BigAl's musings

Android: things they forgot to tell you

2011-09-19T00:04:00.000-07:00

I recently bought a second-hand Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro (big name for a small phone) to replace my SE Z550i (the battery started failing, and I can't get a new one - the best way to make a phone obsolete!). Being a strong proponent of Linux, I was very keen to see what the hype around Android was about. Of course, I'm an SE fan, and loved the idea of the slide out keyboard, so the X10 seemed like an ideal choice! This is my first smartphone, but after two weeks of using this device it seems to me that the Android developers concentrated on the 'smart' and less on the 'phone'. So, in this post, I'll look at a few things that really wasted my time. These are all to do with usability and HCI from an Information Science viewpoint.

The phone has the default SE Android 2.1 installed, so some of my gripes may have been addressed in later releases of Android, but somehow I doubt it.

SMSes
Deleting an SMS Something as simple as deleting a single SMS probably seems trivial to a hardened Android user, but to a newbie, it was very frustrating trying to figure out how to do it, especially as it's so easy with a non-smartphone. Conventional wisdom would say, select the SMS, and then press the menu button on the phone. However, this method yields Delete conversation ie, delete all the SMSes between you and the other party. While this can be good on occasions, you sometimes want to retain the information contained in one of those SMSes.

The trick, I found out totally by accident, was to "long touch" (touch and keep the finger in position) the SMS in question. This brings up a menu with useful options such as forward and delete the SMS.
Changing the notification tone Conventional wisdom would expect the SMS notification tone to be under Settings>Sounds & Display. Settings for changing most other sounds seem to be here, but not the SMS. To change this tone, go to messages and then press the menu button. The settings option on the subsequent menu has an option to change the SMS notification tone (among other things).

Phone book/Contacts
As far as I'm concerned, this is the most messy part of Android. I really have no idea what the developers had in mind with the way they implemented the phone book. With Symbian, a very nice feature of the contacts list was birthdays. When a one of your contacts' birthday came around, Symbian would notify you at 09:00 of the event. I have yet to find an easy way to implement birthdays and birthday notifications...

Also, if you happen to have Facebook and Gmail accounts, contacts from both accounts are downloaded to your contacts list. This might sound like a good idea, but if the contact has nothing in common between these two accounts, you end up with two entries for the same person in your contact list. If you've moved a SIM card from an old phone, then its contact list gets added to the mix making an even bigger mess. You then have to go through a very painful process of joining these contacts.

A further horror is that every email address that you have written/responded to ends up in your Gmail address list and all of these end up on your phone, regardless of their relevance.

Afrikaans characters
A major problem for South Africans wanting to communicate in Afrikaans is the ability to use letters from the Germanic character set. The default Android input languages do not have the ability to select these characters, even though they are in the font set. What I found to work was to install the MultiLing app from the Android Market, together with the Afrikaans plugin for MultiLing (I'm not sure whether the plugin is necessary, but it does give you access to an Afrikaans dictionary for Quick type).

To use it, go to any app that requires text input, long touch the input area and from the menu that appears, select "Input method". Select MultiLing from those available. Now, long touching any letter on the keyboard gives the option to select extra characters associated with that letter. What made me doubly pleased about this was that it also works with X10 mini pro's slide out keyboard - the only disadvantage being that the symbol key does not work.

Lawn Bowls: Determining the size of the bowls

2011-05-15T22:48:00.000-07:00

Conventional wisdom says that if you are interested in taking up bowls, you should first try it out at your local club. Clubs normally have sets of older bowls, donated by past members. By trying out various sets of bowls, you can firstly see if you do enjoy the game, and secondly, find out the size of bowl which suits you. However, these older bowls sometimes don't have the sizes marked on them or sometimes the markings are so worn as to be illegible.

I did a fairly comprehensive Web search to try and find the dimensions of the various bowls sizes, and the closest I could come to what I was looking for was this page on ComfitPro. I have taken their data given for the diameter of the bowl for each of the sizes and used to to determine the diameter in mm and the circumference (of the rolling surface) in mm. For the sake of completeness I have also included ComfitPro's weights for the various sizes.

Size	00	0	1	2	3	4	5
Diameter (inches)	4^9/16	4^5/8	4^3/4	4^13/16	4^7/8	4^15/16	5
Diameter (mm)	115.9	117.5	120.6	122.2	123.8	125.4	127.0
Circumference (mm)	364	369	379	384	389	394	399
Heavy (g)	1215	1260	1355	1410	1460	1520	1570
Extra Heavy (g)	n/a	1330	1390	1450	1510	1560	n/a

To use this information, I suggest getting hold of a dressmaker's tape. Wrap the tape around the rolling surface of the bowl and measure the circumference. From the circumference, you can use the table to determine what is the size of the bowls which you find most to your liking.

(The tape can also be used for measuring winning distances during a game!)

Printer sharing under Kubuntu

2010-06-01T02:59:00.000-07:00

I had an extraordinarily difficult time in trying to find a simple how-to for setting up printer sharing on Linux to Linux machines. There is plenty of information on setting up Linux to Windows and Windows to Linux printer sharing. So I thought I'd document my findings here. (This refers to the Lucid Lynx distribution, but should also work with earlier distributions).

Setting up the host
Open the System Settings utility and make sure that the printer to be shared is shared:

System>System Settings>Printer Configuration
Server Settings>Share published printers connected to the system
Local Printers>[your local printer's name]>Printer status>sharing

Make sure that port 631 is open on the firewall.

Setting up a Kubuntu client
Settings>System settings>New printer>Network printer>IPP
[enter host IP address] then find and verify.

