do I get the information to scheduleworld? That's where SyncEvolution comes in.
First you have to add the repository in Synaptic under the settings menu, select Sources, and then on the "Third-Party Software" tab, add "deb http://www.estamos.de/download/apt stable main" then back in Synaptic, search for "SyncEvolution", and you'll find three packages. For the version of Evolution that comes with Ubuntu 7.10, I needed to install "syncevolution-evolution-2.12" From there, it gets a little more complicated because I need to do some stuff in the terminal, and edit some config files. Fortuneately, the Getting Started link above is pretty specific for what I needed to do. Specifically, I had to do the following 3 commands in a terminal window:
  • mkdir -p ~/.sync4j/evolution
  • cp -r /usr/share/doc/syncevolution/scheduleworld ~/.sync4j/evolution/
  • gedit ~/.sync4j/evolution/scheduleworld/spds/syncml/config.txt
    • set "username" and "password" and choose a unique string for "deviceId"
Once all that was done, I could run the command "syncevolution scheduleworld", which would sync my PC's Evolution calendar with ScheduleWorld, and trigger ScheduleWorld to automatically sync with my Google calendar.
I added a launcher of type "Application in Terminal" with the "syncevolution scheduleworld" command in it so that I could to the sync in one click.
So in summary, I now have it set up so that I can click the SyncEvolution launcher, then sync my Palm, then click the SyncEvolution launcher again, and all my calendars will be up to date everyhwere!

Saturday, December 15, 2007

Bicycle-Geek
I competed in my first bike race recently. The Iceman Cometh Challenge is the worlds largest single-day mountain bike race. It's held every November in Traverse City, Michigan.
There are around 2000 competitors, and I raced in the beginner category.
With my only training being my daily (8 mile, flat) commute to work, I was concerned that I wouldn't be able to finish the 27.5 mile race on hilly trails. My goal was to finish in under 3 hours.
A good friend built up a nice hard-tail bike for me to race on, and I ordered a bunch of Gu to keep me energized.
The weather for the race was perfect, and all was going smoothly until about 2/3 of the way through the race. Inexplicably, the bolts that hold my chainrings started coming loose. I made the mistake of not bringing any tools, so when I stopped there was not much I could do. As I was trying to tighten them as best I could with my fingers, another cyclist stopped to offer help. He asked what I needed and how long it would take; when I told him I just needed a wrench for a few seconds, he produced one and I was all fixed! The joy was short-lived however because the loose rings must have done something to my chain, which broke within a few minutes. So I started walking in the hopes that I would find an aid station and someone with a chain tool. Fortunately, after walking for about 20 minutes another racer stopped to offer a chain tool! Understandably, he didn't want to wait for me to make the repair, so he left his tool with me on the chance that we would see each other at the finish. I worked very hard to remember his name (I'm terrible with names), and though I didn't see him at the finish, I was able to find his hometown from the results board and look him up later in the phonebook so I could settle-up with him.
So I did finish, and even with the mechanical difficulties, I made my goal of under 3 hours!
It was a very positive experience, and I hope to do it again next year. Next time I will bring plenty of tools, and I will also be very willing to help other racers like I was helped.

Here's photographic proof that I crossed the finish line:

Monday, August 27, 2007

MP3-Geek
Last time, I posted about how Wal-Mart has made it as easy to buy music that will play on my computer as it would be to steal the same music. Now that I've bought a few albums (Seventh Day Slumber, Rebecca St. James, and Britt Nicole), I do have one complaint. The ID3 tags in the MP3 files leave something to be desired. ID3 tags are part of the music file that contain information about the song like artist, title, album, track number, etc. In the Seventh Day Slumber album, they were non-existent, for the other two, there was a bunch of stuff missing. This causes a problem because the software that loads these songs on my iPod uses this information to make it possible for me to find the music when I want to listen to it.
So the solution was to select "Add/Remove..." in the Applications menu of Linux, and find a free program that can help me modify my recently purchased files. One of the ones that I found was EasyTag, and it is excellent! EasyTag parses the filenames, and automatically fills in the ID3 tags for all the songs that I purchased from Wal-Mart.
Now I have all my new music on my iPod, and I couldn't be happier.

BTW, I'm really impressed with the Britt Nicole album!

