I was thinking about putting together a new low-energy VT-enabled HTPC. So I can use it to watch video’s, play my music on it, use it for testing purposes, put freebsd on it and a lot more. That’s why I want the VT extension. So I can install KVM/Xen with all the goodies

But, the trick question: what components? Pffff, I don’t know anything about hardware anymore so I had to brush-up my knowledge about this stuff. After reading a lot of forum posts, reviews and the lot, I came up with the following hardware components:

Case: Antec Fusion case

A nice looking case with a lcd display with Linux drivers for it available (I think). And also an infrared receiver. And the price is not too high like some other cases.

Motherboard: Gigabyte vs. Asus

I’ve got two options: The Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H or the Asus M3A78-EMH HDMI. I also thought about a similar Asrock motherboard. Because they use very little energy (so I’ve read). But it’s a bit of a hassle to find a dealer who sells these boards. So I think I’ll stick with the former two.

Why one of these? They both have the new AMD 780G/SB700 chipset which supports full HD hardware encoding. So if I’m gonna us it as a HTPC it does it work descent.

CPU: AMD Athlon X2 4450e

Low power usage and only a couple of euro’s more than it’s brother the 4050. I think it supports amd-v/svm, but it’s not too obvious if you read the AMD site. So I hope I got it right

Cooler: Scythe Ninja mini

I want the system to be passively cooled. And this is the best small heatsink I could find.

Memory: 2 x 2GB

I don’t care what kind of memory goes into it. As long if it’s enough to support a couple of VM’s.

Hard disk: 32GB SSD

This one is hard! Is this worth the 160 euro’s? Well it is fast, silent and reliable! And it’s enough for DomU + some VM’s. All my  data is gonna be saved on another (network) diskdrive. But still….

Because I use Linux on my servers + on my daily desktop (work and private) now, I don’t have an OS to play around with anymore and f*ck up.

So I’ve installed FreeBSD (only in Virtualbox for now). And it worked! Last time I tried to install FreeBSd, it hang on some network-driver issue.

Why FreeBSD? Well, I’ve read some good things about the ports system and it really is nice how you can mix binary/source packages. What’s also nice, is that you can adjust the compile options for each package. Handy for suexec for example!

But why not Gentoo? I’ve tried Gentoo a couple of times. I even had it for a desktop for a while. But it kept giving conflicts between packages and everything is from source. So I find Gentoo a little bit too time consuming for a day-to-day use. Oh, and FreeBSD has a nice installer. Gentoo has not. And it the next version of FreeBSD there may be even a graphical installer! Thumbs up!

The first thing I did after I installed FreeBSD:

pkg_add -r portupgrade fpkg

And what I’ve learned so far: If you use the -P parameter with the port* utilities, it uses binary packages instead of the ports.

I took me a while to figure that one out I was looking for a pkginstall command, but I couldn’t find it. So after reading some docs, it looked like port* was the answer, only you must use different switces.

The second thing I did, was to get rid of the csh shell. What a piece of crap! I installed bash and configured my profile to use bash. After editing /etc/passwd and messing it all up, I found out there was a command to change shell chsh to the rescue.

When I’ve found out how installing packages all works and when I’ve messed up my system for the first time, I think I’m gonna install it on a real computer. Maybe even try FreeBSD with Gnome.

A.K.A.: I bought a Logitech Harmony 525 remote control and a €1.49 remote saved my day!

When I say “525″ in this post, I of course mean the Logitech Harmony 525.

My boss gave me a Mediamarkt gift coupon and this week I decided to buy something for it. I chose a universal remote control, because my current tv (also from my boss ) had no remote control. I believe his daughter bit it to pieces :p

Logitech seemed a wise choice. I think it’s a trustworthy brand, and I really like their squeezebox line.

I plugged it in and of course linux doesn’t have any descent support for it

But Virtualbox to the rescue. I had already have it installed, so I fired it up, but the logitech remote didn’t show up in Windows. Hmzz, after reading the virtualbox FAQ I added this line to my /etc/fstab:

none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=46,devmode=664 0 0

Restarted my box, fired up Virtualbox and voila: I could now access the remote from Windows XP. After installing the driver and signing up for an account I was of. Added my xbox, dvd player an tv to the remote and it worked! Not like a charm, because not all of the features of the original remote of my tv (a Sanyo CE28FWH2F-C) were added to the 525. A search on google didn’t return anything useful so the only solution was to copy the infrared codes from the original remote. But I didn’t have it so I took my chances with a cheap 1,49 remote from Action. And because of the nice Harmony remote software it was easy as pie.

I always forget what tire pressure my Bridgestone battlax BT45′s have. So now to never forget:

2.5 & 2.8

(front & rear)

I recently upgrade my WordPress installation to 2.5.1 and this annoying bug showed up. After some reading I installed the no-flash-uploader plugin. This plugin disables the faulty (flash) component and replaces it with a traditional uploader. So now I can upload my files again. But it is rather annoying. And I think more people would agree with me.

I’ve been using WordPress for over two months now and I’ve already written 24 posts! I thinks that’s a nice average.

When I look at my old blog: v2.vanutsteen.nl, I think my average there is about two posts every month or so.

The difference is that I’m now using WordPress instead of Joomla! And WordPress is sooo much simpler for a blogsite then Joomla! You can use Joomla! for your blog. Even with comments and all. But the way WordPress is set up, every moron (as me) can just start blogging. They made it really simple. And they should keep it that way! No fancy stuff in the default wordpress installation. If you want to get fancy, just install all plugins.

I’ve got to plugins installed. One for generating google sitemaps and another for caching my pages. The first one is a bit slow and I really don’t like it. The caching plugin (wp-cache 2) is really nice. Install, activate and go. And my website flies instead of crawling like it first did.

I’m using Joomla! during the day at my job. So Joomla! is buying my bread and paying my house and I know Joomla! through and through. I make webshops, coporate sites, intranets, etc. with Joomla!. But I wouldn’t use it for a blog. WordPress is the way to go!

edit: I saw I haven’t added the sitemap to the above image. So here goes:

• Red: WordPress
• Blue: Joomla!
• Yellow: Drupal

I daily read a lot of blog posts. To keep up with what’s happening in the ruby/linux community and what’s the latests buzz in the webdeveloper world.

I’m now using google to keep track of the RSS feeds. I’ve used some desktop applications in the past (like rssowl and liferea). I think I’ll switch to a desktop application again. Liferea has the nicest gui. So I think about using that one.

I also found Blam! and Straw. But blam looks very gtk1-ish and the news for Straw hasn’t been updated in 4 months and has no screenshots. And you have to have good documentation as an open source project.

I removed my old blog and created this brand new one! Hopefully I’m going to post a little more here. Maybe some more on Rails. And I’m planning to pick up bass guitar playing again! So maybe some new bass tabs in the near future!