Author: Dave Shevett

My love affair with my Sony MZ-RH1 Minidisc player / recorder just keeps rolling along. After a few bumps getting it set up and running, I’m quite happily listening to music off little handheld disks. The player is working great. Soon I’ll be able to test it as a recorder, as a recently ebayed microphone is on it’s way.

Tonight, though, I had my first ‘walkabout’ with the player, listening to it as I went on a hike. Once I had figured out it’s sort of odd ‘Group’ structure for music, I was able to set up my albums and playlists on the one disk I had filled (well, to 700meg) with MP3’s. All works just as it’s supposed to. I once again have a perfectly useable, long battery life, high sound quality portable MP3 player that has the added bonus of having removeable media, be able to do high end recording, AND is the half the size and weight of an ipod.

But that’s not what I’m here to tell you about.

While it’s true the new Hi-MD Minidiscs use a non-standard format for their filesystem, that doesn’t mean the new player doesn’t function well with others. In fact, I randomly plugged the unit into my Linux box, to see if I could see my music filesystem.

[19860885.124000] usb 4-6: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 6
[19860885.260000] usb 4-6: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[19860885.456000] scsi2 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
[19860885.456000] usb-storage: device found at 6
[19860885.456000] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
[19860890.456000] usb-storage: device scan complete
[19860890.460000]   Vendor: SONY      Model: Hi-MD WALKMAN     Rev: 1000
[19860890.460000]   Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 00
[19860890.476000] SCSI device sdc: 494023 2048-byte hdwr sectors (1012 MB)
[19860890.476000] sdc: Write Protect is off
[19860890.476000] sdc: Mode Sense: 00 2a 44 00
[19860890.476000] sdc: assuming drive cache: write through
[19860890.492000] SCSI device sdc: 494023 2048-byte hdwr sectors (1012 MB)
[19860890.496000] sdc: Write Protect is off
[19860890.496000] sdc: Mode Sense: 00 2a 44 00
[19860890.496000] sdc: assuming drive cache: write through
[19860890.496000]  sdc: unknown partition table
[19860890.672000] sd 2:0:0:0: Attached scsi removable disk sdc
[19860890.672000] sd 2:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
[19860895.184000] FAT: utf8 is not a recommended IO charset for FAT filesystems,
filesystem will be case sensitive!

Well this certainly looks promising. And look! I have a new filesystem mounted!

dbs@yawl:~$ cd /media/usbdisk-1
dbs@yawl:/media/usbdisk-1$ df -k .
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdc                987904    665728    322176  68% /media/usbdisk-1
dbs@yawl:/media/usbdisk-1$ ls -l
total 32
-r-x------ 1 dbs dbs     0 2007-02-21 19:15 HI-MD.IND
drwx------ 2 dbs dbs 32768 2007-02-27 20:07 HMDHIFI

Alas, it’s not quite trivial to browse the music I’ve stored on the disk, as it appears Sony has their own way of clustering music. But, I’m okay with this. Sony has finally removed all the DRM insanity that has plagued the Minidiscs since their inception over a decade ago, and now the format is actually useful – in fact, it’s downright sexy.

Stay tuned for a more indepth review of the unit. I need to go play some more.

Update 2/28 9am – Fixed a little formatting problem with <pre>.

Well, today I received my spiffy Sony MZ-RH1 minidisc recorder and player. It’s a fantastic little machine, very sexy and elegant. It does, however, require the SonicStage software from Sony. I did the full installation, and went to run it, and got this dialog.
I haven’t rebooted yet, but I’m just getting that little shiver of “Oh, this can’t bode well.”
I’ll file further reports as events warrant. But for the moment, I need to reboot. I’ll be back after start the computer.
Update – It rebooted fine, and the Sony software came up as expected. 20 minutes later I have a gig of data on the MD player, all sourced as MP3’s, loaded onto a disc without a problem, and without corruption. Whee!

This thing is by far one of the COOLEST gadgets I’ve ever seen. Watch the videos – it’s hard to explain what it does without seeing it in action. The summary on their page is:

The reactable, is a state-of-the-art multi-user electro-acoustic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical artefacts on the table surface and constructing different audio topologies in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.

The wonder of it all is the entire thing is opensource and downloadable. Build your own!
Thanks to HackADay.

Is this a problem for the 2k’s or what?

Poor clipper is having a hard time dealing with my rampant gadget-itus. Since USB has really taken over the ‘small component’ interconnect need, the number of devices connected to your standard power-users desktop machine has gone through the roof.
Well, I’ve hit the wall myself. clipper lives in it’s docking station most of the time, which provides 3 nice USB ports in the back of the dock (I ignore the 2 ports on the side of the laptop, to avoid having to plug and unplug things everytime I undock). One of the ports on the dock is a cable to my external powered 4 port hub.
Doing the math, that gives me 6 available connections. Here’s how they’re wired up:

• Labtec USB webcam (Used with Skype and MSN Live Messenger)
• USB audio dongle (Dell D620’s for -some- nutty reason have no speaker connector on the dock. So when the laptop is in the dock, I would have to plug in my desktop speakers everytime I dock. Screw that, $10 from newegg got me an external audio device.
• Microsoft 4000 ergo keyboard (IMHO one of the best keyboards ever made)
• USB ‘LED’ mouse
• HP deskjet 5150 printer (I got this printer about 2.5 years ago for $70 from CompUSA. I’ve never regretted it, it’s a great printer.)
• Dock for a Mobile Crossing GPS
• Sync cable for my Treo 650

