AlexH

Wow, the Buy and Sell is doing RSS

The CBC reports (via RSS, natch) that Canada won’t join missile defence plan.

Finally some level heads back east. I’m glad they didn’t cave to the pressure.

You can’t make these headlines up: Yahoo! News - Korn Guitarist Finds God, Leaves Band

I have to disagree with Mr. Scoble’s enthusiasm about Orb Network’s killer app for Media Center.

MythTV already has this functionality, I’ve taken a screenshot to show how it works:

How well is the Buick Lucerne going to do in Canada, specifically British Columbia? I can’t help but laugh at the name, because I associate the word Lucerne not with luxury, but with Safeway’s private label dairy brand. Moo.

I found out what my problem was, I wish I hadn’t wasted the mythtv-users mailing list bandwidth by posting a question… but no one replied so it wasn’t that bad.
I changed my audio device in Setup->General to ALSA:front (was /dev/dsp) and the mixer to default (was /dev/mixer), and also enabled aggressive buffering, and everything worked after that!

So now I’m transcoding all of my MPEG recordings to MPEG4, and this means that I should be able to have tons of shows recorded. With 100GB for the video partition, and high quality shows taking up 750 megs after transcoding, this means I’m able to have about 133 hours of TV at my disposal.

Once Tracy and I have a big enough place, I’m going to put together a RAID server that does SMB and NFS. That will be the central storage server for all of our files, one set of disks will be RAID0 for the TV, the other will be RAID5 for our backups.

Roland Tanglao is always pushing the fact that blogs help your page rank. Well, I agree fully, and my site is an example of this. In November, I posted that I wasn’t yet the top link at Google for Alex Harford. But since starting blogging, and getting links and trackbacks from other sites, I am now.
Next on the list, Harford. It’s going to be tough to beat Harford County, Maryland.

After that, Alex. That’s going to be even harder, with Alex King (one of the authors of this blogging software) getting a default link in all of the WordPress installations.

A quick update on my MythTV situation:

It is now almost working.

Basic specs are this:
Asus Pundit-R
Celeron 2.4GHz
160gb hard drive
PVR-350 (although I’m not using the TV out)
Dual layer DVD burner
802.11b wireless (for the channel listings and web admin, no streaming)
512mb RAM

It’s almost working to my satisfaction.

I spent a bit more that necessary to get the PVR-350, but it gives me a lot of expandability in the future, and I could take the card out and put it in another machine, and use the Pundit-R as a frontend only. I can definitely see myself needing more disk space in the future. I had to aggressively prune my listings because I was running out of disk space. Now I only record 2 rerun episodes of CSI, Law and Order, Family Guy, etc.

The one *big* problem is that MPEG playback isn’t working properly on the ATI TV out. It’s not just the TV out though, it’s the software libraries, because when I was using the PVR-350’s TV out, it was working just fine. Now I’m getting weird glitches where the sound drops out and the video plays at about 2x. It happens when I convert to MPEG4 as well, so that’s why I’m convinced it’s either the PVR-350 generating buggy MPEGs, or the software decoding it.

But DVD playback is really nice, I haven’t tried any games yet but MAME is definitely going to get installed…

BURDEN _ Roy, born November 15, 1919 in Regina, passed away January 28, 2005 at Crossroads Hospice, Port Moody, finally able to fly again. Roy was predeceased by his daughter Lynne, his grandson Russell Harford and great-grandson Braeden Fairley. He is survived by the love of his life, Virginia, wife of nearly 64 years. Also survived by his daughter Dianne (Ken) Harford, his grandchildren, Megan Jane (Reg), Skye, Bree (Mark) and Alex (Tracy) and five great-grandchildren. Roy proudly served overseas in the RCAF during WWII as a typhoon pilot with those experiences meaning so much to him in the past few years. After retiring from the North Van Post Office Mom and Dad spent winters in California and summers camping and enjoying a second home in Birch Bay blessed with good health. Dad loved to argue and tease, was stubborn often and had a wry sense of humour. Thank you to the staff at Mayfair Manor and his Air Force buddies for all your kindness. A celebration of Dad’s life will be held Monday, February 7th at 2:00 pm at Burkeview Funeral Home, 1340 Dominion Avenue, Port Coquitlam. In lieu of flowers, donations to Crossroads Hospice Society would be appreciated.

I’m going to write more on this later. My grandpa was a character, he like to joke that the second thing his father did when he came home after WWI was to take off his backpack, and that’s why he was born so soon after WWI.