Today I again got very, very little done in the packing department but I did some more stuff in the Zipit area. Namely I was looking for a good MP3 player when I found a program that claimed it could both download and player podcasts. Some kind of padcatcher or whatever they call it. So obviously, logically, if the software specifically has podcast in the name I can only assume it is in fact capable of playing MP3s with that auto-resume type feature. Well I guess I’ll never know. You see I tried it with apt-get install and it worked in that it started to download and install both the program and the associated dependencies which it did warn me would take 200+ megs of storage space. Being the Linux noob I am I have no idea how to check how much space I have available in storage so I just said yes and let it do its thing whilst I went to my Dad’s for dinner. When I got back I found out I ran out of storage space. So then i got to have fun trying to figure out how to remove all the dependencies and whatever that was now taking up so much space. I think I caught at least a portion of it but I’ll probably end up re-imaging the memory card and starting over.
The next thing I want to do is two fold: figure out how that shell script for connecting to my local network works then also install an application that auto-syncs with some Internet time source. Then write my own script that just does those two things and have that run on start up. This way I can connect to the Internet and always have a corrected time on the clock. Which is mostly only important because sometimes debian packages will say something about a package dated in the future. Which since the zipit defaults back to January 1st 2000 is understandable. I don’t know that it’s really an issue
The other thing, the trip to my Dad’s for dinner, turned out to be entertaining as well. You see he moved from a modestly sized house (1 bath/3 bedroom) to a mobile home park, single-wide trailer thing. So he didn’t really have any room the PC he had been using. And since I had an Artigo PC, smaller than your average 5 1/4″ CD-ROM drive, just sitting idle I set up him up with that. Well it’s been working perfectly well for at least a year now amazingly. And he has a tone of stuff plugged into it too. I don’t even know how that think is actually running considering the number of USB devices plugged into it. Anyway he says all he did was move it from one place to another and it subsequently decided to boot up to a frozen CMOS screen or just not boot at all. I suggested taking off the hard drive and/or remove the CMOS battery for a few seconds to see if that would help. Well actually when he took it apart and put it back together it wouldn’t even power on any more. And the CMOS batter seems to be glued into place for some reason. I don’t even know what that’s all about.
We worked on it for quite a while. I already knew it was kind of a fragile thing and wasn’t really expecting it to come back to life. I took the whole thing apart, put it back together and tried plugging in the various (unlabeled) wires into difference sets of pins. I was about to give up when my Dad noticed a set of pins which was immediately next to another set of pins seemed to be segmented off in a very subtle way from the rest of the pins. If that makes sense. He plugged the wire plug for the power switch and LEDs into that grouping of pins and then it started working all of a sudden. So it was booting. Which was much more than I was ever expecting out of it. Then the new problem was that it wasn’t detecting the hard drive. Well this also involved some taking apart of components and putting back together. I have no idea when we ended up changing to make it work but eventually it did find the hard drive and boot into Windows.
So perhaps in this instance I was just giving up too early. I also really wanted to look at an actual set of instructions which I did not have on me.
Guess I’l interrupt again and mention I found a script for setting the clock for me. And it works at that. It’s not a an auto-set but it works.
Ok I’m out of stuff to write anyway so I think I’ll end this here.
I saw a segment on a web-based TV show called Hak5 (hak5.org)