Posts
Fixing jerky video in DVDs
On my ThinkPad A30p, watching a DVD with Kaffeine often results in very uneven, jerky video. This has been a problem with both PCLinuxOS 2007 and Mepis 6.5. The cause appears to be an obscure kernel bug that disables DMA on the CD-ROM drive. The fix is to run the following command as root after Kaffeine has started: hdparm -d1 /dev/cdrom It doesn’t work to enable DMA before starting Kaffeine (it’s enabled by default when the system boots). It has to be done after Kaffeine has opened the DVD and started to display its menus, and it has to be done with each new DVD. It’s not a big nuisance, but you can create an icon on the desktop to make it a little easier:
March 1, 2008
Replacing a ThinkPad A30p system board
Last year my ThinkPad A30p started failing to charge its battery, after I’d left the machine on the shelf for a few months. I thought that maybe the battery had died from neglect, but a replacement battery purchased on eBay also had the same problem. So the system board (AKA motherboard) seemed to be at fault. But at least the machine worked when it was connected to AC power. Then a month or so later, it powered off spontaneously after 15 minutes of use, and after that it was completely dead.
February 27, 2008
Free music formats
(Update 2025: I no longer use an iPod or a Treo, or rip CDs to FLAC. Instead, I rip CDs directly to Ogg Vorbis. See my scripts source repository for more information.) Playing music directly from CDs is, like, so last millennium. I don’t even own a CD player any more, unless a laptop with a CD drive counts. I do all my listening now via a 4th-generation iPod and a Treo 700p.
February 23, 2008
Fixing DVD audio sync problem in Kaffeine
Both PCLinuxOS 2006 and Mepis 6.5 come with a wonderful media player called Kaffeine. I especially like being able to customize the toolbars. I’ve added buttons to go backwards and forwards by 20 seconds, which is great for those times when you miss some important bit of dialog. But Kaffeine, as shipped with these two older versions of Linux, has a serious problem when viewing DVDs: the sound is not synchronized with the video, and appears to be off by as much as a quarter of a second. There is a control for adjusting the sync, but it’s difficult to get just right and it requires fiddling with each new DVD.
February 16, 2008
ThinkPad Reliability
(Note: What follows is purely anecdotal, personal experience. Don’t draw any hard-and-fast conclusions.) I own four IBM ThinkPads now: 380Z: 233 MHz, 96 MB RAM, 4GB disk, 1024x768 screen. Purchased used in 1999. A21m: 750 MHz, 512 MB RAM, 40GB disk, 1024x768 screen. Purchased new in 2001. A30p: 1.2 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 60GB disk, incredible 1600x1200 screen. Purchased used in 2005. T40: 1.6 GHz, 1GB RAM, 80GB disk, 1400x1050 screen. Castoff from son, received in 2006. The two older machines have been very reliable. The only problem I’ve had with them was that the disk in the A21m got very noisy after a couple of years, and I replaced it to keep my sanity. The A21m still runs a relatively recent Linux (PCLinuxOS 2006) quite nicely, and I still use it to watch DVDs and as my emergency backup machine when the T40 is being flaky (see below). The 380Z is too old to run anything other than Damn Small Linux.
February 16, 2008
Seagate FreeAgent spindown fix
A few months back I bought a Seagate FreeAgent external USB hard disk with 320GB of space. The intent was to use it as a backup device for my ThinkPads, all of which run Linux. Formatting the drive for ext3 was no problem. I started my first backup one night and went to bed. When I woke up the next morning, I couldn’t access the drive; it appeared to have spun down due to inactivity. After some Google searching, I found a solution here . Quick summary: run the following command as root the first time you connect the drive:
February 15, 2008
Why?
For several years I’ve been keeping a LiveJournal blog because LJ’s social networking features make it convenient to keep up to date with friends. But I also wanted to have a place to record discoveries and thoughts on subjects of little interest to my LJ friends, such as Linux and programming languages. So I’ve created this blog for that purpose. I’ve also been using Flickr for photo storage, but I never found its social networking features as useful or interesting as LJ’s. Then right around the time that Microsoft announced its desire to swallow Yahoo! (and Flickr), my “pro” membership expired. As a result, many of my photos and albums disappeared, and annoying ads reappeared. So it seemed like a good time to abandon Flickr and create my own photo gallery.
February 12, 2008