About 9 months ago I had a 1TB hard drive start to fail. It had 360+ identified reallocated sectors and had numerous I/O errors while trying to access specific areas of the drive. That drive had all our photos on it. Luckily I got most of the data off it and, combined with a simple manual backup I was doing to an external drive, I didn’t loose a thing. It was a painful and somewhat stressful process restoring and checking the recovered data and could have easily resulted in significant data loss.

I needed a more robust backup process. Our entire home computing system is based on Linux - Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04. This includes a desktop computer and a HTPC that triples as NAS, VDR using MythTV, and media centre using XBMC Media Centre. After review of the backup options available I finally settled on using backupninja. It’s a piece of cake to install as it’s available in the Ubuntu repositories, is easy to setup, has good documentation, and has just the right amount of notification related bells and whistles to let me know that things are running when they should, and when things don’t go as they should.

The backup strategy I use now is pretty straight forward, with all the important information on those 2 machines being backed up to 3 places using backupninja:

1. Automatically to the other computer on a daily basis
2. Manually to an external drive stored in our detached garage (in case the house burns down or we are burgled) on a weekly basis
3. Manually to an external drive stored at work (in case both the house and garage burn down) on a weekly (turning out to be more like monthly) basis
4. Future: Automatically to an Amazon S3 account in the cloud (only for the very most important information since bandwidth is an issue here in New Zealand)

Backupninja provides built in support for all the types of information I needed backing up and includes support for setting them up using the curses based ninjahelper interface. Configuring the necessary files manually is also ridiculously easy.

• System Information dump - e.g. hard drive partition information, installed packages
• MySQL database dump - for all of the MythTV recorded TV show information
• File backup using rdiff-backup over SSH or directly to a locally mounted drive - for all our photos and other multimedia
• Future: File backup using duplicity to Amazon S3 - for all our photos

To install backupninja and the other utilities that it can leverage, use the following command line:
$ sudo apt-get install backupninja, debconf-utils, hwinfo, rdiff-backup

Below is part of a sample configuration file for an rdiff-backup configuration to show how easy it is to configure:
include = /etc
include = /home
include = /root
include = /mnt/drive1/multimedia
include = /usr/local/*bin
include = /var/backups
include = /var/lib/dpkg/status*
include = /var/spool/cron/crontabs
exclude = **/.ccache
exclude = **/.local/share/Trash
exclude = **/.thumbnails
exclude = **/.Trash*

There is oodles of other useful information in the Backupninja Wiki so go and have a look at that if you want to know more.

I’m also using smartmontools to monitor the SMART status of the hard drives in all our machines totalling ~3TB of data across 5 drives. Getting a heads up that you might need to move data off a drive onto a new one before it fails is sometimes the easier option than restoring from a backup.

Putting a backup strategy in place is only something most people consider once they’ve already lost data - the same way that most people only get a house alarm after they have been burgled. If you need to go into your house to access any important digital information, then you are at risk of loosing something. Be smart, do something before you lose something.

UPDATE (18-Aug-2009): A recent update of ffmpeg in XBMC (revision 21993 on 04-Aug-2009) meant that the original patch and instructions no longer worked. The instructions below have been updated and a new patch released. Much of the original patch is now directly in XBMC Media Center due to the ffmpeg update so it is much smaller.

I maintain the Myth TV page in the XBMC wiki. Some people in New Zealand have contacted me to get instructions on what needs to be done to get recorded Freeview|HD content playing in XBMC from a Myth TV backend.

Well, here those instructions are. Luckily there isn’t as much voodoo magic as there used to be. There will be even less voodoo once some of my other patches make it into XBMC proper, and Paul Kendall’s patches for LATM encapsulated AAC decoding finally wiggle their way into ffmpeg.

These instructions assume:

• You already have Myth TV working as expected with the digital terrestrial Freeview|HD broadcast. Getting this working isn’t covered here. Go to Myth TV NZ as a starting point or join the mythtvnz mailing list for more information.
• You have seen the light and are using Linux and not Windoze
• You have a level of confidence with Linux
• You are happy to compile XBMC Media Center from source code (and have some concept of what compiling is)
• You have a smoking fast CPU. A dual core 3.0GHz or faster CPU is needed or an nVidia video card / chipset that supports VDPAU. Decoding 1080i H264 content from TV3 is super CPU intensive or needs to be offloaded to the GPU.

The New Zealand Freeview|HD digital free-to-air transmission DVB-T video stream uses the H264 codec (along with PAFF interlacing for TV3). The DVB-T audio stream uses either AC3 or LATM (Low-overhead MPEG-4 Audio Transport Multiplex) encapsulated HE-AAC. The audio and video streams are transmitted within an MPEGTS container.