I couldn't find any way under Kubuntu's tools to check the printer, so open a browser and go to:
http://localhost:631/admin
Select Manage printers, then the remote printer, then under Maintenance, select Print a test page.

Setting up an Ubuntu client
System>Administration>Printing
Add>Network printer>Find network printer
Host: [enter host IP address] then find.

The Ubuntu Printing applet gives you the option to print a test page.

Hope this helps someone :)

Beer price increases

2010-05-15T02:03:00.000-07:00

This is a follow up on my Beer prices in Pretoria blog. The price of Windhoek Lager has been pretty stable for more than a year, but I'm expecting price rises - mainly because of the Soccer World Cup due to start in less than a month.

On this page, I am including establishments on my old list that have increased their prices, establishments whose prices are totally out of line with other establishments in their area and establishments I visited for the first time since 1 May 2010.

Pub	Location	Price	Date
Ritrovo	Waterkloof Heights	R19.00	29/04/10
Cuppuccino's	Brooklyn	R16.90	31/05/10

Price increases since last visit

Pub	Location	Price	Date
Pikkies	Prinshof	R13.00	27/05/10
Picasso's	Villeria	R12.50	13/05/10
Hunter's Grill	Silverton	R12.00	28/05/10

New venues since 1 May 2010

Pub	Location	Price	Date
LM in the East	Lynnwood	R14.00	15/05/10

Current Makro price (15/05/10): R114.95/24 (R4.79 per bottle).

So I got a Kindle...

2010-03-04T20:21:00.000-08:00

I'm actually pretty happy with it, but there are a few irritations...

It arrived at my door, here at the bottom end of Africa, within four working days of the order going through (the actual process was a whole lot longer, but that has nothing to do with Amazon, but rather my bank - however, that's another story).

First thing I did was to charge it, then read through the user guide. While reading through the user guide, I bought my first book, Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol (which is not the topic of this blog) via Whispernet - a really cool feature.

The next morning, I finished reading the user guide, interspersed with a bit of The Lost Symbol, but I did notice that the battery seemed to be getting depleted rather rapidly. That afternoon, I took it with me to the pub to show it off to the locals. They were especially interested, more so when I bought and downloaded a book (Dean Koontz's Sole Survivor) from Amazon in less than a minute.

The next morning, when I switched it on, I hit the first irritation - the battery was running very low. This after just over 36 hours since I'd charged it. What happened to the one week claimed by Amazon? Did I have a dud?

As Amazon's eBook prices seemed a little on the high side, I started browsing the free classics on Feedbooks, and downloaded a few of those onto my PC. I converted them from .epub to .mobi using calibre and uploaded them to the Kindle via USB. [edit]A colleague pointed out to me that if you click on the link to the book's title, rather than the download link next to the title, you get options for different formats, including .mobi and .prc [/edit]

I finished The Lost Symbol and started with The Invisible Man and Sole Survivor. Again, I was horrified that the battery ran down within 48 hours of the last charge. I started googling for info on this and found more than one reference to upgrading the operating system on the Kindle. The recommended OS version was 2.3.3, which was an upgrade on 2.3, both of which fixed battery issues. This gave rise to the second irritation - the OS version on my Kindle was 2.2.1 Why hadn't the OS been upgraded before the device was shipped? Is it a case of sending old/returned stock to the Third World?

Anyway, I downloaded the upgrade (11MB) and installed it on my Kindle. It definitely did fix the battery issues. I've now been running for more than a week (at least four hours per day, probably more) and the battery is still more than 50%. I do have Whispernet off most of the time, I must add.

I have found that the screen is slightly darker as mentioned by some folks on the Web, and I think this has something to do with the way the screen is refreshed between pages (probably how they managed to save on battery life through software). If the ambient light catches the screen in a certain way, there seems to be residual text on it, almost like burn-in on old CRT monitors. This is not too irritating as often in some books the text on preceding/subsequent pages can be seen through the page being read. I'd rather have that than continually having to recharge.

Ok, now I'm getting the hang of this and enjoying the experience, so I want to buy some more books. So I hopped onto Amazon from my PC and started looking through their recommendations. This is where I hit the third irritation - I can't buy more than 60% of their recommendations:

"This title is not available for customers in your location: Africa"

If it's not available, why recommend it? I have subsequently found that a huge chunk of their eBooks is "not available in Africa". And then the publishers wonder why potential customers turn to pirate sources (which I will talk about in a later blog).

From the books that are available on Amazon, I started looking for a selection to buy for when I go on vacation later this month. I'm rather partial to Dean Koontz, so I started with his books that "are available in Africa" and then I hit the fourth irritation. Looking at the book Fear Nothing, I found that it costs $8.39 (it's a bit higher outside the USA because of a $2 Whispernet fee). However, and that's the reason for the irritation, a new hardcover version costs $3.92 and a new paperback $4.77. Why should the eBook be so much more? Milking a dead cow? At the rate at which Dean Koontz churns out books, he has to write them on a word processor, so they must already be available to the publisher electronically. The conversion of such an electronic document to an eBook takes less than an hour (I know, I've done it), so why is it so expensive? To reiterate:

And then the publishers wonder why potential customers turn to pirate sources.

