Dj Skunk Diesel

Using Linux and old computers to do cool stuff. Vol. 2

Before we get started I would like to clarify that the goal here it to inexpensively gain the ability to surf the net and playback audio and video content on your television. If you have money to blow on your home entertainment center then there are plenty of other solutions that would be easier to set up. All three of the current game consoles will do most of the things we are going to do here, but they also have their limitations. Having a computer with a 10 foot UI, a full-fledged browser, and access to a full desktop environment connected to your TV gives you many advantages over a game console or satellite/cable box. Another thing to consider and take some time figuring out is what your goals are by using a media center PC. For instance, if you are wanting to use this as a DVR then you would need a TV Tuner card. That would also limit your choices for distros. Also, where is the digital media that we will be watching going to be stored? Will the content only be streamed from the Internet? Differences in need could greatly affect which distro you choose and which software packages you would need to have installed.

One thing I have found to be true when trying to use Linux to solve problems and perform tasks is that half the battle is figuring out which of the different ways to solve the problem is the best for your situation. There is almost always more than one way to do something in Linux, so choosing which one best fits your needs is key to providing a reliable solution that you will be happy with in the long run. Doing a little research before hand to make sure that the software you install will in fact accomplish all of your goals could save you a lot of time and head aches. The last thing you want to do is spend hours installing and setting up your Linux Media Center box only to find out that it does not have all the features you want.

With that being said lets take a look at some of your choices for hardware combinations. If you are looking to use an older computer for this there are a couple of things to consider. Old computers can be found lying around all kinds of places these days. There are a lot of people who like to buy new ones even when there isn’t much wrong with the old one other than the fact that is was running windows. So find one that is at least a Pentium 4 or better and make sure it’s not a Celeron, add some RAM if you can, and you should be good to go. Here is the system requirements for Mythbuntu, a popular Ubuntu based media center distro. I would recommend more in almost every area, but that can be used as a good rule of thumb. Next we need to make sure that we can make the proper connection between the computer and the TV. Of course there is more than one way to do this, and we also need to think about sound quality. Most TV’s don’t have very good built-in speakers, and if you are going to use an existing surround sound speaker system then you will need to make sure you have the proper cables and adapters to get the sound from the Linux box to the amplifier if that’s what you are going to be using. Would it be naïve of me to assume that if you are geek enough to build your own Linux Media Center that you can handle getting the sound working on your own? I hope not because I don’t want this tutorial to be too long and drawn out.

Now let’s talk about some of your options for distros and software packages. There are a few distros that are specifically made to act as media centers. I have tried a few of them out and there really was not one that sticks out as the overall champ. Some are better at one thing but lack the ability to do other things. If you are wanting to use this as a DVR and record TV shows then Mythbuntu is the clear choice for you. It is pretty solid all around being based on Ubuntu. In my situation I don’t have a TV service since I don’t watch TV, so that settles that. I only wanted to stream movies from my Linux Media Server to my TV and be able to surf the net. For those reasons I went with Element. It does those two things great and also boots and shuts down pretty quick which is important for a media center. People are used to their entertainment center turning on quickly when they are ready to sit down in front of the TV. I have tried a few of the others, actually most of them are applications which can be run from nearly any distro. Element is one of the few distros that comes out of the box with the Ten Foot UI. Another one is GeexBox. It seemed pretty functional when I tried it and also comes ready for your living room out of the box. My choice of Element was simple personal preference. I am sure that once later releases of each come out I will try them and see where I want to go. I love to distro hop and try different flavors of Linux out on a regular basis.

Among the software packages that give a media center experience and can be run from any distro but aren’t a full-blown distro themselves, a few stand out. Boxee is a decent one. It looked like it would have everything you need and would be pretty easy to set up. Unfortunately I don’t think worked well with my video card and my patience was thin the day I tried it, so I gave up on it. The others I tried were Moovida, XBMC, and Enna. LinuxMCE also looked promising, but is still in development. Of those three the one I liked the best was Moovida. It seemed the most mature and functional but of course all three are still very young projects that need work to really be killer apps. At any rate, the choice is yours and I would recommend trying more than one setup. You never know which one will work best with your particular hardware configuration.

Finally you will need a way to control this from your couch or recliner. The best way I found to do this was with one of these. They do have infrared remotes and adapters to use them with your Linux box, but this seemed so much simpler to me. It’s USB, looks like a remote, and is very functional. I love mine, but the choice is up to you.

