It's Just this Little Chromium Switch Here

One of my projects for the weekend was to sit down and do a wiring diagram for the A/V setup. The system has grown in complexity, and it's reached the point where I can no longer figure out connections in my head.

The final straw was last week, when my wife ordered a Netflix Player by Roku, a device that connects to the Internet and streams video provided by Netflix. I was pretty sure we had the connections for it. But when she asked whether she should order the high-def cable package, the best I could do is say, "Uhhh, maybe?"

So, this weekend I mapped out all the connections and did the wiring diagram I needed to figure this out. You may view the PDF of my current A/V wiring setup.

Last December, I published a patch to the Drupal Fivestar module that adds a "rate this post" link at the bottom of article teasers, such a syou see on the front page of my blog. As I explained at that time, the intent is to let people know they could rate the post and to encourage them to click through to access the ratings widget.

I'm pleased to report that as of release 5.x-1.12 of the module, the patch is no longer necessary. The maintainer has incorporated that functionality into the module.

To enable the link, go to:

Administer -> Content management -> Content types

Then, edit the content type of interest, such as story or blog.

Finally scroll down to the "Fivestar ratings" section and set the "teaser display" setting to "Teaser link to full node widget". That will enable the "rate this post" link on teasers of the selected content type.

One of my chores this weekend was to reconfigure a server to convert the Mailman mailing list manager already installed to support virtual domains. I've been using this package ever since its early releases, but it's been several years since I've reviewed what's changed.

One of the greatest limitations of Mailman has been its "virtual domain" support. That's where a single server supports mailing lists that live under different domains, such as list1 [at] example1 [dot] com and list2 [at] example2 [dot] com.

Unfortunately, the virtual domain support hasn't improved recently.

Here is how Mailman supports virtual domains, at least when using the Postfix mail transport. When you want to setup a mailing list called listname, you create an alias file entry that says something like:

This takes incoming email messages sent to listname and feeds then into the Mailman system.

Last weekend, I mentioned the press conference to announce the Grant for Technology Opportunities selections for this year. The press conference happened this afternoon, and will be replayed this week on cable channel 6. Here is the statement I gave at the press conference:

Over seven years ago, local leaders had a vision to use technology in novel ways to help people and to strengthen our community. That vision led to the Grant for Technology Opportunities program, or GTOPs.

GTOPs was created in 2001. It was designed by the predecessor of the Austin Community Technology and Telecommunications Commission. The Commission wanted to support digital technology projects that could benefit our community. GTOPs is funded by the city, and is administered through the city's office of Telecommunications and Regulatory Affairs, or TARA.

The goals of GTOPs are to:

On Monday, I'll be participating in a press conference where the City of Austin will be announcing the 2008 selections for the Grant for Technology Opportunities program.

Here is the press release:

Austin City Council Member Brewster McCracken and members of the Austin Community Technology and Telecommunications Commission will present the 2008 Grant for Technology Opportunities Program Awards at an announcement ceremony on Monday, April 21, at Austin City Hall, 301 W. Second St.

Ten winning projects will receive GTOPs funding for connecting citizens with information technology, computers and the Internet.

"GTOPs enables local organizations to leverage technology in novel ways," said Commission Chair Chip Rosenthal. "Its achievements are remarkable, and a tribute to the innovation and community spirit of Austin."

Posted in

• Austin
• Tech Policy

Earlier this year I wrote about the transition to digital television.

This weekend, the Austin Community Technology and Telecommunications Commission is co-sponsoring an educational event to let people know about DTV and how it affects them.

The Austin Community Technology and Telecommunications Commission and the City of Austin’s Office of Telecommunications and Regulatory Affairs will present a free community forum on "The Transition to Digital Television" from 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday, March 30, 2008, at the Conley-Guerrero Senior Activity Center, 808 Nile St.

Members of the community forum are invited to learn more about the digital TV (DTV) transition, and who will be affected by this technological advancement. This transition affects viewers with televisions that operate with roof-top antennas or "rabbit ears."

The full details are here: City to host forum on transition to digital television

I have amarok configured to submit tracks played to last.fm. If you go there you can see what I've recently listened to.

I get frequent errors in the amarok status bar such as

Failed to submit 'Mining for Gold' and 8 other tracks

and

Failed to submit several tracks to last.fm

I Googled the messages and found many reports of the problem, such as this thread. Most people pointed their fingers at a server problem. I was skeptical.

When, however, I tried to log into last.fm through the web interface and saw it intermittently fail, that confirmed for me that the flakiness lives in last.fm servers.

I saw this thread that suggested resetting the password--even to the same password--cleared the problem. I tried that and it worked. Before, I had dozens of songs pending to be posted. After, they all went through.

Here's hoping that last.fm eventually fixes their infrastructure problems.

A note, primarily to my readers (both of them) who follow this blog by RSS.

I've added a bunch of social network badges to the sidebar of my site. If you know me, feel free to friend me or stalk me or whatever it is you kids do these days.

I was using the Amarok "Album Cover Manager" tool to fill in the missing cover artwork in my music collection.

It has a "Fetch Missing Covers" button, which goes to Amazon and retrieves the artwork it needs. The lookup often makes mistakes, particularly because I tagged artists in a discouraged "Lastname, Firstname" form. Still, it's easier to fetch them all, then go back and manually fixup the ones it got wrong.

I ran it over several hundred albums. It made a lot of mistakes, but none quite so hilarious as the one to the right. The album cover you see is what it selected for London Calling by The Clash.

My media center PC is an ASUS bookshelf computer running Ubuntu Linux and KDE desktop. I use it primarily for music, running the Amarok music player.

Our house is pretty small and open. I can see the entire living room from my desk. I often play music on the media system while I'm working. The annoying bit is that I have to get up from my desk and walk over to the living room anytime I want to fiddle the controls.

I wish I had a good way to control the music from my desk. I've been puzzling over this for a whilte. I've tried various ways to control Amarok remotely and none were satisfactory. Then it dawned on me that I was missing the obvious: I didn't want to control just the media player but the whole desktop. I can do that using something like Virtual Network Computing (VNC).