Virtualbox: SLOW shared folders

2010-02-20T21:20:00.000-08:00

I have been using Virtualbox on Linux machines, with XP as a guest, for a while now. The only reason that I haven't moved away from Windows altogether is that I still use Paintshop Pro as a photo editor (Gimp is useless to me because of the way it handles TIFFs). One of the things I liked about Virtualbox was the ability to use shared folders to share files between the host and the guest. However, I have become increasingly frustrated by the speed at which large graphic files get loaded using these shared folders. This has gotten worse with the newer versions of Paintshop Pro, so I decided to do some speed tests with the different versions, and with different ways of accessing the same file. The file is a 22.9MB tiff.

	v9	x2	x3
Direct	5s	13s	11s
SMB	12s	18s	31s
SFolders	37s	3m 6s	4m 27s

Direct is the guest machine's C:-drive
SMB is using SAMBA on Linux to share the folder with XP
SFolders is using Virtualbox's shared folders

From this example, the file handling of the software has clearly changed with the newer versions, but the time taken to open files like this when using Virtualbox's shared folders is unacceptable.

Another example is using Canon's Digital Photo Professional to access a directory containing 41 RAW files from a Canon 40d:
Direct: 5s
SMB: 13s
SFolders: 49s
The time given here is the time taken from when the directory is opened until all thumbnails have been built.

Update
I've tried similar tests with an external USB hard drive attached directly to the VirtualBox (through Devices>USB devices). Here using VirtualBox v3.2.8 under Kubuntu 10.04 with Windows XP as guest, with the same 22.9MB tiff used in the earlier tests. Again, the time given is the time taken for the file to load completely in Paintshop Pro v9:
Direct: 5.0s
USB drive: 6.3s
SMB: 13.5s
SFolders: 29.7s

Poor man's HDR for PSP 9

2009-12-01T23:10:00.000-08:00

I found this interesting technique for creating a sort of HDR image on DGrin, but it was written for Photoshop. So, I had to find a way to convert it to Paintshop Pro (it should work with any version, but since Corel took the product over, some of the short cut keys have changed). I still like using PSP v9, which was the last version made by JASC.

In order to use this technique, you should have taken your image in your camera's RAW format (or two shots from a tripod with a shot exposed for the highlights and a shot exposed for the darker areas in the image). What I found works best is a shot taken for the darker areas (highlights overexposed), as the RAW recovery produces less digital noise when the image is darkened.

Here is the as-shot image, with areas of the sky, totally overexposed:

Here is the same image underexposed by about 1½ stops in the RAW converter:

Open the images in PSP, and copy the dark image as a new layer on the light image (ctrl-C on the dark image to copy, ctrl-L on the light image to paste as a new layer). You now need to move the dark layer below the light layer, but before you can do that, you have to change the light layer from a background layer to a raster layer. Open the layer palette and right click on the background layer. Select "Promote Background Layer" from the context menu:

(click on image for larger view)

You can now drag the lighter layer above the darker one (or drag the darker one below the lighter one):

Make sure the lighter layer (in this case Raster 2) is selected.

Now add a layer mask to the lighter layer, by right clicking on the layer then selecting "New Mask Layer" then "From Image". In the dialog that pops up, select the file name of the darker image (in this case IMG_6556D.TIF), "Source luminance" and "Invert mask data":

The image already looks appreciably better:

For the next step, we first need to duplicate the dark layer (which is at the bottom of the layer stack). Right click on it and select "Duplicate Layer".

Now drag this new layer to the top of the layer stack:

Add a new mask layer from image as outlined above, but this time do not select "Invert mask data":

After the second mask, some slight changes to the contrast:

Now, for the final editing, you need to make copy of all the blended layers. Select the top layer in the stack and press ctrl-shift-C. This will take a bit of time, especially if your camera has a large sensor. When the processing is finished, press ctrl-L to paste a new layer on the top of the layer stack (you could also merge all layers, but I prefer keeping all the layers in case I want to play around with them in the future).

You can now carry out whatever editing you normally do to a photo (contrast, saturation and sharpening in my case). The final product:

Errors after upgrading Firefox in Kubuntu

2009-08-08T22:33:00.000-07:00

If you have changed from the default (repository) version of Firefox, to the newest version from Mozilla using Ubuntuzilla, you have to run the following command in order to activate the "Check for updates..." under the help menu:

sudo firefox

After updating, when you try to run firefox as a non-root user, you get the following error:

The bookmarks and history system will not be functional because one of Firefox's files is in use by another application. Some security software can cause this problem.

with a link to this page as a possible fix.

The information given does not fix the problem at all, but removes all your history and leaves the bookmarks inaccessible. The following will fix the problem:

cd /home/USER/.mozilla/firefox/
ls

In this listing will be a directory with the name XYZ.default, where XYZ is some random collection of letters and numbers.

cd XYZ.default
sudo chown USER *

will fix the problem (where USER is your login name).

This problem has only occurred since upgrading to v3.5 and subsequent releases.

Investec Online Registration: unsecure

2009-07-09T23:43:00.000-07:00

Investec Asset Management is pushing for investors to register for on-line access to their investment portfolio. However, the registration page is via unsecure http (not https), which means data transmitted is not encrypted. This might not sound like a problem, but they require information such as ID number, street address and full banking details with account numbers. Be aware that it's exactly this kind of information that identity thieves are after.

Here is a screen dump showing some of the info they are looking for, with the unsecure http.

I have tried to contact Investec concerning this matter, but they are singularly disinterested in doing anything about it. The irony is that once you are registered, logging in to their site is via secure http...

Pilanesberg 2009 - enjoyable photo wise

2009-05-02T21:51:00.000-07:00

I managed to get some really nice pics on my annual pilgrimage to Bakubung and Pilanesberg.