So there you have it! I didn’t want to get terribly technical and bore people with details, I simply wanted to give an overview of things to consider since I just recently tackled this project myself and finished with great success. I now have a setup that I am very happy with. If you found this tutorial helpful then stayed tuned! Using Linux and old computers to do cool stuff. Vol. 3 will be How to set up your own Linux Media Server. I use mine to keep all my digital data in a central location and stream it to all the other devices in my house.

Using Linux and old computers to do cool stuff. Vol. 1

As you all probably know, I am a systems technician for an IT outsourcing company, so I work in the computer field. Over the years I have become quite the Linux enthusiast and along the way I have learned how to do a lot of cool things for little or no cost. That concept is at the core of the open source community. The first thing I want to talk about it hosting your own web site. [note: if your website is going to generate a lot of traffic then this probably wont be good idea for you] Having a computer at your home of office that hosts your own personal or business website can save you a ton of $$$ over time. The average  cost per year for a decent web hosting package can run you anywhere from $100 per year to $1000 depending on your needs as far as content updates and number of mailbox’s. NOTE: If you have more than ten mailbox’s with a lot of email and email addresses that already receive a lot of spam then I would not recommend this setup. If you are just staring a new blog or business, or you have a pretty static and small site that doesn’t get a lot of traffic and you are tired of the reoccurring cost  then this might be just what you need.

First you will need to buy a domain name. I have a few, the main one being djskunkdiesel.com. You can buy a domain from godaddy.com pretty cheep now days. Be sure not to let them fool you into buying a hosting package because that is what we will be setting up in this tutorial. You DO want to make sure that your cart includes DNS hosting. We could set this up on the computer we are configuring, but I have learned over the years that it is better to have your DNS on “the cloud”. This way if your server is down for maintenance people will not get errors in their browser and you can even direct them to another site if you want. Also it is usually included for free when you buy a domain. If not then buy through godaddy. If you aren’t sure what DNS is then you should either abandon this tutorial now or go here and do some research. Some info on how to get in and make changes to your DNS can be found here. You will need to point traffic to your homemade Linux box by changing the ‘A record’ for your domain to point to it’s public IP address. You might also need to forward the proper ports in your router if you have one that is between you and the internet. Some good instructions on how to do that can be found here. If you don’t have a static IP from your ISP I would recommend calling them and finding out how much they would charge you to change your service package to one that includes a static IP. There are ways to setup DNS using a dynamic IP address, but I have found it much easier to just bite the bullet and get a static IP.  I could explain it all to you, but I didn’t want this tutorial to be too terribly long. Besides, if you don’t have the ability to figure some things out on your own then go back to using windows. Or better yet, get yourself a mac. [can you smell my sarcasm?]

Next find an old computer with enough computing power for the job. A Pentium 4 that is 3.0ghz or better might do the job, but I recommend at least a Pentium 4 HT 2.4ghz or better. That way you have two cores working in your favor. Now make sure you have enough RAM. Anywhere from 512mb to 2gb should work. We don’t need any kind of fancy video card for this install since this thing will most likely be headless and not even have a monitor plugged in when we are done. From here we are going to setup our web-server with ISPconfig control panel. It is the best of the free web-based control panel suites that I have tried. It allows you to host multiple domains and as many email accounts as you like and it can  manipulate MySQL and PHP which is what we need for WordPress, along with webmail, ftp, and many of the other features you would normally pay your web host for. A good how to on setting this up with Ubuntu server can be found here. That should keep you busy for a bit! Now, if you successfully complete that, the core software of your server will be done! Let’s continue.

For the remainder of this tutorial I will refer to “yourdomainname.com”, please substitute with the actual domain name that you purchased. Mine would be djskunkdiesel.com.

