So I decided it’s time to build a HTPC so I can record TV and also use time shifting when watching live TV.

I’ve tried several products, be it software packages or whole linux distributions, including Windows Media Center, Apple Front Row, vdr, c’t-vdr, yavdr, freevo and mythTV. That last one I liked most by what it offered, so I gave it a try. I stumbled upon many things on my way though. I’ll write down the ones I remember here, perhaps it’ll help someone some day. Read the rest of this entry »

The problem

Did you ever want to install a font on your Mac that’s on a SMB share, for example on a Windows/Unix server? Did you experience the font was broken somehow, being displayed in the finder as “unix executable file” with 0kb size?

We had this issue here often, finally I figured out why this happens.
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The most common solution is pressing the eject key on the keyboard.

If that fails for some reason (in my case the key was not working properly) you could always drag the DVD icon to the trash or right-click (ctrl-click) it and click “eject” - as long as there is a CD or DVD in the drive. But what if it’s empty and you want to insert a disc?

Open a terminal window (Terminal.app) and type drutil tray eject. To close type drutil tray close accordingly.

My boss is working with tons of mails every day. Part of his workflow is to use the “followup” -> “add reminder..:” function in the right-click menu of messages. When I upgraded his Outlook from 2003 to 2007, he asked why that function was gone. I did some investigation, including a phone call at Microsoft tech support, and found out the following:

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I use a little tool to manage my MP3s called “MP3 tag tools“. It’s quite powerful, it allows you to mass edit some or all ID3 tag fields, fill them from a file name scheme and vice versa (create folder structures and/or file names from the ID3 tag fields). Now when I recently cleaned up my collection using that tool, I noticed that I had about 400 double entries. I just didn’t notice before because the file names were different. Now as this tool tried to rename the files and put them in the appropiate subfolders, it threw error messages that existing files can’t be overwritten.

So I had 400 files that I could safely delete, which I did. Now I had 400 dead entries in the iTunes library (marked with a !) which I wanted to get rid of easily. Apparently, iTunes does not have a function to remove dead/broken entries, I’d have to try to play every song from my playlist so iTunes would mark all missing entries and then… then what? iTunes doesn’t even let me sort by the ! column. That’s really stupid.

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Recently, I had a support query where a colleague had three “Flash Player” items in the open with menu when he right clicked onto a .swf file and I was asked to remove them. I learnt that it’s not as easy as it often is with Windows, where every file extension has an entry in the registry which you could edit. Mac OS X uses the so called LaunchServices database to assign applications to file types.
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These are my post-installation steps in Fedora 10.

After I read that Fedora 10 is out on heise.de, I thought, let’s give it a try. Here I’ll describe what I did to set up the fresh install for my needs.
Note: I installed Fedora 10 from the full i386 DVD (not live CD!) on my HP 2510p notebook, just in case you’re interested about hardware.

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Today I experienced one of these problems: My colleague in Berlin had that external hard disk drive. It was connected to a Buffalo TeraStation (that’s a NAS, sort of, with a super small linux). It was used as a backup drive there.

Now the TeraStation was horribly, almost hilariously damaged. It couldn’t be accessed from Windows machines anymore because the smb.conf was completely empty. I could edit it with vi (you don’t have vim on that minilinux) and save, nothing would happen. I could also echo stuff > smb.conf - it would always stay 0 bytes in size. Yes, I was root, I was owner, smb.conf had 777, everything. Whatever, that’s not my point here. Just as advice: NEVER EVER BUY SUCH CRAP!

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Have you ever had an “unknown device” in the Windows device manager and wanted to get rid of it installing the appropiate driver? You just had no idea what device was meant?

This happened to me with a 32-bit PCMCIA Compact Flash adaptor for my notebook (ok, I knew what device it was, but I couldn’t find a driver).

Here is what I found out on wikihow.com:

1. Open the device manager (I usually do this with the keyboard shortcut windows+pause -> hardware -> device manager)
2. Right-click the device and click “properties”, then click “details” tab
3. Choose “compatible IDs” from the drop-down menu
4. Click on the first item in the list and use ctrl+c to copy it to clipboard
5. Click Start -> Run, type “notepad”, this will bring up the text editor
6. Press ctrl+v to paste
7. Let’s say you have an ID like this: PCI\VEN_11AB&DEV_4320&REV_14
   This is the vendor/manufacturer ID, device ID and device revision number.
8. Now go to www.pcidatabase.com/vendors.php?sort=name. This brings up a list of hardware manufacturers and their IDs. Look for the manufacturer ID you got in the previous step (ctrl-f is your friend) and click the name. In my example, 11AB leads me to Marvell Semiconductor.
9. Now you have a list of known devices from that manufacturer. Again, find your device by searching for the device ID. My example brings up this:

   Chip Number: 88E8055
   Chip Description: Marvell Yukon PCI E Gigabit
   Notes: http://www.marvell.com/drivers

10. Now the device is identified. I can now go to the manufacturer’s homepage and try to find a driver.

When I connected my Acer AL2216W 22″ widescreen monitor to my HP 2510p notebook, I didn’t expect there to be problems. But there was a problem: For some reason, I was unable to set the resolution to 1680×1050, which is the monitor’s native resolution.

This took some more googling to find a solution. Here’s a short summary of what I found out:

1. Open the registry editor and do a Find on “DTD”.
2. Populate every occurence of TotalDTDCount with the number 1.
3. Populate every occurence of DTD_1 with the following string:

   21 39 90 30 62 1A 27 40 68 B0 36 00 D9 28 11 00 00 1C 37 01

   and be sure to keep searching until you are sure you got them all.

4. Reboot, and 1680×1050 should become available.

Now, if you need to set another resolution, things get a bit tricky.

You need to find out the correct DTD string (see step 3) for your resolution. That can be done using a small tool called MonInfo. How to do that and how to proceed is described in this article (it’s long but worth reading); I suggest you have a look at it