Category: Linux

Linux and the Open Source Lifestyle

Reflecting on Life with a Chromebook

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Acer Chromebook C7

A week ago, we announced a product review challenge. Spending time with a Chromebook to see if it could be our daily driver. Let’s review the conditions of our challenge. We’d use the device in lieu of our primary productivity machine. So, we’d still have our Android phone for what we used it for. So, it wasn’t the ‘only’ thing used.

Let’s go over a few areas…

Mail

Most mail services have a webmail option, so this isn’t an issue. We use Google Apps mail for our primary address anyway, which is browser based.

Social Networking

We’ve never been able to find a Twitter client we really liked anyway, so using web based ones wasn’t any better or worse. Facebook and Google Plus are web-based anyway, so no difference there.

Chat and IRC

There are no good Chrome extensions for IRC. But most IRC servers have a web client. Will do in a pinch. For chat, we tried a few options. The Chat by Google extension is nice, but only supports one account. We have two, a personal and a business account. So we tried Imo.im, Trillian, etc. Imo.im, nicely, supports desktop notifications.

Productivity

We usually use OpenOffice for simple word processing, but Google Docs is a fine option.

Connectivity

We found an SSH extension for connecting to our Linux box.

So, after all this, what is the conclusion?

We spend much of our day in a browser. This blog is run on an installation of WordPress. The interface is browser based. Our email is browser-based, although we have used email clients in the past. More and more things are based in the browser, so it is logical to have a computer that offers just a browser. And as a secondary system, that is fine. But we’re going back to a full Linux-based system for our daily use.

To that end, the Acer C7 Chromebook is a great secondary system. The touchpad was the only part of it that truly annoyed. But the solution there was to simply hook up an external mouse. After a week, we installed ChrUbuntu, a Ubuntu Linux fork designed for use on Chromebooks, and now dual-boot.

In order to install an alternate OS on a Chromebook, you have to place it into Developer Mode, which means you get an annoying splash screen every time you boot. It also doesn’t support a boot menu, so you have to change settings in a terminal window to switch OSes. But it does give the machine the ability to run full-fledged programs. And there are a few that, if ported to Chrome, might cause us to revisit this.

On a weekend trip, we opted to take the Asus Transformer, a 10 inch tablet with a keyboard dock, over the 11.6 inch Chromebook. So, a few native apps might change our mind.

What do you think? Leave a comment on the matter.

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Taking the Chromebook Challenge

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Acer C7 Chromebook

The Gadget Wisdom labs has recently acquired an Acer C7 Chromebook for testing purposes. The C7 has a list price of $199 and offers an 11.6″ screen, a Celeron processor. The hard drive and memory are upgradeable.

It’s competition in the Chromebook space is the $249 ARM-based Samsung Chromebook.  But, while the Samsung is sleeker than the Acer C7, it lacks the possible benefits of a x86 processor and upgradable components if you want to hack the thing.

But, why buy a Chromebook(other than the compelling price for a secondary system), even if you want to hack it to pieces? Many people live in their browser anyway, so why not have a computer that lives entirely in the browser?

So, that is a challenge we’re prepared to try. We’ve been setting up web-based equivalents of our standard daily programs, and will be trying to live with ChromeOS only while our primary machine gets a clean install of the latest version of its OS.

Will we last a whole week, which is the goal? Or is ChromeOS only good for trips where all you want is a browser? How does it compare to our experiments with the Asus Transformer, which is Android with a keyboard dock.

Stay tuned.

 

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Back to Thinking About Podcasting Studios

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Alesis MultiMix 8 USB Podcast setup left side ...

Audio equipment has a special passion for us for some reason. None amongst our numbers are musicians per se, but the interest remains.

As you may know, the Android Buffet podcast is also a project of the Weneca Media Group, the unofficial parent of Gadget Wisdom and a few other sites. Much of our sound equipment collection is based on serving the needs of that podcast…and actually consists of three basic studio models.

  1. The Home Studio – This is a permanent installation…well, as permanent as we get
  2. The Mobile Studio – This is the single-person mobile studio, designed to fit in a carry-on bag.
  3. The SELF Studio – Used only once, at the SouthEast Linux Fest, this was enough equipment to do a multi-person show live.

