LincolnBlogs
From the twisted mind of me!

I was an early adopter of voip, initially using Broadvoice, then later inphonex for service, but lately, their service has been problematic. My wife had noticed that after making or receiving a call, the next call she would not be able to hear or talk to the other end of the line. This often required me to reset and restart the IP phone and connection. After mucking around with all sorts of settings on my IP phone and then trying several soft phones as well, all with the same results, I was in the market for yet another carrier. Enter MagicJack.

MagicJack has been all over the media lately and I have stayed away from it mostly because there was no linux support. Well, recently, they came out with the MagicJack Plus, which they advertise as “Use without a computer”. I decided that was probably the way to go. After all, who can resist a $25 A YEAR phone bill, right? Shoot, even my Inphonex plan cost that much per month. So, I went out and bought a MagicJack Plus at my local RadioShack and also purchased a cheapo phone to use with it as my only phone for years has been a voip phone.

The good:
The phone quality is decent. It is easy to set up and get going. It is way inexpensive. It is very portable.

The bad:
You *DO* need a computer to set it up. I had to use a mac to get it registered (no Linux yet and I refuse to use windows). Once set up initially, no more computer needed. The quality is decent. Transferring your old number costs additional $$. Had to change my home number.

All in all I call it a good purchase. I spent $70 on it and that gets me a free year phone service along with the equipment. I have made and taken several phone calls on it now with successful results. The money I spent on the MJP will pay for itself in 3 months of my previous carriers phone bill and then I am saving $25 a month and getting better service. I have to admit it seems hard to beat at this point!

You would think that my lack of posts here lately meant I had simply dropped of the face of the earth, but that isn’t really so. I have just been extremely busy with the day to day problems facing me in RL, including how to squeeze >that< much more work into my overly busy day.

This particular recent purchase, the GeChic On-Lap 1301 13.3” Portable and USB powered Thin, Light, and Plug & Play LCD Monitor, has helped me do just that.

One of the things all high-end computer workers need to enable them to multitask better is more screen space. This has been researched and documented in a variety of different places. Well, what are you to do with your mobile workstation? You can buy one of those external USB screens, that’s what. Almost a no-brainer, right? The problem with that for a Linux user is the drivers. Most of these types of screens push video through USB, which means you have to have a working usb to video driver, not to mention video over usb is a little slow. Enter the GeChic!

The GeChic solves these problems by NOT usung usb for video, it actually has both a vga and a dvi input along with being usb powered. That’s right, no extra power cord, just plug in the usb cable and pick your input method and you are rockin’ and rollin’. This means it will work with literally ANY laptop or desktop which supports those types of video output, regardless of operating system or driver issues.

The unit itself is a little pricey at $200, however, it makes up for it’s few downsides by giving me my much needed screen space, in an attractive, easy and mobile form. I did say few downsides, and there are a couple other than the price. The first is the color. It just doesn’t want to color match my laptop’s LCD no matter how I seem to adjust it. The second is that using vga input the picture quality lacks a little. To be fair, dvi input is far superior to vga anyhow, and the vga problems could just as easily stem from my machine than from the monitor and I didn’t spend a whole lot of time messing with the settings on vga before just trying out dvi. Ymmv.

What I do like is that this is an attractive little lcd screen with a nice resolution of 1366×768. You can use it while physically attached to your laptop or it can sit standalone next to it in several positions with its included stand. To connect it to your laptop it has surprisingly strong suction cups that attach it’s swing-base to the top of your laptop and it can simply fold up or swing out for use. This allows you to also do neat things like show a presentation on the back of your laptop while you watch the front, etc..

No matter how you slice it, this little thing is mighty handy to have around and everyone who has seen it in action immediately wants one of their own. Boy, I wonder if I could get a kickback from NewEgg on this? Even at that price, I think we have a winner.

I have long held the opinion that you should not skimp on the things that you use professionally and frequently. For instance I often tell my peers to make sure they buy decent computers and not just bargain basement models. For some reason it never occurred to me to apply this reasoning to my posterior. That is, until recently.

I have been using a most uncomfortable office chair for the longest time, in fact, for the last 5 years. It’s one of those “conference room” models, which, although built plenty rugged, are not necessarily built for comfort. The real problem with this is I sit in the thing almost 8 hours a day. I even had to buy a pillow for it because I have what I like to refer to as “sysadmin’s butt”, which is essentially the lack of a posterior portion of your anatomy, due mostly to parking it in a chair 8 hours a day for many years.

A few days ago, a friend of mine who just happens to work for a great company called Knoll, got me hooked up with a review unit of the Knoll Generation chair. Let me just say I don’t know why I waited so long for a good chair!