Lilacbreasted Roller listening to the sound of the camera's shutter:

Nesting Whitebreasted Cormorants:

Marabou Stork admiring its image:

Crocodile waiting for breakfast:

Hippo having fun:

Mr & Mrs Golden Orb Web Spider:

Threebanded Plover:

Dassie (note the fly on its nose):

Vervet Monkey family:

Blackshouldered Kite with prey:

A couple of visitors to Bakubung resort:

Upgrading to Kubuntu Jaunty

2009-04-30T21:16:00.000-07:00

Recently finished upgrading my home and work PCs to Jaunty. I must admit I'm pretty impressed with the changes I've seen so far. The upgrade wasn't without hassles though. I used the alternate CD to upgrade (to save on bandwidth) and tested it out on my work PC first. The install script died when it couldn't install a CA-certificate for some or other app. I managed to finish the upgrade by going through a recovery boot from grub, but I had no X. It kept dying when trying to load the nvidia drivers. I tried installing them through apt-get, but that didn't work either, so I left it and went home.

Before I did the home upgrade (I wanted to do it yesterday to use my leftover bandwidth), I first spent time on Google trying to find out about upgrade problems and possible fixes (including how to load and run Envy from the command line). However, the upgrade went through with no hassles. The CA-certificate problem also popped up, but it didn't kill the upgrade script. I had to do two reboots before it worked properly, first time the screen resolution was wrong, with no option to fix it and kded4 was hogging the processor. Rebooting fixed both of those. The second time was to boot into the correct kernel. Then I spent time updating a whole bunch of apps that I use regularly.

I also found that I was running the open source nv driver. At this stage, it's working fine, much better than the nvidia driver that I was using in Intrepid. The fix for my work PC was as simple as changing the driver to nv in xorg.conf.

It really does look much more polished than KDE 4.1. Little things like having the start up tune play through does make me feel happier that someone paid attention to this kind of detail. One thing I really like is that the fonts and the font renderer is so much better.

When I feel up to it, I'll try and get the nvidia drivers to work so I can check out the eye candy.

The upgrade is definitely recommended.

Beer prices in Pretoria pubs

2009-02-28T02:46:00.000-08:00

Recently, the South African Minister of Finance added more tax to cigarettes and alcoholic beverages. Usually pub owners misuse this as an excuse to push up the price of their drinks. I am compiling a list of the current price of Windhoek Lager at pubs and restaurants I visit (and will use the info from others as they pass it on to me). Currently (28 Feb 09), Windhoek Lager bottles are on special at R109 for 24 (R4.50 per bottle) at Makro. The normal price is about R125 for 24 (R5.21 per bottle).

Pub	Location	Price	Date
Col'Cacchio	Brooklyn	R16.00	18/01/10
Crystal	Hatfield	R16.00	29/03/10
Geet	Brooklyn	R16.00	25/08/09
Ogalito's	Brooklyn	R16.00	09/03/09
Pachas	Hazelwood	R15.50	23/11/09
Burgandy's	Brooklyn	R15.00	21/01/10
Greek Easy	Brooklyn	R15.00	28/09/09
Kream	Brooklyn	R15.00	26/10/09
Piccola Italia	Monument Park	R15.00	04/03/09
Herr Günther's	Hatfield	R14.50	24/06/09
Oxford English Pub	Hatfield	R14.50	11/12/09
Trademarx	Loftus	R14.50	10/07/09
Adega	Brooklyn	R14.00	01/03/10
BOERgeoisie	Menlo Park	R14.00	27/07/09
Burgandy's	Tukkies	R14.00	26/06/09
Livingstone's	Hatfield	R14.00	27/02/09
Oppieplaas	Waverley	R14.00	18/09/09
Fringes	CSIR	R13.50	07/04/10
Springbok Bar	Hatfield	R13.50	24/06/09
The Corner Cafe	Monument Park	R13.50	10/07/09
Aandklas	Hatfield	R13.00	24/06/09
Achilles	Tukkies	R13.00	25/11/09
Coco Bistro	Erasmuskloof	R13.00	07/03/09
McLarin's	Kilner Park	R13.00	09/03/10
Brooklyn Bowling Club	Brooklyn	R12.00	15/06/10
Pikkies	Prinshof	R12.00	14/09/09
Queen's Cafe	Queenswood	R12.00	22/07/09
Roman's Pizza	Hatfield	R11.95	02/02/10
Cactus Creek	Hazelwood (closed)	R11.90	26/02/09
La Pat	Tukkies (closed)	R11.90	30/06/09
Coffee Buzz	Tukkies	R11.00	25/06/09
Hunter's Grill	Silverton	R11.00	25/11/09
Harlequins	Groenkloof	R10.50	18/06/10
Oom Gert se Plek	Tukkies	R10.50	04/02/10
Picasso's	Villeria	R10.50	12/01/10
Toutrekpark	Villeria	R8.50	07/05/10

Current Makro price (15/05/10): R114.95/24 (R4.79 per bottle).

Herr Günther's was not allowed to sell Windhoek Lager when we visited the pub. SAB is their major sponsor, and for the duration of the soccer FedCup in South Africa, they were only allowed to sell SAB beers. The barman was kind enough to give me their price on Windhoek Lager though.

Trademarx has become the first to increase prices (R13.50 to R14.50), citing the recession as a source. However, the price of Windhoek Lager at Makro has not changed, so the price increase has probably more to do with them having to shut down during the soccer FedCup.

Blacklisted

Hunter's Grill: live music (venue too small for amplified music)
Livingstone's: disagreement with management (obnoxious) about loud music
Pikkies: loading the bill

UPDATE
Establishments in red in the table have recently increased their prices. These will now be updated in a new blog.

I hate flash

2009-02-16T22:49:00.000-08:00

This goes back a long way, when one used to hit a flash site and it hogged the download, even if you didn't have the flash player installed. But, what seems to be happening more and more these days is that Web developers are building flash-only sites: ie, sites which rely on flash for everything, including the navigation, with no html alternative. This irritates me even more than the flash script hogging the whole download. I still refuse to install flash, and have even installed the Firefox flashblock extension. For the past ten years, I regularly get told, "you're behind the times, just install flash". However, that only makes me more adamant that I don't need it.