Now we are ready to get WordPress setup. The full version of WordPress has many advantages over the free version that you have access to with a free wordpress account. This was the main reason I decided to host my own. Now before we can install WordPress we have to get into the ISPconfig web interface on our server. Learning how to get into this was part of the install instructions I directed you to earlier, but to do so point your browser to http://yourdomainname.com:8080 and login with the admin account you setup during the install. If you are behind the same router as the box itself you might have to use it’s local internal IP address instead of it’s fully qualified domain name. If so it would be something like http://192.168.1.2:8080, but with the machines actual internal IP. From there goto “sites” and add in yourdomainname.com the only thing that is not a default option is under ‘php’ you want to choose ‘Fast-CGI’. Next over on the left click on ‘database’. We need to add a MySQL database for WordPress to use. You can call it what you like, I called mine ‘wordpress’. If you are going to host multiple domains you might want to name it according to the domain that will be using it. For the database user you can use whatever name you want. I used ‘admin’. Make sure you give the user full rights to everything. This will install a MySQL database called ‘c0wordpress’ with an admin user of ‘c0admin’. We will need those to put into our WordPress config file later. While you are in there you also need to create yourself an FTP account. On the left click on ‘FTP-User’, and from there add a user for yourdomainname.com and choose a username and password, we will need those later. There are a lot of cool features in ISPconfig if you wanna poke around in there, but this should be all you need, we will do the rest via ftp.

Next you will need to establish an FTP connection to your newly configured server. You can do this any number of ways. Hopefully if you are interested in WordPress you have transferred files via ftp before. My favorite way is with a firefox plugin called FireFtp. It is a full featured ftp client that runs inside a tap of firefox. If you use firefox you can find it here. Otherwise just use whatever FTP client you are familiar with. Now you need to click and download the latest version of wordpress from here. Unzip it some place and then connect to your server via FTP with the username and password you created from inside ISPconfig earlier. For some reason ISPconfig puts the word ‘default’ directly in front of the username you specify. So for mine the username was ‘defaultadmin’. Sort of like the way it puts the ‘c0′ in front of your MySQL database name. I guess this helps it differentiate between ftp accounts you create there and ones you might create via SSH with the normal ftp administration. Anyway, once you are connected transfer everything inside the wordpress folder you unzipped into the /web folder that you see in your FTP session. Now you need to edit the ‘wp-config-sample.php’ file that was in that wordpress folder and change the lines that talk about your database name and username and password to make them represent the actual database username and password that we created while we were in ISPconfig earlier. Then save the file as ‘wp-config.php’ instead of ‘wp-config-sample.php’ and transfer it to the server. Now you should be able to goto “http://yourdomainname.com/wp-admin/install.php” and get a nice window that will ask if you want to install wordpress. Click on install and it should give you a temporary password for your wordpress admin account. Highlight and copy that to the clipboard or write it down. Then goto “http://yourdomainname.com/wp-admin” and log in with it and congrats! You have access to your wordpress. If you don’t know what to do from here you are screwed. I don’t have time to write a tutorial on web design using wordpress.

If you liked this tutorial stay tuned. The next two will be on how to use an old computer as a Linux media center and how to setup a Linux media server.

Later!!

People keep asking me about this and I finally had a reason to figure out how to do it, so here ya go!

• Log into your blip.
• Click on your listeners, find the person you want to block.
• Click on their avatar which will take you to their page.
• Now look for the little pull down arrow next to the small gear symbol under their listener number.
• Click that and choose ‘Block Listener”. There ya go. Done deal.

I think I may use this new section of my blog to post short how to’s for things I get asked about a lot.

P.S. Lick My Nuts.

You know I once wrote a blog entitled ‘Mouth Zipped‘. The main point of that one was that if you aren’t sure what to say, you should just say nothing at all. This blog has a very similar theme, except the main point being that you shouldn’t stick your nose in places it doesn’t belong. It is one thing if somebody chooses to confide in you with their problems. It that case it would be your obligation as a friend to keep that information private and not to tell it to others. Especially people who you were explicitly instructed not to tell. I know what you are thinking, “that sounds like a no brainer Skunk”. Well you would be right, it is a no brainer. But evidently some people don’t have much in the way of brains. With that being said I would like to cover my next point.

Jealousy and envy are not the same thing. Let’s analyse this a bit. First let’s take a look at the definitions of each. I am going to use askoxford.com because sometimes you have to go back to the old English or even further to Greek or Latin to find the true meanings of words. So first let’s take a look at Envy.

envy

• noun: discontented or resentful longing aroused by another’s possessions, qualities, or luck.

I will expound upon this a bit. Basically it is the feeling of sadness or ‘discontent’ as a result of wanting what others have. This could be possessions or qualities or even situations. The things is, envy is completely natural. Everyone feels it at some point. Envy can cause ill will, sharp words, and of course depression. But it almost never results in lashing out against the person you are envious of. This is where Jealousy comes into play. Let’s take a look at it’s definition.

jealous

• adjective: 1 envious of someone else’s achievements or advantages. 2 resentful of someone regarded as a sexual rival. 3 fiercely protective of one’s rights or possessions: they kept a jealous eye over their interests.

