Dead Roomba battery
My Roomba's battery is dead. Am I brave enough to make my own new one? Probably not, but I'll make a note of the howto, so I can go it next time.
Noisy neighbours at Central Park in Mountain View
Its 5am my time, and I've been awake since 3am. Not from choice though -- its the downstairs neighbours waking us up yet again. They're shift workers you see, and must either sleep with construction hearing protection on, or be deaf. Either way, they seem to think its ok to stand outside our apartment at shout at each other at 2am, or slam doors at all hours, or listen to music so loud it vibrates stuff in our apartment basically all night. We've asked them nicely to turn it down (we used to get on quite well with them at first). We've asked the complex to please do something. We even rung the complex security folk when its happening, and asked for some peace. Its really done nothing to help -- they perhaps turn the music down for 30 minutes until security leaves, and then turn it right back on again. So, we've run out of ideas, apart from ending the lease early (which will cost an unknown amount of money), and moving somewhere else. We're so serious about doing that that I have started looking around Craigslist already. Perhaps the floor between apartments is too thin, because the bathroom…
Illegal download sites for the MythTV book
In the last week, I have discovered three download sites offering illegal downloads of the MythTV book e-book. If I can find three without really trying, I assume there are a lot more of them out there. This raises a question for which I don't have a good answer. Do illegal downloads of books increase, or decrease sales? I can see arguments either way, but I'm tending towards the belief that they don't increase sales. Does anyone out there have any data which isn't merely anecdotal? Want to share it?
MythNetTV release 2
This release has bug fixes (including code from "nickca" for FLV support), and some new minor features. Enjoy! Started working harder to ensure video filenames are unique once imported into MythTV, I now prepend video files with epoch seconds at time of import DIVX (not divx) doesn't need transcode, added. Check for the existence of the video directory, and return an error if it needs creating. Handle storage groups, check for the existence of the data directory Updated docs Complained about the poor state of SWF support WMV support FLV support Get it here if you care: http://www.stillhq.com/mythtv/mythnettv/
Schedules direct is live!
Ok, for those of us in the US, we'll be glad to know that Schedules Direct is now live with two weeks to spare. It seems that the easiest way to perform the upgrade is to upgrade to 0.20.2, and then change the configuration to use SD instead of Zap2IT. Note that I haven't done it myself yet, but that there are instructions on the MythTV wiki.
I feel like this engineer
I am currently transporting a bounty that has been frozen in carbonite with a device you created. I have been told to direct any questions or comments I might have your way. The Inbox Of Nardo Pace, The Empire's Worst Engineer (via Good Gord).
Guide data update
Its been a while since I have commented on the state of US guide data for MythTV here. That's mainly been because I have been waiting for the situation to become more clear. At this stage there are some interesting things to report: zap2it shutdown is still slated for September 1, 2007 MythTV developers, and others, have teamed together to form Schedules Direct as a replacement There are forums for Schedules Direct discussion Schedules Direct will be charging around $5 US a month, at least initially The first 100 beta testers have been added, and bugs found Code has been added to the development version of MythTV to start handling Schedules Direct (although you are not forced to upgrade to use the new guide data source)
Video and slides from the Google talk
I'm a little slow at posting this, because I've been really busy. Google had the video of the MythTV talk online a day after the talk, which was nice. I haven't watched it myself, but hopefully it turned out ok. The talk got a little exciting when I had to reboot one of the machines mid talk because it wasn't seated in its dock properly. Such is life I suppose. Here are the slides for the talk. Hopefully they'll help someone.
Google book search
I just noticed that the ImageMagick book appears in Google book search. I'm pleased.
MythTV talk at Google
I'm giving a MythTV talk at Google in the next week (although I can't find it on the events calendar at the moment, I'll update this post when I do) so I've been playing with MythTV 0.21 a little more than I have in the past. Its pretty cool. I'm still writing the talk, so I don't know 100% what it will cover, but I'm thinking it would be good to include some of the stuff from 0.21 as a teaser. Storage groups, the flash player in MythWeb, and the tweaks to the theme system seem like good things to include. Does anyone have other things they think are really cool in 0.21? Oh, and I'll have to cover guide data for the US, so it might be time to catch up with my MythTV email backlog once again. Hopefully in you live near Silicon Valley you can come along to the talk and we can chat afterwards. Update: I found a Google blog post with the details. To quote the most important information: Like all sessions of the Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series, Michael's presentation will be open to the public. Doors open at 6:30 PM at…