Everything continues to evolve each time we assemble it for a trip. The requirements we have are simple.

  1. A co-host and/or guest, coming in over the Internet.
  2. A mostly live to tape performance…editing a podcast is a pain…so we quickly gave it up.
  3. Live audio streaming.

Video sounds like a lot of fun, at least as fun as doing audio. However, the amount of work and cost required to do video is exponentially higher for less of a return. Many podcasts do video as merely an extension of audio. You end up with talking heads, which is sometimes interesting, but not quite worth the effort.

Streaming, when coupled with a live chat room, is a great thing. Many shows offer both of these, and it has become essential to our podcast model. We started out hosting ourselves, but now use a third-party Icecast server. It’s running right now, running repeats. Tune in at androidbuffet.com/live.

The issues come in designing the equipment to run this. We tried slaving everything through a single computer, but using an analog mixer meant connections went into the computer and back out again, which was also confusing. So, ideally, each function should have an independent system.

  1. Co-Host/Outside Audio
    • This has been done by a computer of varying processing capabilities as well as an old Android phone.
  2. Streamer
    • There is no Icecast streamer for Android(volunteers to port it, anyone?)
    • Tried using a Raspberry Pi, but there were some issues. Will be revisiting this with the new 512MB Pi.
  3. Recorder
    • This has been another computer, but also a dedicated hardware recorder which supports line-in and records to SD cards for easy and quick editing.

Part of the problem is, of course, Linux. There are some limitations in Linux compatibility and software. But we aren’t changing that, or using a hardware mixer. Everything else is up for grabs.

More specifics to come, but would appreciate suggestions to simplify this, while maintaining the quality and ease of recording.

Shrinking Your Electronics by Thinking Embedded Systems

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English: Extract from Raspberry Pi board at Tr...

Electronics are getting smaller.  People don’t have desktops in as large a number as they once did. Many have laptops, netbooks, tablets, etc.

This is an area we’ve been thinking about a lot lately, mostly due to the flood of inexpensive systems on a board, led by the Raspberry Pi. The Pi is a computer the size of a credit card, and the commonly sold version includes RCA video, HDMI video, two USB ports, and an Ethernet Port. The entire assembly is powered by a microUSB charger of the sort bundled with phones and other electronics. The GPU onboard is capable of blu-ray quality playback. There is no built in drive, the OS is loaded off of an SD card. You can hook in a USB drive, but not as a boot drive.

There is a special version of Fedora, Debian, and even an XBMC port to turn the Pi into a full-fledged media center

Now, this won’t be taking the place of a full-fledged PC for many things, but the Pi, and some of the competing devices are perfect for ’embedded system’ type functions.

An embedded system is a computer system designed for specific control functions within a larger system. With something like a Pi, with its pricing, even with the purchase of a case(we mentioned case not included, right?) you can buy multiple Pis and use them to do one thing.

This changes design conceptions a lot. When you are trying to figure out your connected home and life, you can build a Pi to boot, launch a function, and perform it well, just like your cable box(well, like your cable box could be), VoIP phone, etc.

We currently have a quad-core server, that does multiple functions. It does do CPU scaling when idle, but many of the functions could be taken over by a Pi. Using Wake On Lan functionality, the Pi could even wake up the full computer and transfer control to it.

There are a lot of good ideas here. Have a device that does one thing, and nothing else. This would mean incredible long term stability, and because the Pi loads its OS on an SD card, you could have different SD cards to change the Pi’s functionality.

What ideas do you have? We’re just getting started.

Feed Changes

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English: This icon, known as the "feed ic...

To All RSS Subscribers:

Due to the recent uncertainty regarding the future of Feedburner, we are removing all redirects to Feedburner. All links on the site will now use local feeds. If possible, please update your subscriptions.

If not, the Feedburner feeds will continue to be maintained for as long as Google continues to offer the service, but we feel that self-hosting all feeds is the more prudent long-term move.

