Older blog entries for Rich (starting at number 70)

Roku

My "I don't need it but I want it" technology purchase this Christmas was a Roku.

I spent several hours early on the Christmas break trying to build a XBMC raspberry pi media center to act as an office jukebox. This worked ok, but I learned two things. One, it doesn't like to run "headless" (ie, without an active screen) and two, you really need a powered USB hub if you're going to plug in any non-trivial (ie, not a keyboard) USB devices, such as a wifi dongle or a USB hard drive.

Anyways, as fun as that was, I wanted something more polished, and picked up the Roku 3 at Radio Shack. In addition to playing my music collection, it can also do Pandora, Netflix, and a few thousand other things.

So, it's kind of overkill for what I wanted - just an easy way to play my music with a simple remote control - it's a fun toy, and also a great way to watch Netflix in the evening.

It's also interesting to compare this with the Google Chromecast that I picked up at LinuxCon a few months ago. While the Chromecast is a cool device, it's *way* behind Roku in terms of content and apps, and it's going to take a lot of catching up before I'd consider using it in place of the Roku. I'm sure that they'll get more content, but they may have already lost the race.

Syndicated 2014-01-02 15:23:14 from Notes In The Margin

Proliferation of OSes

As of yesterday, we now have the following operating systems in this house:

Desktop:
* Windows 7

Laptops:
* Chrome OS
* OS X
* Fedora 20
* CentOS 6

Phones:
* Android
* iOS
* Random AT&T phone

Tablets:
* Android
* Android with CyanogenMod

Raspberry Pi
* Pidora
* Raspbian

And, of course, being The Computer Guy, they're mostly my job. Fun, fun.

Syndicated 2013-12-23 19:37:09 from Notes In The Margin

Blog comments

I just upgraded Habari (the blog software) and in the process of purging spam comments, I appear to have also nuked all legitimate comments. I suppose I should be upset, since there were almost 3000 comments on the site, but it feels like a chance to start fresh, and not have to paw through a million spam comments for the occasional diamond.

The one page with really valuable comments is archived at archive.org

Syndicated 2013-12-23 18:28:23 (Updated 2013-12-23 18:30:29) from Notes In The Margin

Red Hat stands behind the code

Cool OpenStack video with footage of Red Hat engineers at the OpenStack summit in Hong Kong last month.