Made by Mikal – Page 110

On freely available guide data

Post author:mikal
Post published:April 18, 2006
Post category:Mythtv

One of the flaws with Microsoft's Media Center flavour of Windows XP when it was released in Australia, was that it suffered from the same inherent flaw as every other PVR option in Australia. No guide data. It really says something about Australia's television networks that they don't want to help people with even vaguely modern computing setups watch their content -- it's a situation which reminds me a lot of the RIAA's stand over tactics, and I think it's equally doomed. That's one of the joys of my MythTV setup in the US -- the guide data is trivially available in return for doing a simple four or five question survey every three months or so. What could be easier than that? Well, when I was using a TiVo in Australia the OzTiVo folk had a solution to these problems, and were working with the XMLTV / MythTV people to make it more generic. I hadn't been paying much attention to it until today when I was randomly surfing on the topic, but it's interesting to see that they also now provide instructions for how to import their guide data into a Windows Media Center PC. It's cool to…

clusterssh

Post author:mikal
Post published:April 12, 2006
Post category:Clusterssh

For reasons which might be fairly obvious, I've been doing a lot of repetitive sshing to machines recently (think executing the same upgrade on four mail servers for instance). I pondered aloud in the cube the possibility of an application which would give me a dialog to type in, and then wack that text into a bunch of xterms all at the same time for me. Andrew did some Debian foo and suddenly cluster ssh is presented as an option. It's pretty cool, and basically does exactly what I wanted. It's not perfect though -- some people have complained that it uses gnome-terminal, and about the fonts of all things. I've noticed some odd behaviour if you try to cut and paste into the gnome-terminal as well (instead of the text entry dialog). Interesting, I think it might be time for me and the cluster ssh code to become acquainted sometime.

MythTV frontend on an xbox

Post author:mikal
Post published:April 12, 2006
Post category:Mythtv

Surprisingly easy. Xebian, and pre-compiled packages make me smile. Time spent building the whole thing -- about an hour. Children now quiet after Australian DVD player broke in the US -- two.

Off line versions of the color images from the book

Post author:mikal
Post published:April 6, 2006
Post category:Imagemagick

There are now off line versions of the color images available. There is a zip version and a tarball version.

Apparently I regulate

Post author:mikal
Post published:April 5, 2006
Post category:Travel

Someone in the office complimented me on "regulating" today. It turns out that's crazy American speak for laying down the law.

A simple tutorial on creating firefox extensions

Post author:mikal
Post published:March 27, 2006
Post category:Link

An interesting tutorial on creating Firefox extensions. Nice.

Compiling MythTV 0.19 for Ubuntu Dapper

Post author:mikal
Post published:March 27, 2006
Post category:Mythtv

I've been finding that MythTV is really unreliable after dist-upgrading from Breezy to Dapper. In fact, it's been crashing six or seven times a day, which has been really annoying. I figured I though therefore bight the bullet and upgrade to the latest stable version of MythTV. I was previously running a SVN snapshot because it fixed a couple of bugs I was having when I first installed Myth. Installation was pretty easy. First, grab the one or two libraries you're missing and that the configure script doesn't necessarily detect the dependency for properly: sudo apt-get install mesa-common-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libglu1-mesa-dev \ libqt3-mt-dev libqt4-dev mesa-common-dev qt3-apps-dev libglu1-mesa fftw3 \ fftw3-dev libsdl1.2-dev festival festival-dev libdvdread3 libdvdread3-dev And then the usual configure, make, make install in the mythtv and mythplugins directories.

Wanted: a rear wheel bike computer

Post author:mikal
Post published:March 27, 2006
Post category:Bike

Catherine picked up a fluid based resistance trainer for her bike today. Because the front wheel doesn't move when she rides on this thing, she also needs a bike computer which can be mounted on the rear wheel. Suggestions?

Don’t try getting Delonghi blender parts in the US

Post author:mikal
Post published:March 26, 2006
Post category:Travel

I've given up after calling four places. All I want is a blade for my Delonghi blender, and it seems that no one in this country sells them. When I asked the people I called for a suggestion of someone who might sell the part, they were quite confused. I suspect I'll be off to Frys to buy a new blender soon. Meh. All I want is a Margarita. Is that too much to ask?

Modified bike commute down L’avineda Street

Post author:mikal
Post published:March 23, 2006
Post category:Bike

I tweaked the bike commute this morning, and in return for spending the same amount of time on roads as before (but much busier roads), I pretty much cut the commute in half. It's a bit of a shame really, because it no longer feels like a real ride because it's too short. Now I need to decide if I go the long way or the short way.