T-Mobile Fail!


Ok, time to take the gloves off. T-Mobile's screw ups over the past month have been monumental and it's time for them to hear what consumers are thinking.


11/3/09 Voice/Data Outage

When it started it was said that it was "only local tower outages" , then only UMA customers not being recognized, then it was only SMS, then it was only data. I smell something fishy in billing/provisioning that Customer Care was not privy to.

I had problems with my Tmobile@Home Voip adapter that is not even connected to your cell phone towers and was unable to make nor receive phone calls. So that leads me to believe that it was something with their provisioning system.

One recommendation T-Mobile. Make updates to the billing and provisioning system at night while 95% of your users are asleep.

Another recommendation is to update all of your Call Centers and Stores on Outages in all areas so that they can have the same answer from all reps.

BTW it was still going on the morning of 11/4. Calls were disconnected and not able to go through.


Even More & Even More Plus Plans

Your Billing and Marketing Departments need to be fired for coming up with such stupidity. I know that you're in the business of making money and all but the average consumer who used myfaves will have to switch to an unlimited plan to compensate for the loss of unlimited calls to their 5 most called contacts who more than likely are not on the T-mobile network. With an Even More Plus plan my bill for Unlimited Voice,Data,Text Plan, Insurance, and Tmobile@Home will come to just over $104 with tax and fee. Even More will come to $130.

Spotty 3G Coverage
When you can get it you better stop moving. Coverage is not contiguous in the Metropolitan Atlanta area. I have an edge detector known as the edge buzz over my car stereo over the auxiliary input.


3G Speeds
It's bad here in Atlanta. It's fast in the fringe areas and slower as you get into more populated areas. Burst speeds up to download speeds are 950 Kbps uploads are still capped at 268 Kbps. When I run tests I'm usually getting double the speed of Edge as if the 3G band is a combination of dual edge cells triangulated to a customer. In the 1 year plus of owning my G1 I have yet to go over the 950 Kbps mark.

When it rains, data all but stops. You would think that the 1700 Mhz band would have been tested in the heat, rain, cold, snow.

Dot Gloves Review

I want my money back!!

The tips started to unravel about 5 minutes after first use. Only one pair of gloves worked.

Letter To The Post Master General

Dear Mr. Potter,

I found it rather disturbing today that a fairly simple task of buying a stamp would turn into a game of hunt and seek. Three Post offices in my area have removed their stamp machines. This is a major problem. Who has the time to stand in line to get 1 stamp? A couple of problems are wrong and your committee need to figure it out.

1. Removal of Stamp Machines. Major problem #1. You think that first-class mailing are declining, expect it to almost stop.

2. Your Post Offices are understaffed. Why is only one or two out of four registers opened at any time? A facility like the Main Atlanta Post office with dozens of customers waiting should not have to queue in line for 2 registers.

3. Your staff is not efficient, courteous, nor knowledgeable. Why is it that at staff of 2 at a FedEx/Kinkos can serve 20 customers in the time that it takes you to serve 5? Customers should not be shunned and made to feel stupid for filling out the wrong forms.

4. Your computing systems are antiquated and need revamping

5. Not being able to track a package in real-time is unbelievable in the 21^st century

6. Ordering online is painful and delivery is slow. You would think that the US Postal Service would be able to get speedy delivery done right, correct?

7. Saturday Delivery is a joke. You might as well cut that out as well. Letters that arrive on a Friday afternoon are 90% likely to remain at the local post office until Monday's delivery

I think that hiring some FedEx and UPS guys to help out might be a good idea or else either of them should take up operations for the USPS because you are your own worst enemy. Offer early retirement for workers who are nearing retirement age and fire inefficient ones. Get some new,skilled blood in your ranks. I do have to commend you on your removal of the Java dependency for your online postage printing. This makes printing on non-Microsoft Operating Systems almost flawless.

Thanks for your time,

Noah Swint

LinuxMCE alpha2 Day 2


Day 2 was much better.


After a fresh install of Kubuntu 8.10, I performed all the updates and rebooted. Then loaded the restricted nvidia driver and then rebooted. I then loaded the linux mce install and rebooted. To my surprise AVWizard started up just fine and I heard "Sarah". After setting up the core I rebooted and then placed the core as the main dhcp server for the network.

