AlexH

Jim Carrey’s appearance on Conan O’Brien has to be one of the funniest late night shows I have ever seen.  The two of them were bouncing back and forth and it just got better after every joke.  Normally I find Jim Carrey annoying (Fire Marshall Bill) but this time he didn’t just depend on his rubber face to get the laughs.  He was on to promote Fun with Dick and Jane, which looks like a pretty good movie.  I think a lot of people will end up seeing it when they can’t get in to King Kong, but they’ll end up enjoying it.

And then, just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, Isaac Hayes is the musical guest, and he does a ‘Shaft’ tribute to Conan.  The Max Weinburg 7 played with the band, and you could tell that they were having a great time with the music.

I just realized that I had a broken file that I was pointing to when I was talking about getting my Pundit-R’s ATI IXP9100 TV out working in Linux for my MythTV box.

The correct link is here: xorg.conf

Please note that this is for NTSC.

You also need to make changes to your bios: Go to Advanced->Chipset->Northbridge and choose TV only for your output. When rebooting, you should get the text on the TV, and it should also stay on the TV output when X starts.

While I was sick, I had an interesting entanglement of nuclear and quantum mechanics related topics.

First was Fat Man and Little Boy, a movie starring Paul Newman, about the Manhattan Project, the creation of the United States atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This was a really interesting movie, although not a Hollywood blockbuster. Science geeks would definitely enjoy it, as it dramatizes Robert Oppenheimer and the other scientists’ roles in building the bomb. John Cusack plays Michael Merriman, who is a ficticious character. SPOILER WARNING: He dies as a result of an experiment where two plutonium cores accidentally touch, going critical, and he knocks them apart using his bare hands. I knew that an accident like this had occurred, and I had always assumed that it was before the bombs were dropped in Japan, but apparently it happened in 1946, and was declassified in 1985. Although the movie’s writers changed the timeline, it is still a sad story.

The next piece of the puzzle is Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, made in 1964, directed by Stanley Kubrick. This is a spoof movie, but when it came out in the 60’s, it must have caused quite a stir. It makes the US President, the Russian premier, and the entire US military look like fools. And Peter Sellers does an amazing job in his many roles. I need to watch more Pink Panther.

The final entangled thread is Entanglement: The Greatest Mystery in Physics which is a summary of quantum mechanics for the layman. It was very interesting, and I was surprised to read about the same people that were involved in the Manhattan Project on the same day that I watched them in a movie. The part that I found most interesting was that even though Einstein contributed so much to the field of relativity and quantum mechanics, he was completely wrong about entanglement!

Not many posts on my blog lately, first I got sick with the flu (which I’m sure I picked up from someone at the gym), then a week later I caught a cold. Missed 4 days of work over a 2 week period. Ouch. Good thing I had a lot of sick days saved up.

I’ve found an interesting occurence with my MythTV box. When I first put it together, shows were coming in fast and furious and I struggled to keep up with all of them. I felt bad when they expired without me watching them. Especially the movies/special. I was particularly mad when the A&E special on Eisenhower/D-Day got deleted.

Since I was sick, I got caught up on a lot of the shows. I watched Fat Man and Little Boy, Dr. Strangelove, a ton of CSI episodes, and some Law and Order.

And of course I was able to keep up with Conan, Leno, and the Daily Show.

So now I’ve reached an equilibrium with my shows, and the drive space is steady at about 100GB free/133gb total. It seems like the shows being recorded are coming in at a slower rate as well, to I’ll feel less pressure to keep up with the shows.

I would still like to expand the disk space in this machine, probably with a quad bay firewire enclosure, and starting with a single 200GB drive inside. Ideally I’d be able to store every single CSI, Simpsons, Futurama, and Family Guy episode, just in case.

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…

The first try for a decent mythtv setup:

• Barebones system: Soltek QBic
• Capture card: Hauppauge PVR

Add some ram, DVD burner, hard drive and I’ll be set.

There is a great resource called EpiaWiki that has all the details on using Linux on an EPIA based system.

I’m also thinking that this Hauppauge stand-alone unit would be a great frontend with this firmware.

I’ve been bitten by the MythTv bug.

It’s a really cool idea that was inspired by Tivo, but it’s grown way beyond that. You put together a computer with a video-capture card, TV output, big hard drive, and give it a net connection. You let it know which shows you want to download, and it saves them to your hard drive. You can use it to watch and pause live tv as well.

It’s been getting lots of press lately.