This chair is the epitome of office comfort and has so many options to aid you in that regard it’s difficult to mention them all. Of course it offers the standard amenities such as height adjustment and a reclining back, but wait, there is more! It has these cool adjustable arms that not only raise and lower but they also have arm pads that adjust in depth, width and pivot. The back of the seat has this comfort type netting which is flexible, cool and very comfortable. The top of the back flexes almost over backwards and it a great place to rest your arm while sitting sideways in high comfort. I think the feature that threw me the most is the flex seat. Unlike most chairs with a solid unyielding seat, this seat has some degree of movement or side to side pivot. I almost thought that my chair was broken until I realized that this was intentional! This pivot to the seat allows comfort and support for how people sit. What I mean by that is people sit different ways and on different angles with their feet up, legs crossed and what have you, and this seat allows some motion in that regard to keep even support and pressure where it should be, fully on your posterior instead of on your legs when you are not seated “flat”. In addition to that, the seat depth adjusts as well.

Although this chair may be on the expensive side, I believe it’s well worth it, especially for people who are confined to such devices for much of their day. I wish they had a travel version available, I would buy it in a minute I think the best testimony is that every person in my office has now sampled the chair and ALL of them want one! If you are in need, you can’t go wrong with one of these. It’d most likely be the last office chair you would ever need to buy.

My only hope and wish is that the Knoll folks see this review and decide to send me one of their other products to test as well! Other than that, I’ll be happy to hang out in my own Genertion!

Long have I wanted to have a device that would easily tie my Netflix subscription and other streaming internet media to my tv. I have tried lots of nice things, but they all left me wanting something more, that is, until I got a Roku.

I picked up a Roku 2 XD at BestBuy for $79 and figured I would try it out and return it if it wasn’t what I really wanted. To my surprise I really like it!

My first impressions are that it is REALLY small. It literally fits, in its entirety, into the palm of my hand. It’s pretty slick looking for a little black box with a fabric tag sticking out the side. It has the normal input/output ports that you would expect for a device that connects to your tv to have, and, really, nothing else but the remote, which is also quite small.

Once you hook it all up and plug it in, you are greeted by the Roku logo while the system loads, and then you are taken through a series of steps to register your box and your account (free). After that you can start adding channels and enjoying your streaming web content on your tv!

Now the channels on Roku are different than I expected. Each channel is a service. For example, Netflix is a channel and Hulu is a channel and Crackle and Pandora, etc. and the list goes on. I am sure there is something in there for almost everybody. The ones I really enjoy, outside of Netflix, are Crackle, which somehow provides FREE streaming (recent) movies and tv content, Pandora, and Pub-D-Hub, which has all kinds of old movies, shows and cartoons (and even commercials).

The only thing I really do not like is it’s difficult to actually locate the kind of content you are looking for. This is primarily because there is so much available, and, I will have to admit that sometimes it’s fun just searching around.

What’s Good:
Small, Good looking, Quick, Inexpensive, easy to set up and easy to use.

What’s Bad:
Hard to sort through all the content to find exactly what you want.

I have been carrying a Targus laptop backpack around with me for years. Well, let me qualify that a little. I have been carrying that around with me for years while I have been trying other bags.

Honestly, I was perfectly happy with that Targus bag for the longest time, until I got old In the last 4 years or so, I have had some issues with my right shoulder, and slinging that backpack around on that shoulder has occasionally aggravated that. I know what you are saying, why not wear that backback as a backpack? Well, there are a lot of reasons like accessibility and convenience and comfort, along with the face that it makes me look/feel like more of a geek/dork/fat than I am already.

I tried to find a good sling backpack, but they are all either ridiculously expensive, cheaply made, too small or the sling is on the right hand side. Most recently I tried a Solo messenger bag, which worked in form factor, but had it’s own issues like the pocket in the flap bulged out nasty when used, the flap closure clip was single in the middle of the bag which made the bag front roll up on the corners, and the pockets just weren’t adequate enough for my space needs.

Enter the last try, the Rothco Vintage Classic Army Messenger Heavy Weight Shoulder Bag. This is a messenger-style bag made out of heavy/durable canvas material. It has 2 roomy front pockets big enough for me to carry all my odds and ends including my Kindle, usb drives, mail, my little travel hygene/medial kit,etc. The 2 side/drink pockets are great Normally those kinds of pockets are only 3 or 4 inches of mesh, but these are almost full bag height solid canvas pockets which work fantastic for carrying things like all my assorted cables and my glasses case, etc., and can be secured with snaps at the top. There is one small zippered pocket on the inside that is big enough to carry all your assorted pens and paraphernalia. Lastly the single main interior compartment is quite sizable. Although not padded for laptop carry itself, you could easily fit a 15″+ laptop in there with plenty of room to spare for your chargers, books, papers and probably your lunch too. Also, worth noting is that the bag, even when packed, does not look oddly malformed or too bulky to carry comfortably.