What I'm pleased to find is that I am not alone out there. Googling the phrase "I hate flash" comes back with almost 20k hits (153k: 12/9/09), the most eloquent being this one.

This is a collection of flash-only sites that I have found:

Telkom SA's do broadband (lost a potential customer for adsl)
Sinotech SA (not that I'd buy any of their products, just wanted to look at what's available)
Wyckedd Foods (I like their products, and have a printed list, so don't need their site)
MNA Brewing (Text based, but uses flash navigation only)
Spengler Medical Equipment
Amalgamated Appliances (see my Russell Hobbs rant)
Subaru SA
Legacy Hotels
Scribd documents, for instance Linux starter pack
Wodim (I was looking for info on the wodim cd burning app when I came across this site).
Ekuthuleni Lodge
Crumpler camera bags
Kuswag Hoërskool

I have deliberately not included photography sites - there are a myriad of those too.

I recently purchased a Samsung NC10 netbook, and was horrified to find that the online user manual (the only manual available) was a flash app. Fortunately, I could figure my way around fairly easily as I dumped windows in favour of Ubuntu, and there's plenty of help for that out there!

Another reason for avoiding flash from PC Pro Magazine
"Mozilla is kicking off with reminders to upgrade Adobe Flash Player, which has been held responsible for a series of malware attacks."

Russell Hobbs rant

2009-01-25T23:04:00.000-08:00

I recently bought a Russell Hobbs Pet Cyclonic 1800 vacuum cleaner (model 13944).

It worked really well for a while, but then one day it started making a really awful racket. Being me, I had to find out what was causing the racket, so I stripped the machine (mistake I know - I should have just taken it back). I traced the problem to the roller brush, so I stripped that too. This was a bit more tricky, as the bearing shaft had melted into one of the end plates of the roller brush. However, a bit of coaxing, and I was eventually able to get the endplates off. What had happened was that hair (probably mine) had gotten inside the roller brush and wrapped itself around the shaft and the endplate. Eventually, there must have been so much of this hair that it caused the shaft to heat up to such an extent that

the hair melted into the plastic of the endplate;
the shaft melted into the end plate; and
the bearing no longer fitted in its housing in the roller brush.

It was the bearing rattling inside the roller brush which was causing the racket.

Hair melted into the endplate:

Where the shaft had melted into the endplate (this is the outside end of the endplate):

The bearing, showing clearly that it no longer fits in its housing (note the gap above the bearing):

Ok, so now I'd stripped it, so the warranty is no longer valid, so I thought I'd just buy a new roller brush. This was just the start of my nightmare.

First of all, trying to find the local agent was a mission all on it's own. The South African importer/distributor is Amalgamated Appliances and they do have a Website, the only problem is it's 100% flash driven so useless to me (I hate flash and refuse to install it). Through a service agent for another product, I managed to find the agent in my home town. He said he'd try to get it for me and let me know. Two weeks went by with no word, so I phoned again, and he said Amalgamated Appliances still had not come back to him. After another week, I phoned again, and he told me Amalgamated Appliances carried NO spares for this particular vacuum cleaner.

I thought, the Internet is your friend, so maybe I could source it from overseas. I spent virtually one whole day trying trace the roller brush for this particular machine, without any success. So I decided to try to ask Russell Hobbs UK directly.

Through a process lasting several weeks, I eventually got them to send me the roller brush. It arrived about two weeks ago. This is what I was wanting:

but what I got was the item on the box:

the turbo brush for the same vacuum cleaner.

Now what do I do? Of course I emailed them immediately, and a few days later, I received this reply:

Dear Sir

Thank you for your e-mail.

We note your comments and advise that unfortunately, the roller brush for this model is not available as a spare part. However, you may return the incorrect brush to our Service Department in Manchester where a refund will be processed.

We would also ask you to please contact the following regarding your vacuum cleaner:-

Amalgamated Appliances
P O Box 39186
Booysens 2016
Johannesburg
South Africa
Tel: 0027 (11) 626 3415
Fax: 0027 (11) 626 1782
Website: www.amap.co.za

Please note that this company is not a Service Agent for Salton but they do sell and repair products so they may be able to assist you further with your enquiry.

This really bugs me, as I cannot understand why the roller brush is not a spare part. The brushes do most of the work for the vacuum cleaner, and they must wear out with time.

Also, I have to return the turbo brush to the UK for a refund, but the postage from South Africa to the UK costs more than the turbo brush, and will I get refunded for that??

From the local agent's comments on Amalgamated Appliances, as well as the negative comments about them on hellopeter.com, I'm not sure that it's worth me wasting my breath and chasing my blood pressure up further by trying to contact them.

All in all, a rather expensive lesson...

[update]
I started a thread on a local forum, to test the opinions of others. Much to my surprise, a member of that forum offered to see if he could fix the roller brush. I took him up on his offer, and fix it he did, within a couple of hours too! He made a shim for the bearing, and then rebored the roller brush to take the shimmed bearing. What's more, the very kind gentleman refused to accept payment for his services. It's wonderful that such people still exist.

[update 2]
On the way to fetch the roller brush, someone drove into the back of my car at a traffic light.

This has become a very expensive vacuum cleaner...

[update 3]
One month after the roller brush was repaired (used four times), I decided to open the roller brush to see what it looked like. As I expected there was a build up of hair again.