All devices started getting leases and my nas, squeezeboxes, voip mta were recognized in the orbiter. After all the software was installed from the autoconfig session I started on the Media directors.

Diskless Media Directors

amd64 w/ Nvidia

vmlinuz-2.6.27-14-generic and initrd.img-2.6.27-14-generic was missing from the /usr/pluto/diskless/*/boot/ directories. I copied both from the /boot directory

I did not get the AVWizard on the screen after the 2nd boot so I rebuilt the image as i386.
After this was done, I got the AVWizard but the mouse froze after selecting continue on the first screen. I had to reboot the Media Director and upon reboot I got a transparency error but finally something on the screen and then nothing but gray screen.

I changed the video card settings to standard and the acceleration to XV and the orbiter appeared on the screen.  Yeah!

I don't have sound but the major hurdle is over.

amd64 w/ Ati
I never got anything on the screen at all after the second boot outside of the console messages. X never started.

A couple of new bugs that I've found. 

• Turning off any media director from the orbiter also turns off the core :-( very bad.  I'll open a bug for this soon.
  
• The Squeezecenter needs manual setup before it will even work
• Mythtv has not added my hdhomerun as tuners.  I cannot watch tv from the tuner from any media director and even on the core.
• The orbiter menus are a little buggy and I cannot go back in the menus sometimes.
• The media director cannot control my LG LCD tv via serial yet.  I don't know if I'm doing something wrong but it has not turned the display off when using the orbiter to turn the display off.  I have to tinker with that.
• My N800 orbiter running the 5/2008 update cannot connect to the core running the Maemo 710 software.  I'll speak with the developer about that.
• I cannot make any calls out using the orbiters and my Grandstream Handytone. I need to go check on the diaplan settings
• X10 Motion sensors are not included in the Security Templates. Bummer.

I'll know at Dawn and dusk if the Sunrise/Sunset Events work.  If so I can stop using when this experiment ends.  

Tests

• I also have to play around with adding my security system as a Generic Serial Device.
  
• Importing my mythtv recordings database
• Figuring out how to get cover art for all my movies and mythtv recordings on my NAS.
• Controlling my Roku Media Player via ip or ir and having it available from any Media Director.
• Follow me audio/video on my media director and squeezeboxes.

LinuxMCE Alpha2 Day 1



Day 2 is in progress. I'll update the link tomorrow.


I decided to give Linuxmce another shot since the kernel is now up to spec to support my onboard intel hda sound card and better memory management. I need a one stop shop to to the following things:

• Home Automation: Zwave, and X10
• Record TV (Preferably Mythtv due to me having a 4 years worth of recording)
• Multiroom Audio (Prefereably Squeezecenter due to a couple of Squeezeboxes)
• Multiroom Video
• Asterisk Voip
• Voicemail
• Web Control
• Scenes, Schedules

Linuxmce gives me that and so much more.

I spent Friday night (5/22/09) installing Kubuntu 8.10 (sad that 9.04 won't work with linuxmce yet), upgrading packages, and installing linuxmce with their provided scripts.

Starting bright and early on Saturday, I moved the alpha2 server my server closet and performed these steps:

• Plugged my main web/automation server directly into the router with it's static assigned ip.
• Plugged my Micasaverde Vera into the router directly
• Plugged my Tmobile@Home Voip MTA directly into the router
• Plugged the eth0 card on the alpha2 server directly into the router
• Plugged the eth1 card on the alpha2 server into my 16-port gigabit switch
• Turned off dhcp on my Linksys WRT310N that's connected to my cable modem (history has told me that I still want to do this because my network turns to much in the linuxmce internal/external network setup)
• Unplugged the link from the router to the switch.
• Powered up the alpha2 server

Within about a minute I realized that dhcp was not working. So I went thru the song and dance of powercycling all my network connected devices because I didn't have an hour to wait for all of them to get new leases.

I tinkered around with the interfaces file in vi and found that the netmask 255.255.255.0 eth0 line for card eth1 caused problems. I removed eth0 and restarted networking and dhcp started up. I powercycled all the devices and they got new leases.

