News, Notes, Pictures

Snow? In my state? (Edit: ice lolololol)

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Houston gets an onset of cold weather (mid – high 20’s) and a little bit of freezing rain / sleet while I’m at work. While on break I walk around to check out the condition of roads…while most of the surface streets seem fine, our sidewalk at work is coated in a sheet of slick ice, and our Employee of the Month sign is very frosty looking:

Back in the toasty confines of my swampy gator-cubicle, I check the traffic conditions for Houston and this is what I get:

Awesome, just awesome. Thanks to @Snipa_ABlair for the photo.

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Notes

Minidlna and custom upnp icons

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After a few hours of digging into hex and binary conversion tools, I have completed my task. If you download and compile Minidlna on a Linux box, it will show a Tux penguin for it’s upnp icon (for instance, if you were browsing over the network on the PS3). Since my Minidlna server is PowerMac G4 running Debian, I converted a few PNG images of the Apple logo into it’s hexadecimal equivalent, changed the source file icons.c, and recompiled it. Done! Click here to get the updated icons.c file.

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Notes

Installing miniDLNA on Ubuntu PowerPC

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I don’t think I’ve seen anyone maintaining packages for the excellent MiniDLNA media server for Debian or Ubuntu. The instructions provided here should work for both Intel and PPC builds (maybe others?) of Ubuntu and Debian Linux.

  1. Run this command to get the pre-req packages needed to build MiniDLNA:
    • sudo apt-get install libexif-dev libjpeg62-dev libid3tag0-dev libflac-dev libvorbis-dev libsqlite3-dev libavformat-dev cvs make
  2. Log in and check out (download) the source code for MiniDLNA from SourceForge:
    • cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@minidlna.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/minidlna co -P minidlna
  3. Change into the directory and build, then install it!
    • make
    • sudo make install
  4. That’s it!
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Life, Notes, Wait, what?

ERAU Nukes My E-Mail Account, Says “Too Bad”

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4 years, over 100 grand, and endless repetition “you must use your e-mail account”, then after graduating and 6 months later, they delete it. I was too busy in the midst of relocating my life halfway across the country, never mind accepting a new job the education helped to provide, and now my account was nuked.

I called up their tech support line, hoping to get it reactivated for just a week or two, so I can move services that were associated with that account over to a new email account, but it’s a no-can-do. They’ve killed it for good and were unwilling to re-activate it. I even offered to pay, since working at the school I also know that the services their email servers provide aren’t free. Come on guys, I just need it turned on for a week.

Honestly I was hoping they would treat their alumni better, but they still don’t mind calling every now and then to ask for money. To make it worse, I can’t sign up on their alumni website either.

What a bunch of jerks. FYI any recent graduates, your account expires in 180 days.

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Notes

SERO 500 + Palm Pre, part II

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In my previous post, I discussed somehow squirreling a Palm Pre onto my excellent SERO 500 plan.

As promised, I went to a local Sprint store and asked one of their sales agents if I could activate a non-contractual Palm Pre (purchased at the full retail price) on the SERO 500 plan. The agent was very understanding, and agreed that they were all instructed to NOT activate any Palm Pre’s unless the plan has the word “Everything” in it. He also said that while Sprint stores would be well stocked, Best Buy locations would be getting around a max of 5 per store. He then told me that if I did want to get a Palm Pre activated on SERO I should buy one at Best Buy at the non-contract price and attempt to activate it online.  

Apparently he doesn’t know if there are any specific checks in their system to disallow activating the Palm Pre yourself, but it would most likely not work and ask you to call customer service. What he said next suprised me: apparently there are around 35000 customer service reps in call centers – he suggested that not all of them know the policy or care about the policy and I would have a very good chance of getting it activated that way.

To add some relief – he then told me that the Palm Pre should be available for employee-referral type plans after 60 days from launch, much like the Instinct was. Happy Pre-hunting!

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