Already in December, the antenna signal deteriorated and DVB-T units got all “pixly”. Colleague Niklas (the antenna guy) helped me out by swapping the aerial for a new one I bought, but the measuring  equipment handy was only showing actual signal power and not signal quality so it had to be a best effort. Pros: Reception did improve for a period of time, and I got rid of the old analogue monster antenna and the ugly box that joined the two antennas. However, signal wasn’t significantly better and after a while it again it fell below the acceptable levels. Lowering the aerial on the antenna pole didn’t help.

The USB harddisk to the Wii was unreachable and started making a very frightening click sound. I have given away all physical Wii games but one, so the standard offering of games got *really* limited. LEGO Indiana Jones, which I naturally just have to hack the Wii and install USB disks. The intention was never to actually play it

Good part was I took the HiFi klubben offer for NAD speakers and the AVR-1912 (was very kindly allowed to upgrade the 1612 that was in the package). Installed the speakers (still loose cables but it’s getting there). Mmmm – NICE sound, but was also a first step on the road to hell.

The AVR-1612 channelled the  HDMI in nicely to the HDMI connected TV, but installing the AVR-1912 made the screen blank out at the point the Windows 7 normally welcome you. It worked fine in Safemode and with the ATI drivers removed. Playing with it, made me reboot the machine by pressing and holding the the power button quite a few times, and suddenly in the process, the web access was gone (general IP fine but web browsing was dead) and the MySQL part of MediaPortal was also dead. The sound settings was indicated that no speakers were connected to the HD sound port in the HDMI cable.

So basically no TV in the entire house at this point in time, HTPC (also media repository) was seriously crippled and with drivers installed it couldn’t show any picture. I guess this was rock bottom. (Edit: Little did I know

Took the indoor DVB-T antenna from the bedroom (where we have no central antenna), disconnected the external aerial and replaced it with the indoor one. So, killed the bedroom TV but won the kitchen TV by this move, and have fair signal in the rest of the central antenna system. Kitchen TV is 14″, no timeshift, no web server and no nothing. It’s almost criminally simplified, but working!

Secondly, the upstairs PC connected to the projector had a MediaPortal installation, but for some reason I installed that as a media client only, and not with it’s own TV server, even if the machine has a TV card and access to the central antenna. I am not aware of a way that you can add the TV server without installing the system again, so I uninstalled the MP (small uninstall – keeping settings and data) and reinstalled it with the server enabled. Server was there and configurable in it’s setting application, TV was an option in the media client. Things is, it didn’t work and there was no TV option in the clients configuration. So, I had to really remove the MP *totally* and reinstall it.  Generating new thumbnails for all pictures and updating the databases for music and films takes so long just the machines part, and the manual fixes needed for music and films is massive! As this PC is connected to the central antenna, I now had a second TV operational. This one has timeshift and full media portal. Where this strange real time Tv concept actually works.

Attached the Wii USB disk to the computer. Worked no problems. Attaching it to the Wii again it fired up nicely. I guess it was on sympathy strike with the other hardware. Don’t do that to me again, please!

Installed an antenna splitter from the indoor antenna, pulled a cable to the bedroom and installed a permanent cabled access to that room. The indoor antenna was also placed in a more semi-permanent manner. It can be like that for some time with no problem. TV3 now working

Back to the HTPC. Removing Avast and drivers for the LAN card totally, seems to have cured the lack of web access. Screen still black, and I presented my case in one of the many fora for owners. Explored on and eventually found that there is a total mess in the communication between the DENON unit and the ATI card. Not a very good combination. It’s not really easy as obviously pointing at one being the single source of error, but nVidia cards are said to work which gives you some indication. I was able to “solve it” by pressing windows + p (the projector settings) and blindly making a selection of another screen configuration. Not always but quite often (mind: now “always” and we all understand the WAF of “working sometimes”) this gives the picture back.

I guess I am now landing in a new stable situation. Need to re-install Media Portal on the HTPC (basically from scratch) and the other issues I still have are both related to the HDMI between the DENON unit and the HTPC. I do want screen to start when HTPC is selected  without some Win + P fiddling, and the sound still doesn’t work. It DID work at one occasion (using Realtek drivers and not the ATI ones) and this was when I had the “projector setting” to mirror the screen on the projector (where it identified itself as unit 1 and 2 on the same screen). The error message was gone but I still didn’t get any sound from the HTPC.

So, more work to do and I do need someone to look at the antenna system for me!

Edit: The HTPC refused to boot. The kitchen TV refuse to show some of the channels. Rock bottom my ass! Dante taught me there are different levels of hell and I seemingly wasn’t on the Judas level quite yet. Now I need to buy a new graphics board. FINGERS crossed I don’t also have to buy a new TV card.  Detaching the antenna for the HTPC made a few more Tv channels work on the kitchen TV.