Feed: http://www.gadgetwisdom.com/feed/

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Amazon MP3 Drops Linux Support, Adds DRM-Lite

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DRM Is Killing Music

As we’ve previously mentioned, we’ve been redoing our music collection. Now, after weeks of part-time ripping, and some cleanup, it is time to upload the music to various sites, as a test.

Amazon has discontinued its music downloader for Linux and is no longer allowing Linux users to download the .azw file for use with a third-party application. The AZW files are used to download an entire album when purchased.

This occurred concurrently with the rollout of their new Cloud Player product, which included one other fun feature. DRM. Not on the file level. Amazon proudly sells DRM-free MP3s, but to upload or download albums, you need to authorize your device. You are allowed a maximum of 10 devices, you can deauthorize a device and the slot will reopen thirty days later. This includes Android devices. If you don’t do this, you can only download albums one track at a time.

We wanted to see who else was pointing out that this is a DRM-like feature, and came up with an interesting analysis of same by The Leisurely Historian. His theories are: (Comments are ours)

  • Compromise negotiated with music labels over cloud player – This seems the most likely. But, is increased monitoring of download/uploads really an unreasonable restriction? We made a complete backup of all of our Amazon purchases locally and we can copy it anywhere(even back to Amazon Cloud Drive, ironically.
  • Back door to DRM – We agree that DRM on Kindle and Video has been good to Amazon. But they can’t reverse course on music. So, they’ve created this hybrid model to support keeping people in their ecosystem.
  • This is all about User Tracking – This is quite possible. We have the tab…”You listened to ___, people who listened to ___ also bought ____.” This is the classic Amazon upsell method of getting you to buy more, based on offering you things they think you will like.
Basically, Amazon wants people to use Cloud Player and the Cloud Player apps. This keeps people inside their garden. So, bad enough we are forced to boot up Windows, which we never use, to retrieve/upload our music…but there is no indication from Amazon that they plan to restore Linux support in the future.
Even if they do not want to write Linux apps, they could provide developers with an API to build support into their products, but third-party support is not what they want on any platform.
Just to be fair, the web player does work on Linux. And, while we gave them $25 for a year of service, it does not mean we will next year…although it would cost more to store the same amount as data on Amazon S3(although there is always Glacier). It is just disappointing.
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Amazon Glacier for the Home User

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Backup Backup Backup - And Test Restores

Earlier this week, Amazon announced Glacier, which is long-term storage that costs one cent a gigabyte per month. This compares to the 12 cents a gigabyte per month for S3. The basic difference is that Glacier can take between 3 and 5 hours to retrieve data, and S3 is instantaneous.

“Amazon S3 is a durable, secure, simple, and fast storage service designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Use Amazon S3 if you need low latency or frequent access to your data. Use Amazon Glacier if low storage cost is paramount, your data is rarely retrieved, and data retrieval times of several hours are acceptable.”

But, let’s go to the pricing. As a home user, we’re assuming you have less than 50TB.

  • Storage
    • Glacier – 0.01 per GB/month
    • S3 – 0.12 per GB/month
  • Data Transfers In – Free on All
  • Data Transfer Out - Glacier and S3 both use the same pricing.
    • 1st GB free
    • Next 10GB, 0.12 a GB
    • Next 40GB, 0.09 a GB
  • Requests
    • Glacier
      • Data Retrievals are Free, however, Glacier is designed with the expectation that retrievals are infrequent and unusual, and data will be stored for extended periods of time. You can retrieve up to 5% of your average monthly storage (pro-rated daily) for free each month.
      • If you choose to retrieve more than this amount of data in a month, you are charged a retrieval fee starting at $0.01 per gigabyte. Learn more. In addition, there is a pro-rated charge of $0.03 per gigabyte for items deleted prior to 90 days

Amazon has promised that there will be an upcoming feature to export from S3 to Glacier based on data lifecycle policies. The details on how this will work aren’t 100% available, but we could imagine offloading from S3 to Glacier based on age. So, you keep the last 1-2 months of data on S3, and the older backups on Glacier. It would allow you to save a good deal of money for backups.