Without further ado:

1. Install Subversion.
   $ sudo apt-get install subversion
2. Change to a directory where the XBMC source code will be downloaded to (a new directory called XBMC will be created after this step).
3. Download the XBMC Media Center source code from SourceForge using subversion. This will create a directory called XBMC that contains the source code for the linuxport version of XBMC. This step will take a while as all the source code downloads.
   $ svn co https://xbmc.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xbmc/branches/linuxport/XBMC XBMC
4. Once finished, change to the new XBMC directory.
   $ cd XBMC
5. Install build / compile dependencies. Follow the instructions in the README.linux file to obtain all the build dependencies.
6. Remove pulse audio (optional) I strongly recommend removing pulse audio as ALSA audio works fine. I had nothing but problems trying to get pulse audio to work. The step below is optional but strongly recommended:
   $ sudo aptitude remove libpulse-dev
7. Install libfaad
   $ sudo aptitude install libfaad-dev
8. Download the latest Freeview|HD patch file to the XBMC directory.
   $ wget http://s3.teirney.net/xbmc/freeview-hd-linuxport-r22286.patch
   The remaining areas from the original Freeview|HD patch have been removed pending further testing of the mpegts seek handling improvements added directly to the XBMC source tree. The updates to mpegts file handing to continue playing after seeking if there is a timestamp discontinuity within the mpegts container have also been removed pending further testing with the seeking changes directly in XBMC. The Freeview|HD patch used to bundle the patches attached to ffmpeg issues 1128 and 452. You can apply these patches from ffmpeg directly if you have any problems with playback stopping when trying to seek (let me know here if you do as well). The remaining patches in the original Freeview|HD patch have already been committed to XBMC or will be committed shortly. Below are some of the goodies. If you have any conflicts with future updates, revert the file that conflicts.
   • Correct frame rate detection for 1080i TV3 so the commercial breaks are automatically skipped in the correct place (if flagged correctly by mythcommflag)
   • Tweaks to reduce the amount of time it takes to start playing MythTV files - this will depend on your MythTV configuration, but helps immensely for me with a Nova T 500.
   • Another tweak to help better determine if something is a movie if using the movie length HACK, which I don’t think I’ve documented yet.
9. Revert any existing Freeview|HD patches. Any existing Freeview|HD patches need to be reverted prior to applying this new patch (in fact any existing patches wouldn’t have worked after the big ffmpeg update in XBMC). This step is only needed if you have installed a previous Freeview|HD patch.
   $ svn revert -R .
$ make distclean
10. Install the NEW Freeview|HD patch.
    $ patch -p0 < freeview-hd-linuxport-r22286.patch
11. Configure the XBMC source tree enabling external libfaad support. This will take some time (~5 minutes). External libfaad support is needed to decode the HE-AAC content and turns on the LATM handling.
    $ ./configure --enable-external-libfaad
12. Make XBMC. This will take longer (~15 minutes).
    $ make
13. Install XBMC
    $ sudo make install

Hopefully that’s all gone smoothly. Now you should be able to follow the instructions on the XBMC wiki for Myth TV to get the out-of-the-box Myth TV integration in XBMC up and running.

Any problems, kudos, whatever. Leave a comment.

The Wordpress administration UI improvements are a welcome and refreshing change but there are still some confusing parts with quite different background colors behind some of the buttons. I can understand why they did it, but for some reason I didn’t even see some of the buttons first time round “where is the Publish button?” Generally the important stuff is much more accessible so great job!

As expected since there is no plug-in management to speak of in Wordpress all of the plug-ins I had were well out of date. I’d really appreciate some form of management for these (similar to the package management on Linux) so I can just be told when there is new stuff and say “yes, please download and update to the latest version, thank-you”. Trawling around the internet to get the latest versions is a bit painful.

Anyway, watch this space for a slowly updating Wordpress theme based on Deliciously Blue, which was curiously based on the previous theme I was using (Glossy Blue). I’m going to try for a strictly gray-scale theme with a splash of two contrasting colors to see what I’ve learned from my typography reading.

Download Photeon Backgrounds version 1.1

If you download and use the backgrounds please leave a comment. I’d love to know what people think of them or what could be improved!

Movies - original by Jean-Luc ST-Hilaire (clasixart) of Quebec, Canada.

TV Shows - original by Miroslav Sárička (v_hujer) of Prievidza, Slovakia.

Clips - original by Melanie Kuipers ** (yum) of Germany.

Pictures - original by Piotr Lewandowski ** (LeWy2005) of Gdynia, Pomorskie, Poland.

Music - original by Bart Noszka (noszki) of Dabrowa, Slaskie, Poland.

Games - original by Stephen Davies (steved_np3) of the UK.

