Eblo

PC, TV, etc.

So last week I lost a huge post about the new PC and how that build went (thank you, Firefox!). Basically, it went well with the exception of one bad stick of RAM in the pair I bought. So I ordered a new pair and ran on one stick (1GB) until the replacement arrived and I RMA'd the bad stuff. Thank you Newegg.com.

The machine is running the SMP console client for Folding@Home. It's crunching along nicely and has helped halt and somewhat reverse my precipitous fall on Team DnD #53338. To really keep up, though, I really need a PS3. Maybe later this year. I've played a few games on the new box (Flight Sim X mostly) but haven't bought anything new for it yet. Thinking Madden '07, NHL '07, and maybe F.E.A.R. will be among the first purchases. I haven't done any recording or editing on it yet either, but soon.

One thing that did suck up a bunch of silly time last weekend was playing WinAmp visualizations on my other recent acquisition - a 61" TV. A friend's parents' were upgrading to High Def. from their 'lowly' Sony KP-61HS10, so I 'did them a favor,' by getting it out of the way very cheaply.

The cool thing is that this thing actually DOES do HD, if you have the right source. It doesn't have an HD tuner, but can display HD from one of the component inputs. And the vid card on the new computer? Puts out HD on the component outs :D So I was playing Flight Sim, Iron Aces, and WinAmp visualizations at 1080i. Text wasn't very sharp at all, but everything else was great. As for getting it home, a good friend helped move it. It was a challenge in that it only fit in the van by 1/8" and had to go in a very specific way. I had to lay it back for the trip, which worried me, but it thankfully survived intact. It now graces our living room until I get my ass around to finishing out the basement.

One MAJOR annoyance that happened last week is that Google-bot ATE ALL OF MY MYTHTV RECORDINGS (a la Spider of Doom)!!!!!! I'm not sure if I was more mad at Google, the MythTV package maintainers, or myself. What basically happened is this:

1. A recent update to MythTV removed the .htaccess file I had in place to require passwords to get to the MythWeb interface to MythTV (the REALLY stupid thing is that the .htaccess file mine was replaced with WARNS that you should use authentication for just this reason, but DISABLES IT BY DEFAULT!!!!!).


2. That or another update removed the robots.txt file I had in place to prevent spiders from crawling MythWeb OR I forgot to put one in place when I built this box (I know I had one on some install at some point).


3. Googlebot came along and indexed MythWeb, which included hitting the links for deleting recordings.


4. I got home to watch some TV, found 2 recordings, and flipped out.


5. In researching what I thought was a hack of my system, I noticed apache still getting flooded with requests from Google-bot, so I shut down apache, fixes robots.txt and .htaccess and picked up the shattered pieces of my life.

Now you know. Grrrrrrr. BTW, the bot also seemed to hit some "Never Record" and "Record Later" links, because future scheduling was all borked, too. Oh, and it seems that all of that incoming traffic from Google-Bot was enough to piss off Comcast who decided to change my officially dynamic, but for all practical purposes, static IP address. GGGrrrrrrr!

Anyway, that's about all the time I have for catch-up right now.

I'm supposed to be jammin' tonight live on JVonD Radio, so check out JVonD.com for more info.