Working:

- Upstairs PC and the projector, including Tv and everything.

- Kitchen TV

- Bedroom TV (a bit pixly but once the roof antenna is back in production, maybe this will go away).

So pending;

- Make HTPC work. Need new GFX board and picking a nVidia one would hopefully also take care of the communication with the AVR-1912.

- Re-cord the distance between antenna and the in-house system (will have to wait until spring, as crawling on the roof these days is likely lethal). The indoor antenna has drawbacks – as soon as a moped runs on the street outside, I get interference. Why mopeds???

I deleted my Gallery installation on bergatrollet.se

There was still a bit of confusion on the installations, and the versions after the migration. I should have known better, so it’s not a blame but a reason; My Webhotel keeps me with Fantastico and Softaculous and there was a confusion between the two.

So let me give you a few pieces of advice here;

If you have installed your stuff via Fantastico, I first suggest that you have Softaculous import the setting from Fantastico. After this you are migrated and done. Never use fantastico again.

If you did as this retard and accidentally deleted the installation of the G2 stuff, you can actually import the old pictures from a backup. “Backup”??? Well, I’m a retard, not a complete wacko so I do have a backup

Restore pictures from backup:

The G2 of Gallery stores the actual files in the folder “g2data/albums/” … Add the module “Server add”, and point it at the pictures and then just let it work it’s way through the bunch.

Please mind that the metadata is of course not there, and you have naturally also lost sorting, comments and what have you but this SURE beats uploading them all again.

Upgrading/importing summary

1. Backup your g2 (data folder and database)
2. Put g3 on your server, e.g. to a parallel folder to your g2.
3. Install g3
4. Enable the comments module and the g2 import module in g3
5. Configure g3′s g2 import module and run the import process.
6. Rename your g2 folder to something else (e.g. from “gallery” to “gallery_old”)
7. Rename your g3 folder to what the g2 folder used to be (e.g. “gallery3″ to “gallery”)
8. Add the mod_rewrite rules from g3′s g2_import module page to your .htaccess file to ensure that the g2 urls continue to work
9. Delete your g2 folder (“gallery_old”), it’s no longer needed. you can delete your g2 database as well. (but keep your backups)

If the pictures on this site worked, then you know the above is corret

Today I noticed that there was a version 3 and I installed a new instance of it at berg.to …

It’s not that straight forward;

1) You need to installe a upgrade module. So select “module” and add the “Gallery2 import” component.

2) It then asks for a path to gallery2 installation, and this is the tricky part. It’s NOT asking for the URL, but the actual filesystem path. In my case “../bilder” did the trick

Sometimes this might be the purpose, getting rid of old junk and starting fresh on the new location.

I must admit that I am a collector; my c64 history, all the articles I ever wrote and ALL mails ever written.

For quite some time, but many years ago, did I use Forté Agent. It was brilliant as it could handle mail and Usenet news in one package. I was even a paying user for very long, provided points of view for the future development even if I now realise that there was a lot going on behind the scene with the program. It was sold to Alcatel and then divested again from Alcatel (who naturally failed big doing anything relevant to the product!). Eventually Mozilla Thunder showed up – it was just as competent, and it was free. News was deleted from the offerings of my ISP and the other News servers that could be accessed for free were closed. With News not being accessible, migrating to Thunderbird I found that I had produced quite a lot that was now locked in, in the Agent proprietary storage format. BUMMER!

I have migrated the archive with every swap of computer since, both for me and my wife until today where the ultimate solution has been applied – it’s now being uploaded to GMail, so it’s not available and not bound to me remembering to migrate it every time. RELIEF!

So how did I do it?

1) First step – extract it from the Agent cage.

This is a tricky step. The only relevant solution is to extract it using the only relevant converter there is. Aid4Mail. This program converts also very large mail boxes between formats. I used Agent as source and Outlook PST as destination.

2) Second step – get it to GMail.

The trick here is to use Outlook as the vehicle that takes you there. Basically I followed this guide.

What you need to do is to

a) Enable IMAP in GMail. Under Settings, Forwarding and POP/IMAP there is an option to simply enable it. Save the setting and that piece is taken care of.

b) Define a GMail account via IMAP in Outlook. To be honest, this is the tricky part. Defining username, password and servers might be straight forward, but you need to do the advanced setting, defining SSL and also a specific port. There are guides available for this, for example this one (Swedish I’m afraid but I’m sure you can find it in your language as well or have it translated).

c) The guide referenced on the first line of this section suggests you import messages from the PST file. That’s not really needed. It’s even a fairly clumsy solution. All you need to do is to open the PST file. (Select Open from the Archive menu). Quite a lot easier as the target is not to have the mail available in Outlook when I’m done with this. If it was, you can of course also copy the PST to the hidden directory where all of the others are also placed.

d) Now the really easy part – just select the directory with the mail and copy it got the GMail folder. It will naturally take LONG to copy data over IMAP. We are talking hours even with modest volumes, but who cares – let it work overnight and wake up a happier person!!!

