$40 mp3 player with wifi, speaker, linux support (palm pixi plus)

For almost 4 years I have used a mp3 player from Creative Labs named "ZEN Stone Plus with built-in speaker". It was used it to play music for our toddler all night long, nearly every night.

It was an absolutely wonderful product. Battery life via rechargeable battery was excellent, it was small enough to forget about in your pocket, and the speaker was sufficient for what we needed

The only deficiency in my opinion was that it could not play music while plugged into AC power. That meant that a.) the battery would have to last the 10+ hours every night and b.) we had to plug it into AC power every morning to charge it. In the end, it was the latter that caused me to need to replace it. After probably 1000+ plug-in and remove (many by a child under 5 years old) the pins in the USB connection eventually failed.

If you're looking for a portable MP3 player with a built-in speaker, your options are very few. The Ipod Touch (and Iphone) are perfectly good solutions, but come a hefty price tag even used. So, I had to get creative.

I'd seen the Palm Pixi appear on a couple "deal-a-day" websites at the $30 price range, and that lead me to consider the Palm Pixi Plus. The Pixi Plus has the following features that made it look *very* tempting:

• 8GB storage
• Internal Speaker
• wifi
• web browser
• GPS
• Camera
• Touch screen and physical keyboard
• can play music while charging
• runs linux! (just geeky)
• open development platform

However, I googling left me unsure about a couple things:

• Could I use the pixi's wifi without first activating it with some carrier? I had no interest in a phone, or a monthly bill. It did seem that worst case, I could activate on a pay-as-you-go provider and get going for probably less than $10 total.
• If I could manage to avoid activation, could I still have access to the Palm WebOS Store? Having an "App Store" was an unnecessary upgrade from the zen stone we had before, but sure would be nice.

In the end, the answer to each of the above questions was 'Yes'. I now have a MP3 player with a builtin speaker, that also has all the functions generally associated with a smart phone (see above). I'm really happy with it. It cost me $40 shipped in 2 days (I do have amazon prime, so total cost may be a little bit more). The only two issues at the moment are:

• Getting it plugged in for charge is a bit of a pain, and it seems to me that likely the thing that will end up failing is that connection, because its not 100% trivial (and remember, toddlers/young kids are using it). There is, however, a $15 solution for that. I've not purchased it yet, so I'm not 100% certain, but it looks like I can get a Touchstone Palm Pixi Charging Dock and Palm Pixi Touchstone Cover shipped for under $10.
• The music player stops somewhere after 2 hours or so when its on repeat of a single song. Obviously this is not an issue for many people, but it affects my use case.

In Summary, if you think an 8GB mp3 player with GPS, speaker, camera would be a generally cool toy for $40, then buy one today. I'm really happy with this one. I'll try to write another article soon that describes how to use Meta Doctor to flash with activation disabled and then run the first use program to set up a profile.

Chuck sightings

Chuck loves the Red Wings!

Chuck has a 4 year old

RFC: anyone using vmdk or ovf files from cloud-images?

Friday I posted the following on ec2ubuntu and ubuntu-cloud mailing lists. I'm posting here in an effort to reach a larger audience.

If you are using the OVF files or VMDK files, please respond.

Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2011 16:34:41
From: Scott Moser
Subject: Anyone using the .ovf and/or .vmdk files on cloud-images?

Hey all,

   Is anyone using the .vmdk or .ovf files on
http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com [1] ?

   In the 11.04 cycle, I started building .ovf files with corresponding
.vmdk images.  The goal of this was to make Ubuntu available for use via
software that supported importing OVF.
   I chose to to create the disk as VMDK formated images rather than a
more open-source friendly format such as qcow.   The OVF file and
associated disk image is consumable by both vmware tools and by
VirtualBox.  There are no OVF consumers that I'm aware of that would
function with a qcow (or even 'raw') disk image.  I feel compelled to also
mention that this format of vmdk (compressed) is not supported by qemu-img
or kvm.
   Since having an OVF that could not be used by any software is not
significantly more useful than not having an OVF, we went with vmdk.

   Largely prompted by the interest in providing a download format that is
ideal for OpenStack users [2], I am re-considering my decision.  I would
like to avoid adding another full disk image format to the output of the
build scripts.  As a result I'm thinking about replacing the .vmdk images
with compressed qcow images and updating the OVF files to reference those.

   The reason behind not wanting to just add yet another deliverable is
that more downloads are confusing, and disk space is not necessarily free.
If I can drop a deliverable not used by anyone, then I'd like to do that.

   So, would anyone object to the removal of .vmdk files from
cloud-images?  Is anyone using these that could not just as easily use
qcow2 formated images?

