Category Archives: computing

computing in general

sox soxio: Failed reading : unknown file type

2008.06.27 – 5:08 pm PDT

I got this error on my Ubuntu system. It stuck me as odd because the script I had made, ran just fine previously.

sox soxio: Failed reading `hello-thank-you-for-calling.wav': unknown file type `raw'

Upon searching, I found that for some reason sox lost all it’s available formats.

$ sox
...
SUPPORTED FILE FORMATS: pls m3u

The following installed all the available file formats.

$ sudo apt-get install libsox-fmt-all
...
$ sox
...
SUPPORTED FILE FORMATS: 8svx aif aifc aiff aiffc al alsa ao au auto avi avr caf cdda cdr cvs cvsd dat dvms fap ffmpeg flac fssd gsm hcom ima ircam la lpc lpc10 lu m3u m4a mat mat4 mat5 maud mp2 mp3 mp4 mpg nist nul null ogg oss ossdsp paf pls prc pvf raw s1 s2 s3 s4 sb sd2 sds sf sl smp snd sndfile sndt sou sph sw txw u1 u2 u3 u4 ub ul uw vms voc vorbis vox w64 wav wmv wve xa xi

Here is the command my script was running to convert a text2wav file into a GSM encoded file for my Asterisk setup.

sox --show-progress -V1 hello-thank-you-for-calling.wav -r 8000 -c 1 -t gsm hello-thank-you-for-calling.gsm resample -ql
By px | Also posted in Ubuntu | Tagged , , , , , |

Blogger import

2008.06.20 – 9:36 pm PDT

So today I’ve just been trying to work on importing my blogs from Blogger to here. What a task. It’s a pain to spell check, browse over, then categorize each and every single entry into work comp, pain journal, or other, and there is no shortage of entries. Then try to figure out tagging of each post, if it requires any. I’m not having much luck and have had to restart a few times. Good thing I made a nice clean backup before playing around. Which I will have to create a new one after this post, seeing as it will be lost if I have to restore again.

By px | Also posted in WordPress, blogs | Tagged |

Cox, “Yes we’re a wasteful business.”

2008.06.14 – 4:10 pm PDT

Dear COX, What a waste of resources.  I do not have a cable box from you assholes, therefore I cannot watch your VOD, ONDEMAND programming.  “YOU have the power with Cox Digital Cable. Watch what you want, when you want.”

Let’s clear the air here.  I have the power to watch what I want when I want because of my and .  I know you’re sad I’m not paying you $12/month for you’re set top box, get over it.  Please stop contacting me and further wasting resources on customers who are unable to utilize your service.  No I won’t switch.

dsci0407.jpg

By px | Also posted in hardware, media, thoughts | Tagged , , , , |

netgear ps121 usb print server notes

2008.04.10 – 3:31 pm PDT

I had one while I was living with my , and got used to not having to walk to the printer, plug in the laptop and wait.  Over the weekend I ordered a refurbished Netgear PS121 USB Mini Print Server for cheap and got it up and running in minutes not counting my fruitless searches to find the default log-in and password.

Hopefully this page will rank high for those searching for the default log-in, password, and settings of their new Netgear print server.  I am using CUPS on Linux.  Right now using Ubuntu, and Gentoo primarily.

By default it uses DHCP to request an available address from your network.

Also by default the user-name is “admin” and password, “password” both with no quotes.

LPR Queue name “P1”

IPP URL “http://ip:631/ipp/p1” (Connects; unable to print; reason below)

AppSocket/HPJetDirect “socket://ip:9100/p1” (Works; Read Update Below.)

Also to print a test page, hold down the reset button for 2 seconds.

To reset back to factory default settings, hold down the reset button for 10 seconds.

The web based configuration tool for the Netgear isn’t that involved, and certainly isn’t as “smart” as the banner proclaims it.  There isn’t even a way to control jobs via the web interface.   If you do not know how to configure your DHCP server to assign a static IP address reservation, the only important thing to configure security wise is the password.

