Archive for category technology

Adding shares to your Serviio library

Let’s say you are running Serviio as a media server on your Windows machine and you want add share folders to the library. You may find that the share locations show up on your media device but your actual files do not. This is because Serviio is running as a service on your computer and it’s probably being started by the default “System” user. That user may not have access to your shares, especially if you have the shares mounted using specific user credentials. There’s two things I can show you to fix this issue.

First, when you add the folders to Serviio make sure to add them via the “network”. In other words, if you have the shares mounted as mapped drives, don’t use the mapped drive letters. I experienced some issues when doing it that way.  Secondly, you’ll want to configure the service to run under your user account. Here’s the step-by-step:

First open control panel and open Administrative Tools:

 

Next double-click “Services”:

Find the Serviio Service:

 

Right click on it and choose “Properties”:

 

Click on the “Log On” tab and set the credentials for the user which has access to the Windows Share:

 

Hit OK and stop/start the service by right clicking on it and choosing “Stop”. After it stops, right click again and choose “Start”.

You should now be able to access the files from your media device (PS3, Xbox360, and other).

 

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Cool Christmas Gift Idea

Looking for a cool gift for Christmas? I found a cheap little device that would be awesome for just about anyone, or you could even get colorful cool socks. It’s called the WikiReader. For around 20 bucks, you get a device contains the entire Wikipedia encyclopedia in English. It comes with a four gigabyte SD card. It has a touchscreen display with an onscreen keyboard. Your information will always be up-to-date because there are updates available for the device quarterly. For $20, it’s a hell of a deal. Wikipedia has over 3 million topics and contains the equivalent of 1,000 volumes.

Some people may dispute the accuracy of some of the things in Wikipedia, because it can be updated by anyone. This is very much a testament to open source in general. Even though anyone can edit Wikipedia, it can also be checked and verified by the community. I’ve always found that Wikipedia is as accurate (and sometimes more so) than any World Book or Britannica. Here’s a link to the item:

http://bestsellingauctions.com/index.php/shop/comments/220910497098

This is one of my new sites. It is designed to add better communication to auction listings. I’m really excited about the site, and I’m looking for participant in the community.

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Couldn’t Load XPCOM

If you are like me, you like to use the latest plugins for Firefox (when you use Firefox). Things like Firebug have become a staple for my web browser usage. I also love using Debian as my OS, and the stable version comes with a much older version of Firefox (sans logos and with the name iceweasel). Unless you download older version of plugins, most of the time you’ll have trouble installing the plugins you want.

The simple solution is to download and install the latest version of Firefox directly from Mozilla. There’s not much of an install process. Just download and uncompress the file. You’ll get a firefox directory, which I moved over to my home directory and proceeded to create shortcuts for on my desktop and menus.

If you are using the 64 bit version of the OS, you will quickly run into the “Couldn’t Load XPCOM” error. It’s obvious that it is a library issue but the error doesn’t give you a big clue as to how to fix it.

Good news, the fix is extremely easy. You are lacking some 32 bit libs that are required to run the program.
Fix is by running the following as root or with sudo:

apt-get install ia32-libs-gtk

After that, you should be able to run Firefox. Enjoy!

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Double-Edge Razor Bliss

My father used to have a comb-over and I always said, “if I go bald, I’m going to shave it all off”. Well genetics is hateful to some of us, and I indeed went bald quickly after the age of 19. Being a man of my word (usually), I started shaving my head after the denial stage. I’ve been shaving it ever since. I’m almost 34 years old, so I have quite a few years of shaving experience. Today changed everything though.

I’ve been using a Fusion Power for about a year. Before that I used a regular Fusion. Before that I used a Mach-3 Power. This goes all the way back to the Gillette Sensor. It was a two blade razor. I’ve been using mult-bladed razors for at least 10 years. The more blades the better, I’ve always thought.

I’ve been stupid. The multi-blade razors have been tough on my skin AFTER the shave is over. They shave close and really aggressively. Your skin is smooth after you shave with them but the next day you’ll have ingrown hairs and bumps. I’ve read that this is a result of the lifting motion of the first few blades on the razor. This lifting motion was once regarded as a break through for close shaves. I remember the commercials. The first blade lifts the hair out of the skin and then the next blade either lifts further or cuts the hair. This actually cuts the hair so that it settles under the skin. Thus the reason it produces a lot of ingrown hairs. The hairs grow back the wrong directly.

Some ideas are great, but are later found to have negative effects. This is one of them.

