Jul 27

TivoGrab

By linc Programming, TivoGrab No Comments »


A while back I mentioned a little work I was doing investigating getting my recorded shows off of my new Tivo onto more portable media (I watch my shows on the train to work).

After talking about that, my friend Allan spoke with me about getting a script together and specifically, about getting a BashPodder type of setup working to download the shows automatically. Well, I did a little poking around with php and after some tweaking I have some up with just such a monster. Now Allan was supposed to beta the script out for me this weekend, and I haven’t heard anything from him yet, however, I have been running the script myself now for most of a week and have decided to release it into the wild after commenting the crap out of the code. So without further ado, I give you TivoGrab.

Now just for a little review: This php script is designed, similarly to BashPodder, to be run from command line, probably via crontab entry. I have designed and tested the script on php 5.x cli with simplexml, which I believe to be included standard with php 5. In a nutshell, this script downloads the shows.xml file from a web enabled tivo2 (and maybe others?), parses it out for downloadable shows, checks those shows against a log file it keeps of downloaded shows, and creates a bash script from the results. The bash script, called getshows.sh, will download the shows off the tivo, decode them, and convert them for further use.

Now this leaves a variety of ways open for this to be run, but probably the most popular would be by hand and through a crontab entry. By hand, you can run the php file “php tivograb.php”, generate the getshows.sh and then have the opportunity to look through it and delete any shows you really don’t want before running the shell script (it’s not hard to follow). As a crontab entry I would recommend running it out of a wraper shell script so you can launch the tivograb.php and then the getshows.sh afterwards. One small warning about that, though, would be to keep good track of that process as it can take a very long time to run – maybe once a day during the night would be a good time.

As always, I am interested in seeing what else people can do with this, so drop me a note and let me know!

Jul 22

Want to feel cheap?

By linc Customer Service, Home Life, Humor, work No Comments »

computertraining

This will be of interest to any of my fellow computer professionals out there:

Recently I have been bombarded every time I turn on the TV with commercials from ComputerTraining.Com. This is an institution which boasts that in just 6 months it can turn your life around with an exciting new and high paying career as a computer professional. Now to me, this is wrong on so many levels…

I find it hard to believe that you can be turned into a computer expert in 6 months. The mere suggestion that you can acquire that kind of knowledge in that short amount of time at least implies that knowledge and training in this field is easy, even simple. It really cheapens my chosen career.

This is the kind of place that turns out paper tigers who inundate the field, making opinions and salaries of legitimate professionals low. If you think I am kidding, remember how many horror stories you have heard and perhaps personally experienced about help-desk/support calls. Then, take a walk to their website and look at the job titles of the people who have student success stories..(help desk tech’s)

Jul 20

The Source

By linc Linux No Comments »


Episode 7 – “Virtualbox” – July 8, 2008 from thesourceshow on Vimeo.

To stay that I have been busy this past year is kind of an understatment. It’s been a while since I have had the opportunity to catch up with some of my podcasts, and I did so this weekend. One of the ones I caught up on was The Source. I just wanted to say that I am always impressed with the quality of this videocast, which is as good better than most others available on the net. Great job Aaron and crew! BTW, the commercial was great! Cute kids ;-)

Jul 17

And all I got was…..

By linc work No Comments »


So, I sent my daughter to Hawaii this summer with some schoolmates on a science trip. She just got back a few days ago and brought me a present – a little hula girl dashboard bobble head doll. She’s the only thing I have adorning my desk right now and looks pretty lonely there. I’ll have to get her some company.

Hey, you think Darth Vader action figures dig Hula Girls??

:-)

Jul 16

Moving right along..

By linc work No Comments »


What does an entire year of cube life look like? Well, it looks like this. This is the pile I have accumulated after working at the Uni for a year. I just got to move into my new cubie diggs and managed to fit all my stuff on one cart ;-)

Now what I really need is some good artwork and a desk set. Shouldn’t be this hard to find a decent stapler ;-)

Jul 14

Facebook and Old Friends

By linc Home Life No Comments »

I have never been much of a supporter of the big social network websites like myspace, etc.. I have never seen much use for them. Well, that is until recently. Just recently I was contacted twice through facebook by old friends. One who was nice to the fat kid and helped me through hard times in highschool, and one who was my best friend in college.

Talking to my old friends gave me pause to reflect a little bit. I just wanted to take this opportunity to say thanks to a few people (whether they read it here or not).

I want to thank my friend George Cosentino for being my close friend all through grade school and into highschool. He and his family are amongst the few people that I think were always really good to me.

I wanted to thank my friend Dylan Turnbull and his family for the same while I was in highschool. Some of the most fun times I had were with Dylan. When I wasn’t hanging out with him and his family, I was hanging out with my buddy Bob Lisak and his girlfriend Carolyn Kavitch (hope I spelled that right). These are the people that kept me sane and (mostly) out of trouble while I was stuck back in nowhere upstate New York.

