loved The Grocer's Son (delivered by Netflix) on Boxee →

Excellent movie, but not for the faint of heart, makes The Shining look like Bambi.  →

My Essential Favorite Google Chrome Extensions

• Session Buddy
• Forecastfox
• Shareaholic
• Delicious right
• Date Today
• goo.gl URL Shortener

Going with Banshee for Android syncing after all!

It turns out that Banshee was hogging the CPU because I had automatic BPM detection enabled. Once I turned that off, it started behaving very nicely. Of all the music players I tried, the only one that supports synchronization with USB mass storage devices (such as portable media players, including Android phones) to my liking is Banshee. This article is a great starting point, but doesn’t cover all the goodies. (Amarok 1.4 and its fork Pana, by contrast, support access to mass storage devices but not proper synchronization. Furthermore, I really like Banshee’s clean layout and resulting usability, and version 1.7.x seems quite stable.)

What works for me is to set up a dedicated playlist for my Android phone. I add all tracks that I want on my phone to that playlist and configure the phone in Banshee to synchronize the music manually to that playlist. The nice surprise is that any playlists that include one or more of the tracks to be synced get copied to the device as well!

For usability (good playlist management) and features (Shoutcast support), I am keeping Exaile on my HTPC, which is separate from the laptop I use to manage my stuff.

Switched from Exaile to Pana (Amarok 1.4 fork)

Unfortunately, Exaile’s support for portable media players (especially those showing up as USB mass storage devices) is still very weak (as is Amarok 2.x’s). So I gave Banshee another chance, but it kept hogging the CPU even though it wasn’t supposed to be doing anything. Then I looked at Amarok, but portable media player support was apparently removed as part of the reorganization of the code base for version 2.x, and some folks were recommending reverting to version 1.4. This lead me to some pointers to a relatively recent Amarok 1.4 fork called Pana, which is what I am using now. It seems to be doing everything I need reasonably well.

To me as a Gnome user, it’s ironic that I had to resort to the KDE community for two of the most important apps (digikam for photos being the other one).

My iPhoto and iTunes replacements for Linux/Gnome

For photo management, I narrowed the list to digiKam (a KDE app) and gThumb. (I tried several others but eliminated them for various reasons.) I ended up going with digiKam for the following reasons:

• free rotation/straightening
• auto exposure
• export to various online photo services
• 0-5 star rating with smart selection based on rating

For music management, it was a lot harder to make a final choice, and I had to try lots of applications. I initially had a feeling that exaile would be the one, then tried a whole bunch of others with mixed results, and came back to exaile when I finally got it to recognize my Android phone as a USB mass storage device. It seems to be the only app to support these features properly and out of the box:

• large collections
• smart playlists
• ShoutCast internet radio
• USB mass storage
• equalizer

Preventing auto mount of Android phone’s ext partition in Gnome

In Gnome’s Nautilus file manager, usually all partitions of a removable USB drive are mounted automatically when you connect the drive. This includes Android phones, which often have multiple partitions on their SD cards, such as a FAT32 partition for media/data and an ext2/3/4 for apps2sd.

This behavior became a problem for me when trying to manage the music on my Android phone with a Linux-based music manager such as banshee or exaile. Apparently, the music managers got confused by the presence of two partitions associated with the same device. In particular, exaile did not show any device in its device manager.

The problem went away when I created an entry in /etc/fstab to prevent the ext partition from being mounted automatically.

sudo tune2fs -L myphone-ext /dev/sdb2 # assume this is your ext partition
sudo mkdir /mnt/myphone-ext

# fstab entry
LABEL=myphone-ext /mnt/myphone-ext ext4 noauto    0    0

You can still mount this partition manually when needed:

sudo mount /mnt/myphone-ext

Migration from iPhoto 6 to digikam 1.2.0

The photokam utility can help with this task. To get it to work with digikam 1.2.0, I had to take the following steps:

1. Create this symbolic link:
   cd ~/Pictures.OLD/iPhoto\ Library
   ln -s . iPhoto\ Library
2. Modify photokam-0.5/process-digikam-db.py as follows:
   26c26
   <         input = args[0]+’/digikam3.db’
   —-
   >         input = args[0]+’/digikam4.db’
   67c67
   <     c.execute(“select id, url from Albums”)
   —-
   >     c.execute(“select id, relativePath from Albums”)
   118c118
   <             “where Images.dirid=Albums.id and url=? and name=?”, params)
   —-
   >             “where Images.album=Albums.id and relativePath=? and name=?”, params)

After the conversion, I found a few iPhoto film rolls that had not been included in the conversion and migrated them manually.

ASUS WL-520GU running on four NiMH AA cells in WLAN client mode 

I am providing a lightweight RESTful web service on it. The device runs for over four hours on a single charge while handling one request every five seconds.

Brief HOWTO: Wake-on-LAN for Intel Mac mini running Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)

I recently set up an Mac mini Core Duo as an HTPC running Element OS (based on Xubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala). I finally managed to get WOL to work after studying numerous forum posts and trying different combinations of steps. I wrote this summary to put everything together in a single place.

Assumption: the Mac mini is connected to the wired LAN and its MAC is aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff. The wired ethernet adapter is at pci:0000:01:00.0 (verify using lspci).

Add the following lines to /etc/rc.local:

echo ‘PXS1 S4 enabled pci:0000:01:00.0’ > /proc/acpi/wakeup  
ethtool -s eth0 wol g

Then modify the following lines in /etc/default/acpi-support by adding sky2 and eth0, respectively:

MODULES_WHITELIST=”sky2”

SKIP_INTERFACES=”dummy qemu eth0”

Then reboot the machine and verify that the desired settings are effective:

$ cat /proc/acpi/wakeup 
Device S-state  Status   Sysfs node
PXS1  S4 enabled   pci:0000:01:00.0
PXS2  S4 enabled   pci:0000:02:00.0
…

$ sudo ethtool eth0 | grep Wake
Supports Wake-on: pg
Wake-on: g 

Now suspend the machine:

$ sudo pm-suspend

You should now be able to wake it back up from another machine using wakeonlan or some other suitable utility:

$ wakeonlan aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff

It takes about 10 seconds for the Mac mini to wake up.