And I’m out of ports. I’m somewhat amused that the Dell monitor I have has a pair of USB ports on the side of it, but that’s pretty ugly, and would only gain me one more port (it would take up a port to plug it in).
The search is now on for a super-geeky 8 port hub. I want lights and blinky bits and cool live activity. I have to thank Mort for finding this Evil Genius USB hub which is mighty tempting, though it’s only 4 ports. (And no, I -do not- have USB powered manicure kit 🙂

Nothing like posting on Thursday some details about what happened a week ago, eh?
Well, one of the things I did on my absurdly productive weekend was bring yawl back from the dead. Some may rememeber that the poor Dell suffered a fatal drive crash back in December. Since then it’s been sitting, forlorn, silent. I had actually purchased the replacement 160gig drive already, but just never got around to putting it in.
Well this weekend provided the final kick in the pants to finish the upgrade. I realized that yawl was the host to the external drives I use to back up our colocated server. With yawl down, I couldn’t run the backups. THAT needed to change.
So open went the case (Yay for Dell creating -really- nice SFF (small form factor) cases. This case just opens right up with two button pushes, and the drive pops out via a simple plastic clip). In went the new drive, and back together it went. Total surgery time – perhaps 15 minutes.
The next problem of course, what to install on it? Since I’ve had Windows on clipper for the last 6 months or so, I haven’t been using a Linux desktop. Before that I had been running Debian etch with KDE as my desktop. For the new ‘yawl’, I decided I needed to get in on what is now the most popular free distro – that being Ubuntu. This distro is primarily Gnome based, which is something I’ve been avoiding for quite a while, but I figure I should give it a run for a bit and get at least mildly familiar with it, even though it doesnt’ match my preferences.
The install went perfectly, with an excellent clean installer (came right up in X and walked me through the setup). Rebooted, and lo! A clean desktop with sound and graphics all working perfectly.
I won’t go into a more detailed rundown of it quite yet, but it’s good to have it back. I was able to mount my external drives and run my backups, letting everyone breathe a little easier!
At any rate, we happily welcome ‘yawl’ back into the planet-geek system farm!

This is a big Happy Birthday to an entity near and dear to all of our hearts. One year ago, we brought boomer online. It has been running without fault ever since. Boomer provides web, mail, chat, database, and other services to over 30 users, handling 5000+ mail messages daily, on a 1.6gig AMD Sempron with 512meg of RAM and a pair of mirrored 80gig drives.
(In reality, it was brought online in September or thereabouts of 2005, but a power-nudge caused a reboot one year ago. It’s been up ever since)
20:09:11 up 365 days, 3:28, 20 users, load average: 0.11, 0.30, 0.34
Yay stable, long running, dependable Linux boxes!

I was just reading a cool review of the Nokia N800 written by a Sean Luke, an assistant professor at George Mason University, and fairly serious Apple Newton Hacker. In the article, he runs down how much better the N800 is over the Newton Messagepad 2100, but also really lambasts the UI designers for making abysmal decisions on decisions.
I have to side with the Sean on a number of points. There seems to be a mindset in the Linux community that GTk is the be all end all of UI’s, and it’s simple to just adapt it to whatever machine or environment you’re running it on. But in reality, GTK is a badly designed environment. The widgets are painful and inconsistent, they, as Sean says, borrow some of the worst ideas from Windows, and apply them poorly.
In the case of a handheld PDA-like device, these metaphors break down even further. Desktop processes for managing applications, tools, and workflow simply do not work in a handheld, pen based environment. This has been proven time and time again with the success of the Palm line of products (an environment that has nothing to do with windows), as well as the Newton line itself (also has no desktop equivelent). Both these environments were designed from the ground up to work on a small screen, doing basic tasks, interracting with just a stylus. I believe that many of the issues with the WindowsCE line come from this basic poor assertion. Windows isn’t a great GUI to begin with. Adapting it to a handheld device just by making it smaller doesn’t work, and even now, 10 years after the original version, the UI is difficult to work with and notoriously inconsistent.
I think the only ‘open’ environment that has come close to tackling this problem has been the fine folks at Trolltech, with the QTopia handheld environment. They’ve taken the QT environment and re engineered it to work on an embedded platform. The very first iterations of this, running on the Sharp Zaurus were functional, but still had that ‘first time’ porting problem. Trying to fit an Xwindows based environment on a small handheld screen, without a mouse.
Later versions have reached a high level of stability and functionality. Why doesn’t Nokia use this environment? The best I can think of is “Because it’s QT! Not GTK! Not real Linux!” Which makes me sad. This argument has been going on for years now, and frankly it’s time to bury the hatchet. But while the linux world continues to back GTK and Gnome, while ignoring the (IMHO) technically superior, more consistent, and better designed QT based environment, I feel that Linux UI’s will stay in the also-ran category, never considered a serious alternative.
Having said all that, I still find the N800 sexy as all get it. It does take things to the next possible level of Ubiquitous Computing, with it’s wireless capability and long battery life. Closer and closer.