Samsung Vehicle Dock Kit for Galaxy Nexus

OK so I love car docks .. I bought a Google Nexus One and forked out for a custom Google car dock (shipped from Europe at no small expense). So now I have a Galaxy Nexus it was just a matter of time before I caved in and got a car dock. I found one discounted on MobiCity (parallel importer in Wellington) - not cheap but acceptable at the time.

So now it's arrive - time to unpack. 

OK so straight up this is a nice looking car dock. Time to put my phone in .. OK it is a very very tight fit - will be interesting to see how it goes in the car ..it's a 2 handed operation. All in all look an feel and operation is so far a Rating: 4/5

Not having yet plugged it in (and in doing so triggering the bogo pins into action) I start looking to download the google car dock app .. oddly it't not available for 4.x .. hmmm. Once usb is connected to the dock however - bingo the base home screen goes landscape and the view is quite tidy .. so I might be fine as is. What is particularly nice is the voice activation icon on the bottom left.

Just by fooling I'm finding the voice activation is quite cool but my results to date are well below 50/50 however:

• CALL call such as "call fred mobile" rarely if ever seems to work.. the more words you say the lest likely it is to succeed Rating: 1/5. Simplifying to call such as "call fred" can work well for simple names ... I don't hold out much hope that it'll replace typing / touch in the car but it can help to reduce typing by bringing up search results Rating: 2/5
• DRIVE drive such as "drive home" works well for simple preset destinations - the integration here with google maps online is pretty awesome. That said if I ever try "drive Quay street Auckland" the best I get is "drive key street waltham" .. not likely to work at any level of acceptability .. possibly my accent - enunciation is very definitely important  Rating: 3/5 (for the saved locations and maps integration)
• LISTEN listen to a-la "listen to the x x" .. so far only succeeds in starting my preferred music player (PowerAMP) with a failed search .. but a one touch from here to folders so Rating: 2/5. That said to be able to support 'start music' and 'stop music' simply activating/deactivating your preferred music player would be a 5/5 for me. How about "drive home" "start music " .. that would be cool.
• SEND send text to along the lines of "send text to matthew hello" .. this finally worked on about the fifth attempt after giving up on a couple of other names. Once I got it working I still needed to choose a matthew as I have a few in my contacts .. unlikely to use this with much success Rating: 0/5. Given sending a text was not super successful you can imagine how much success was in store for email .. send email quickly yields results .. but once you have a email editing dialogue .. well, good luck to you.

A complete list of valid actions can be found here http://www.google.co.nz/mobile/voice-actions/

Also note my voice settings are for 'English (UK)' and I have this downloaded to be able to work offline. Phone search is across People and Play Music.

403 Google Play issues?

OK so these were driving me nuts .. seriously. Lots of online comments about deleting caches, removing Google accounts, etc, etc .. until I read this link

The solution - remove the proxy on your Mobile network APN .. WTF .. don't ask me why but it worked. I do a bit of mobile testing so I remembering adding it but how / why it makes google think there is a authentication issue is a bit beyond me.

Getting to grips with Unity ... MyUnity

I've also been through my share of Debian based distros pre Ubuntu such as Storm and Knoppix. I briefly tried dabbling with non-Debian distros (Redhat and Centos) but just didn't like it. I'v esince settled happily with Ubuntu.

Having initially started with Windowmaker I would now say I'm an established Gnome (+ metacity) user. I tried KDE but it didn't work for me .. actually it worked just fine - I simply prefer the Gnome look-n-feel (maybe the big paw print struct a chord .. who knows). I wanted to like OS X but couldn't (the app / window thing .. no sorry).

So in summary I've been very happy with Ubuntu and Gnome ... until I upgraded and got Unity. Previously I tried Enlightment but reverted - but I didn't get it by default. With 11.04 I hunted and found out how to remove it - I succeeded but now on 12.04 I 'm getting constant dialog errors, etc, etc .. so I'm thinking it's time to create a new user with default settings to see if I've broken things. Along the way I'll check out Unity.

So this post is a bit about me trying Unity - hopefully positive, and capturing the little customisations, things I like and how I've managed to set them up in Unity.

Now that I'm on 12.04 I've found MyUnity .. things are looking up .. temporarily :)

Things I like

Focus follow mouse 

Easy to configure with gnome-tweak-tool and it doesn't seem to be a bad thing - i.e. it won't break Unity. Ref: http://askubuntu.com/questions/64605/how-do-i-set-focus-follows-mouse

Summary: gnome-tweak-tool is good.

Application menu in panel

A bit weird to me but I'm getting used to it (bit Mac-ish maybe?). When you have multiple windows of different apps and focus following the mouse this is a bit of a fail.