Up next was setting up the pxe netboot on all my my frontend desktops that are already connected to tv's and monitors. First time boot worked and they got new leases and the pxe magic worked. Upon reboot they could not find the vmlinuz images. I thought that this might be a problem because they are all amd64 machines and thus detected as amd64. I rebuilt one of the orbiters as an i386 server in hopes that it would correct the problem. Quick reload of the dce router and reboot of the orbiter had the same problems.

I decided to try a real i386 machine. I went into the bios on my Asus Eeepc 1000HE and turned on the pxe boot. First boot worked just like the other and second boot the vmlinuz images could not be found. Yes, major problems if I actually want to use the correct way of having the orbiters use the alpha2 server in the inteded way.

From one of the desktops that failed the pxe boot experience I sshed into the alpha2 server and saw the the symlinks to the images were all bad so it's probably something in the linuxmce diskless boot scripts that is off. I opened up a ticket with them on this.

I changed the symlinks to the correct ones and then tried again. This time there was a nfs mount problem in the that forced me back to busybox. Again opened up a ticket with linuxmce developers.

With that aside I turned off pxe on all the desktop and just let them boot into regular ubuntu.


Up Next was Automation

I was still having problem with the nvidia drivers producing a black screen upon boot where the setup wizard was supposed to be. I showed up only once and never came back.

Previously in linuxmce if I plugged in a zwave usb controller it would popup the wizard and let me know that I plugged in a zwave controller and would ask if I wanted to setup lights. No X so no wizard. So I setup the rooms manually, added the X10 CM11A and Zwave Crontrollers manually. I setup a few X10 lights and they worked. This did not work in previous linuxmce versions.

Without X I don't think that I can set Zwave modules. At least from the web admin I couldn't find any templates to add zwave devices.

Up Next was Voip
Under the lines section Broadvoice was one of the default providers. I typed in my phone number and passwords and voila, I was registered with no headache. Calls were coming in but they were going to voicemail.

I tried to setup my handytone 286 adapter that is connected to my fax machine as an extension but it was having problems trying to connect to broadvoice at the same time as linuxmce and the web interface for the adapter wouldn't let me in to reconfigure it to point to the alpha2 server as an extension.


Up Next was Security
This did not go well at all. I have a couple of wifi cams and my hardwired security cameras also connected to a Aviosys 9100A 4-port video surveillance appliance that turns all my cameras into ip cameras with motion jpgs. Very cheap and effective solution.

My Micasaverde Vera uses the same dce router and motion wrappers as linuxmce and can view all the wifi cams and motion jpgs from the 9100a but alpha2 could not display any images.

Also the wifi cameras would not connect to a seperate router that I'd plugged into my gigabit switch because it did not know how to handle dhcp routing and dns with dhcp turned off. Not only that all my orbiters, wifi phones, cell phones, and laptops were now dead. I need to do some more experimentation with more routers to see how to get around this.

They worked on the linksys wrt310N but that was not a true test because it was bypassing the linuxmce dhcp routers.


Up Next Mythtv

I didn't even make it this far. I just turned the bloody thing off because it never even detected my hdhomerun or installed tuners.


At this point now I'm reinstalling Linuxmce alpha2 from scratch again. Maybe I'm insane and hope to get different results on the second time around. If nvidia and xorg play nice this time around I might actually get to configure the alpha2 server as expected. One positive side effect of the internal/external network were my browsing speeds and network transfers were amazing. I don't know if the qos on the linksys routing is slowing stuff down but once off of it ny speeds were explosive.

See you in day 2.

Cheap Whole-House Audio


Here's one more low cost way to have whole house audio.
Building construction in my house prevented wiring of speakers in my masterbedroom.

I've been been playing around with MPD using Misterhouse along with an fm tuner for areas in my home where I can't wire speakers and don't have a squeezebox. I've been using it for a few years but I really hate having to login to the web gui and queuing up my music while I'm getting ready for work in the morning. It's possible but a little tedious.


MPD and Misterhouse + Shoutcast 

My mpd configuration.

