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The Moxi DVR is great.  Really, really great.  It took almost a decade, but a company finally came out with a UI better than that of my Series 1 TiVo.

One neat thing about the Moxi is the ability to add an external hard drive.  I tried adding a 750 GB Seagate FreeAgent Pro drive to the unit.  It is recognized, formatted, and ready-to-go.  Problem is, after a certain amount of idle time, it will stop functioning.  When you try to play a show on the EHD, you will get a prompt — twice, oddly — that says “Do you want to keep this episode?”, with “keep” and “delete” options.  Also, if there is no room on the internal hard drive, the unit will fail to record episodes, and in the “Canceled/Deleted Episodes” log, the (unhelpful) reason will be given as “Failed (No Signal)”.  If you go to “Setup”, then “External Hard Drive”, select “Disconnect”, then physically disconnect and re-connect the drive, it works again.

The problem is that the Seagate EHD goes to sleep, and the Moxi cannot wake it up.  The fix is to connect the EHD to a Linux box via USB, and use sdparm to clear the “Standby” flag on the hard drive.  See the flags on the hard drive by typing:

sdparm -a /dev/sdX

where X is the letter assigned to the device (type “tail /var/log/syslog” after plugging in the drive to see what letter it’s assigned.)

To clear the flag, type:

sdparm -c STANDBY -6 /dev/sdX

The “-c STANDBY” clears the “Standby” flag, and the “-6” does it in six-bit mode, which is apparently required.

Answer for how to keep these drives from going to sleep was found at the blog My Slice of Reality.

I’m beginning to get a sense of what it’s like to be lost around computers.  I have a Canon AP 350 electric typewriter, no manual, and no idea what most of the settings do.  The logos aren’t clear, the operation is not intuitive to me, and when I want to do something that I assume should be trivial, like move the paper a tiny bit up or down electronically, I haven’t the foggiest how to accomplish it.

Ah, torrential autumnal storms and Pizza Hut Quikorder.  A match made in Valhalla.  A $5 tip will just about assuage my guilt, I think.

These are my friends and cube mates:

They are good for cheering you up, keeping you company, or being sympathetically down while you’re down.

I’ve placed an order for an e-book reader: the first-generation Amazon Kindle.  I’ve been interested in a good e-book reader for about 8 years, but what I previously thought was going to be the best, the Everybook, failed to bloom.  It was many times as expensive and heavy, and used LCD screens.

I sat down some years ago and put together a checklist of what I wanted in an e-book reader.  They were:

1. Lightweight
2. Electronic paper
3. Long battery live
4. Expandable storage
5. Ability to be annotated
6. Multiple format support
7. Price under $500
8. Fold-open design to see two facing pages
9. Viewable area at least as large as a paperback
10. Hackable!

Only the first seven are guaranteed.  This is only a one-page reader, however, rather than a two-page reader.  The viewing area is only 6 inches diagonally.  And I’m not sure whether it’s going to be hackable, but I’ll try my best.  But Amazon added a whole bunch of extra functionality: MP3 player, free wireless access to buy books or download content while seeing Amazon reviews, free browsing of Wikipedia, an email address for the device.  I think this all adds up to “good enough for now”.

Notice how everything is converging?  My ideal reader today would support full-motion video, color, advanced music playlist management, email, telephony, touch-sensitivity; it would be a replacement for a separate book reader, phone, mp3 player, PDA, calculator, and laptop.

My phone whines at 12 kHz.  All the time.  This is tinnitus-range.  Anyone else?  And have there been any reported self-inflicted deaths?

Running Linux and want to test your hearing?  Beep!  Try:

beep -l 10000 -f 12000