Matt's Tech Blog

Install Digital Now Quad Card on mythbuntu 10.10 64-bit

I found the Digital Now Quad Tuner card worked great in my mythtv server and was well worth the $199 AUD price tag. In fact, it’s probably the best tuner I have ever used with mythtv. However I did have to do a few things to get it to work, as it doesn’t work straight out of the box – at least on mythbuntu 10.10 64-bit with kernel 2.6.35-28. It doesn’t work on 11.04 on kernel 2.6.38-8. I googled around and put together the following to get it to work.

First of all you need to install all sorts of packages that are needed to compile the drivers. I’m not sure whether you need all of these, but if you install these you should be okay.

I did everything below as root.

apt-get install fakeroot build-essential
apt-get install crash kexec-tools makedumpfile kernel-wedge
apt-get install git-core libncurses5 libncurses5-dev
apt-get install libelf-dev libdw-dev asciidoc binutils-dev

do uname -a to get the current kernel version you are using.

root@clumix:~# uname -a
Linux clumix 2.6.35-28-generic #49-Ubuntu SMP Tue Mar 1 14:39:03 UTC 2011 x86_64 GNU/Linux

now install the headers for that version. Example:

apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.35-28-generic

wget http://www.medianow.com.au/data/Linux4Quad2.zip

unzip the package by running this

unzip Linux4Quad2.zip

You should then have a directory called “Linux4Quad” – change to this directory

cd Linux4Quad

Untar the tar-bzip file in this directory.

tar jxvf digitalnow-quad.tar.bz2

You should now have a directory called “digitalnow-quad” – change to this directory.

cd digitalnow-quad

And now there is yet another tar-bzip file to uncompress. Don’t run the install.sh script as it won’t work.

tar jxvf v4l_dvb_digitalnow.tar.bz2

Now you need to modify the “.version” file under the “v4l” directory to match your kernel version.

VERSION=2
PATCHLEVEL:=6
SUBLEVEL:=35-28
KERNELRELEASE:=2.6.35-28-generic

Now you need to compile the software and this will take time to complete depending on your PC specs. I found on a quad core machine it took about 10 minutes. Run this from the “digitalnow-quad” directory.

make

Once this completes successfully you need to run this to install:

make install

then reboot the machine.

I found that for some reason my MCE remote stopped working. I suspect the mceusb module was being loaded incorrectly due to the installation of a custom v4linux drivers (or something silly). So I edited /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

and add

blacklist mceusb

rebooted again and all worked fine.

Note: you may find that if you update you kernel that you will need to recompile and reinstall these drivers in order for the card to work again.

Size of the Universe

Here is another great video that describes the size of our universe.

Star Size Comparison HD

If you have every tried to get your head around how big the universe is, than watch this video clip. Remember it doesn’t cover the huge distances between objects as well.

Opensource photo stitcher – Hugin

I’ve always used Photoshop for stitching together photos for my panorama’s, however I’ve been having trouble with it lately for some unknown reason.

So I went on a search through the web and found an opensource program called Hugin.

So far, so good and it’s extremely easy to use. Best of all it’s free! I’m uising the Windows 64-bit version and there is also a Mac OS version too (I haven’t tried the Mac version yet).

Here is a panorama I created using Hugin with 12 images stitched together. It took me around 5 minutes to do.

1 week using the iPad

I finally caved to the pressure of the latest and greatest of what technology has to offer and purchased an iPad. I have had it for about 5 days and here are my thoughts on it thus far.

The screen is a dream to look at. I found that after using for some time and then having to look at my iPhone screen that you miss the large screen immediately. Pictures and videos look terrific and browsing the web is simply a breeze. Unless of course you go to a web site that has flash or java in which case it’s difficult to use with those sites. Given that apple has sold millions of iPads and will probably sell millions more maybe website developers will start abandoning flash and java overtime – only time will tell.

The iPad definitely won’t replace me netbook at this point in time. Whilst I would prefer to use one integrated device for everything, there are just too many holes that a full windows OS covers. Eg. I run hubb networks software for stock information. This is written for windows and definitely will not run on an iPad. However given time maybe future apps will catch up and I can find an alternative. I also can’t plug USB devices into the iPad, though apparently there is an adapter for plugging in camera’s available. At the moment there is just too many things I rely upon that run on windows in order to make a complete move away from it – but maybe my view change over time.

I discovered the kids absolutely love the iPad. My niece used it to play a Thomas the Tank Engine app on weekend and she could not get enough of it. The interesting thing is that nobody real taught her how to use it. She was able to immediately understand that it all worked through touch. This shows just how versatile the touch interface really is and just how simple it is to use. However I couldn’t or wouldn’t leave the iPad alone with a child as I don’t think it’s tough enough to cope with the beatings that kids could give it. Way too expensive as a toy too. Perhaps we will see adaptions for young children in the future.

The keyboard is okay. Whilst a normal keyboard might have more tactile feedback I have noticed that you do learn to adapt to a touch screen keyboard quite quickly. In fact this article was written using the iPad through the word-press app and I think my typing is just as good as it is on normal keyboard. I have the official apple iPad case which does enable me to put the iPad on a lean and this does make typing easier.

I discovered that when I first setup my iPad that iTunes just put all of my apps that I have installed on my iphone straight unto the iPad. This was a little annoying as there are heaps of apps that didn’t really want on my iPad to begin with. However this has helped me to be able to assess applications on the iPad that would probably not have considered otherwise. I found there Serena number of apps that have the capability to run on iPad and iPhone and take advantage of the larger screen. Eg. WordPress, IMDB, Amazon.com and goggle. I have discovered some apps have specific Ipad version which is a little annoying as I had to uninstall the iPhone version and reinstall the iPad version. Eg. eBay, shazam, backgrounds and bloomberg. But there is still a heap of apps that seem to only have iPhone versions. Eg. Facebook, pay pal and Skype. These iPhone apps still run but they don’t take advantage of the larger screen and iPad capabilties. I’m hoping these will eventually have iPad specific apps in the near future too.

Reading magazines on the iPad is just like reading the real thing only better. I have the zinio app installed and I’ve subscribe to Digital camera World. This magazine usually costs me $16 Australian to buy and is 1-2 months behind by the time I receive it from the UK. Now it costs me $6 and I can get it on my iPad straight away. This is a full color magazine and it read exactly the same as the paper version. Up until now this has only been a dream and reading it off a monitor didn’t quite do it for me.

I will post more as I keep experiencing new things on my iPad.