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Elisa

With the recent announcement of Ubuntu forming a Media Center team focusing on Elisa as it’s media center platform, I took another look at Elisa as a potential solution for my home theater PC. (Sidenote: I’m way too lazy and need a gook kick in the butt. I’ve had my HTPC built and ready to go for a year, and have barely tried to fix the last few issues I have with it. Shame on me. Though since I got my dual-tuner HD-DVR from DirecTV, when combined with my Sonos and Xbox 360, I haven’t really needed all the features of a HTPC that I originally planned on).

Elisa was already available in the Foresight repository, but it was version 0.0.1. Asking nicely in IRC, Ken Vandine updated the version to Elisa’s current release, 0.1.6. Ken was unable to run it because of an ATI or Xorg issue in 1-devel with 3D effects, but it started right up for me.

I’ll do a more formal review later, I’ve only played with it for maybe 30-60 minutes tops over the last day and a half, but for a very, very early release, Elisa looks promising. After some user error on where you edit different file locations in the ~/elisa/elisa.conf file, I was able to browse my music and photos.

To be clear, it’s a program to manage your media – it does not have DVR functionality built-in. And for me, that may just be perfect. It will manage your movies & videos, play DVDs, photos, and music. It has built-in support already for Streamzap remotes. (I don’t know what that is yet, but I’m going to find out).

One obvious bug, is when I start Elisa from a terminal or Alt-F2, there is no window border. Changing Elisa to fullscreen with the “F” key and back to a windowed version, brings up a window. This tip is useful, because if you don’t, and you lose focus of Elisa, none of the shortcut keys work if the window border isn’t there.

I’m going to play with it more this weekend, and will post more thoughts on Elisa early next week. For now, here are some screenshots of Elisa in action, with bigger versions available on my Flickr account.

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elisa2

elisa-photos

No Halo3 Beta For Me

I bought a copy of Crackdown when it came out a few months ago, and was quite happy with the game. It was fun to play a GTA-style game on the side of the good guys for once.

An added benefit of buying Crackdown was an exclusive invite to the Halo 3 beta, which went live this past Wed. Or was supposed to. Of course demand was higher than expected, and the download was delayed a few times throughout the day.

I was finally able to download, and I start the beta through Crackdown – which takes about 10 minutes from start to finally getting in the game after going through the Halo 3 lobby and matchmaking. And each time I try to play, I get an error: “The disc is unreadable” – which is kind of funny as there is no disc.

There are a few threads on the Bungie / Halo 3 forums about this, with other folks having the same issue, and no clear cut fix. Quite frustrating, to say the least.

doh!

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Bladerunner DVD Details

One of my new favorite blogs to read, Total Dick-head, devoted to everything Philip K. Dick, has the details on the next Bladerunner DVD release, via DavisDVD.

I love Bladerunner – it was really the Director’s Cut being released in theaters that really got me into it, as I remember going to the Oriental in Milwaukee to watch it, and just being blown away. The first DVD release was pretty poor – it was basically just the Laserdisc version slapped on to DVD without being remastered, and the quality is iffy at best. Bladerunner is by far the best adapation of a Philip K. Dick story (though A Scanner Darkly is the truest adaption), and the story, the visuals, and the acting were all top notch.

I eagerly await this release on DVD! Read the details on the 5 disc box set here.

Bluetooth (Headset / ALSA) update

A follow-up to last night’s post about Bluetooth adapters on Linux to use a headset with my desktop:

_

Breaking News: Foresight Developers can read minds!_

Serendipity struck, that within an hour of posting, Ken Vandine pinged me in IRC on #foresight to let me know that earlier in the day, he had already updated the Bluetooth ALSA packages on Foresight to make this project work.

So not only will Foresight developers package up software if you ask nicely in IRC, I have now learned that Foresight Developers have the ability to read minds, and package software they know their users will want later in the day.

Can your distribution’s developers read minds? Get Foresight today!

(Now I’m off to pickup a bluetooth adapter later today!)