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Music-Geek
Finally, I can buy music online!
OK, you might be thinking that purchasing music online has been around for years, but when you consider that I am using an iPod and Linux, that's not so true. Up until now, the only way to buy music was through iTunes or a similar "store" that only sold DRM'd song files. Then even when iTunes started selling some of their music without DRM, I was still left out because there is no iTunes application for Linux. (Of course it has been dead simple to get music at no-cost online, but I really do consider that stealing. How can it be easy to steal, but hard to pay for a product?!?) But now Wal-Mart has come to my rescue with their musicdownloads.walmart.com store. I can download tracks right from my web browser and now they play on my iPod, my computer, and my CD MP3 player!
It is amazing to me that it has taken this long for a retailer to finally start collecting my money!
I'll be enjoying the latest Seventh Day Slumber album now. . .

Oh, I almost forgot; the Wal-Mart store says it requires Windows, and it turns out that it will refuse to work with Firefox, but thanks to some advice from a guy on /. I installed the Epiphany browser, and that worked fine.

Saturday, June 30, 2007

Family-Geek
My youngest daughter and I had a little argument today over who loves who more. It went something like this:
Her: I love you daddy.
Me: I love you more!
Her: No, I love you more.
Me: No, I love YOU more.
Her: (thinks for a moment) ...I love you less than God, but more than baby birds. And I love baby birds a lot!

So she won the argument. I think it was really a win-win though!
It really doesn't get any better than that!

Friday, June 08, 2007

There and back again.
The Pecos Wilderness was better than I expected! It was also snowier than I expected.
Overall, it was a phenomenal trip. There couldn't be a better group of guys: sharing, encouraging, and adventurous. We couldn't have asked for clearer skies, the only precipitation we saw was a light snow as we reached the highest pass. It couldn't have been much more extreme without major injuries; we really really had to rely on God for strength and wisdom. He is awesome!

Here are some pictures from the trip:

IMG_0499

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Backpacking-Geek
After taking last year off to take the big family RV trip, we're back to the annual men's backpacking trip! This year we'll be spending 6 days in the Pecos Wilderness in New Mexico.
Here is a map of the area that we plan to hike in:
Day 1 – Leave Michigan 9:00am
Day 2 – Arrive at the wilderness 24 hours later and start hiking.
1st night will be along Rio Santa Barbara.
Day 3 – Hike up above tree-line, past No Fish Lake and over to the South side of the ridge
2nd Night near Truchas Lakes
Day 4 – Leave camp set up, and go day hiking up to Truchas Peak, or just hang out in the quiet solitude near camp.
3rd night in the same location
Day 5 – Hike East along the ridge line
4th night near intersection of trails 26 & 36
Day 6 – Continue hiking along the ridge, heading North today
5th night near Jicarita Peak
Day 7 – Hike out by evening and start driving home
Day 8 – Arrive back home the following night

Please “...keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give [us] the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that [we] may know him better.” (Eph 1:17)

Sunday, May 20, 2007

Storage-Geek
Back in the old days (early 2006), we stored all of our important documents in a shared folder on one of our Windows desktop computers. This was handy because all 4 computers in our house could get to the same files, but had it's share of problems.
One problem was that the sharing computer had to be running all the time - an obvious waste of electricity.
Another problem was even more important - a single point of failure. That computer decided to have hard drive problems one day and we thought all of our family photos were lost forever! That's a terrible, sinking feeling. The backup of that computer was several months old (quit shaking your head, you're backups are old too), and we were really worried. Fortunately, with a little tinkering (including putting the drive in the freezer), I was able to recover almost all of the data from the failed drive.
So learning from that experience, we decided to buy a RAID NAS to store our files a little more safely. We decided on the D-Link DNS-323 (from NewEgg of course), and a couple of Seagate drives for it (because they have a better warranty). The only minor issue with the DNS-323 is that you will need to install the latest firmware, but if you're buying a BYOD NAS, then you probably won't have a problem with that. It was real easy to set up in a mirrored RAID array for redundancy, and now I feel like my data is at least safe from a single-drive failure. I bought a third hard drive at the same time, and still use that to back up the NAS periodically to guard against a catastrophic accident of some kind.