I mentioned previously that this was made of durable heavy canvas. That level of durable construction appears in every aspect of the bag. The stitching is solid, the hardware all the way around is metal and build for hard use. I am quite impressed with the strap itself. It too is made of a wide width heavy canvas, attached directly to the bag and is not removable. Many other messenger bags use cheap plastic clips or thin metal dog clips which invariably bind up on something and detach at the most inopportune moment. An added bonus of the strap being canvas is it does NOT slide off my shoulder

All in all it’s a great bag and so far I am quite happy with it. For around $25 you just can’t beat the price. I highly recommend this for the rest of you commuters, it gets 2 thumbs up!

   Early last week I had another burst of reading activity on my Kindle 3. Reading for me tends to come in spurts when the rest of my life doesn’t interfere and it had been a while. I loaded up the Kindle with some new goodies (Sh*t my dad says is hilarious, btw) and started peeling through not only the books but also the menus, setting things up just the way I like them.

RANT: As a side note here, why the heck are collections so freaking difficult to setup? I mean come on Amazon. Make them work by directory structure or something easy, or at least fix it so that when you add to collection, you are only shown books not already in another collection by default. OK, rant done

   Anyhow, as I was reading and setting up different collections, etc. I noticed a familiar recurring problem. The short history is when I got my Kindle 3 I noticed every so often the e-ink would not fully display, but only display VERY faintly. I called Amazon and they had me update the firmware but ut was really hard to tell if that fixed it as it was not a constant thing. Queue up last week and I notice this a LOT more. Not only while reading the books, but now in the menus, etc.. So, I called Amazon right up as they instructed me to do the last time I noticed this. They IMMEDIATELY sent me out a replacement. I mean I had it the NEXT day, during a snowstorm. There was no arguing, no listening to some low end tech worker flip pages on the other end of the phone, no shipping or return costs, no hassle whatsoever. THIS is what customer service is all about and it’s easy to see that Amazon stands behind it’s products. This is why I will always recommend the Kindle. I don’t know what the other guys service is like, but Amazon is absolutely tops every time I have had to deal with them.

   Shortly after I got my new Kindle (read hours) I got horribly sick (sinus infection) and have been that way for 4 or 5 days now. During my occasional bouts of lucidity and while waiting for the NyQuil to kick in again I was reading through my facebook posts and noticed Tom Higgins mentioning that he was enjoying using Subsonic, which is a new (to me anyway) software that manages your music collection for you. It’s a server side app with some seriously nifty clients you can run on you android phone, which made it catch my eye. I have (and still do for now) been using Kplaylist for quite some time and I really like it, but, hey, nothing wrong with checking out new things, right?

   Well, the thought of me trying out some new music collection software got me looking at my music collection. You know what this is like. I have been hanging on to my music in digital form for better than 10 years, so, it’s substantial / sizable, in different formats, mixed up, formatted and named badly, bad mp3 and ogg tags, etc.. What’s a guy to do? Well, I searched around a bit and found a whole lot of programs for Linux that will let you manually fix tags. Ick. With thousands to do I kept searching. I found a bunch of programs for windows and mac that will help you reorganize and fix your collection, and, eventually, I found ONE that will do the same on a Linux box. It’s name is MusicBrainz Picard I have been using it here and there (still sick) for a couple days now, sicking it on a directory of my music collection here and there. It sure beats doing this all by hand! It’s not perfect software by any means, but it sure will be a timesaver compared to the alternative and the more people that use it and update those databases, the better it’ll work. Check it ut, I think you’ll like it!

Some days things just go right. It’s been a while since that happened to me, hence the lack of posts lately. Well, that changed tonight…

I decided it was high time to get a new printer. I have been using used HP LaserJets for years and my last, a LaserJet 5 was finally starting to show some wear, not to mention hogging enough electricity to power a small city. I have also endured about 4 years of complaints that we didn’t have a color printer.

I checked out the stock of some local electronic stores online and spent an hour or two googling whether this or that model printer wold work under Linux. I actually wanted to grab the same printer Dann bought, just because I knew that one would work, however, I couldn’t find a local source. I settled on buying an Epson Workforce 520 from the local BesyBuy.

Setup was an absolute breeze. I unpacked it, followed the setup instructions to add it to my local wireless connection via the printer’s control panel. Then I headed to openprinting.org to grab the driver and installed it. It’s just a deb (or rpm) package so it was a click or two to install. After that I headed to Linux Mint’s printer config utility, told it to search for network printers and it was found and installed automatically with no fuss, no muss whatsoever.