So, on with my story. I started reading about double-edge razors and wet-shaving in general. I found that there were a lot of people that really take their shaving seriously. I watched video reviews on Youtube of razors. I shopped on Amazon for the perfect razor. I ended up buying one of these:

This is the best purchase I’ve made in a long time. It came in today and I had to immediately shave with it. It’s amazing. I can’t describe the difference, but it’s makes you want to shave. It shaves like a knife through butter. It glides across your skin. It’s just amazing. Plus I bought 100 blades for this thing for a whopping $14. This is the cheapest, most amazing, and close shave I’ve ever had. Read up on double-edge shaving. It’s well worth the time and you’ll save a lot of money.

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LXDE – The Light-weight Linux Desktop Environment

I was reading a post over at the Linux Mint Blog and found that I’m a bit behind on my Linux news. I’ve never heard of LXDE. Now my desktop environment of choice is Gnome, usually. I also like XFCE, but Gnome has all the features and rarely lets me down. I like the variety in Linux so I was glad to see yet another desktop environment.

LXDE seems to be geared toward netbooks and other cloud-client computers. Linux has many light-weight desktop environments, and even though I like variety, sometimes I wish that they would all come together and work together.

This leads me to a pitfall of open source. It’s also an advantage. Those are complete contradictions, but there’s really no other way to explain it. I lean more toward the advantage side of things but sometimes I wonder if the different projects could be merged as much as they are split.

It seems that it’s perfectly logical for developers to split from a project and create a fork, but rarely do two projects merge to form a super project. Perhaps open source in general needs more merging to balance out the massive amounts of forks….just a thought.

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What’s Killing Linux and Software Freedom?

I know many will say “we knew that already” when they read what I’m about to write, but I just came to this realization today. I was reading a blog title “I miss using Linux“. The author was describing some of the reasons he can’t avoid using Windows. That blog is a continuation and actually comprises of my interpretations and expostulation on the previous blog on data synthesis.

There are many good reasons like the ones he offers. Some people want to game, but game companies just don’t make games for Linux because it isn’t popular enough. Others need certain programs that are only available for Windows. Whatever the reasons, it’s not going to be the “year of the Linux Desktop” any time soon, but those people have another option and are Nevada Online Casinos games .

One part that really stood out to me about the post was the reiteration that Photoshop was a main reason for not using Windows. I would actually go so far as to say that the entire creative suite is a major reason more people don’t switch to Linux completely.

Sure, one could possibly run it in a VM but that’s not a good solution. If you need a VM of Windows, why not just run Windows, right? That’s the correct reasoning if you ask me, and I’m a Linux advocate. The problem could be that more people are procrastinating truthfully. They simply don’t want to switch completely or don’t feel comfortable enough in Linux to use it full time. I don’t think this is the prime reason, but for some it could be a factor.

Adobe is the problem, at least in my mind. Adobe is the last non-open company. Microsoft office uses an open document format finally. There is a lot of compatibility with Open Office. Most other programs have decent open source alternatives. Even Photoshop has a decent open source alternative in the Gimp, but some people don’t think it is enough. Adobe has a lock on a lot of the media on the web right now with Flash, even though there are better alternatives to using Flash, most sites use it.

Adobe is holding back Linux. Rather, our dependency on Adobe products is holding back Linux tremendously. There would be a lot more people to adopt Linux if the Creative Suite was available in it. There would be a lot of people adopt Linux is Flash was no longer the defacto standard for media on the web.

Apple has the right idea by not including Flash support on the iPhone. This will help push us away from the closed-standard. I’m for this change.

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Driver Scanning Scammers

I was trying to locate a simple audio driver for a Windows XP VM I have. Basically, I’m in Linux and I want to watch Netflix but my main VM is having trouble with SilverLight for some strange reason, and rather than deal with that, I decided to use a spare VM. The movies play but I don’t have sound in that VM. I realized that the VM was an N-Lite created image, which means that most of the drivers were stripped out of it. So I decided to find the driver and install it.

This is when I started getting furious. The problem is, when you search Google for driver downloads, you will undoubtedly run into nothing but scams. This is the same for Bing and Yahoo. The entire first page of just about any driver download search will have nothing but scams. By scams I mean people trying to get you to download software that costs money, just so you can download and install FREE drivers for you hardware that you’ve already bought.

So, looking through these scams I realized that there are at least three different pieces of software everyone is trying to sell. The first one I ran into was Driver Detective. This seemed to be the most spammed software out there. Tons of fake sites with fake “Thanks” comments on them, but no true download for your driver, blanket the first page of search results. These sites don’t actually have the driver, only a download link for the DriverDetective software. Whether or not the driver detective software works isn’t even the questions. The tactics used to sell this software make it nearly impossible for even a very computer-literate person to find the driver they need.

It’s days like this that make me appreciate some of the OEMs like Dell, which make it very easy for customers to find drivers. Undoubtedly the adsense to the right of this post will have links to driver software, but that is expected, those are ads. They clearly say so. They are required to disclose what they are selling.