   Thanks,
   Scott

--
[1] http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/server/oneiric/current/
[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/833265

Amazon issues with EBS affect Ubuntu images in the EU-WEST region

Note: This blog post has been updated in-place.

We have received information from Amazon that the EBS snapshots for our released 10.04 images from 20110719 were not affected (ami-5c417128 and ami-52417126). It seems that an api issue incorrectly marked them as such. It was an error in our logic that associated snapshot-ids with amis that gave us the incorrect output. The only Ubuntu images that were affected were old daily builds and milestone releases. If you are interested in reading the original message, please do so on the Ubuntu cloud-announce mailing list archives.

We received this morning an automated email[1] from Amazon informing us of possible loss of data in EBS snapshots on the EU-WEST-1 region. Our engineering team immediately started an assessment of the damages this might have caused to the EBS images that we publish for our users. We are working with Amazon to re-mediate customer impact and prevent any future outages.

A number of non-current daily build and old alpha or beta images have been affected, but we hope that no one would have been using these images for production use; we are not planning corrective actions for these images. You can see the full list of AMIs affected at http://paste.ubuntu.com/662210/.

To have this type of announcements sent to your email directly, please subscribe to our ubuntu-cloud-announce mailing list at https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-cloud-announce..

Our support services are available to help customers of the Ubuntu Advantage Cloud Guest program. Details about this program can be found at http://www.canonical.com/enterprise-services/ubuntu-advantage/cloud

[1] Email received from Amazon on Aug 9 2011 at 9:11 UTC


Hello,

We've discovered an error in the Amazon EBS software that cleans up unused snapshots. This has affected at least one of your snapshots in the EU-West Region.

During a recent run of this EBS software in the EU-West Region, one or more blocks in a number of EBS snapshots were incorrectly deleted. The root cause was a software error that caused the snapshot references to a subset of blocks to be missed during the reference counting process. This process compares the blocks scheduled for deletion to the blocks referenced in customer snapshots. As a result of the software error, the EBS snapshot management system in the EU-West Region incorrectly thought some of the blocks were no longer being used and deleted them. We've addressed the error in the EBS snapshot system to prevent it from recurring.

We have now disabled all of your snapshots that contain these missing blocks. You can determine which of your snapshots were affected via the AWS Management Console or the DescribeSnapshots API call. The status for any affected snapshots will be shown as "error."

We have created copies of your affected snapshots where we've replaced the missing blocks with empty blocks. You can create a new volume from these snapshot copies and run a recovery tool on it (e.g. a file system recovery tool like fsck); in some cases this may restore normal volume operation. These snapshots can be identified via the snapshot Description field which you can see on the AWS Management Console or via the DescribeSnapshots API call. The Description field contains "Recovery Snapshot snap-xxxx" where snap-xxx is the id of the affected snapshot. Alternately, if you have any older or more recent snapshots that were unaffected, you will be able to create a volume from those snapshots without error. For additional questions, you may open a case in our Support Center: https://aws.amazon.com/support/createCase

We apologize for any potential impact this might have on your applications.

Sincerely,
AWS Developer Support

This message was produced and distributed by Amazon Web Services LLC, 410 Terry Avenue North, Seattle, Washington 98109-5210

How to find the right Ubuntu AMI with tools

A while ago, I gave instructions on how you could find the right Ubuntu AMI. I promised to write about how you could accomplished programmaticly.

When we publish Ubuntu AMIs, we simultaneously publish machine consumable data to https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/query/. The data there contains information so that you can:

• Find the latest ami of a given type (hvm/ebs/instance-store), arch, and region.
• Download the pristine image files

I think the format of the data is generally discernible, but there is some more information on the Ubuntu Wiki.

I've put an example client together. Here is some example usage:

• Launch the latest released image in us-east-1

$ euca-run-instances --instance-type t1.micro --key mykey $(ubuntu-ami)

• Open the Amazon EC2 console to launch the latest Oneiric daily build

You can now directly link to launching an image in Amazon EC2 console, combine that with this tool to open your browser to the right page.
$ ami=$(ubuntu-ami us-west-1 oneiric daily i386)
$ gnome-open https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/home?region=us-west-1#launchAmi=${ami}

• Download and extract the latest tarball for lucid
Here, 'pubname' is the recommended "publish name" of this AMI, which happens to correspond to the basename of the name on EC2, and "url" is a fully qualified url to http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com .
$ wget $(ubuntu-ami -f "%{url} -O %{pubname}.tar.gz")
$ uec-publish-tarball *.tar.gz my-ubuntu-images

I don't think I'll get this into 11.10, but I'd like to have something with this function into 12.04, and support launching AMIs directly through it for ease of use. I'd love to hear input on what you'd like a "ubuntu-run-instance" command to look like and do.

