Got tired of the Mac-look

I got a bit tired of the Mac look.

So I completely changed the look of my desktop.

• I switched to Cairo dock
• I started using Emerald theme manager. This enables you to modify the window borders exactly how you want them to be. In my case partly transparent for the active window, fully transparent for inactive windows.
• Icons are Faenza.

A lot of Windows users

By the way: I was just checking the visitor stats. Many Windows and IE users. Did I convince any of you ti try Ubuntu or XBMC? Pageviews by Browsers

Internet Explorer (65%) Firefox (26%) Safari (3%) Chrome (2%) Opera (1%) (FlipboardProxy (<1%) Mobile (<1%) PicMorphSearchToolbar (<1%) Ubuntu (<1%)

Pageviews by Operating Systems

Windows (79%) Other Unix (15%) Linux (2%) Macintosh (1%) BlackBerry (<1%) Nokia (<1%) iPhone (<1%)

Choppy playback XBMC solved

A couple of weeks ago I switched from an internal HDD in my HTPC to a NAS.

Some time ago the HDD in my HTPC broke down (it was a WD 2TB EcoGreen disk). I replaced it with a Seagate 2TB drive. But even though I backed up all of my photos and music and most of my movies it was still a lot of work (and time) to copy everything from the USB drive to the (new) internal HDD.

So I decided to get a NAS with two 2TB HDD's in RAID1 configuration. I chose the Synology ds211.
I read some positive reviews on the dutch site tweakers.net (these reviews are for the DS211J). I chose the DS211 because of the slightly faster processor and more RAM.

Especially the many possibilities that the included software offers is a big PRO (among other things: newsgroup downloads, torrent downloads). Another big improvement is the low power usage: 22W when both discs are spinning, 10W when both discs are idle.

But that isn't what this post is about: after reinstalling XBMC to a small SSD I used to replace the internal HDD I experienced choppiness while playing some video files. It was especially visible during panning. (by the way: the SSD reduced the boottime to about 25s!)

It turns out that this is caused by a mismatch in refresh rate of the TV and framerate of the video file. Many video files have a framerate of 24fps, the refreshrate of the TV is 50Hz. Luckily the XBMC crew has solved this problem: you just have to know what options to turn on. Well here it comes:

• Go to "Settings"
• Go to "Video Settings"
• Go to "Playback"
• Turn ON both "Adjust display refresh rate to match video" and "Sync playback to display"

Especially the first one is important: It sets your TV refresh rate to 24Hz. What happens otherwise is that the video frame rate of 24fps does not "fit" on the TV refresh rate of 50Hz which leads to a jitter in the video about 2 times per second.

Now playback is as smooth as silk. Enjoy!

My videogames history

Don't know what got me thinking about this. But here's a list of the most memorable video games I played the last 25 years. I added the systems on which I played 'm.

And by clicking on the image below, screenshots of all belowmentioned games can be found (well that's a work-in-progress).

2011 - Game_images

Commodore 64

• Snoopy (1984, C. Kramer)
• Pole Position (1983, Atari)
• H.E.R.O. (1984, Activision)
• Donald Duck's Playground (1984, Sierra)
• Donkey Kong (1981, Nintendo)
• International Soccer (1983, Commodore)
• Pac-Man (1983, …)
• Pitfall (1982, Activision)
• Pistop (1983, Epyx)
• Wonderboy (1987, Sega)
• Dr. J vs Larry Bird (1983, EA)
• Decathlon (1983, Activision)

First PC (Tulip x86, monochrome screen, NO HDD, NO extended RAM, only 640KB base memory)

• Test Drive (1987, Accolade)
• Blues Brothers (1991, Titus Software)
• Prince of Persia (1990, Broderbund)

Nintendo Entertainment System

• Super Mario Bros 1,2 & 3 (1985-, Nintendo)
• Super Off Road (1989, Virgin Games)
• Gremlins 2 (1990, SunSoft)
• Nintendo World Cup Soccer (1990, Nintendo)

PC (486DX 33MHz, 4MB ram, 40MB HDD). Around 1990.

added a 512MB HD, Soundblaster and CD-ROM later on.

• Space Quest 3 (1989)
• Stunts (1990, Broderbund)
• Mortal Kombat 1-2 (1992-1993)
• Grand Prix Unlimited (1992, Accolade)
• Grand Prix (Microprose, 1992)
• Dune II (1992, Virgin Interactive)
• Wolfenstein 3D (1992, id software)
• Doom (1993, id software)
• Beneath a Steel Sky (1994, Virgin Interactive)
• Under a Killing Moon (1994, Access Software)
• The Need for Speed (1994, EA)
• FIFA Soccer 95 (1994, EA)
• Raptor: Call of the Shadows (1994, Apogee)
• FIFA 96 (1995, EA)
• Discworld (1995, Psygnosis)
• Discworld II (1996, Psygnosis)
• Syndicate (1993, EA)
• Micro Machines II (1996, Codemasters)
• Simcity (
• Railroad Tycoon (
• Worms (

PC (Pentium II, 266 MHz, ?? RAM, ?? HDD). Around 1998.