Hair on the damaged endplate:

Hair around the shaft at the undamaged endplate:

The hair removed from the roller brush: left from the undamaged end and right from the damaged end

This vacuum cleaner is clearly a very high maintenance item...

VirtualBox, USB & Kubuntu Intrepid

2009-01-07T19:51:00.000-08:00

First of all, USB will not work with VirtualBox OSE found in the Ubuntu repositories. You have to download the compiled binary files from Sun. There are many, many Internet references to getting the USB system to work in VirtualBox, but very few make this very important point. You can get your VirtualBox system up and running using the OSE version, in order to make sure that everything works according to the book. After that, you can install the binaries from Sun, which will pick up your virtual machine and its settings with no problem, including the VirtualBox Guest Additions, if they are installed (which should be as far as I'm concerned, but getting those additions installed has issues of its own).

First off, you must add yourself to the group vboxusers (System>KUser Manager). Select the Groups tab and look for vboxusers (#121 on my system). Click on it and you will get the "Group Properties" dialog. Find your username in the right hand box, select yourself and add it to the group. Close the User Manager.

Now comes the magic bits. You now have to do some editing.

Edit mountdevsubfs.sh:

sudo kate /etc/init.d/mountdevsubfs.sh

Near the beginning of the file, you will see the following:

do_start () {
#
# Mount a tmpfs on /dev/shm
#
SHM_OPT=
[ "${SHM_SIZE:=$TMPFS_SIZE}" ] && SHM_OPT=",size=$SHM_SIZE"
domount tmpfs shmfs /dev/shm tmpfs -onosuid,nodev$SHM_OPT

#
# Mount /dev/pts. Master ptmx node is already created by udev.
#
domount devpts "" /dev/pts devpts -onoexec,nosuid,gid=$TTYGRP,mode=$TTYMODE
}

Add the following lines before the final brace (}) (copy and paste them to avoid errors such as unwanted line breaks):

#
# Magic to make /proc/bus/usb work
#
mkdir -p /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs
domount usbfs "" /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs usbfs -obusmode=0700,devmode=0600,listmode=0644
ln -s .usbfs/devices /dev/bus/usb/devices
mount --rbind /dev/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb

Save mountdevsubfs.sh

Now run mountdevsubfs.sh:

sudo /etc/init.d/mountdevsubfs.sh start

You now need to edit two rules files:

sudo kate /etc/udev/rules.d/40-permissions.rules

Add the following lines at the end:

# USB devices (usbfs replacement)
SUBSYSTEM=="usb_device", MODE="0664", GROUP="vboxusers"

Now edit the basic-permissions rules file:

sudo kate /etc/udev/rules.d/40-basic-permissions.rules

Modify the first two active lines so that they look like this:

# USB devices (usbfs replacement)
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="usb_device", MODE="0664", GROUP="vboxusers"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb_device", MODE="0664", GROUP="vboxusers"

(What you should essentially have had to do was add [, GROUP="vboxusers"] to the end of both lines.)

Now restart the udev service:

sudo /etc/init.d/udev restart

If everything went according to plan, your USB devices should now be selectable from the VirtualBox. You can now install the drivers for the devices under the guest operating system.

Note1: you may have to reinstall the Guest Additions after installing Sun's non-OSE VirtualBox.

Note2: active devices used by the VirtualBox will not be accessible to the host system while VirtualBox is running. For devices such as flash disks, I prefer to mount them through the host OS, then access them from the guest OS via the /media directory (which I have as a shared folder under VirtualBox). This means both OSes can access those devices.

Note3: if you want to run a tablet under your guest OS, make sure it is working in the host OS and make sure it is active in the VirtualBox's USB filtes before you install the guest OS drivers. You may have to disable mouse integration in the Guest Additions to get it to work in the guest OS (guest OS main window menu>Machine>"Disable Mouse Integration"). My Genius WizardPen 5x4 (UC Logic Tablet WP5540U) works, but the response is a little slow when drawing. Judging from the way it draws, I think it's a combination of both the VirtualBox video driver and the way that the tablet's event manager is shared between the two operating systems. It is usable though.

Very useful links:
VirtualBox FAQ
Ubuntu VirtualBox Community Document

There were many others that I looked at, but these contained most of what was necessary to get my scanner running under XP in a VirtualBox

Black Egret within city limits

2008-12-23T02:47:00.000-08:00

I popped into a local bird sanctuary (Austin Roberts Bird Sanctuary) yesterday morning, just to see whether there was anything new to see. The sanctuary itself, is a city block in size and used to be in suburbia. However, with businesses moving from downtown Pretoria into the suburbs, the sanctuary is now in a mini business hub. It is pleasing to see that the birds are remaining in the sanctuary, in spite of the developments.

I found a Black Egret in open view from the hide, preening itself:

I took many shots, but unfortunately, in the excitement of finding this bird, forgot to change the camera from ISO 1600, that I'd been using on another bird in the shade. I was able to save some images with a bit of aggressive post-processing:

After preening for about half an hour, it jumped into the water and started wading around. It was here that I realised that I was working at too high an ISO.

One of the amazing things about a Black Egret is that it fans its wings to form an umbrella while hunting. It then catches fish which move into the shade of this 'tent':

All in all, a very rewarding session, not only for finding the bird, but also seeing it go through its 'tenting' routine.

Kubuntu 8.10 mutterings

2008-12-19T20:05:00.000-08:00

Why Kubuntu?
I started with Unix back in 1988 with system development, mainly interfacing between the Unix box and peripherals. This followed a period working on CDC mainframes, Novell networking and PC software development and support. Around 1998 I got back to Unix through Linux when I built my first Web server. At this stage, X was also starting to make an appearance. I looked at Gnome, but didn't like the way its mouse handling worked, so I changed over to KDE. Unfortunately, I had no time to do any serious work with it, so was out of Linux until recently. Naturally, I felt that I had preferred KDE historically, so had to go for Kubuntu.

