recently i acquired a sony bdv-e370 home theater which originally didn’t ship with DLNA support. a recent firmware update as of 2/2011 added DLNA support. which was awesome because it was a feature i wanted, but at the time was not willing to pay an extra $100 for the sony bdv-e570 to get it.

so then it was time to find a free linux based upnp/dlna mediaserver…luckily there are several. i’ve tried mediatomb, ushare, coherence, and minidlna. i had the most success with coherence and minidlna (minidlna seems to be based on aspects of coherence). there is also a coherence plugin available for totem and rhythmbox in gnome. some quick edits of the configuration files of minidlna and coherence allowed me to serve up multimedia files to the bdv-e370. a common problem i’ve had was getting any video files presented that were not mpegs. seems like that’s all the device wants to recognize, despite being able to play several formats. files can be transcoded into mpegs by using ffmpeg (ffmpeg -i movie.avi -target ntsc-dvd new.mpg). if an error occurs during that conversion try installing the ffmpeg unstripped packages.

update 1/11/2012:
i had abandoned this project for a long time because i had deemed it not that useful. i recently revisited it and updated to the latest minidlna (1.0.22) and there has been at least one sony firmware update since my original post. so what’s changed? the newest version of minidlna is now allowing the device to see more video formats. i can now see .avi and .mkv files (possibly others). that’s pretty awesome. the downside is that some videos, now visible, still can’t play. the device will claim that the file is corrupted. most likely the file uses a codec that the device doesn’t support. the near dvd quality videos skipped like crazy, but i’m fairly sure that’s because i’m streaming over wifi (wireless-N, but a weak signal). the device i’m running minidlna on is directly wired to the router. also a certain video played one frame and then locked up the sony device completely…i’m talking like a hard freeze. the power button wouldn’t even turn it off, i had to pull the power cable. so all and all, DLNA support on the sony device is a cool feature, but in its current state still not that useful for me. it’s less of a hassle to just watch the videos on my laptop. hopefully future firmware updates will continue to improve this feature.

pearson/vue (cisco/comptia):
DSC in deland
flagler tech college
ormond beach?

prometric:
FL tech college (deland)

i’m interested in taking red hat’s RHCSA exam at some point

when trying to do a system repair/recovery and running “sfc”…you might get an error about a repair service being unable to start.

to get around this run sfc like this:
sfc /scannow /offbootdir=c:\ /offwindir=c:\windows

source:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/winserversetup/thread/00580ff7-4412-459b-b176-c8a002ebd740

i recently received a kindle as a christmas gift and wanted to jot down some of my initial thoughts about the product. i have the wifi-only version of the kindle which i find to be very sufficient for my usage. i imagine the 3g connectivity model only becomes handy when someone either travels often or reads lots of periodicals. so what’s the most incredible feature of the kindle? clearly, the e-ink display. i mean really every other feature is secondary compared to the display. visually, i can honestly say, that i prefer reading text on the kindle versus reading physical printed media. i haven’t tried reading on the kindle for long periods of time yet (2 hours+), so i’m not sure if it really is immune to the eye strain problems caused by ordinary color LCD screens. i really dislike when people compare tablets or color e-readers to e-readers with e-ink displays. they are not the same thing. i would never want to read something the length of a novel on a color LCD. never! i also have seen people write-off the kindle as being a crappy computing device, again ignoring the incredible e-ink display (which is the center piece). will i use the kindle to web browse? i doubt it. will i use it to listen to mp3s? probably not. i have a much more compact and capable smartphone that fulfills those needs. i just simply want to use the kindle for what it’s truly meant for – reading.

update 3/21/2011:
i’ve had the kindle a couple of months now and have finished reading a handful of novels on it. i read for about 45 minutes at a time or so and never experience any eye discomfort. i obsessively only want to read material on the kindle now and not in printed form. it’s very convenient, you always have a ton of books with you. your place during reading is automatically bookmarked and there’s a built-in dictionary to look up the meanings of unknown words. i still do not use the web browser nor have i purchased any applications for the kindle (and probably never will). the kindle that i own has native PDF support, but i found it troublesome to use. for example, when viewing a single page of a PDF i had to navigate the screen several times to read the entire page. this is probably acceptable for looking at graphics, but it’s not really usable for reading. luckily, i stumbled upon a great alternative. there’s an OSS program called calibre that lets you convert amongst various ebook formats. it can convert PDF/CHMs to mobis (a format natively supported by the kindle). the PDFs are then viewable like normal kindle ebooks. calibre can also convert epubs to the mobi format.

i finally caved in and shelled out $60 for the leather case with a light. i think $35-40 would be a fairer price for it…but oh well. the good news is that the case does not look or feel cheap. the kindle snaps into it very securely and now i feel okay about bringing the kindle places. the light works great as well and is worth the extra 30 dollars…i guess :(.

if for some reason you want to read your ebooks on multiple platforms. the kindle and kindle apps will sync your ebooks and their bookmarks to your registered devices (PC, smartphone, etc).

battery life, i’ve left the kindle uncharged for 2 weeks or so with wireless turned on and it still held half a full charge.

pros:
excellent e-ink display
kindle apps for every popular platform
ebooks synced amongst different platforms
great battery life

cons:
no replaceable battery (this bothers me)
amazon DRM on purchases
does not come with a cover/case (and covers/cases are ridiculously expensive)
native PDF support isn’t as useful as it would seem
no SD card slot

recently, i was messing around with sound settings in ubuntu and somehow managed to make it where sound no longer emitted from the headphone jack. normal speaker sound was still functional however. no matter how much i tried changing settings back, i could not restore the headphone audio.

i followed the steps on: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Audio/InstallingLinuxAlsaDriverModules

and the problem was resolved.

summarized, to install latest alsa drivers…
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-audio-dev/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install linux-alsa-driver-modules-$(uname -r)

a little while back i was experimenting with expanding an xfs volume in linux and found that there’s a native utility to accomplish this called xfs_growfs. i read the man pages about it and it seemed pretty self explanatory and i tried it…and it didn’t work.

lots of googling later i finally found the solution on this blog:
http://mdesbo.wordpress.com/2010/07/15/expanding-the-array

basically, it boils down to having to delete the xfs partition and then recreate it with the desired size of what you wish to expand it to. then running the xfs_growfs utility on that partition.

the parted commands from the blog above (unmount partition first):
parted <partition>
print
mkpart primary xfs 0 -0
quit

…. then … use xfs_growfs

that’s the bare essentials of it….lots more details on the linked blog.

recently, i was unable to reconnect a host to vcenter using the usual troubleshooting methods. couldn’t find any clues as to what the problem was from the logs. the only thing noteworthy was something similar to “could not resolve version for authenticating to host agent” in the vpxa logs. i also couldn’t connect the vcenter client directly to the host either.

i eventually found this article:  https://www.igotitworking.com/problem/view/91

and after initiating a esxcfg-rescan vmhba35 from the host i then could magically rejoin it to vcenter.

note: this article was written with ESX 4.0 in mind, if this doesn’t resolve the issue try the other suggestions listed in this post – http://resinblade.net/wordpress/?p=1539

two good articles about fsmo roles:
http://www.petri.co.il/transferring_fsmo_roles.htm
http://www.petri.co.il/determining_fsmo_role_holders.htm

bum – daemon/service configuration
gufw – firewall configuration
gnome-device-manager – device manager