Learnings

Did the above sound easy? In theory YES, but in practice NOT AT ALL!

My transfers were interrupted many times for various reasons.

Key one was that it wasn’t possible to create subfolders. Thing is – I didn’t have any subfolders so this was in fact an error that indicated unsupported characters in the directory names. Of course the “/” is not to be used, but I also guess that the “!” and the quotation mark itself.

Secondly there is a restriction on length of the tag name. If the foldername that gets to the tag is longer than the allowed tagname, then you’re our of luck.

My favourite IM client is Trillian (now version 5 beta). I just quickly added a Jabber/XMPP account and used the Ovi mailaddress and password. After this I suddenly could use the Trillian client to send and receive messages to Nokia owning friends. Sure beats the cost of SMS any day of the week!

After reading up on the picasa.ini format, I see that there is a reference to the faces in it; The rect64 value is the location of the rectangle and the 16 byte value after is the person. Like this:

faces=rect64(7aba40739a7c79cc),75bf2e1b31682632

In the end of the picasa.ini file there is a section named [contacts]

75bf2e1b31682632=[my google accountname]_lh,807347f0b130260

The latter must be a reference to an id in the contacts.xml (field bolded – Search path on my Xp installation: c:\Documents and Settings\[name]\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Picasa2\contacts\)

I have a number of “unknown” people in my contacts.xml (such as the one above) – they are all garbage.

<contact id=”b9a1192a96e98d7″ name=”Unknown” display=”Unknown” modified_time=”2010-06-28T18:48:21+02:00″ sync_enabled=”1″>
<subject user=”[my google accountname]_lh” id=”807347f0b130260” person_id=”pISMFWwoX-SCa3htCsnNVl1oaUzi8If3QVwrey6Mlrs”/>
</contact>

As you can see the id for the contact above is the same one as referenced above as the “subject user”

So I am now planning to see if I could make some sort simple of referential integrity validator; all persons referenced in the picasa.ini files must be in the contacts.xml file and those being represented as “unknown” are garbage and should for sure be deleted from the contacts.xml file.

Anyone having any view or insight of this?

It shows that I can just double click on the outline of the window, and hey presto – it’s there again!

Total Commander – With the old roots in the Norton Commander structure and Directory Opus for the Amiga the two window file manager tradition is where I was born and bred. It has so many features that I simply don’t know how to do without it; pattern based mass renaming, support for all compressed formats, FTP, fully configurable button-bar, extensive search.

VLC – Videolan plays all the media-formats you feed it without the need to install the vast variety of codecs available. It’s all built in, nicely packaged and available for free. I wouldn’t mind a more cosmetic and skinned front-end, but the engine inside is second to none.

Firefox – I refuse to work with Internet Explorer. I believe in competition and a vital part of that is to steer away from the leading provider and support a challenger where I can do this without too much effort. So as you notice I do run Windows (XP, Vista and now 7) as all efforts to run Linux failed horribly. It has improved SO much but so many times did it fail on lack of support for a piece of hardware. I am well beyond the average user but even I am reluctant to go to the shell window and start issuing a “sudo” command, no to mention the “classical” “make and install” combination.

Must have plug-ins:

- Swedish and English dictionaries. I know you can’t always tell I use it

- Google Gears – Offline support

- IE tab – allow using IE for specific pages withour fireing up IE itself.

- Twitterbar - If you are a tweeter, twitterbar is fantastic. When you find a link to share, enter a comment in the address field and fire away the comment + link as a tweet.

- Xmarks - Synk your bookmarks between computers. It can do passwords as well but I never spent the time to get that to work. It’s worth the effort to install it by the bookmark synker alone.

Microsoft Office – Yes, Open Office cannot give me what I need – sorry! Pivotables based on an underlying SQL query to a MySQL database is yet to show up in OO, so there is no option for me.

Nokia Ovi Suite – I gues this replaced the PC Suite. Being a Nokia junkie, I do of course need this.

Vuze – Nuff said. Good shit that you need

Dropbox – You get access to a slice of diskspace on the web and a brilliant sync function to it. The stuff that I have at home and at work which I need to have consistent across is there. Source code for a project, EXE files that in the virus infested net never seem to get through in any other way, plus you can provide a link to a file or directory for someone.

Avast Antivirus - Going cheap, this is the best no money can buy in terms of safekeeping your environment.

ACDSee - My favourite program for handling the family pictures. I have used it since version 2, where it’s now in version 9. Very good! Favourite feature is the ability to rename files from an EXIF property.