Arcade - original by Sas Van Veen ** (xtrapink) of the Netherlands.

Apps - original by Brian Lary (blary54) of the United States.

Weather - original by G Schouten de Jel (gabriel77) of Den Haag, Z-H, Netherlands.

Settings - original by Giovanni Miniato (desmox) of Italy.

Extras - originals by GLS (glspro5) of Argentina, and Laura Shreck (Columbine) of the United States.

The backgrounds are all 720p BMP images so will work with both original XBox hardware and Linux/Windows HTPC solutions without any rescaling.

Legal Stuff

All images in the Photeon series of backgrounds were obtained from stock.xchng, a free stock photo site, and then modified as necessary by David Teirney.

All images remain protected by the original terms and conditions of stock.xchng. Please respect the original license conditions as also noted in the enclosed License.txt file.

Changes from 1.0

• Added “Apps” image.
• Added “Arcade” image.
• Added “Clips” image.
• Added “Extras” images.
• Added “Games” image.
• Changed “Settings” image.
• Removed the “TV Shows” image and replaced with the old “Live TV” image.
• Repositioned the existing version 1.0 images to better work with the Showcase view and the AEON menu bar.
• Cleaned the close-up images to remove unsightly artifacts like small hairs and other imperfections that were blatantly obvious when blown up to 46+ inches on an HD TV.
• Altered the color curves for most images so they are more consistent across the set of images.

Installation

Download the photeon-backgrounds-1.1.zip file (18.2 MB) and follow the instructions within the enclosed Readme.txt file.

The download is hosted by Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) so tell all your friends as it’s hardly costing anything to host and share this with everyone.

Today I tested a 720p H264 movie that is freely available for download called Big Buck Bunny.

With debug information turned on there was still plenty of memory free (~20Mb) but the CPU spiked to 100% and playback was a miserable 17fps. The sound was playing fine, but the video was very laggy.

In the debug log I was very amused to see the following:

16:39:31 M: 18128896 DEBUG: msg:
************************************************
**** Your system is too SLOW to play this! ****
************************************************
Possible reasons, problems, workarounds:
- Most common: broken/buggy _audio_ driver
- Try -ao sdl or use the OSS emulation of ALSA.
- Experiment with different values for -autosync, 30 is a good start.
- Slow video output
- Try a different -vo driver (-vo help for a list) or try -framedrop!
- Slow CPU
- Don't try to play a big DVD/DivX on a slow CPU! Try some of the lavdopts, e.g. -vfm ffmpeg -lavdopts lowres=1:fast:skiploopfilter=all.
- Broken file
- Try various combinations of -nobps -ni -forceidx -mc 0.
- Slow media (NFS/SMB mounts, DVD, VCD etc)
- Try -cache 8192.
- Are you using -cache to play a non-interleaved AVI file?
- Try -nocache.
Read DOCS/HTML/en/video.html for tuning/speedup tips.
If none of this helps you, read DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports.html.

It’s very saddening to see that the Xbox has almost come to the end of it’s usefulness.

I could look at hooking in some of the mplayer options to try and help the CPU out but it really looks like its time to start putting together a new Linux HTPC now that HD TV is available in New Zealand via DVB-T.

To workaround this you can configure the XBox remote to perform PageUp and PageDown actions by altering the Keymap.xml file in the UserData folder.

UPDATE: This no longer seems to work on later versions of XBMC. I will post another article that contains details on the changes necessary.

Change the existing buttons mapped to the PageUp and PageDown actions for the remote.

Change them to be and as shown below (at the top of the Keymap.xml file).

<keymap>
  <global>
    <remote>
      <three>VolumeUp</three>
      <six>VolumeDown</six>
      <nine>Mute</nine>
      <play>Play</play>
      <pause>Pause</pause>
      <stop>Stop</stop>
      <forward>FastForward</forward>
      <reverse>Rewind</reverse>
      <left>Left</left>
      <right>Right</right>
      <up>Up</up>
      <down>Down</down>
      <select>Select</select>
      <!-- Alteration for PageUp/PageDown starts -->
      <skipplus>PageDown</skipplus>
      <skipminus>PageUp</skipminus>
      <!-- Ends -->
      <back>ParentDir</back>
      <menu>PreviousMenu</menu>
      <title>ContextMenu</title>
      <info>Info</info>
      <skipplus>SkipNext</skipplus>
      <skipminus>SkipPrevious</skipminus>
      <display>FullScreen</display>
      <start>PreviousMenu</start>
      <record>Screenshot</record>
      <volumeplus>VolumeUp</volumeplus>
      <volumeminus>VolumeDown</volumeminus>
      <mute>Mute</mute>
      <power>XBMC.ShutDown()</power>
      <myvideo>XBMC.ActivateWindow(MyVideos)</myvideo>
      <mymusic>XBMC.ActivateWindow(MyMusic)</mymusic>
      <mypictures>XBMC.ActivateWindow(MyPictures)</mypictures>
      <mytv>XBMC.ActivateWindow(Home)</mytv>
    </remote>
  </global>
</keymap>

The XBMC wiki has more information about the Keymap.xml file.

