About six months ago my main PC died and I needed a new one. Not having a lot of cash, and not really having a lot of free time to spend on the computer, I decided to get an Acer C7 Chromebook to hold me over.

Refurbished units are available on Acer's official refurb store, over on E-Bay. I paid $149 at the time. Now the base 2 Gb unit with a 320 Gb HD is available for $139.

These are Intel Celeron-based systems with 2 SO-DIMM RAM sockets and a mini-PCIe slot that holds the a/b/g/n/Bluetooth adapter. With only one RAM socket populated, it was easy to pop in a 4 Gb module for a total of 6 Gb of RAM. Adding more RAM allows the system to operate better with multiple tabs open. Other than that, you won't notice much of a difference.

Now that I've been using this as my primary machine for the last 6 months I can render an informed opinion.

I'm amazed at how much of what I do now is thru a web browser. After adding an SSH app, there is very little I couldn't do with the Chromebook. Still, there are some critical limitations that have driven me to get a "real" computer.

One of the big ones is the lack of network file system support. There is no way to access SMB/CIFS or NFS shares on the Chromebook. It also doesn't have FTP support, though there is a commercial app available for FTP. It is only $1.99, but needs to phone home to make sure you've paid, so requires connectivity to function.

If you can live with accessing files only through Google Drive, everything is fine. But, if you have -- like me -- a few terabytes of data on local shares, you're stuck. No, uploading every movie, television show, educational video and audio file I've every ripped to Google Drive is not an option.

Speaking of uploading music, that is another limitation. If you use Google Music, you can play everything fine, but will need a "real" computer to upload any files.

Printing, too. There is no direct printing support. The system only supports "Google Cloud Print", which means you either buy a new printer that supports GCP or leave a PC running with the printer driver configured, and logged in to Chrome (browser). You also have to be comfortable with everything you print going up to Google and back down. Meh.

It is impressive what can be accomplished through the Chrome browser, an SSH app and an FTP app. There are numerous web IDEs such as Shift Edit that are actually very good for development of HTML, CSS, Javascript and other script-based languages.

Of course, Chrome doesn't do Java. There are still some things on the web that require Java.

The lack of network file system support is a show stopper for me. I'm also taking some online classes including a couple in Java development, which means I can't use the Chromebook.

Not that I'm getting rid of it. I have given it to my wife. My young son also has one.

For $139 plus $20 or so for extra RAM it makes a wonderful backup system. Or one to grab and take with if you aren't going to be doing heavy development.

A small bluetooth peripheral that combines both wallet theft protection and lessens the number of cards you need to keep in your wallet. Pre-order for 50% off only on 12/12/2013 (ok, I waited for the last day to pre-order mine and get a referral link).

Then apparently they will fire the manager who tried to live up to the guarantee

Respond to this, especially the "controversial for Americans" paragraphs 50-64 and 178-216

Courtesy of the Guardian - Ayn Rand or Gina Rinehart
http://www.theguardian.com/business/quiz/2013/nov/25/ayn-rand-gina-rinehart
10 questions one page
I got 5/10 but I didn't try hard

If you don't know about Gina - here is a sample
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-09-05/rinehart-says-aussie-workers-overpaid-unproductive/4243866

I need to think about this

Some while back I posted a journal entry about streaming video to my television from a central server in my basement. My conclusion at the time was wireless B/G/N couldn't really cut it when streaming via SMB over TCP.

I've experimented with a couple things and finally got it working where I can stream 1080p video (ripped BluRay) to my television via wifi. The difference was switching to the 5.0 GHz band (802.11 a/n) and changing the file share from SMB over TCP (Samba shares) to NFSv4.

NFS has less overhead than SMB over TCP and the wireless channels in the 5 GHz range are wider than those in the 2.4 GHz range.

So this setup now works for me without issues:

Small PC w/Via C7 chip acting as a server. Runs NFS and has copies (h.264 encoded as MKV) of all my movies, television shows and music (Ogg-FLAC). Connects to 10/100 wired switch in basement.

Zotac ZBox HD-11 running w/o a hard drive and booting OpenELEC off a 2 Gb SD card. Connects to home network via Cisco/Linksys WUSB600N USB wireless dongle on 5 GHz band (802.11 n).

I still have Samba running on the server so the couple of gaming PCs my kids have can reach the movie shares and perform automatic backups to private shares. I need to find a nice (free) NFS client for Windows 7. Suggestions?

Yet another cutting edge, value adding software project cut because the stock market went down.

The manager who told me in 2001 that any project that takes over 4 months to be complete is a failure, has been proven right in my career more often than he's been proven wrong. 2 quarters, that's all you ever get to show success anymore.

Oh well. This one was good resume fodder for next time. But I'm glad I never got around to buying my own whiteboard pens.

I am significantly less bothered by individual acts of sin, both in others and myself, than I am by collective attempts to redefine sin as not-sin.
 
Even in authoritarian terms, forgiveness outweighs justice.