Dear Lazyweb: Bluetooth Adapters on Linux

Dear Lazyweb: I’m looking for a USB Bluetooth adapter that is Linux friendly.

I have two headsets with boom mics I’ve used on my desktop – one is a cheap off-brand, and one is a very nice Plantronics. I have been working on a podcast off and on for the last couple of months using Jokosher, more as a test to learn Jokosher so I can add audio to screencasts and help show users how to use Foresight.

Unfortunately, the sound quality on the boom mics is lacking – the cheap off brand sounds tinny, and the Plantronics makes it sound like the mic is 10 feet away from my voice, and doesn’t really move on the headset so I can position it better.

However, I just received a Jawbone bluetooth headset for my cellphone. The Jawbone’s claim to fame is that they made it for DARPA, and it blocks all ambient noise so you only hear the user’s voice. My hope is that it might work well for voice recording on Linux. But I’m not sure how compatible the different USB Bluetooth adapters are for pairing a device like a headset, and I don’t even know if Jokosher or other applications will see the headset as a microphone for voice recording.

If anyone has any thoughts, please leave a comment here, or drop me a line at pcutler _at_ foresightlinux dot org.

Thanks!

Joost Beta Invites

Do you need a Joost beta invite? I’ve hooked up all the friends (I think) who want one, and still have a bunch leftover.

Drop me an email at pcutler _at_ foresightlinux.org if you want one.

Mac & Windows only now, thought there have been rumors of a Linux client sometime in the future.

It’s definitely interesting – and different. Joost continues to sign up content partners, and it’s getting better each week. I don’t use it all that often as I’ve been mostly using my laptop now rather than my desktop, but when I am in my den, I’ll run it on my extra Windows box from time to time just as background noise and to keep tabs on what the Joost folks are up to.

Off the Grid

I’ve been off the grid most of the weekend, as I took the family home to Wisconsin to visit the in-laws.

My father-in-law has a wireless broadband connection (supposed to be about 1 meg down, but feels much slower). It’s connect to a Linksys 802.11b router. I’ve been unable to to get my Toshiba laptop to connect to the net, though my work laptop running XP didn’t have a problem nor did my wife. My Toshiba gets an IP address and saw the nameservers on the wireless (eth1), but has horrendous packet loss. Pinging google.com resulted in 66% packet loss, and web pages wouldn’t pull up at all. I don’t know if it was a Linux thing, Foresight, or the ISP itself.

It has reminded me how much I loathe not being connected. So much for tackling learning docbook this weekend for the Foresight user guide or the blog theme on WordPress MU.

Having some time on my hands, I did do some shopping yesterday, stopping at a local bookstore, who hosted John Scalzi just over a week ago. I missed him in Minneapolis last week, and was able to pick up an autographed copy of his latest book, The Last Colony, which oddly isn’t featured on his Books page yet. The Last Colony is the third book in his Old Man’s War trilogy.

On a recommendation, I picked up You Suck by Christopher Moore, which was good and as funny as promised. I finished it yesterday, and I love books that make me laugh out loud, which this did a few times. An odd note about the book: One of the characters is from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, about an hour north of where I am visiting right now in Milwaukee. I was born in Fond du Lac, and most of my extended relatives live there. It’s fairly small with about 40,000 residents, and I was surprised to see it in a book. (But not as surprised when Oconomowoc, where I am right now, was featured in Cryptonomicon).

I also picked up a nice hardcover edition of four Philip K. Dick stories – The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Ubik and The Man in the High Castle. I own a number of his short stories, and since it was featured on Boing Boing, the Total Dick-Head blog has been a favorite of mine to read, so it was good to pick up a couple of Dick’s classics.

I enjoy supporting local bookstores, it’s always worth the premium I pay in my mind. I enjoyed visiting Harry Schwartz Bookstores. They had a fairly good collection of books in all genres, and had recommendations for books by their employees all over the store, which I loved.

Now it’s off to lunch and a 6 – 7 hour drive home today.