Picked up a WDTV last night for $200. As you may have guessed from some of my other posts, I’m into my A/V stuff, so this thing seemed like a bargain. Many reviews will rave about how great it is, and I must say it’s not too bad, but I have found there are bugs (even in the latest 1.0.1.2 firmware): Playback of any AC3 file seems to result in a barely noticable (but very annoying) 100ms or so audio lag.

A new and significant release from Sun, Virtualbox 2.1 is now out just in time for Christmas. I’ve been checking out a couple of new features that have been added. First, the most significant (to me) is native built in host networking support. This makes it super easy to connect a VM up to a host network adapter so that you can access the VM from the outside on the network - far easier and more simple than setting up tun/tap interfaces.

Don’t let the Australian government censor the internet in Australia! Sign the petition and get involved. Censorship is a *bad* thing.

*Updated! The xbox360 doesn’t like divx/xvid files that have ac3 sound tracks, so we can use mencoder to convert these files so they use 128kbit stereo mp3 soundtracks instead. This isn’t too hard to do, just use a command similar to: mencoder input.avi -ovc copy -oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr:br=128 -channels 2 -o output.avi Easy when you know how.

I recently purchased the Edimax EW-7728IN IEEE802.11n Draft 2.0 wireless card. Although I’ve not tested the performance yet, I have managed to get it to successfully connect to my Billion 7300N 802.11n wireless router at a rate of between 270 and 300Mb/sec. Before I began I read on the Ubuntu forums that many people had problems trying to get the thing to work. I found it was fairly straight forward which is probably a result of the new(ish) drivers on the edimax website for Linux.

Hi, I’ve posted this to my site in order to find people looking for a central coast linux user group (Central Coast, NSW, Australia that is.) Basically, I’ve sort-of found one at http://cclug.com, but it seems to be a bit dead with hardly any info. If you are interested in a central coast LUG, please leave a comment with your email address and I’ll get in touch. Perhaps you can help me find the mysterious CCLUG, or help me establish a new one?

Explaining microblogging is slightly difficult, but I’ll give it a go: You sign up for a microblogging service like twitter. You ‘follow’ your friends that are already on there, and perhaps some people that aren’t your friends but people who say interesting things. Once you’ve started following your friends, you might download a program for your computer to alert you when they post (or in the case of twitter ’tweet’), and to allow you to post your own ’tweets’ without having to visit the twitter website at all.

Just a quick upadte, john-hunt.com is now hosted in Australia rather than the UK. This is good because it means I don’t have to wait ages for pages to load on my own sites etc.. I’m going to set up a more personal blog, probably at blog.john-hunt.com with posts about life in Aus, photos etc…what I should have sorted out ages ago really.

If you find your system isn’t booting sometimes and you get this funny error message, edit your kernel boot line in /boot/grub/menu.lst: kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-19-generic root=UUID=75a92494-bdae-4715-92d9-f06d1887008e ro all_generic_ide e.g - Add the all_generic_ide parameter. All should be fine once again. I believe this is a strange Ubuntu kernel bug, although I’m not sure.

While it’s not possible to play mkv files directly on the xbox360, you only need to do a few things to remux the video and audio streams into the mp4 format. This means that no re-encoding is done with the video, therefore there is no loss in video quality. At the time of writing, the xbox360 doesn’t support anything other than 2 channel AAC audio for mp4 streams, so you’ll have to put up with that.