I've been looking at Kubuntu 8.10 for a while now. I have it on my office PC and there it seems pretty stable, but I don't do too much out of the ordinary with it. I had 7.10 on an old machine at home, which worked very well, albeit a bit slowly (350MHz P2). Come October this year, and I decided maybe it was time to have a look at what KDE 4 was all about. First thing that happened was that I couldn't upgrade as the driver for the old nVidia TNT card caused hassles with the upgrader. To upgrade from a live CD:

sudo /cdrom/cdromupgrade

This bombed out during the process with "cannot calculate upgrade". After much searching on the Web, I found that it was a package that the upgrader could not uninstall (the said TNT driver). The upgrade errors can be found in this file:

/var/log/dist-upgrade/main.log

I tried to set the system back to the generic nVidia driver, then uninstalled the TNT driver manually. Unfortunately, this broke X completely, so I had to install from scratch. As a test of the upgrade, I first installed 8.04, then upgraded to 8.10 and everything went well. KDE 4 was unbelievably slow on the old machine, so I decided to pop the hard drive into a 3.0GHz P4 HT machine. This worked very well, with Linux picking up all the necessary hardware changes on the first boot. However, and this is the reason for this post, I started running into many of the complaints against KDE 4 found in cyberspace, with the new setup. What follows is some of the problems and the fixes that I've made to get everything working (these are not necessarily in the order that I came across the problems). I'm going to put everything into this post, so it may become a bit monolithic.

Mounting Windows disks in Kubuntu
Even though I had already sorted this out with 7.10, I'm going to include it here too, as it's not trivial to mount other disks from Kubuntu. First off, all the disks and their various partitions can be found with:

sudo fdisk -l

The disks will appear as /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2 etc for the partitions on the master disk (sda), /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdb2 etc for the partitions on the second disk (sdb), /dev/sdc1 for the third disk, and so on. Now normally, in other flavours of Linux all that is necessary to mount a partition is:

sudo mount /dev/sdc1

(this will probably require some extra switches to mount the correct disk format). However, on Kubuntu trying this results in the error

mount: can't find /dev/sdc1 in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab

Kubuntu requires that the disk be mounted according to its UUID and the problem is trying to find that UUID. What I found by trial and error was a directory under /dev/disk called by-uuid. Now if you list everything in that directory with

cd /dev/disk/by-uuid
ls -al

you will get the UUID of all the partitions with the corresponding link to the sdxn. These are pretty complex IDs, so instead of trying to copy them, create a file with the necessary entry in (here looking for sdc1):

ls -al | grep sdc1 > /home/alan/disk3

This creates a file in your home directory (you will of course not use alan here :)) called disk3. What I then did was to edit the file to remove everything other than the UUID and then add the commands to actually mount the disk (it's a bit too much to remember).

cd
kate disk3

Now, change the contents of the file so that it contains the commands necessary to mount the disk:

sudo mount -U your-UUID-here /media/windowsd3

To make the file disk3 an executable script, do the following:

chmod 751 disk3

Now before you can execute this file, you need to make the mount point, windowsd3, for the disk:

cd /media
sudo mkdir windowsd3

Now you can go back to your home directory and mount the disk:

cd
./disk3

and the disk will be available under /media/windowsd3

Simple??

Booting from a Windows slave disk
Although this is also not a specific 8.10 problem, but rather X in general, I am adding it here as it fits in nicely with the previous section. Again, although it may look easy, trying to piece together all the necessary information is not trivial, especially as Windows wants to control the boot process. A simple bit of editing in the Linux grub menu is all that is required.

sudo kate /boot/grub/menu.lst

Near the top of the file, you will find the following entry:

# title Windows 95/98/NT/2000
# root (hd0,0)
# makeactive
# chainloader +1
#

Copy these lines and paste them at the bottom of the file, before the following line:

### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST

Now edit the lines that you have added, firstly by removing the # at the start of each line. Add the lines so that your entry looks like the one shown below:

title Windows XP
root (hd1,0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

An important point to make sure of is the space between the entries in the two map lines. If your grub menu is hidden, make sure that you increase the timeout entry to something around 10s (or add a # before the hiddenmenu entry). When you next boot, pressing ESC when requested will take you into the boot menu and you will be able to select your Windows entry.

KDE 4 has a grub editor in the system settings, but it's a bit painful to use, so I rather edit the grub menu file directly.

Adept package manager
Adept has changed from KDE 3.5 to KDE 4, and not for the better. In 3.5, I used adept-manager to add packages. While this was quite buggy (suffered from frequent crashes), it was reasonably easy to use. With version 4, adept-manager disappeared to be replaced by adept, with two switches (as far as I can make out - no man entry and no documentation for the help files), manager or installer (with manager being the default). Both of these appear in the menus:
* under the classic menus, manager is under system and installer on the start menu
* under the new kickoff menus (which is rather painful to use), installer is under the application menu and manager under application>system menu.

What makes both flavours of the adept software excruciatingly difficult to use is that the packages are not sorted into alphabetical order. So, unless you know exactly what you are looking for, it is incredibly difficult to find packages if you have included universe and multiverse repositories. installer tries to make it easier by categorizing the packages. However, the browse function requires that you enter the complete and correct name of a package in order to find it.

Fortunately, there is always synaptic to fall back on.

