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I haven’t posted for a while, but I’ve been working on a few things that will hopefully generate some posts once I finish with them…. I hope 😯

Until then here is something that I think everyone should be aware about – especially if they haven’t heard about it before – watch the video then go to the Earth Hour portal  www.earthhour.org to find out more. In a hurry – from Canada? go to wwf.ca/earthhour/ from the USA? go to www.myearthhour.org/home and lets all turn out the lights together….

So if you recall, yesterday I was chatting about how great the WDTV is for playing audio by such things as performer and genre.

What I didn’t mention yesterday, was the challenge I had finding all the songs I thought should have been marked as Christmas ( ’tis the season after all ) in the Christmas genre, they were all over the place. To the point that I was only playing about 1/5 of all the files I had saved as Christmas music! The rest were tagged as Holidays, Party, Jazz, Children’s, etc etc etc. How to fix them so that they were all marked as Christmas was my dilema.

Sure I could manually go in and edit the properties of each file individually, but that would have been painful and taken way too long. So I went on another quest, to find a tool that would let me “bulk update” a whole list of song cuts with the genre I thought they should be in, and not the one that the ripping software either thought it should be, or worse, that wasn’t marked at all….

This was a tougher task than I had thought. To me this is the sort of need, with all the iTunes and MP3 players out there, that tons of people had already fixed…. Now to be truthful, maybe that tool is available within some of these tools, like iTunes, but I don’t use them, nor do I want to. So, I had to find another way to do it.

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So I got a neat little gadget from my daughter and her partner a while back – it’s called a WDTV or (Western Digital TeleVision) and I have to tell you – it’s pretty cool!

I’ve been using it pretty extensively now for I think almost a year and it has worked flawlessly. What’s it do? Here’s a short list:

• Plays any type of media content you can think of – Video, Stills and Audio
• Connects to either a regular TV (red, white, yellow) or a HDTV at 1080p ( red, white, green, blue, red or HDMI )
• Connects to two USB  powered external drives at the same time or two USB memory sticks
• Is heavily supported by Western Digital, with numerous easy upgrades
• Can be converted, with a bit of work, to a Linux media player using one of the external hard drives
• Can use play lists for both audio and video files
• Can play videos/audio/pictures by either folder, genre, random or author
• Is supported by a huge on-line community/forum

This little box – and it is VERY little, approximately 3 inches by 5 inches by 2 inches in diameter, is  very impressive and I’ve converted a lot of my CD’s to MP3 just so I can access them whenever I want to. Instead of going to my wall cabinet and pulling out CD’s that I want to listen to, I just look them up on my WDTV, plus I can mix and match as I choose.

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So I’ve been distracted for the last couple of days trying to get a great little flight simulator called RealFlight to work on Virtualbox ( a stand alone Windows environment ) within my Ubuntu 9.10 environment.

It would start the main menu, but then fail when I tried to go further, complaining that the graphics card couldn’t handle pixel shaders ( a feature found in advanced graphics cards – which mine supposedly does. ) and I did my usual Google search looking for what other people may be trying or having problems with, and hopefully what they may have found that worked…

The best potential hit was on the RealFlight forum itself…. Which sort of made sense, if anyone has had experience with that sort of problem, I’ll probably find them there… and I actually found someone who was actually trying to get it to run in Wine ( another type of Windows emulator for Linux .) He was having problems getting the software to find the controller. I responded to him that I had installed RealFlight on my Virtualbox and it looked like it saw the controller ( it actually insisted that it be plugged in before continuing ) but that I ran into a pixel shader problem and thought that perhaps we were getting close because the main menu worked on my machine, but when I tried to go further the shader problem popped up. I asked if anyone had any experience with this issue and what they might recommend…

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As you are probably aware by now, almost every manual and “official” document that you find on the Internet ( and in business ) is in PDF (Portable Document Format). It was designed by Adobe Systems and ( thankfully ) in 2008 they released it as an open format. What this meant was that other companies could then legally design tools to view, edit and create PDF files without Adobe going after them for copyright/patent violations.

The reason I said “thankfully” is because although Adobe made and released a great software program that allowed one to read PDF format files ( originally called Acrobat Reader ), this at first wonderful piece of software became bogged down into newer, better, more powerful versions. Which resulted in bigger, slower, more cumbersome versions…. to the point that on some older computers the reader would take OVER a minute to load up before you could use it! It was worse than watching paint dry!

So the search was on for a PDF viewer that was faster and as powerful ( yes some of those add-ons that Adobe came out with were useful ) as the original Adobe Acrobat was, but faster…. oh please much faster….

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