Fix a Byte to Eat

After many years of loyal service, it's time to replace my Audrey. Her outdated and not-really-upgradable browser is having trouble recognizing websites more and more often. (She's free to a good home, so say they word if you want her).

For a replacement, I wanted a tablet PC, as it would have a touchscreen (essential when cooking, to prevent biscuit-dough-keyboard). Also, it would free up the space taken up by a keyboard and mouse. And finally, I was toying with the idea of mounting the PC upside down under a cabinet, and a Tablet PC would allow the screen to hang down in front, rather than in back.

Not mine, and not a tablet, but you get the idea

They're finally starting to show up for reasonable prices on eBay. I found a great deal on a Thinkpad X41 tablet there, so I grabbed it.

The reason it was a good deal, though, was because of this one bullet point

Not Included: Hard drive&Caddy&Cover,Stylus pen,Wifi,Ac,battery

It looks like the seller stripped it down and is selling each of the parts separately. That should have sent up red flags, but I thought I was okay because:

• Hard drive: I have a dead laptop already, with a hard drive to donate
• Caddy & Cover: Pshaw!
• Stylus pen: I got ten of 'em, at the end of my arms
• Wifi: Again, dead laptop to the rescue
• Ac: I have a thinkpad power supply already. Somewhere.
• Battery: Don't need it, as it will be under the cabinet and plugged in all the time.

When it arrived on Wednesday, though, I could see I was in trouble:

• Hard drive: It doesn't take a standard laptop hard drive, it takes an "iPod Classic"-sized hard drive. Uh-oh.
  
• Stylus: Turns out that the touchscreen technology is based on the pads that graphic artists use to draw, and that the stylus is a functional (and not cheap) piece of electronics. Uh-oh.
  
• Ac: The power supply hasn't turned up yet, so I'm borrowing one for the moment.
  
• Battery: This thing could be really cool if it were totally wireless. So I may end up buying a battery anyway.
  

Despite all that, I needed to make sure it would boot okay, so I could complain to the seller if it didn't. So I decided to try running Linux from a USB drive. There's a great program called UNetbootin, which makes this super-easy. I tried CrunchBang linux without success, and then gave DamnSmallLinux a try, and that worked great.

I was kind of amazed I was surfing the Web on a PC with no hard drive.

So for now, I know the thing works. But without a stylus, or an OS I'm familiar with, I don't yet know if the touchscreen is going to work.

The next step will be to get Ubuntu on it, as a lot of people have gotten the touchscreen to work with Ubuntu. Not sure if I can get Ubuntu to run well enough off an SD card, though.

Full list of tasks:

1. Get Ubuntu working
   
2. Install Ubuntu tablet functionality
   
3. Test with borrowed stylus
   
4. Get hard drive
   
5. Get stylus
   
6. Get Flash working
   
7. Install Skype (also, test speakers/mic, install webcam)
   
8. Mount under cabinet
   

Stay tuned.

---

Update 4/19: I can't seem to get any Ubuntu variant working from my 4GB SD card ("SRST failed, errno=-16", whatever that means), so I'm going to need a hard drive for sure. I eBay'd one, and it should be here on Monday or Tuesday.

Update 4/23: New hard drive arrived, but it's not the right one. I got the HTC426020G5CE00 instead of the HTC426020G7AT00. Duh! Boy, is my face red. Anyway, so I have to either order a new one or buy a ZIF-to-IDE adapter and hope that the hard drive+adapter still fit in the drive bay. The adapter is only $4, so I'm going to try that first.

On the bright side, I finally got Ubuntu to run off an SD card, thanks to an obscure forum post I found. I added "all_generic_ide" to the startup options in unetbootin's syslinux.cfg file on the card, and that did the trick. By also adding "persistent" and downloading the casper.rw file from unetbootin's site, I'm able to save any changes I make, so I have a working system now.

However, I can't get the touchscreen to work yet. I borrowed a stylus, and configured it using documentation others have provided (ubuntu on an X41 tablet, ubuntu on an X41 tablet, but no luck yet. It could be because I'm not using the stylus made for this laptop, though it surprises me that others don't work.

Update 4/25: Progress! The Lenovo stylus arrived today, and worked basically right out of the box, since I had done the configuration ahead of time. I'm still a bit bummed that I have to use a stylus at all, but so far, it's not so bad.