Notice the multiple definitions. At it’s core it is very similar to envy, but once you get deeper into the meaning you realise that it is more than just envy. It also involves people’s perception of who should possess what. See definition number three, that is the one that gets people into trouble. When they actually believe that something or somebody is ‘theirs’. Or better yet that it ‘should’ be theirs, that they truly ‘deserve’ it. When you start to believe that something somebody else has is supposed to be yours and they don’t deserve to have it, is when people start to lash out and try to harm or damage the person who possesses what they believe to be rightfully theirs.

When you find yourself thinking those kind of thoughts, and having those kind of feelings, do yourself a favor and squash that shit before you do something stupid. If you hear one of your friends talking like they have those feelings or intents, do them a favor and tell them to chill before they do something destructive. Because I would be willing to bet that the percentage of times that lashing out in jealousy ends in the jealous person getting what they want is EXTREMELY low. What people should probably do is spend more time working on improving themselves and trying to achieve their goals rather than worrying about what others have and do. THAT would be a much smarter investment in time.

You are probably wondering why I have chosen this as a blog topic. Without sharing too much I will say that I have found a girl that makes me very happy, and I would like to think that I make her happy as well. Love is a very rare thing to find in the grand scheme of things. So is true beauty, real honesty, and people who are truly genuine. These are most definitely things that would make someone envious. They are also evidently things that make people lash out in jealousy. I will leave it at that.

P.S. Lick My Nuts!

So it’s been a while since you guys have heard from me. Basically things have been slightly on hold for a couple reasons. I know how the Internet works though. It’s like a plant, If you don’t feed it (get on there and add content and talk to folks), then it whithers and dies. This is very clearly evident. Look at myspace. Or better yet go back and look through your own timeline. See how 6 months ago you were probably sending @’s to quite a few tweeple who might not even be around any more. Sure there are your core friends who would never unfollow you and who have other ways of saying hi besides twitter. But then there is this other group of friends that grows or shrinks proportionally based on your amount of interaction. Unless of course twitter has put you in the Suggested User List or you somehow got mentioned by some celebrity or have some other avenue of sending followers your way like being on the radio or TV. For the rest of us we must always remember to feed our plants.

The other thing is the radio show. I asked about whether I should keep doing it on twitter the other day and a lot more people said for me to keep doing it than I expected. So I guess I will keep plugging away at that. I really wish I had somebody who was a little computer savy who could help out a bit with that because I ‘feel’ like I am too busy to properly plan the shows out and come with good content. I love Chip, but he is really bad with computers, so he is no help. Anyway, I will leave that discussion for another time. Idea’s for show topics are always welcome. You can check the show info out here. Also don’t forget, you can ask me questions about anything over here on the ‘Ask Skunk’ portion of my blog.

P.S. Lick My Nuts.

What’s wrong with Hollywood? I could go on and on for hours about it, I am going to use Avatar as a prime example. Don’t get me wrong, it was good in some ways, and certainly visually stunning. But the political over tones were sickening. Also the fact that it was aimed at our youth almost guarantees that most of the people who watched it didn’t even comprehend the things that were backwards about the movie. Let me explain.

CAUTION: SPOILER INFORMATION IS INCLUDED IN THIS POST. IF YOU DON”T WANT TO KNOW THE PLOT GO WATCH THE MOVIE FIRST.

Alright, let’s take a step back from the enchanting jungle and CGI animals and look at this from a real life point of view. A couple things jump out at me right away. Number one, making it seem like one day there will be a magical way to escape reality and live in a fantasy world is not a cool thing to sell kids. Number two, making the American soldier into the bad guy is just wrong. Marine’s and other members of our military deserve our utmost respect and should always be portrayed as the ‘good guys’ because that is what they are. Period.

If you don’t think that Hollywood studios have a liberal agenda to push, then you need to wake up and smell the roses. I can name countless movies in the past ten years that were saturated with political statements and liberal over tones, it makes me sick. Now let me prove the fact that it’s political. If the people who made this movie didn’t hate the US military they could have easily made the soldiers Chinese or Russian or even make it like the United Nations or something. But no, they were clearly American whites with a few black guys sprinkled in. I didn’t see any of the soldiers who were of any other ethnic background. Now me personally I hate to EVER bring up race, but when the negativity is aimed at me I have to say something. I am an American and I believe that any time you choose to hyphenate your name (African-American, Latino-American) you are making the mistake of separating yourself from your fellow Americans. I mean if the goal is not to see people by their race then why constantly point out what race you are? But I digress. This is about Hollywood.