Picasa – Picasa is a free picture managing program. Very good and the 3.5 has a truly nice face recognition feature. If it could do a few of the things ACDSee can, then I would terminate the use of ACDSee but so far they are complimentary.

Snagit – Snap pieces of the screen. The new “snipping tool” in Windows is a light version of Snagit and works really good (however a bit primitive) but nothing beats Snagit.

Thunderbird – Mail and news monster. Second to none. My mail is relayed to GMail so I can read it on the move, but mail at home is read using Thunderbird using IMAP. I then collect and delete it from the server using POP3 from Outlook. Might seem like a clumsy solution and to some extent it is. I am sort of halfways between webmail and client based mail, wanting the best of both worlds.

TweetDeck – Recent acquaintance. Really convenient for following feeds from twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and so on. Actually made it possible to follow both Facebook and Twitter without much human CPU load.

I would want to say I use Spotify and Voddler a lot, but I honestly don’t. I have accounts, have both programs installed, friends working for Spotify and honestly support their cause with all my heart, but I consume local media using MediaPortal (TV, movies and sometimes music) on the HTPC and MediaMonkey (music) and SqueezeBox (music – hardware but the HTPC also run as a SqueezeServer)

Webservices

iGoogle – My opening page is the iGoogle page where I have a set of gadgets that shows the information I need on a regular basis

- Twitter gadget - Read your twitter feed in a compact way

- Stock portfolio – Monitor one or more stocks. I am naturally following my employer.

- GMail – THE online webmail. I collect my mail using POP3 (with no delete) from my normal accounts. Gives a common interface to all of it and also a storage repository.

- Latitude - Google’s positioning service that sits on top of the Google Maps

Anyway – it worked for some days on my 4 core CPU computer and it did a fairly good job even if I have spent hours and hours to manually adjust things. Very few false positives but very many unidentified.

There are a few things I would like to see addressed in an update:

* When it allocates a face to a name as “Suggestion” you can select if the programs assumption is correct by two easy to understand symbols. Pressing No it tries to match the face to another name and so on. Sometimes the face belongs to a person that just happened to be in the picture even if this is unintentional and you don’t want the person registered in your list, like if you took a shot as something or someone in a public place with lots of unknown people around. In the “unnamed” category you can select “Ignore Person”, but in the named albums this is not possible. PLEASE add “Ignore Person” to the right button menu for the people added to albums as suggestions. As it it now, these unknown faces ping pong between albums, tying to find a home it will never reach.

* The the right click menu for the “Suggestions” there is an option of adding a person to an album (“Add to People Album”). I have 466 identified contacts which makes this function totally impractical for any contact that does not have a name that starts with an “A”. Scrolling the list to later characters takes forever.

* Also for the “Suggestions”, you can double click the thumbnail and add the name to the persons on the picture. Sometime naming the people there, you still have the person in the album listed as a suggestion, even if you just filled in the name manually. This only happen sometimes and I find no system in when it works or not. I get the feeling that not all changes made to the picture opening a “Suggestion” is trapped by the program.

* In the same context, opening the picture of a suggestion and clicking the “X” symbol of the identified people on the list (even all of the people on the list) the suggestion is still there. As an example; my daughter in a group of people. None identified but the program has her suggested as on of the faces, but the wrong one. I open the picture and “X” away all the people that aren’t relevant to keep (right or wrong, I use this a “Ignore people” on a picture by picture basis). I then define my daughters name to the correct face. Not the picture contains *one* identified person – my daughter – and I press escape to get back to the list. Now, the album still has the suggestion to accept my daughter as being identified in the picture but a) she is already identified and b) the definition of the face to the suggested on is not there – I just deleted it.

* If I from the “Unnamed” category has chosen to Ignore Person, I can still see the same person from the same photo as a suggestion in one of the people album. When ignored in the Unnamed category the face should universally ignored.

* Also in the context of opening the picture of a “Suggestion” the option of manually adding people is not there.

* When I enter an album, sometimes I find that there is a person that is added that doesn’t belong there (so person X is present in the album of person Y). However, opening the picture I see that the person in the album isn’t even present in the picture. So all faces are properly named in the picture, but it’s still there in the wrong album.

* Similar to my reflection above, I have cases in the album of my wife where the thumbnail shows a picture of my daughter. My wife is present in the picture so the thumbnail correctly points to picture of my wife but shows another person in the same picture in the thumbnail. I right clicked my wifes album icon as listed under “People” but the thumbnail is still wrong.

It might be that I do something wrong but the results still indicate room for improvement. I do think these are errors in the implementation.

One other thing which should be considered is differentiating unnamed and unrecognised. I found it so that pictures feature a person whom I know but do not recall the name of (class mate of the children, person on a party I don’t recall the name of and so on). I would like to be able to have a convenient mean to allocate references to “identified but unnamed person X”.