Not everyone, for that matter, needs high availability…especially if you are keeping something that is infrequently modified. For example, the family photo album. You can keep your local backups, and for 1 cent a month, you get a copy that you can access in an emergency.

What we’re missing is that many reports indicated that retrieval is potentially costly. But we found it equivalent to S3, only slower.

But, what would you use this for? We’d like to hear your thoughts.

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Mandatory PSA: Secure Your Digital Life

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The KeePass Password Safe icon.

Every tech pundit out there has been talking about the heartbreaking story of Mat Honan of Wired and how hackers used social engineering to gain access to one of his accounts, and the chain reaction results.

One of Honan’s problems stemmed from how his accounts were daisy-chained together. `The recovery email for one account led to another, account names on different networks were consistent, etc. Figuring out how to mitigate this requires some thought. We have multiple email accounts, and it will probably require some diagramming and planning to figure everything out there.

Then there are passwords. We admit to people all the time that we don’t even know half our passwords. We use a two-pronged attack on this. One is the open-source, multi-platform app KeePass. KeePass offers a password vault stored as a file, encrypted using a single Master Password. All of the passwords in it are generated by the program and impossible for most people to remember.

We also use Lastpass as a service. Lastpass has a plugin for every browser, offers one click login, form filling, and more. The basic service is free, but the premium version adds mobile support and additional features. We’re not using half of the options that it offers, even with the $12 a year we give them for premium.

But, as part of a redundant philosophy, you should have your most important passwords in multiple locations. Also, having passwords even you don’t know in vault means you can easily change your credentials regularly for individual sites, should you choose to. do so.

Two factor authentication, although it could be a bit more user friendly, is enabled for all Google accounts and Lastpass. This is not a challenge for hackers to hack. There’s nothing very interesting there anyway.

In security, the mantra is trust no one. Try to walk the line between paranoia and rationality very carefully.

The second issue is backup. This is an area where we could be better. We have a backup plan that needs to be upgraded. We have various cloud backup solutions, and a few local ones. They need to be unified. We’ll get back to this in a future post, once we create a checklist.

But, for those of you out there, let’s cover a few basics. Periodically, extract your online data and store a copy somewhere, both locally and remotely, in addition to your cloud storage. Try a relative’s house. The likelihood of you and your relative both suffering calamities is probably slim. Remember that sending your data to a remote drive and deleting your original copy is an archive, not a backup.

Make a plan, automate as much as possible, because manual action is so easy to get behind on.

So, backup, secure your accounts, do some planning…we’ll be back with more. Consider yourself warned.

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Ripping Music Revisited

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Bundle of CDs.

Amazon MP3 Tech Support is useless. Of course, as friendly as Amazon is, they have been consistent useless to us. From insisting our package would be delivered when UPS insisted it had been delayed to the latest, asking us to email log files repeatedly to an address that sent back it did not accept incoming emails…and it was apparently correct as we’re still waiting.

At the beginning of the month, we wrote about Amazon upgrading Cloud Player. It prompted us to break out our music collection and try uploading it. Now, we’ve gone back and forth about cloud based music, having tried the now defunct mp3tunes, Moozone, Google Music, and Amazon Cloud Player.

We’ve also bought a lot of DRM-free MP3 files from Amazon during sales. Amazon is great at sales.

So, it made sense to give Amazon a shot, as they’ll store anything you buy from them for free. Their new model is $25 a year for more song space than we can use, and a good amount of general file storage. If only they had full Linux support and/or an API. But we hope this will come soon, at least for the Cloud Drive.

So, we uploaded the entire collection overnight. However, it was several messed up in the metadata department. We spoke to Amazon, and they did not offer any suggestions. We’d had similar problems with Moozone and with Google Music.

Deciding the problem was likely with the decisions made during the initial ripping, we made the decision to rerip the entire collection. Armed with an old laptop and an external hard drive, we’ve been slowly making our way through the collection.

One of the issues came from the decision to originally rip into the Ogg Vorbis format. Now, this was a freedom based decision. We wanted to support open standards, and still do. But, the limitations of this have come to bite us many times. Most notably that Moozone is the only cloud storage that offers decent Ogg support without transcoding, and Moozone appears to be dead in terms of development.