UPDATE: An updated Version 1.1. of the Photeon Backgrounds for the XBMC AEON skin have been released!

Download Photeon Backdrops Version 1.0. If you download and use them please leave a comment. I’d love to know what people think of them!

All images in this Photeon series of backdrops for the Aeon skin were obtained from stock.xchng and then modified as necessary. All images are still protected by the original terms and conditions of that web site. Please respect the original license conditions as noted within the photeon-backdrops-1.0.zip file.

Special thanks to each of the image authors for giving permission to redistribute the modified versions of the images:

• TV Shows - Jayson Gatdula (jaylopez)
• Movies - Jean-Luc ST-Hilaire (clasixart)
• Pictures - Piotr Lewandowski (LeWy2005) - no response after a week so I hope it’s OK
• Music - Bart Noszka (noszki)
• Weather - Gabriel Schouten de Jel (gabriel77)
• Live TV - Viktor Hujer (v_hujer)
• Settings - Kalyana Sundaram (kavitha)

TV Shows

Movies

Pictures

Music

Weather

Live TV (courtesy of the aeonmod by Rand Al Thor)

Settings

To install:

1. Download the photeon-backdrops-1.0.zip (9.8Mb)
2. Unzip the photeon-backdrops-1.0.zip file and transfer to the skin directory of your XBMC installation. This will created a series of named folders within XBMC/skin/Aeon/backdrops/photeon/720p. Each named folder corresponds to Live TV, Movies, Music etc. and contains a single 720p BMP backdrop image.
3. Open Settings for XBMC (press Up from the main menu while using the Aeon skin)
4. Choose Aeon from the Settings menu and then configure the backdrop folders for each of the main menu items to point to the appropriate folder under .../photeon/720p.
5. Configure the Settings backdrop image to point to the image within the .../photeon/720p/Settings folder. If this is not done, the existing Settings image will be used when a Setting menu item is chosen.

The download is hosted by Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) so tell all your friends, it’s hardly costing anything to host and share this with everyone.

Sample photos of the backdrops using the Aeon skin are shown below.

TV Shows

Movies

Pictures

Music

Weather

Live TV (part of the Rand Al Thor Aeonmod)

Live TV recordings listing

Live TV channel listing

Settings

All of the images were sourced from stock.xchng which is a stock image library with free content. I still need to contact the authors of the images that were manipulated to get their permission to redistribute to anyone else that would like to use them.

I purposefully chose images that were crisp and not colored. I wanted the actual colored content in each menu, such movies and pictures, to pop out of the screen yet still have some level of eye candy for the menus. There could still be some improvements to align better with the Aeon menu overlay and perhaps refining of each image, but these will do for the moment.

If you are interested in using these backdrops with your Aeon skin please leave a comment below (might help convince the photo owners to allow redistribution).

Kiwi-ise contains a number of packages that can be installed using Installer.app to provide:

• Caller ID
• Phone Number Formatting
• Voicemail button
• Call Forwarding Active Fix
• Alerts for Unread SMS messages and Missed Calls
• Kiwi-ised Google Maps application icon

It includes all of the great stuff that was in the XK72 repository plus some other goodies. I particularly look forward to seeing how the alerts for unread SMS messages and missed calls will work. I really missed that feature off my old Samsung phone.

It’s great to see so much effort being put into making using the iPhone as simple as possible here in New Zealand.

There’s also great reading about jailbreaking and unlocking in general.

1. Sync your iPhone to create a backup of the configuration within iTunes (just in case something goes wrong and you need to restore to 1.1.3).
2. Upgrade the iPhone to 1.1.3
3. Follow the instructions at iClarified to Unlock Your iPhone with ZiPhone GUI (Windows). I used ZiPhone 2.2 on Windows and didn’t have any problems with SMS or dialing crashing the iPhone after the unlock.
4. Open Installer and add the XK72 repository http://xk72.com/iphone/repos
5. Within Installer, open the Tweaks (XK72) category and install all 1.1.3 packages - Caller ID update (1.1.3), NZ Phone Formats (1.1.3)
6. Set the Region Format to New Zealand. Settings > General > International > Region Format
7. Set the APN for Edge to direct.vodafone.net.nz (leave Username and Password blank). Settings > General > Network > Edge > APN.
8. Change the Voicemail button so it dials 707 rather than nothing. Manually dial *5005*86*707#.