# $Date: 2008-04-24 06:07:17 -0400 (Thu, 24 Apr 2008) $
# $Revision: 1428 $

# An example configuration file for MPD
# See the mpd.conf man page for a more detailed description of each parameter.

######################## REQUIRED PATHS ########################
# You can put symlinks in here, if you like. Make sure that
# the user that mpd runs as (see the 'user' config parameter)
# can read the files in this directory.
music_directory  "/mnt/music"
playlist_directory "/mnt/music/playlists"
db_file   "/usr/local/mh/data/mpd/tag_cache"
log_file  "/usr/local/mh/data/mpd/mpd.log"
error_file  "/usr/local/mh/data/mpd/errors.log"
pid_file  "/usr/local/mh/data/mpd/pid"
################################################################


######################## OPTIONAL PATHS ########################
#
# If specified, MPD will save its current state (playlist,
# current song, playing/paused, etc.) at exit.  This will be
# used to restore the session the next time it is run.
#
state_file  "/usr/local/mh/data/mpd/state"
#
################################################################


######################## DAEMON OPTIONS ########################
#
#
user                            "root"
bind_to_address                 "localhost"
################################################################

########################## AUDIO OUTPUT ########################
#
# MPD supports many audio output types, as well as playing
# through multiple audio outputs at the same time.  You can
# specify one or more here.  If you don't specify any, MPD will
# automatically scan for a usable audio output.
#
audio_output {
       type     "pulse"
       name   "MPD/Pulse"
       server "localhost"
}

audio_output_format             "44100:16:2"
audio_output {
       type                    "shout"
       name                    "Misterhouse Music Stream"
       host                    "localhost"
       port                    "8081"
       mount                   "/mh.ogg"
       password                "mypasshere"
       quality                 "5.0"
       format                  "44100:16:1"
       description             "Sound Stream from the Misterhouse HA Software" # optional
       genre                   "all"                  # optional
       public                  "yes"                    # optional
}
################################################################

############################# MIXER ############################
#
# MPD needs to know what mixer settings to change when you
# adjust the volume.  If you don't specify one here, MPD will
# pick one based on which ones it was compiled with support for.
#
# An example for controlling an ALSA mixer:
#
mixer_type                      "software"
#
################################################################

###################### CHARACTER ENCODINGS #####################
#
# If file or directory names do not display correctly, then you
# may need to change this.  In most cases it should be either
# "ISO-8859-1" or "UTF-8".  You must recreate your database
# after changing this (use mpd --create-db).
#
filesystem_charset              "UTF-8"
#
# The encoding that ID3v1 tags should be converted from.
#
id3v1_encoding                  "UTF-8"
#
################################################################


######################### OTHER OPTIONS ########################
#
# The metadata types MPD will recognize.
#
#metadata_to_use                  "artist,album,title,track,name,genre,date,composer,performer,disc"
#
# Enable this if you wish to use your MPD created playlists in
# other music players.
#
save_absolute_paths_in_playlists "yes"
#
################################################################

Squeezeslave
http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/SqueezePlay
Squeezeslave is the the headless software Squeezecenter client like Squeezeplay(formerly known as Softsqueeze)

With the squeezeslave running on my squeezecenter server, I can now carry my Duet Remote and change the music. If there was a smaller, cheaper Squeezebox boom I would have one in each room.

I'm really cheap

Ok some of you who have read my blog over the years know that I'm really cheap, but this one takes the cake.


I've wanted a 24" - 26" LCD tv in my bedroom to replace the monstrous 24" crt tv that I bought for my apartment 7 years ago. But prices have been skyrocketing since the Superbowl, which previously was the best time to buy a tv was after the event. A couple of weeks ago there was a refurbished 20" Soyo Widescreen LCD on sale for $90, I think on geeks.com. This was a complete impulse buy. I didn't really need it but I thought I'd keep it incase one of my other monitors went out I could have a spare. My the picture on my CRT had been slipping south over the years but became really unbearable when I couldn't read the scrolls on new channels. So I went to Frys looking to pick up some home automation equipment and a another HDHomerun when I passed by a Kworld External ATSC/QAM TVBox DVI Edition. I'd owned the previous NTSC Vga Tvbox but gave it away to a co-worker. So I thought I'd give it a try.

I set everything up and it works great. I get Clear qam channels and I can flip to the dvi interface on my computer to watch tv using mythv. Win all around and I save some power in the process.