I did hit one very bizarre bug with 'adept manager'. For some reason, it refused to look outside the CD as a repository, which meant that it could not find synaptic. 'adept installer' found and installed it through the browse function, but synaptic suffered with the same problem as 'adept manager', it could only find packages on the CD. I tried many different "tricks" to try and get these apps to see all the repositories (including many apt switches, such as 'apt-get update') without any luck. You can imagine how frustrating this is when you're wanting to install your workhorse apps (firefox, krusader, etc), but instead find yourself trying to fix something else. Along the way, I found that this was not a unique problem. What made this problem even more bizarre was that the next morning, I tried 'apt-get update' again, and synaptic could suddenly see the outside world...

Playing an audio CD
Neither Amarok nor kaffeine will play an audio CD as both look for the CD device in /dev/cdrom (as does System settings>Advanced>Audio CD). There was no device /dev/cdrom on my system, so I changed the device to /dev/scd0.
Amarok:
Settings>Engine>Default device
To play the CD, Engage>Play Audio CD

Kaffeine:
Settings>Xine Engine Parameters>Media

In some situations, I found Kaffeine would not play, so I created a cdrom entry in /dev:

sudo ln -s /dev/scd0 /dev/cdrom

This seems to have made Kaffeine happier.
[update]My /dev/cdrom entry has been deleted by Kubuntu on reboot. Methinks it's time to uninstall Kaffeine.

Playing a movie DVD
One of the strange features of the ubuntu range is that a DVD movie player gets installed, but it can't play DVD movies! (Unless of course you have medibuntu installed.) You need to install some software from the medibuntu repositories in order to get your DVD movies playing. The easiest way to do this is the following:

sudo apt-get install kubuntu-restricted-extras

However, this is a rather large download as things like flash and quicktime players get installed as well. Now, one of my pet hates is flash and I don't want it on any of my machines, so I had to find another route to get the required software. The following does the job very nicely:

sudo apt-get install libdvdread3

Once the download is complete, you need to run the install script:

sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh

You should now be able to view your DVD movies.

CD drive opening then closing immediately on eject
This was really irritating, when I ejected a CD, the drive would open, then close as soon as the drawer reached the end of its travel. The drive would open, and remain open, if the eject button was then pressed.

I did a bit of searching for this and found that it is a bug which is due to be fixed in KDE 4.2 (is evidently fixed in 4.2 beta). A workaround is to download this rules file, then do the following:

cd /etc/udev/rules.d
sudo mv 60-persistent-storage.rules 60-persistent-storage.rules.old
sudo cp /home/ME/Download/60-persistent-storage.rules .

Of course, the ME/Download will be replaced with where ever you downloaded the rules file (also, this blog template has split line two - there should be three lines, one starting with cd and two with sudo).

Kmail causing Kontak to crash
Recently, on starting Kontak, it would crash with the error:

"KCrash: Application 'kontak' crashing..."

with preceding references to kmail. Now, I have never used kmail, so ran it to check whether it was causing the crash. Sure enough:

"KCrash: Application 'kmail' crashing..."

So, I started searching. One possible solution I found was to install kdepim. I did this (45MB download, with several upgrades I hadn't done), but kmail still crashed. Another option found was to reinstall kmail, but to no avail. Eventually, I searched synaptic for kmail and found one upgrade hadn't been done: libkpgp4. Upgrading this fixed the problem.

From the description of this library:

"This package contains libkgpg4, a gnupg-library for kmail and other parts of kdepim using gpg-based crypto.

This package is part of KDE, and a component of the KDE PIM module. See the 'kde' and 'kdepim' packages for more information."

So why didn't the installer see the dependency of kdepim on this library when it upgraded many other modules?

Garbled or broken taskbar icons
This is a bug in Kde 4.1 which has evidently been fixed in 4.2. It seems to be caused by a mixture of Qt4, the taskbar manager (plasma) and nVidia drivers. A workaround is to switch to a console (ctrl-alt-F1) and then back to the GUI (ctrl-alt-F7). This forces a redraw of the entire screen.

Things that don't work
Kdehelpcenter
Kexi, Amarok and Kaffeine (plus: Korganizer) are still using old helpcenter files, so no online help is available.

Kipi plugins
The kipi plugins have not been upgraded to KDE 4, so Gwenview (and I imagine digikam) have very limited capabilities.

Every so often, the time goes haywire. I haven't figured out why yet. I'm on GMT +2, and every once in a while, I find the time at GMT +4.

Another "every so often": KDE hangs while shutting down. I have to do a console login (ctrl-alt-F2) then shutdown with

sudo shutdown -h now

Rietvlei Dam Nature Reserve

2008-12-13T20:28:00.000-08:00

On my last visit to the reserve, I was pleased to see that the building activities at the bridge between the two dams was complete. They had built a weir which formed a really nice little dam which was well shaded by willow trees allowing for plenty of hideaway places for birds. Here, a Little Egret hunting next to the road.

What was also nice to see was a Giant Kingfisher sitting on the railing of the bridge. As I tried to move closer, she flew into a tree giving a more natural looking backdrop.

Elsewhere in the reserve I also managed to get a shot of a Golden Bishop. Unfortunately, it never sat in a place where I could get a clear shot at it.

Another bird which was not at all keen to have its picture taken was a Levaillant's Cisticola. With this shot, I had to aim the camera very carefully between the reeds.

One bird which was very keen to pose (for a change) was a male Whitewinged Widow. I took many shots of this bird as he called trying to attract a female. Unfortunately, the sun stayed behind the clouds during the time he was posing for me.

As I was leaving the reserve, I came across this Rufousnaped Lark singing on a bush.

All in all, a pleasant morning, with not too many photo opportunities, but I was able to use those that presented themselves.