Update 4/26: I put the laptop through its paces for the first time, using it to display recipes for a meal I was cooking. I loaded each dish's recipe onto a different Firefox tab, and was able to go back and forth between them as I cooked. I also watched a bit of The Daily Show on Hulu while I did some of the more boring repetitive tasks. It worked great.

Update 5/12: The IDE-to-ZIF adapter arrived, and it's working well, after following the instructions on this page (translated from German). It's one of the geekiest tasks I've ever done, as it involved desoldering a piece from the circuit board, soldering a new connection, and opening the laptop (14 screws!) to get the adapter+hard-drive to fit. But it worked, and likely saved me about $100.

After a small hurdle (booting Ubuntu from the sd card froze until I removed the "all_generic_ide" option), I was able to see the drive from Ubuntu. Turns out the ebay seller didn't format the drive, and it seems to have come from a TomTom GPS, complete with the previous owner's cellphone contacts. Anyway, the next step was to install Ubuntu from the usb key, but that presented a problem. The installer couldn't unmount the "/cdrom" partition, since both it and the new drive were mounted to /dev/sda1. Apparently the fix is to create a new live USB key, which means I'll lose some of my work, but no big loss.

Update 5/13: New live USB key made, Ubuntu installed. Next up: Customization

God bless us, every one (and zero)

I love that Internet-enabled devices are becoming more and more common. I jumped on this trend this year and gave three different Internet devices as gifts: A Kindle, a Netflix-capable Blu-ray player, and a wireless digital picture frame. I was particularly happy with the wireless digital picture frame, because I've been waiting for one to come out for years now.

You see, a few years ago, we gave Amy's parents a Ceiva, which is a digital frame that downloads photos every day (via modem). It's worked out great, but Amy and I rarely remember to send photos to it. I've been searching for a more automated alternative ever since. I even tried building my own out of an old laptop, but I just ended up with a dead laptop and ridicule from my geek friends. This year I think I found my solution with Kodak's W1020 frame.

It has wi-fi capability, so it can download photos from KodakGallery, Flickr, and (most importantly for me) custom RSS feeds. This means that with a little nerd wizardry, I could give this frame to my parents, and it would automatically grab photos from my siblings and me.

To accomplish this nerdery, I relied heavily on Yahoo Pipes, a service which can combine several RSS feeds into one, and manipulate the data along the way. I combined my Flickr photos, my siblings photos from Facebook (via the Photos2RSS facebook app) into one feed. Along the way I filtered out portrait-oriented photos, since the frame displays landscape photos much better (though I was only able to apply this to the flickr photos, since Facebook doesn't provide dimensions).

Unfortunately, the frame didn't like the RSS feed from Yahoo Pipes, so I had to write a custom converter script in PHP, hosted on my site. But that only took an hour or so.

As a bonus to using Yahoo pipes, I can change which photos appear on the frame, without my parents having to do anything.

Amy also gave me one for Christmas, and I'm already loving it. I don't have to keep copying photos to an SD card too keep the photos fresh.

So I highly recommend this frame for any tech-oriented folks, particularly to give as a gift to those not-so-techy people in the family.

Curse you, Billy Reuben!

Well I've been a dad for a week now, and it's even more enjoyable then I thought it would be. I'm surprised my friends with kids don't make a bigger deal about it than they do. Or maybe I just never understood.

Darren's doing really well. He had a slight complication early on with jaundice -- caused by high biliruben levels -- which made him sleepy all the time. The issue got compounded with some nursing issues, leading to a bad cycle of not wanting to wake up to eat, and then not getting enough food energy to stay awake. Once we fully realized what was going on, we started subsidizing his feeding with bottled formula, and he's been steadily improving since. I'm now in the odd position where I really enjoy his crying (well, as much as anyone really can), since he didn't do much of it at first.

Amy and I are sleeping pretty well for new parents. We've been getting about 10 hours each night, but we get up every two hours for about 30 minutes to feed him. We usually manage to sneak in a two hour nap somewhere during the day.

Here are some photos of his first week home:

This might be my last baby post in a while, as the little guy is taking up pretty much all of my time these days. But if you just can't get enough Darren, check out the slideshows here, as I'll likely keep adding more photos