After a quick nmap scan of the new device on my network, it revealed several open ports which you may want to firewall from outside networks as there is no password authentication required to telnet, or print to the device.

PORT     STATE SERVICE
23/tcp   open  telnet
80/tcp   open  http
139/tcp  open  netbios-ssn
515/tcp  open  printer
631/tcp  open  ipp
9100/tcp open  jetdirect

UPDATE:

I’ve had the printer server for about a month now, and I have to say that it pretty much sucks.  I would not recommend it to anyone.  I haven’t really been able to print anything reliably without multiple attempts or wasting paper from printing garbage.  I have only had luck with the AppSocket/HPJetDirect, LPR/LPD methods.  I have not been able to get IPP to work either.  This post from 2005 confirms it’s apparently by design.  Pretty lame.

By px | Also posted in hardware, notes | Tagged , , , , |

wordpress 2.5 release candidate

2008.03.18 – 1:54 am PDT

A couple hours ago the first release candidate for WordPress 2.5 was released and I felt the urge to test it out on here and write a quick post about it. I like the new color scheme in the dashboard.  Also the ability to add media to a post is quite cool.  Now it’s possible even easier, to link to most media types with a URL. (flickr, youtube, mp3)  Neat stuff!  Sadly attempting to link to a YouTube clip failed for me along with linking to an image URL.  Time to feed the testers mailing list, because the WYSIWYG editor is broken as well when attempting to create hyperlinks and couple other things.  Good thing it’s not difficult to create hyperlinks manually.  :)

2008.03.18 ^ wordpress 2.5_rc1 dashboard Screenshot

update: youtube link worked now after the post has been edited. hmm

super fast driving time

it’d be nice if the *tube/flv automagically embeded with a player.

By px | Also posted in WordPress, thoughts | Tagged , |

Firefox 3.0b4 under Ubuntu

2008.03.11 – 10:15 pm PDT

It’s pretty easy to try out the latest beta for users.  I’m sure it’s just as easy to try it out on other Linux distributions that are up to date.

2008.03.11 ^ Screenshot

Simply choose your language from the Firefox beta download page to begin your download.  Once completed open up a terminal and run the following commands.

# create a temporary directory if you do not already have one.
mkdir -p ~/tmp
cd ~/tmp
# un package the tar ball.
tar -jxvpf /path/to/firefox-3.0b4.tar.bz2

Once the tar process completes

cd firefox
# Launch Firefox
./firefox

Or close your terminal session and launch via the ALT-F2 Run Application method.

~/tmp/firefox/firefox

This new instance of Firefox does not use any plugins which may be already installed on your system. You will need to download any plugins you use such as the Adobe Flash player to

~/tmp/firefox/plugins/libflashplayer.so

By px | Also posted in Ubuntu, internet, software | Tagged , , , , |

OpenID + Wordpress = <3

2008.02.16 – 4:52 pm PST

The pun is a little late for Valentine’s day, but I just noticed and installed it today. There is a working OpenID plugin for Wordpress. My previous method for using with Wordpress failed and stopped working several months ago, I forget when, I even left the plugin sitting there broken and activated until I just now removed it. How bad is that? haha, but anyways. You should also drop any old OpenID related tables from your database before enabling the new plugin. Enjoy the OpenID + Wordpress = <3 and always remember to back your database often.

By px | Also posted in WordPress, blogs, software | Tagged , , |

my ballot has been cast.

2008.02.05 – 4:23 pm PST

I voted today. I originally registered to vote absentee by mail, but changed my mind because I didn’t want to buy a stamp. Besides, my voting place wasn’t that far from where I live, it was at a senior living facility around the corner. I think in some ways voting should be a social experience if your able to participate. Once I got there, it was a real pain to find available parking. When you arrive at the polls, there is always someone there to help you with the voting process. There was also an error with my registration, one of the numbers if my street address was different in two sets of records. Once that was rectified, the polling workers gave me the choice of using a paper ballot, or computer which had a paper trail. I chose the computer method. It was kind of lame, I wish it were a touch screen instead of some kind of scroll wheel. After fumbling around with the scroll wheel trying to cast a write in vote, the rest was relatively easy to complete. I got my “I Voted” sticker, put it on my shirt, and went on my way.