The NAS has been working great with Windows clients, and I assumed that it would also work great with linux, but I did run into a slight problem. I was able to browse to the NAS over the network, and get to the files, but some applications didn't show the network in their "open" dialogs. So I had to figure out how to "mount" the NAS differently.
To get it to work in linux for every "open" dialog, I had to mount it using the /etc/fstab file by adding the following line using a text editor:
//192.168.1.48/Volume_1 /media/nas smbfs username=myuid,password=mypwd 0 0

Now all is working very well, and I feel pretty safe with my files. :-)
iPod-Geek
This episode in my Ubuntu adventure has to do with my iPod music player. I love my iPod, and would be pretty upset if it wasn't going to work with Linux. Fortunately, I am not too attached to the iTunes application or the iTunes Music Store. I've purchased a few songs from the ITMS, but not very many. Most of my songs are in the MP3 format, ripped from CDs that I've purchased.
So anyway, with that as background, I found that gtkpod works just fine for my needs. It read the library from my iPod without any trouble, and I was able to easily put new music on my iPod. I had been a little worried that the music wouldn't show up properly on the iPod, but it was exactly the way I expected it to be.
It's not as seamless as iTunes, and if I had a lot of DRM'd music, I think that would have been an issue, but for me it is exactly what I need. I am really looking forward to Amazon.com opening their music store that will sell platform-independent music, so I can buy the music once and know that it will play on any device.

Saturday, May 19, 2007

Printing-Geek
One of the problems that I've run into already with Ubuntu is printing. I think if I had a locally attached printer, it would be simple plug-and-play (or close to it). But I've got to complicate things by having a networked printer.
I'm using a Brother MFC-420CN printer. Not only that, but it's a multi-function device and I'd like to be able to scan too. Picky, huh?
Anyway, after a lot of head scratching and trying to follow the instructions at the Brother web site, I found this help page.
There are some bits that only apply to the older versions of Ubuntu, but it's pretty easy to figure out which ones, and follow the instructions that apply to Feisty Fawn.
Once I followed these instructions, I was able to print and scan without a problem!

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Transition from Windows to Ubuntu
Since I have almost no experience with Linux, I chose to install Ubuntu on a separate hard drive, and dual-boot with Windows until I get everything figured out. I'm not sure if this is the best idea, since I'll still have a crutch to fall back on. If I were "upgrading" to Vista, there would be no turning back, so I'm not sure why I'm being so cautious here, but it seems like the safe thing to do.
The installation went surprisingly smooth! Compared to installing Windows, it was a breeze! This is certainly encouraging. All the normal stuff was installed by default, the updates ran automatically, and didn't even have to reboot 42 times. Having OpenOffice and Evolution is comparable to MSOffice and Outlook, and I didn't even have to install anything extra.
There are a bunch of optional packages that are easily installed from the "Add/Remove..." application, and they're all free.
So far, I'm not seeing any fatal flaws or show stoppers in my plan to switch completely to Linux. I'll get it all figured out on my PC, and then I'll go ahead and roll it out to the rest of the family. The goal is to be completely switched over by the fall.
One significant thing to note here is that I'm not switching because it's free, I'm switching because it's better. We're relatively happy with WindowsXP, but we're going to have to switch to another operating system in the future, and it looks like Ubuntu is the best choice.
Linux-Geek
I've been a long-time Microsoft customer from the days of MS-DOS 3.3, and have seen each iteration of their operating systems as an improvement (WindowME excepted). Until now.
Windows Vista does not seem to be an improvement. There is much on the web about the many issues with Vista, so I won't go into detail other than to say that my experience and the experience of people I have spoken with tells me that I don't want to use it.
So if I'm going to have to switch operating systems eventually, perhaps Vista is not the only option. I could replace my 4 computers with Apples, but that would be really expensive! So I've decided to make the switch to Ubuntu Linux instead of switching to Vista (or Apple).
I know that there will be some bumps along the way, so I'll try recording my experiences in the hope that I can help some others who want to do something similar.
Wish me luck!

Friday, January 19, 2007

Comic-Geek
I was very pleased to learn that I am Superman ...

Your results:
You are Superman
























Superman
75%
Green Lantern
60%
Spider-Man
55%
The Flash
55%
Iron Man
55%
Supergirl
50%
Robin
47%
Hulk
45%
Batman
35%
Catwoman
35%
Wonder Woman
25%
You are mild-mannered, good,
strong and you love to help others.


Click here to take the "Which Superhero am I?" quiz...