Back in 2003 Marshall Brain, founder of How Stuff Works, wrote a short novel titled Manna . It is an exploration at what increasingly looks to be the logical conclusion of the Industrial Revolution. If you haven't had the opportunity to read it before, I highly recommend it. It isn't long or difficult, but it raises some very interesting notions.

I mention it now because of the news out of San Francisco.

While not the same angle as Manna, it essentially is a big step down the same path. In 2012 there were over 4 million people employed in the fast food industry in the United States. What is going to happen to the country when they're almost all replaced by automation?

Thinking about the different jobs that can be done better, faster and cheaper by robots today is an interesting exercise. Contemplating which jobs will be better handled by automated systems in 20, 50 and 100 years...is scary. Scary, that is, unless we fundamentally change the way we think about work, employment and the economy. I'm having a very hard time thinking of any jobs that can't be better done by robots than humans, including the so called "creative" ones, in 50 - 100 years.

With latest Debian sid 3.9 kernel, tv card works if I manually modprobe cx88-dvb.

I will be offline for a considerable period possibly weeks soon while I get temporarily and until I have stuff sorted out. Internet will be way down the list of stuff.

Move is because I am waiting on a formal offer of employment in a faraway city by myself for crap pay. But it is employment..

This is a duplicate of a post I made in one of the recent topics. I'm copying it here for easier reference as I send it to a couple friends.

* * *

So what exactly is metadata?

Many years ago I was a telecommunications engineer for a large company and worked CALEA. For the uninitiated, that is law-enforcement wiretapping.

My job was to make sure CALEA functioned properly on the new cellular network. We tested on an internal, micro-cell network that was isolated from the real world. The end result was to make sure targeted devices sent CDR (call data records, or metadata) and voice to the destination. This was all piped thru IPSec tunnels to the appropriate destination law-enforcement agency.

In the event of a tunnel failure, CDRs were required to buffer but voice was not. Saving voice during an outage required too much storage space, but the text nature of CDRs meant they were small and largely compressible.

Metadata consisted of EVERYTHING THAT WAS NOT VOICE.

To be clear, it included the following:

called number
calling number
time of call
duration of call
keys pressed during call
cell tower registered to
other cell towers in range
gps coordinates
signal strength
imei (cell phone serial number)
codec
and a few other bits of technical information.

Everything above "cell tower registered to" applies to traditional, POTS land line phones. This information seems to be what the disinformation campaign currently going on seems to revolve around. They never mention that there are over 327 MILLION cellular phones in the U.S., which is more than one per person. They never mention the bottom set of metadata.

Capturing all key presses makes sure things like call transfers, three-way calls and the like get captured.

It also grabs things like your voicemail PIN/password, which never seems to get explicitly mentioned.

But the cellular set is more interesting. This data come across in registration and keep-alive packets every few seconds. This is how the network knows you're still active and where to route calls to.

But by keeping all this metadata it allows whomever has it to plot of map of your phone's gross location and movements.

By "gross", I mean the location triangulated from cell tower strength and not GPS coordinates. Towers are triangular in nature and use panel antennas. They know which panel you connect thru and can triangulate your location down to a few meters just by the strength of your signal on a couple different towers.

GPS coordinates are "fine" location. For the most part the numbers sent across are either zeroed out or the last location your phone obtained a fix.

GPS isn't turned on all the time because it sucks batteries down. If you own a phone you know how long it can take to get a fix, so this feature isn't normally used.

HOWEVER, it can be turned on remotely and is a part of the E911 regulations pushed to help find incapacitated victims after 9/11.

[There is a reason the baseband radio chip in your phone has closed, binary-blob firmware -- whether or not the OS itself is FOSS. We wouldn't want the masses to be able to disable remote activation, would we? Or let them start changing frequencies and power levels.]

So, are we comfortable with the government knowing where we, thru our cell phones, are at every moment of the day? Because that is what metadata allows.

Think of what can be learned by applying modern pattern analysis to that data set.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/queens-birthday-honours-arise-sir-baldrick--tony-robinson-knighted-just-a-cbe-for-blackadder-8659793.html
"As Baldrick once said: âoeItâ(TM)s all right, Blackadder, you donâ(TM)t have to curtsy or anything.â Tony Robinson, the diminutive actor, presenter and political activist who rose to fame in the 1980s as the put-upon manservant in the Blackadder series, is now Sir Tony."

We are well through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole.

Was here looking for last years posts on getting a tv card working so thought I would say Hi.
Hi.
So running debian sid I just did an update/upgrade to the 3.8 kernel and a bunch of other stuff.
xfce a bit busted.
grub changed some stuff around which was not expected but fixable.
And as alluded to above tv card not working. Not sure why. Boot into 3.2 kernel - working. Boot stock or custom 3.8 no.

Also with the install of the 3.8 kernel, the 3.8 source code doesn't come with the header files even if you have the 3.2 headers installed. Maybe that is why I have no dvb modules. About to reboot and see if the latest kernel compile with headers works.