By px | Also posted in personal, thoughts | Tagged , , , |

forced upgrade cycle, how bored must I be?

2008.02.01 – 2:13 pm PST

R.I.P 2006-2008 - 2nd hand Pentium 4 2.4Ghz CPU and ASUS Motherboard.

This morning I awoke to the peculiar sounds of my home server turning on and off rapidly. I didn’t have time to do any digging into the issue before physical therapy so I just flipped the power switch off. When I got home, fearing that my somewhat new and very expensive Antec super efficient power supply had failed, I got out my trusty power supply tester. Luckily the tester showed everything was fine, which means it’s the motherboard. *sigh* more rubbish. I guess I need to start shopping for a new(to me) one. It is about that time when all my computers start to walk off the cliff like lemmings. Hopefully I can salvage the RAM to sell and or determine if the CPU is still good and reincarnate the system again. Maybe it’s time I round up all the hardware I have and just get rid of it all in order to buy brand new stuff and make it a complete upgrade cycle. With hard drive density soaring and Moore’s law continuing to show no mercy, my aged technology is whooping my ass. The most rugged piece of technology I own is a 15″ Mag Technology DX1595 Color Monitor which I purchased in 1996. 12 years isn’t bad. Hopefully this year I will replace it with a LCD.  Who can say they’ve had a piece of technology for that long which still works.  I’d like to know.

By px | Also posted in hardware, personal | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |

transitional title of importance

2008.02.01 – 12:37 am PST

Today I decided that I would import my LiveJournal posts. This process started off with manually exporting each month which contained a post. Taking breaks every 30-40 minutes this took me about 3 hours. The next part of my monumental task of importing took the longest thus far. A reason it took so long though was due to the pinging process happening for each post after it was imported. Once realized and turned off after completing about half of the data set, it only took me another 45 minutes importing each month. Holy crap is it a manual task to get information out of LiveJournal and into something else like Wordpress.

I imported roughly 700+ posts, and now have begun the task of categorization, tagging, spell checking, and filtering. Even if I attempt to break up the task into about 100 posts/day, I expect this to take the longest as there isn’t any quality plugins for mass post property editing in Wordpress. I don’t think it imported any of the comments, which is unfortunate, but fine as I rarely ever received comments.

It’s interesting reading and going over stuff that happened to me so many years ago. The earliest bit of information I now have is from July 2002.

Here is my tip to give to the community.  One key thing to remember is the more plugins you have activated in your Wordpress installation the slower it will function.  Before attempting such a task yourself, disable all unnecessary plugins you have.  This will save a tremendous amount of load time off each page/edit/task you attempt.

By px | Also posted in WordPress, blogs, personal, software | Tagged , , , , |

Terrific Tuesday, take 4 3/4

2007.12.11 – 9:35 pm PST

This is now the 6th time I’ve attempted writing this post over the last 2 hours not including breaks. I was fighting some bad behavior, a funky Wordpress plugin which had become outdated and needed to be updated.

I had the first post-op visit with my this afternoon. After waiting in the waiting room, and then a briefly some x-rays of my neck were taken, then more waiting. The surgeon, Dr Jon White, came in and took the tape off the wound, and said it looked great, and proceeded to show me the x-rays on his laptop. Very neat. He discussed the hardware that now occupies my neck, and said that I will begin physical therapy soon. I hope soon is the operative word here. Ahh progress is still progress, which is nice. I ask him if I could drive and how much I should move my neck, and was then on my way back home.

A week without shaving left me with a full beard. Shaving with a new thing on my neck was a task to get used to. The wound just feels funny to me, so I avoided it while shaving in the shower with out a fog free mirror.

Outside of my neck feeling a bit stiff, and the low back I’m feeling great.

PS.  I got the new Futurama Movie today in my Netflix if anyone is interested in seeing it on my big screen.

By px | Also posted in WordPress, personal, thoughts | Tagged , , , , , , , , |

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