Everything works, and I mean everything. This is one of those multifunction printers that not only prints, but faxes (actually I haven’t tried that and probably won’t), copies AND SCANS! After my initial test print, I fired up Mint’s “Simple Scan” which scanned a document I had on the printer easily and perfectly. I was amazed!

I believe I may have found the perfect wireless printer/copier/scanner to run under Linux Mint (yes, it’s wireless too, did I mention that). I know Linux printing has come a long long way, but this was trivially easy. If you are looking for a great new printer addition to your Linux setup, this is it!

Nope, I am not talking about the curious little Madagascan primate, I am talking about the one from System 76!

It has been a while since I have done a review, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been working one up At this past years Ohio Linux Fest I got to rub elbows with Carl Richell from System 76 who promised me the opportunity to review one of their masterpieces. After some killer anticipation, the unit arrived on my doorstep and it turned out to be their Lemur Ultra Thin laptop.

This lappy has a GORGEOUS 13″ display, a core-i3 proc, and the all the assorted (and working) ports, wifi, ethernet, sound, SUSPEND, etc., that you would come to expect. I did say working didn’t I? That’s important because, as retailer of Linux computers, it’s important to make the distinction that there is NO guesswork as to whether or not Linux will run on perfectly on it. It does

System 76 was nice enough to let me demo this thing for a long time, so it’s safe to say that I tested this thing out really well. I used it extensively at home to do my normal web surfing, video watching and music playing. I also used it for work where it was my portal for a bunch of system administration work, rdesktop and ssh sessions galore, plenty of terminals open with configuration scripts and php programming, connected through every kind of free and paid wifi you can think of, not to mention my work vpn. And a lot of that was all at the same time! This system performed more than admirably. I even used it at a work conference where I did splunk installs and testing without issue.

I am not sure what kinds of proprietary things that System 76 provides in its own packages, however everything in Ubuntu, the Linux distribution that System 76 ships with by default, runs perfectly. Then again, so did Mint 10, the other Linux distribution I installed and tested with. This left me with, literally, nothing whatsoever that didn’t meet my personal satisfaction

This laptop is very light, perfectly functional, very good looking and stunningly well designed and put together. It feels to me like a MacBook Air with a warp drive, and at literally half the price. In short, this is the laptop that I want to carry around (did I mention it’s light too)? I am hoping that Mrs. LincolnClaus is reading this. It would look great under the tree this year! I would gladly get rid of most of the rest of my laptop entourage to be able to carry one of these.

Hey, anyone want to buy a pristine condition used netbook? Or two?

How many is too many? Is this excessive or have I just been watching too many episodes of Hoarders?

• Top – Dell Inspiron 15 – My “desktop” machine.
• Far left – Macbook 5,2 – Use when I am relaxing in bed with my feet propped up. Pisses me off that I cannot get Linux shoehorned on this properly yet.
• 2nd left – Acer Aspire One – netbook I use for TLLTS work.
• Bottom middle – Acer Aspire 3680 – my main livingroom machine – always tethered to the power cord because I have had it so long the battery only lasts 11 seconds.
• 2nd right – HP Mini 110 – new netbook and daily carry.
• Far right – Thinkpad X31 – dev/test/slush box.

And, of course, these are not *all* my computers. I also have a couple ESXi boxes which run a few virtual servers and an old G3 (upgraded to G4) Blue and White that mostly is a nightstand.

So, what computers do you all have kicking around?

Wow! Long time no post! I didn’t realize it had been so long. Lots of things have happened since I last wrote here. I had a little vacation time where I did pretty much nothing, I had a great belated birthday party that many of my friends attended, and I finally got my new NAS.

I really needed a new NAS. I keep running out of room on my old 500Gb NAS, which holds all my backups and media files and such. I have been putting off getting a new one for a long long time (I am a great procrastinator). Finally I broke down and picked up a Western Digital 1TB MyBook World Edition. I quite like it!

This NAS, priced around $170 depending on where you buy it, is actually pretty featureful. It offers cifs, afs and nfs filesharing, has optional ssh login ability and serves an itunes share and streaming media share. This NAS uses green technology, so not only does it automatically go into powersaving mode when not in use, but it uses a low power drive as well, so very little heat, no fan noise, and very low power draw. The gigabit ethernet affords decent speed on data transfers and the built in software is easy to setup and use and will let you get things like individual user accounts running quickly.

All in all, not a bad NAS for the price. In fact, this is probably the most inexpensive NAS I looked at with the featureset I needed. I have never yet been disappointed by Western Digital and that holds true on this purchase as well.