Update: rebooted and almost
Jun 2 15:58:50 tqft kernel: [ 5.905783] cx88/2: cx2388x MPEG-TS Driver Manager version 0.0.9 loaded
Jun 2 15:58:50 tqft kernel: [ 5.906683] cx88[0]: subsystem: 00ac:0400, board: DViCO FusionHDTV DVB-T PRO [card=64,insmod option], frontend(s): 1
Jun 2 15:58:50 tqft kernel: [ 5.906684] cx88[0]: TV tuner type 71, Radio tuner type -1
Jun 2 15:58:50 tqft kernel: [ 6.086895] cx2388x alsa driver version 0.0.9 loaded
Jun 2 15:58:50 tqft kernel: [ 6.087136] cx88/0: cx2388x v4l2 driver version 0.0.9 loaded
Jun 2 15:58:50 tqft kernel: [ 6.556278] tuner 9-0061: Tuner -1 found with type(s) Radio TV.
Jun 2 15:58:50 tqft kernel: [ 6.769787] xc2028 9-0061: creating new instance
Jun 2 15:58:50 tqft kernel: [ 6.769789] xc2028 9-0061: type set to XCeive xc2028/xc3028 tuner
Jun 2 15:58:50 tqft kernel: [ 6.769791] cx88[0]: Asking xc2028/3028 to load firmware xc3028-v27.fw
Jun 2 15:58:50 tqft kernel: [ 6.771530] cx88[0]/2: cx2388x 8802 Driver Manager
Jun 2 15:58:50 tqft kernel: [ 6.771560] cx88[0]/2: found at 0000:03:00.2, rev: 5, irq: 16, latency: 248, mmio: 0xf4000000
Jun 2 15:58:50 tqft kernel: [ 6.771652] cx88[0]/1: CX88x/0: ALSA support for cx2388x boards
Jun 2 15:58:50 tqft kernel: [ 6.772044] cx88[0]/0: found at 0000:03:00.0, rev: 5, irq: 16, latency: 248, mmio: 0xf6000000
Jun 2 15:58:50 tqft kernel: [ 6.772258] cx88[0]/0: registered device video1 [v4l2]
Jun 2 15:58:50 tqft kernel: [ 6.772324] cx88[0]/0: registered device vbi0
Jun 2 15:58:50 tqft kernel: [ 6.811124] cx88/2: cx2388x dvb driver version 0.0.9 loaded
Jun 2 15:58:50 tqft kernel: [ 6.811128] cx88/2: registering cx8802 driver, type: dvb access: shared
Jun 2 15:58:50 tqft kernel: [ 6.811131] cx88[0]/2: subsystem: 00ac:0400, board: DViCO FusionHDTV DVB-T PRO [card=64]
Jun 2 15:58:50 tqft kernel: [ 6.811132] cx88[0]/2: cx2388x based DVB/ATSC card
Jun 2 15:58:50 tqft kernel: [ 6.811133] cx8802_alloc_frontends() allocating 1 frontend(s)
Jun 2 15:58:50 tqft kernel: [ 6.826605] i2c i2c-9: sendbytes: NAK bailout.
Jun 2 15:58:50 tqft kernel: [ 6.826665] zl10353_read_register: readreg error (reg=127, ret==-5)
Jun 2 15:58:50 tqft kernel: [ 6.835128] xc2028 9-0061: Loading 80 firmware images from xc3028-v27.fw, type: xc2028 firmware, ver 2.7
Jun 2 15:58:50 tqft kernel: [ 7.172301] cx88[0]/2: dvb frontend not attached. Can't attach xc3028
Jun 2 15:58:50 tqft kernel: [ 7.172359] cx88[0]/2: dvb_register failed (err = -22)
Jun 2 15:58:50 tqft kernel: [ 7.172400] cx88[0]/2: cx8802 probe failed, err = -22

And an update to the update
  sudo modprobe cx88-dvb
gets tv card working. Why it isn't automatically I don't know. Maybe I should remove the modprobe.conf entry and let the big L handle it.

Three stories caught my eye this week, and a fourth hidden story was found because of the other three.

Apparently, homosexuals with the help of religious zealots have gained a new level of equality this week, with Lesbians in Florida now able to be charged with statutory rape under a rather odd rape law that that calls statutory rape "lewd or lascivious battery on child". I think that means seduction is now rape. And speaking of seduction being rape, while discussing this case, I had cause to look up The age of consent in Massachusetts, where I leanred that there too, seduction = statutory rape, but ONLY if the person under the age of 18 is "chaste". Elsewhere in Massachusetts law, apparently, is a stricter version which is about sexual penetration and only applies to girls younger than 16. So if you are a slut, you can't cry rape in Massachusetts.
 
This all jives in with the story from Elizabeth Smart on how overzealous Christian sex ed led her into a polygamous marriage with her kidnapper. I think the same people who wrote that Mormon sex ed curriculum wrote the Massachusetts law on age of consent.
 
And finally, just to bring it back around to homosexuality the Department of Justice now requires employees to have some pro-gay paraphanilia in their workspace- J. Edgar Hoover and his closet full of dresses would be so proud!