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.

Falling Behind

I flew on Wednesday. Still have to do a write-up on that. 7 take-offs and landings. Woo!

I'm embarking on a new project. MythTV. I ordered a Hauppage PVR-250 today. Picked up a 160 GB hard drive from Sam's. Going to try slapping the Hauppage into ye olde' PII-400MHz Gateway. The specs say it won't work, but some stuff at MythTV suggests it will since the card does all of the hard work. This stage is just tinkering/testing to see what I can do with middle-aged hardware and to try to get an idea of how I should build a dedicated box. To view any recordings on a decent display, I'll need to pull them to my laptop and play them there. But one half of the puzzle wouldn't be bad to get worked out.

Still trying to figure out what architectire I want to go with - where I'd put a powerhouse backend, and where the lighter frontend(s) might be. Right now we only watch TV in the living room, but if/when the basement gets finished, the entertainment center will get moved down there. But we'll probably want TVability up here, too. We'll see. My current thought is to build a pretty hefty, machine, and perhaps migrate eblo and other web tasks to it, since load is low, it'll be running mysql anyway, and it'll be on 24-7. But I don't want the machine too crazy-jacked up, because the humming of fans might distract from my viewing pleasure.

Another question is what kind of case to use. There is some really cool stuff out there, but the cooler, the more 'spensive, and I don't pay for my style ;-). Someone suggested building a custom case out of wood. I'm not a master craftsman or anything, so I pretty much brushed that off. However, I did recall that I have a dead Pioneer A/V receiver sitting around. I wonder if I could shoehorn an ATX motherboard into that. Might be fun. Would be cool if I could use some of the panel buttons and lights, too, but since I have no clue how to even PRETEND to know how to hack that, that's not likey. Could probably manage to stash the IR receiver in the front window and perhaps light some LEDs at the very least.

And ewww - motherboard/CPU. It's been a long time since I've looked at mobos. Too many options. My head spins just thinking about it. And then there's making sure it's all linux-friendly. . . .

And HOLY CRAP, when did DVD burner prices drop so far? Sam's has a Pacific Digital DVD/CD-RW burner for $130. My wife paid about twice that for my Plextor 10x12x32 CD-RW burner about 2.5 years ago (I still love that drive, by the way)! I only found one review of the drive, but that person seemed happy. According to them it's rebranded NEC, so it can't be all bad, can it? Anyway, by the time my box gets to the point where I'm going to burn DVD's off of it, perhaps they'll be down under $100. Wow.

Ok, I'm off now. Need to straighten up the house and get some sleep tonight. I'll try to be better about posting. But not this weekend.

TV just keeps getting worse, and we keep watching.

So after cleaning the birds and bunz and spending some quality time on the floor with them, I'm kickin' it on the couch, getting some rare potato time in. So what the crap is Who Wants to Marry My Dad? Just when I think TV can't get stranger, we have a show about 4 kids trying to hook their dad up? What the hell? And why am I still watching?

I've got excuses:
- I'm too tired and zoned to change the channel.
- I'm not really watching, it's just background noise.
- I can't find the remote.

But the fact of the matter is:
- It's a train wreck I can't stop watching.
- Some of the chicks are hot.
- In a way, it's funny as hell, especially with the "da-da-DUM" music.
- I'm trying to figure out WHO THE HELL IS DON MUELLER?

I'm thinking he's not a baseball player born in 1927, and probably not a geeky Assistant Professor.

Though it seems he's a spammer and/or telemarketer. That's how I take "mass-marketing," anyway. Now it all makes sense.

As much as it can, anyway.

Nye-night.