Like I said, I cold go on all day, but I am gonna try and give a ‘big picture’ type summary of what all is wrong with this movie and let you draw your own conclusions about how this relates to the rest of Hollywood. Fist of all there is the whole ‘escaping reality’ part. Like if your real life is messed up like the guys legs were messed up, you will someday be able to lay in some fancy machine and escape to a fantasy world that is actually real, not a video game.  Then to top it off, at the end he gets to lay under some voodoo tree and actually transfer his being into this ‘Avatar’ and leave his ‘evil white American’ body behind. Also, the amount of tree hugging going on in this movie was sickening. Yes we should respect nature, no we should not sacrifice great forests for some precious metal, but really, what were they trying to say? Do you not enjoy your running water? Do you not need electricity? Is civilization wrong? I am getting the point and missing the point at the same time.

Let me see if I can sum it up. Nature good, civilization bad. Jungle people good, American Military bad. Science good, Capitalism bad. They even named the mineral they were after ‘unobtainium’. Haha, so that means we should have known from the get go that they weren’t going to get the mother load? By the time the final fight came around I looked around the theater and it was clear that they had successfully brain washed the audience and had them rooting against the US military. Now if we could all just get it through our thick sculls that the American White Military Corporate Complex is the root of all evil life would magically fix itself right? No! The truth of the matter is that it’s the Rock Ribbed White Americans that made this country the greatest country ever. If America is so evil and bad then why are people all over the world trying to get in and very few trying to get out? Anyway, I will let it go at that. Just know this Hollywood, that we aren’t all asleep and you can’t pull the wool over everyones eyes. You can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool ALL of the people ALL of the time. Oh and you can’t fool me ANY of the time!

P.S.  Lick My Nuts!

Yep, they are after you. Wait no, they are after me. But I didn’t do anything wrong! FUCK THE POLICE!

Are you engaged in any illegal activity? Well I used to be, and so did my best friend Chip. This blog post is to announce this weeks topic and give you guys a chance to comment. Last week we didn’t get any comments that we could read on the air and I wanted to make sure I gave the proper opportunity for you guys to tell your stories. So how about it guys? Tell me a crazy story of a run in you had with the cops. Me and Chip are gonna tell ours live on the air. You are also welcome to call in and tell them live.

I will admit that my run-ins with law enforcement have been way more tame and uneventful since I quit doing drugs. But no worries there was enough when I was involved in that scene to make up for it. Anybody who missed when I spilled my guts about my time in prison on Ihuntmidgets‘ show should definitely tune in. It should be fun. So there you have it. See y’all on the flip side!

There is something refreshing about starting over. It makes you look back at where you have been and also look forward to what is in your future. This week has brought many changes for many of us. This year will bring many new things for all of us. I am most definitely looking forward to it. This brings me to a couple things.

First is the fact that my best friend @TheChipStar has just broken up with his girlfriend of over a year. This is not small news for people our age. Normally when you put that much into a relationship it changes many portions of your life. One of those portions is normally always the amount you interact with your friends. I will give Chip credit, he kept it real the whole time and stayed in touch. But the bottom line is that he is back on the ‘market’ and in the best physical shape of his life so… ladies….. *wink*

Next would be some of the changes in my own life. I have decided NOT to use the ‘twosidestoanycoin’ theme until and or unless I find a way to continue the same format. I still love the idea, just not sure it can continue the way it was for various reasons. This show that me and Chip are going to try is going to be different, and we actually are not certain what all we want to do with it. I am hoping that not putting much effort into it and not have such a set format will make it less stressful for me. I tend to take things a little too serious sometimes.

I would also like to say that I have recently lost a few very close friends. When I say lost, I only mean lost from twitter, but when that was how we met and the way we normally talked it feels like really losing them. I am very sad about this, and anyone who knows me probably knows who I am talking about. I would like to say to them that I am sorry if I hurt them in anyway and I miss their friendship.

So there you have it, new beginnings. Let’s all step into this new year with the knowledge that WE are the ones who make things happen. We are the ones who choose our surrounding, and the best way to make things happen is to say out load what you want to happen, and then physically do it.

P.S. Lick my nuts.