If you run into this problem, here’s probably the easiest way to find the correct driver for your system. Open up device manager. This is usually accomplished through the Windows Control Panel. Once there, find the problem device, with the exclamation point beside it, and right click on it. Choose “Properties”. Go to the details and look for the VEN and DEV ids. These should each be four characters long. Pull up http://pcidatabase.com on your browser. Search for those ids. You should get the manufacturer and device from that. This will at least help narrow down what driver you need. Get the drivers from the manufacturers website. Don’t even bother Googling it.

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Is Debian Still Relevant

I’ve been dual booting or running Linux full time now since around 1996. During the first few years, I used mostly Red Hat based distributions. I used Mandrake/Mandriva, SuSE, Red Hat, and Fedora to name a few. When I switched over to Debian, my eyes were truly open to what a distribution could be. I’m not even sure what made me switch to Debian. If I had to guess, it was during my distro whoring days when I just switched distros at random, trying each one out for at least a few days.

Needless to say, Debian-based distros have been my staple ever since. I’ve tried others. I’m a big fan of ArchLinux, for example, but I’ve always had a Debian-based distro running on a machine somewhere.

A few years ago I started using Ubuntu, which is probably the most widely used distribution of Linux there is. Ubuntu uses as its base Debian testing/unstable, and build upon it, creating a great user experience.

Ubuntu has become so popular that there are now many distributions of Linux based on Ubuntu. That makes Debian the grandfather distribution of all of these. Probably may favorite Ubuntu-based distro is Mint. It adds to the base Ubuntu system and promises a better out-of-the-box media experience, along with a better theme. Ubuntu needs better designers in my opinion.

With all of these Debian-based distros and distributions based on Debian-based distros, is there still a need for Debian itself?

Here recently, I decided to replace my Mint installation with the newest Ubuntu release (10.4). I should mention that I’m installing the 64-bit version of all OSs mentioned. This is so I can take advantage of the RAM I have installed on my main system. I should also mention that there is an issue with my nVidia card and the “nv” generic open source nVidia driver. This error causes many problems when I try to install most distros. The problem occurs when the distro recognizes my nVidia card and uses the nv driver. This usually causes the system to not boot. I was able to get around this by using the Ubuntu alternative install CD and using the curses-based installer. This installer is more like the default Debian installer and doesn’t require X. I’m probably one of the few people who like this type of installer over the Live-CD installers. There are two main reasons that I prefer them.

  1. Curses-based installers are much faster. Waiting on a Live-CD to load can take time. There are advantages to Live-CDs but when I’m wanting to install an OS that I’ve pretty familiar with, curses-based installers are more efficient.
  2. Errors like the one I mentioned can make the OS much more difficult to get up and running. The installer mistakenly uses the wrong display driver. This mistake doesn’t just cause an issue with X. It makes the entire system freeze for some reason.

So even though I used the alternative installer, I still ran into issues post-install. This required me to boot into recovery mode and install the proprietary nVidia drivers from the command line. Since one of Ubuntu’s goals is to make Linux easier for the masses, this is very counter-intuitive. If a first time Linux user ran into this same issue, they would be turned off of Linux instantly.

So, after having other issues with Ubuntu that shouldn’t be there, such as 64-bit Adobe Flash sucking completely on it (videos won’t pause or let you use the slider to seek through them), I decided to try something else. I thought to myself, “Why not try Debian 64 bit?” I was in for a surprise.

Debian had none of the issues I ran into with Ubuntu. I even installed the desktop right away, and it came up without any errors. I still had to install my proprietary nVidia drivers, but for some reason Debian used X settings that didn’t freeze the system. This is probably due to the fact that it doesn’t use Compiz right out of the box. I believe that the issues I had in Ubuntu were due to Compiz being enabled by default. I like my eye candy just as much as the next guy, but a desktop that works out of the box is a great thing.

I’ve always like Debian as a server OS and I’ve used it many times as a desktop OS. I have to say, after evaluating the latest Ubuntu and Mint, Debian is still very relevant and could even give them a run for their money as a desktop OS. Sure they have some added features that make them a bit easier for a new user, if the user doesn’t run into the issues I had, but for many of us, Debian is actually easier to use. I’ve been using Ubuntu so long, letting it take care of things like my networking and automatically starting Empathy when I login, I have forgotten just how simplistic Debian can be. It does what I want, when I want it, with little fuss.

I’ll be using Debian this year. I may try out the next Ubuntu release in October. I’ll probably try a few other distros as well, but Debian doesn’t seem to be going away from my computer any time soon. The politics inside the Debian camp may be rough, but the results are spectacular.