Summary: Still not convinced

Lots of horizontal workspaces 

I'm trying to figure out the how Untiy will let me keep working with lots of horizontal workspaces - myUnity can configure them  yippeee .. ah no - It seems I'm running Unity-2D (see http://askubuntu.com/questions/136324/always-boots-into-2d-mode) and likely my hardware doesn't support anything more advanced (Toshiba Portege m800).

Summary: OK so now we start failing big time


Also .. what about dragging and dropping windows in the workspace panel app thing ???

So MyUnity doesn't allow me to configure all the fancy stuff .. but some of it is not really that fancy? Why can't I configure the number or rows / columns of workspaces. Arrrgh.

So what to do - sadly I'll need to try gconf-editor and try and hack away without breaking things.

I'll update as I continue but it just seems Unity is too aggressive a proposition. There's too much lost functionality .. hey I 'could' do some good stuff .. but I can't. The Unity upgrade didn't come with a box full of free hardware.

Icon HDP for SPDIF Cubox audio

http://www.internationaldynamics.co.nz/ are the NZ distributor of the Icon HDP for $799.

This looks like a very tidy option give it's time for me to make use of SPDIF audio on the cubox.

Cubox [Part 3]: Revisited .. Asterisk 1.8 issues

Turns out there is no sound on out-bound calls so my claims of success were a little premature.

I've been trying to diagnose - asterisk debugging is not super easy to follow and nothing cries PANIC. A good way to test was to use call-recording feature on 2talk and then test outbound call to mobile (using a friend to talk on one and you on the other is easiest ;). If both voices are recorded then obviously 2talk is receiving both and having issues thereafter (simple and obvious but seems to confirm that 2talk are passing on what they receive).

Searching around I see some notes on similar (no/extremely choppy audio on outbound call issues) such as https://issues.asterisk.org/jira/browse/ASTERISK-16258

Some things to try to resolve this.

Also review iax show netstat maybe the lack of sound is due to issues with load encoding on the fly, etc.

Cubox USB bus limits?

Starting to see some USB bus contention / limits being hit on cubox (ref: http://www.solid-run.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=635)


I have 2 usb sounds card(s) and 1x usb HDD (will move to eSATA when I get a new housing) running off an unpowered hub on USB bus 2 .. i.e.


root@cubox:~# lsusb
Bus 002 Device 020: ID 0d8c:000c C-Media Electronics, Inc. Audio Adapter
Bus 002 Device 019: ID 0bc2:3300 Seagate RSS LLC 
Bus 002 Device 018: ID 145f:0090 Trust 
Bus 002 Device 017: ID 05e3:0606 Genesys Logic, Inc. USB 2.0 Hub / D-Link DUB-H4 USB 2.0 Hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

The USB HDD is powered .. I've seen other posts recommending using a powered hub and ensuring devices are shared over the 2 ports .. any limits here. I was hoping to run a second USB HDD to pair the existing for back-up. Over-night I found mpd had stopped (possibly during maintenance - still investigating). During 'working' operation MPD is, on occasion, reporting ..



Jun 17 09:20 : output: "Lounge Speakers" [oss] failed to play: Write error on /dev/dsp2: Broken pipe
Jun 17 09:20 : output: "Lounge Speakers" [oss] failed to play: Write error on /dev/dsp2: Broken pipe

I'm also seeing the following in syslog

Jun 17 09:20:34 cubox kernel: [829633.363960] orion-ehci orion-ehci.1: sitd_submit: can't schedule iso stream
Jun 17 09:20:34 cubox kernel: [829633.373964] cannot submit datapipe for urb 0, error -28: not enough bandwidth
Jun 17 09:20:34 cubox kernel: [829633.390285] orion-ehci orion-ehci.1: sitd_submit: can't schedule iso stream
Jun 17 09:20:34 cubox kernel: [829633.397412] cannot submit datapipe for urb 0, error -28: not enough bandwidth

Cubox [Part 4]: usb wifi + kernel build

Ideally a Ralink so I grabbed a cheap D-Link Wireless N 150 USB adapter:


[93379.042492] usb 1-1: new high speed USB device using orion-ehci and address 2
[93379.211469] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=07d1, idProduct=3c16
[93379.218616] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[93379.226201] usb 1-1: Product: 11n Adapter
[93379.230249] usb 1-1: Manufacturer: Ralink
[93379.234729] usb 1-1: SerialNumber: 1.0
[93379.240455] usb 1-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[93861.002520] backlight power down

Debian wiki shows the way forward http://wiki.debian.org/rt2870sta 

Sadly the modules that have been built for the stock kernel .. however in the wonderful world of openness the lovely folk at solid-run.com have the kernel on github   https://github.com/rabeeh/linux-2.6.32.9 so I can simply clone it and build (no huge reason to make a massive jump yet).

Watch this space ...