Month: November 2005

I confess. I’m a technophile. I like reading about new technologies and gadgets. Even better, I like owning new technologies and gadgets. And yet, I don’t have a cellphone of my own. I bought one for my wife but that was only because she was doing a lot of driving out into the boonies of Iowa as part of her degree program. The phone is a couple of years old now but I’m in no hurry to replace it. I’m in even less of a hurry to get one for myself.

Why? Because every cellphone I see out there sucks. The cellphone manufacturers are rushing to build in all sorts of extraneous functionality. This adds to the phone’s weight, size & complexity without providing any meaningful benefit.

Let’s look at a similar product for a moment, the iPod. In a field of hundreds, if not thousands, of MP3 players the iPod is the industry leader and it has the least functionality of the lot. While the other manufacturers have added FM tuners and recorders and god-only-knows what else; Apple has kept the iPod simple and it’s making them money hand over fist.

But what does the iPod have to do with cellphones? Besides that hideous ROKR thing? That’s simple, literally. By restricting the functionality of the device to the bare minimum, Apple gave consumers exactly what they wanted. While cellphone manufacturers keep throwing function after function into their phones in hopes that more people will plunk down $500 for their latest toy.

All those functions sound great, but really how many people actually use all of them? I cannot speak for everybody, but I would greatly appreciate a cellphone that simply promises:

  • Superior battery life
  • Excellent Reception
  • Easily fits in my pocket

However from all the adverts I see for cellphones; I have a feeling that is just too much to ask for. *sigh*

From Pukka:

Not from Pukka:

Gossamer Commons, 16 Nov 2006

To borrow “snarkism”, somebody deserves a tasty, tasty biscut for today’s bit of hilarity over at Gossamer Commons.

If you do not regularly follow the strip; Malachite saved Keith from a Barghast by summoning forth Apokoryfoma. She’s a Neriad and the Viceroy of the Cul-de-Sac. She also happens to be Malachite’s ex-girlfriend. *laugh* If that were not bad enough by her code Keith is now required to make some sort of sacrifice to her, as a token of gratitude for saving him. Unfortunately, he’s not exactly overburned with resources at the moment and offers up a candy bar. Today’s strip is Appie’s reaction. Greg Holkan‘s art and Eric Burns‘ one line of text in this strip blend beautifully. Malachite’s reaction in the background of the strip is particularly worth paying attention to. 😀

I’ve written before about trying to get sound working on my ancient laptop. When Ubuntu Breezy (5.10) was released; I wiped my laptop and reloaded it from scratch. Unfortunately, this version of Ubuntu also failed to auto-detect/setup my laptop’s soundcard. After much googling and reading of the Ubuntu Forums, I finally got the sound working!

Below, I’ve summarized everything I read and tried in getting this working:

  1. Edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and add acpi=off to the end of the options for the kernel1.
  2. Install libsdl1.2debian-alsa via Synaptic.
  3. Removed /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.
  4. Created /etc/modprobe.d/alsa2.
  5. Added snd-cs4236 to the bottom of /etc/modules.

Mind you that summary leaves out dozens of pages of instructions, including the various diagnostics I ran to try figuring out what was wrong. Some of those diagnostics were:

  • lspci -v — No help to me as my soundcard is connected via ISA and not PNP.
  • lspnp -v — This would only detect my soundcard after I turned off acpi.
  • dmesg | grep -i "isa\|multi\|sound\|audio" — This might give you more info about the soundcard, but didn’t help me.
  • pnpdump — This might give you more info about the soundcard, but didn’t help me

Additionally, I ran across several recommendations for the options line in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa but the version of the file listed in the footnotes is the only one which worked for me.

Lastly, if you have this laptop there is a considerable amount of good information still available on Dell’s website for it. For example, apparently there is a Windows/DOS utility for configuring the IRQs and whatnot that the soundcard uses. Fortunately, I didn’t have to try downloading it and finding some way to run it but the option is there if you need it.

1/boot/grub/menu.lst
title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.12-9-386
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-9-386 root=/dev/hda1 ro quiet splash acpi=off
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.12-9-386
savedefault
boot

2/etc/modprobe.d/alsa
alias char-major-116 snd
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias snd-card-0 snd-cs4236
options snd-cs4236 port=0x530 cport=0x210 isapnp=0 dma1=1 dma2=0 irq=5
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0
alias sound-slot-1 snd-card-1

alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss

alias /dev/mixer snd-mixer-oss
alias /dev/dsp snd-pcm-oss
alias /dev/midi snd-seq-oss

options snd cards_limit=1

So last night, the wife was asleep. The cat was on the couch. I was sitting at the computer going through my email, reading a few news websites. Since the wife had left the bedroom door open, I closed the door into the computer room to keep the lights from bothering her.

Then about 10:00, 10:30 at night when I noticed a pounding sound. I was a bit puzzled because it sounded like somebody was at our door. I peeked out the window, but didn’t see any of our friends cars. So I headed up to the door and I could hear voices like the people were talking to one of the neighbors. I looked through the peephole, but couldn’t make out what was going on. Then they knocked again. I opened the door and found two cops on my doorstep.

They said one of the downstairs tenants had called in a complaint that we were making too much noise. They said they’d been told the noise sounded like somebody was stomping or bowling down the hallway. I told them I didn’t know what the noise was because we weren’t doing anything. I also mentioned that sound bounces around in the building quite a bit1.

They replied they’d been out there knocking for a while and hadn’t heard anything, but when they get a compaint they are required to check it out.

1 I recounted the story of the time when we thought the people above us were playing their music too loud, but it turned out the music was actually coming from one of the downstairs apartments.