• Command & Conquer (1995, EA)
• Duke Nukem 3D (1996, 3D Realms)
• Grand Prix 2 (1996, Microprose)
• Need for Speed II (1997, EA)
• Colin McRae Rally

Playstation 1

• Crash Bandicoot (1996, SCEA)
• Several FIFA games (1999- , EA)
• Formula 1 97 (1998, Psygnosis)
• Gran turismo (1998, Sony)
• International Superstar Soccer (1998, Konami)
• ISS Pro Evolution (1999, Konami)
• Metal Gear Solid ( , Konami)
• Syphon Filter (1999,
• Tekken
• Tomb Raider (1996, Eidos)
• V-Rally (1997, Infogrames)

PC (Pentium IV HT, 2.4GHz, 1GB RAM, 40GB HDD). Around 2003(?)

Not really used to play games.

Wii

• Mario Galaxy
• Call of duty ??
• more to add later on
  

PC (AMD Athlon II X4 620, 4GB RAM, 60GB SSD, 500GB HDD)

Only Torpia (www.torpia.com)

Airflow in my HTPC

Today I added a fan to my HTPC. When I removed the original PSU and put in a PicoPSU the only fan that was providing airflow through the case was also removed.

This was kind of the point of placing the PicoPSU as the fan was making way too much noise. However it also meant that all the hot air generated by the CPU keeps hovering around in the case.

That just doesn't feel right so I ordered this fan.
I made a small bracket to mount it on and fill the hole that the old PSU left behind.

Result after slowing down the CPU fan to the lowest possible speed: CPU temperature 35C and GPU temperature 45C.

Installing an SSD

Recently I made another fine addition to my Ubuntu powered desktop system: an SSD drive (more specific the 60GB version of this). Installing it took some tweaking and I'm not gonna take all the credit for this. This post describes exactly what I did, the posts above that one show the help I got.

I have to add that I changed the swap space back to the HDD. For some reason mounting the swap space on the SSD takes about 10s. I don't know why, so if someone has a bright idea: tell me, I'm all ears.

But now for the results (I used bootchart to visualize):
This is the bootchart with the HDD.

And this is the bootchart with the SSD.

Installing the SSD shaved about 10s off the boottime. Looking a bit closer reveals that this is almost completely realized by a much faster completion of ureadahead. The much higher throughput of the SSD is clearly taken advantage of.

Some stopwatch results:
With the HDD:

• 25s from grub to login
• 20s from login to Firefox ready to use

With the SSD:

• 10s from grub to login
• 12s from login to Firefox ready to use.

So again it makes quite a difference, although it's kind of a bummer that getting to grub also takes 10-15s. But this is the BIOS booting, so there's little I can do about that.

Besides a reduced boottime the overall user experience is better: every program starts faster, I have no way of measuring this though...

Some tweaks to XBMC

Okay so I re-installed XBMC live on my HTPC (my hard drive gave out).
Still some stuff just wouldn't work. Took me quite some time to figure it out. So I thought I'd post it here, maybe it's of some use for someone. I installed a LiveCD from XBMCfreak.nl.

First of all I had no sound whatsoever. I've now got sound over the optical cable (SP/dif). The settings I used:

- In System - settings - audio output:
- Optical/coax
- speaker 5.0
- all three buttons ON
- audio output device: iec958
- Passthrough output device: iec958

Before my hard drive crashed I had audio over HDMI (just to the TV) and over the optical cable. I'll have to look into that again... I'll post it when I've fixed it. For now at least I've got sound.

Secondly I had no internet connection. Turned out that some settings in the "interfaces" file were wrong. This is how I solved it:

- Check what connection is set in "interfaces" in /etc/network (eth0 or eth1)
- Enter "ifconfig -a" in the terminal on the XBMC machine. Does this match the settings in "interfaces" (both eth0 or eth1?)
- If not. Change the setting in "interfaces" to match the output of ifconfig and save. (If it is the same I guess you've got a different problem)
- Then enter "sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart" and it should be working.

Finally I wanted to change the keymapping for my remote. That wasn't too difficult:
Create a file named "keyboard.xml" in ~/.xbmc/userdata/keymaps

In this file you can add/change the default settings by using this layout:

< .keymap>
< .global>
< .keyboard>
< .t mod="ctrl,shift">FullScreen< ./t>
< ./keyboard>
< ./global>
< ./keymap>

- Remove the space and period after each "<" I had to do this to prevent the browser of thinking it's html...

You only need to put the keys you want to change in this file. For the other keys the XBMC default will be used. For more info see here. The default XBMC keymap can be found here.

Hope it helps! Any questions: let me know. And also, if you've got a solution how to get sound over HDMI, let me know.