That alone wouldn’t have caused us to go back and destroy all the old files. We’re not audiophile enough to try 320kbps or FLAC, but the original files did show some encoding glitches, and we will be encoding at 256kbps MP3 as opposed to the originally quality of roughly 192kbps, but the big issue was metadata. Our metadata was in horrible shape, and made it impossible to find things.

The hardest type of album to deal with, of which we have many, are ones with multiple artists. ID3 tags initially did not have support. The Album Artist tag came later. In fact, up until more recently, our audio file tagging program on Linux, Easytag, didn’t support the Album Artist tag. It now does, which is most helpful. The other helpful tool was the free MusicBrainz Picard, available for multiple platforms, which encodes files with metadata from the MusicBrainz database.

Even with this, being the musical mavericks we are, there are plenty of CDs we have that have nonexistent or incomplete entries in these databases, that we’ll be going through manually. Also, this has inspired us to fill some gaps in the collection. Some of the files were encoded from audio cassettes, and we’ve been using Amazon Marketplace to purchase selected used CDs of said content for cheap, allowing high quality copies to be made.

It may be time to finally throw away the tapes., however, and go completely digital. As we migrate further from analog media, it is odd we have no intention of chucking the vinyl. What makes vinyl so nostalgic and tapes..not?

So, the above chronicles the journey from freedom loving Ogg user in search of a cloud to freedom-hating individual seeking to be locked into one platform…or not. The truth is, no matter what, we’re committed to a local copy. Cloud services are wonderful for keeping a backup copy, and pulling music on the go when you have a hankering for something from your collection, but trusting any service 100% is foolish, and we all need to be more diligent about that.

Our ripping is being done with Linux based tools. Audex is currently handling the ripping, Easytag the tag editing, and Picard filling in extra metadata. Amazon is providing cover art and data for manual correction as needed from their vast library of pages. This is vastly different from last time. Although things have changed, and ripping music from CDs isn’t as popular as it once was in this digital age, would be curious to see what people think, which is the purpose for this post.

How do you build a perfect digital music collection, what tools(Linux-based preferably) do you use to build it, and what do you do with your collection?

For one, we’ve never created a single playlist. Playlists are the mix-tapes of the modern era. Perhaps it is time to find the mix tape we made in the 90s…Songs to Be Depressed By, and recreate it for the modern era. (Songs to Be Depressed By were actually uplifting songs)

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Trying to Build a Better Web Server

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We’ve been working hard here, behind the scenes, upgrading the Weneca Media servers. The Weneca Media Group is the umbrella term for all the sites we collectively host together.

The Weneca server works on what is called a LEMP stack. Linux, Nginx, MySQL, PHP. Nginx(pronounced Engine-X) is a lightweight web server which powers about 10% of the world’s web servers, including sites like WordPress.com and Netflix. Most of you have probably heard of Linux, the MySQL database server, and the PHP scripting language.

Nginx has just announced SPDY support in its development version, which should speed things up more. SPDY is a Google developed protocol to reduce web page load time, and is implemented in both Chrome and Firefox. It can work concurrently with HTTP, the common standard for web serving.

So, with this, we have a solid footing for implementing a lightweight framework to serve a lot of web pages. However, Nginx does not have built in PHP support. You have to pass PHP to be handled by another program. In this case, we are using PHP-FPM, which is now part of the official PHP package. PHP-FPM is a FastCGI manager creates a pool of processes to process PHP scripts and return the results to the server.

To reduce load on this, Nginx supports FastCGI caching, so the results of any dynamically built page, with some deliberate exceptions, are cached for a few minutes, and can be served as static files. The duration of the caching is variable. If you want basically fresh content, you can microcache, cache in seconds. So, only when your server got hammered would it be seeing static content. If you have a bit less dynamic content, you can increase that to minutes, or even hours.

Now, we continue to tweak and improve the services. In future, we’ll be covering a little of the Nginx and PHP-FPM configuration settings you may find interesting.

 

 

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