Updated AWS tools PPA for Ubuntu

I thought I would post a quick entry to spread the word about a ppa I've been maintaining with up to date versions of some of the AWS tools. It is named simply awstools. You can find it here.

Right now the ppa has the following packages:

• ec2-api-tools : Amazon's EC2 command line tools
• ec2-ami-tools : Amazon's EC2 AMI tools (rebundling and uploading images)
• iamcli : Identity Access Management (IAM) Command Line Toolkit
• rdscli : Command Line Toolkit for the Amazon Relational Database Service

To add this repository its as easy as:

$ sudo apt-add-repository ppa:awstools-dev/awstools
$ sudo apt-get update


Then, to install the newest available version of ec2-api-tools, do:

$ sudo apt-get install ec2-api-tools


I hope hope that is helpful.

How to find the right Ubuntu AMI on EC2

For anyone getting started on EC2, the first obstacle they're faced with is selecting an AMI (Amazon Machine Image). If your trying to find an Ubuntu image either via the Amazon Console or via the output of ec2-describe-images, you're likely to be overwhelmed. The success of Ubuntu as a platform and Ubuntu's commitment to refreshing AMIs means that there are literally thousands of of images on Amazon EC2 with "ubuntu"in their name. That, combined with and the lack of Ubuntu on the "Quick Start" menu makes this a non-trivial task.

The purpose of this post is to document how you can easily, quickly and safely find the Official Ubuntu AMIs on EC2 via the Amazon EC2 console or via your web browser.

Some General Ubuntu Information

You already may be aware of these items, but I want to point them out for those who are just getting started with Ubuntu or EC2.

• Ubuntu releases every 6 months. Each release has a version number and a codename. The most important thing to note here is that every 2 years a LTS (Long Term Support) release is made. If you want stability and support for 5 years, select an LTS release. If you want the newest packages, select the most recent release. See the wikipedia entry for more information.
  
• At the time of this writing, there are 5 "regions" in Amazon EC2. Each region represents a geographical location. Each region has its own AMI ids. Inside each region there are 2 architectures (x86_64, i386) and 2 "root store" types (EBS or instance). That means that for each build Ubuntu releases, we generate 20 ami ids.

Easiest: Find AMIs From Your Web Browser

You can choose your interface for selecting images. Go to either:

• http://cloud.ubuntu.com/ami
At the bottom of this page, you can select the region, release, arch or root-store. You're only shown the most recent releases here. When you've made your selection, you can copy and paste the ami number, or just click on it to go right to the EC2 console launch page for that AMI. or
• https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/server/releases/
• Select Your release by number or code-name
• Select 'release/': We keep historical builds around for debugging, but the 'release/' directory will always be the latest.
• Select your AMI from the table and click to launch in the console or copy and paste a command line.

Search through the Amazon EC2 Console

The EC2 Console is a graphical way to sort through AMIs and select one to launch. To Launch an Official Ubuntu Image here, follow the steps below.

• Select the region you want in the top left, under 'Navigation'
Example: "Us East (Virginia)"
• Click "AMIs"
Do not click "Launch Instance", see note below
• for 'Viewing', select "All Images"
• Limit the results to Ubuntu Stable Release images by typing ubuntu-images/
You should expand the 'AMI Name' field as wide as possible (maybe shrink the others).
• Limit the results to a specific release by appending '.*'.
For example: ubuntu-images/.*10.04
• Limit the results to a given arch by appending '.*i386' or '.*amd64'
Note: If you want to run a m1.small or c1.medium, you need 'i386'. If you want to run a t1.micro, you will need to select an 'ebs' image.
• Sort your results by AMI Name and make selection
By sorting by AMI name, you can more easily see the newest AMI for a given set. Each AMI ends with a number in the format YYYYMMDD (year,month,day). You want the most recent one.
• Verify the Owner is 099720109477!
  Any user can register an AMI under any name. Nothing prevents a malicious user from registering an AMI that would match the search above. So, in order to be safe, you need to verify that the owner of the ami is '099720109477'.
  If "Owner" is not a column for you, click "Show/Hide" at the top right and select "Owner" to be shown.
  
• Click on the AMI name, then Click 'Launch'

Notes

• HTTPS Access
Of the options above, right now https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/server/releases/ is the only one that provides data over https. This may be important to you if you are concerned about potential "Man in the Middle" attacks when finding a AMI id. I've requested Ahmed [kim0 in irc] to support https access to https://cloud.ubuntu.com/ami .
• Web Console 'Launch Instance' dialog
I saw no way in the 'Launch Instance' dialog to see the Owner ID. Because if this, I suggest not using that dialog to find "Community AMIs". There is simply no way you can reliably know who the owner of the image is from within the console. For advanced users, I will blog sometime soon on a way to find AMIs programmatically [Hint].