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Streamlining e-commerce

E-commerce has been around for a while now. Ever since the early day of the internet, people have been making purchases online. It has become much better over the years, no doubt. At the same time, it has become a very complicated beast.

I recently started a class on e-commerce. We are actually in our first week of class still, but one of the first discussions has centered around a diagram that lays out the steps involved in a typical e-commerce setting. Looking at it has led me to realize that e-commerce is much more complicated than it should be.

I have a prediction for the next decade or so. There are some forms of e-commerce which have already emerged as forerunners of a new type of system. People don’t want to go through a 12 step process to make a purchase online. We make purchases online because they are convenient. I would much rather go shop, when I’m trying to decide what I want to buy. However, if I know what I want to buy, I would much rather purchase it online.

Online purchases are more convenient, offer more selection, and are less expensive due to the more globally competitive marketplace. It’s not as timely in regard to actually receiving the product. One has to wait for the product to arrive through shipping. Today, shipping has been streamlined to the point where it’s almost not a good argument. I would much rather wait for a product to ship to me than fight the crowds at the stores.

Think about a trip to your local Wal-mart. They have fifty checkout lanes but only five are open. They could handle a massive amount of people, yet you almost certainly have to wait in line every time. This is, of course, unless you are like me and only go at 3am. At 3am there is only one lane open, lane 17 next to the cigarettes.

The point is, no matter how many customers there are in the store through the day, there are always lines at ever cash register. These lines keep people in the stores. It makes them spend more. The longer you are in Wal-mart. The longer they have to convince you to buy something else. They do this, not through pushy salespeople, but through subtle subliminal advertising techniques that deal with your senses of sight, smell, and hearing. They’ve found that the best way to get someone to spend more money, is to make them stay in the store longer, and at the end of the visit, they put you in tight quarters with many “must-have” items. They also put things like candy and tabloids there for you to grab while you wait.

This technique is being tested within e-commerce itself. Let’s dig into this more and discuss how people make money online.

Making money online is dependent upon one thing…Traffic. Traffic is THE major factor in making money online. If one has traffic, the rest is pretty easy actually. Some people will tell you that you have to have targeted traffic or a certain type of traffic, but that is non-sense. The only real requirement is TRAFFIC. With traffic, you can find a simple way to make money.

That’s what these sites are thinking when they make the checkout process so difficult, and this theory probably holds a lot of weight. It most likely does create more income for the sites. If they customers spend more time browsing your site, they are more likely to buy more stuff. Here’s one thing to consider though. How annoyed with your site does the average customer become after a given amount of time.

Apple has done one thing completely right over the past decade. Some people think that Apple is great because it made such a great media device when it created the iPod. You may feel that the iPhone is simply the best phone ever made. All of these are mere opinion. All of these are things you would hear fanboys of Apple spout.

I agree with us trade data that the iPod is not an amazing product in the personal media device category. It’s merely a mediocre product. The really amazing product in this situation is the iTunes store. Now, along with the AppStore and the BookStore, Apple has created a digital marketplace that is superb. These stores don’t offer the typical e-commerce atmosphere. They make the buying process a one-click process. THIS is why the iTunes and AppStore is better than most others. They meld their hardware products such as the iPod, iPhone, iMac, Macbook, and Mac Mini to their stores of digital products.

Their version of e-commerce takes a 12 step process and turns it into a three step process. Those steps are browse, buy, and use. They have found that the faster a users gets through the buy step, the faster they can get back to the browse step.

In the future, we will see a lot more marketplaces like this. Others have already appeared, such as the Playstation Network.

This is the new way to sell things on the web.

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Resetting WordPress Passwords Manually

I’ve had to do this for my wife and her mom both, so I thought I would share this with anyone who needs to reset a WordPress password. I personally love WordPress. You can build any type of site with it, not just a blog. If you have created a WordPress site but haven’t visited the admin dashboard in a while, you may have forgotten your password. I thought that WordPress would email you a lost password, but maybe they didn’t put in their correct email address. It could have also been the installation script they used through cPanel. Whichever the case, they couldn’t get into their dashboard and they needed their passwords sent to them.

There’s a very easy way to reset that password through SQL. Whether you are using phpmyadmin or some other SQL client to access your databases, you’ll want to use the following SQL statement to reset your password:

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UPDATE `wp_users` SET `user_pass`=md5('password1') WHERE `ID`=1;

You can change password1 to whatever you want. I’m amazed that WordPress passwords aren’t stored with more encryption than a simple MD5 hash. It’s secure enough, don’t get me wrong. I’m just surprised that the WordPress developers didn’t opt for more.

Oh well, I hope that helps someone in a pinch.

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