When I went to college, I actually felt pretty abandoned and lonely. Central Ohio is a long way from upstate NY when you only have a motorcycle :-) Luckily I found a new best friend there who not only became a great portion of my support system, so far away from home, but also became a brother to me – really part of my family. That person is Gary Savage. I owe him a lot. Gary not only helped me find places to live and helped me get back and forth to work, but also was instrumental in leading me to Jesus. He was also really very entertaining to hang around with :-) Ahh, the stories…. But I digress….

This is where I met my wife, Michele. It goes without saying that she is a big portion of my life and I couldn’t do without her. Now I might imagine it differently now and again, but just the same, couldn’t do without her. She, of course, was instrumental in the birth of my daughter Charlotte as well :-)

Since then, a few friends have been instrumental in helping me grow up along the way. They are my friend Bob Catera, for finally getting me into the IT field my buddy Carl Whitmore, for keeping me sane and entertained so may years on Rock Street, my friend Dann Washko who was instrumental in my Linux wanderings and ultimately my current career, and finally Brian Hechinger, for getting me started in my new and better life in Downingtown/Philly.

So, why the trip down memory lane? I just wanted to make sure to go on record and say thanks to a few friends. Real life can be so demanding these days that many times people can forget to do so. Certainly I have been one of them.

Jul 06

A man and his coffee

By linc Home Life No Comments »


I had a nice weekend. My parents came down for a visit, and while here, surprised me with an early Christmas gift. They knew I dug my Keurig coffeemaker t work and bought me a personal model for home. It’s a Keurig Elite B40. If you haven’t seen these things in action yet, they take little k-cups, which are small plastic cups with some sort of coffee or tea in them and are individually sealed, and you place them in the machine and you get 1 serving of coffee/tea/whatever. It’s a brilliant invention which keeps me from wasting a whole pot of coffee every time I want a cup, not to mention it’s loads faster than making an entire pot. I have seen two different types of these, the k-cup type and the Senseo type, which use a little teabag type setup to accomplish the same goal. My preference, however, after having sampled both types of machines and both types of coffees is for the Keurig. It’s wonderful stuff and I am off now to have another cup :-)

Jul 01

OpenSuse 11

By linc Linux, OpenSuse 1 Comment »


So it looks like Pat and I had the same idea this weekend. That is to play around with the new OpenSuse 11.

Before I started, though, I needed a system I could install on. Live cd’s are great and all, but it’s just not the same as having the OS running on your real hardware, and I wanted to give it a fair shake, so to speak. Well, since I am broke and can’t afford a test box, I figured I would just install on my trusty lappy and see what was what. But first things first, I needed to make some freespace. I just didn’t want to blow away everything I already had on there.

gParted to the rescue. This was the very first time I have used gparted and I have to say that I am darned impressed with it. I popped in an ubuntu 8.04 install disk, which just happens to have gparted on it, and use gparted to shrink my current linux partition 20 gb to give me enough space to to a few test installs. Using the utility wass absolutely straight forward. I selected the partition I wanted and then drug the endpoint backward 20gb and hit go, and It just “did the right thing(tm)”. I was a little freaked that it was taking a while with practically no indicators of what was going on, but I just left it alone and it did it’s thing, and did it without breaking anything that I can find at least – hooray!

After I had some drive space I grabbed the OpenSuse 11 KDE Live CD to install from. I was originally going to grab the dvd image, but read several websites which said you can do a perfectly usable install from the cd image, so why bother with the multi-hour download?? :-)

The install was pretty straight forward and the only hiccup was having to pay attention to *where* it was installed, but that was strictly a problem with my type of install to a separate partition. If you were doing a default install on the whole drive it would be a cake walk. I do want to note that after I went through a little hoop making sure this install used only a giant root partition, it did autodetect and configure itself to use the available swap partition. Bonus!

The install, from cd at least, was quite fast. After it was finished, it rebooted and did an initial configuration, and then it was ready to rock and roll. I was greeted with KDE4, which looks and seems to function quite nice. The system is very responsive as well. I was, however, presented with a couple problems. The first was OpenSuse did not autodetect my screen resolution correctly. I have a 1280×800 widescreen and was sitting at 1024×768, which was pretty ugly. I tried to fix it with the user preference manager for the monitor, but it would not let me change resolutions that way. I had to use YAST to change them. This could be a no brainer for someone who is used to OpenSuse, but I admit that I was at a loss for a few minutes just how to do that and why my monitor preferences wouldn’t change or save. After the resolution change, the real beauty of the OpenSuse look became apparent. I dig it anyway.

The bigger problem, and one that I still have is that my wifi will not work. The lappy I have uses an Atheros wireless chipset, which works OUT OF THE BOX with Ubuntu. If they can do it, why can’t OpenSuse? It’s monsterously frustrating to have come that far only to find out that you have no connectivity. The worst part of that is I thought I would be slick and just push in my old trusty bog standard Linksys wireless card, which has worked on every distribution I have tried in the past 6 years. That didn’t work either. My frustration abounds…

I will try and plug it into a hardline tonight and give some effort to finding out how to get wireless working, but if it becomes a pain in the rear to do so, I am going to have to give OpenSuse a failing grade on this one. Seriously though, there is no reason one distribution can do something that another cannot – they are all Linux and have access to the same super and subset of software and having x configuration and networking be problematic is not a great way to make people happy :-)

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