Rolling back to MythDora because of Charlie Brown

Vista Media Center has been great, except for some issues that don't bother others but me:
- It runs on Windows Vista
- I have to do an ugly hack to get guide information for subchannels.

More importantly, it doesn't give me the flexibility to do compression. I'm using a 120 GB drive, and OTA digital TV takes lots of space. BlueRay might be important down the line, but I'm watching on a SD television, I don't have a blue-ray drive, or any movie discs. The fact that I'm using a Media Center remote works out well too, but I think I can get by with it working. Oh, and ` GB of RAM was inadequate at times... watching that circle just go around and around got old. RAM is cheap, but I wasn't ready to get more RAM.

So, the straw that broke the camels back was my mom-in-laws request to record the "Great Pumpkin" episode of Charlie Brown. I accidentally recorded an hour of weather and news, because the guide information for the subchannel of ABC Broadcast Television was the same. (My fault, I should have checked... but I was busy... that's why I built a DVR...)

I hate to take some thing that is working well, and kill it, but hey... I wasn't a real Vista Fan anyway and I want to use this Schedules Direct subscription, and I wanted to run Linux, and Media Portal is still in their nearly-infinite 1.0 release candidate... blah blah.

I'm mostly concerned about getting an Internet connection to the TV. The supposedly-final straw that tipped me over to Vista was support for a wireless G card that I had. I'm going to stick a wireless b card in and see if that works after I install.

T-Mobile Shadow Update

Today, at work, I'm going to work on making my T-Mobile Shadow experience better. In between tasks, and generally filling time as I can, while doing work, of course. So, it is going slow. (I'm starting this post at about 10:00 AM. I've been at it off and on for an hour, inbetween reading training material, reviewing trouble tickets, dodging funny pictures sent to me by my colleagues and such.

For those of you, like my Aunt Staci, who says that I make "boring" posts. This one will probably be boring. Fair warning and all that...

So, music... I've purchased a set of Motorola S9 stereo bluetooth headphones. They're great, and I was going to use them with my Apple PowerBook, but I need Leopard for stereo sound, rather than the simple headset/microphone profile. I'm selling my PowerBook anyway... not specifically for that reason, Mostly because I don't want to pay for the battery upgrade, memory upgrade, and Leopard upgrade, but I digress... The bluetooth headphones work great with the phone, and I'd like to use them when I work out in the mornings before work.

I loaded a few songs from my PowerBook onto the phone, using a memory card that we've bought. They were encoded in AAC (.m4a, like on iTunes/iPod/iPhone) and they worked fine in the Windows Media Player. I haven't ripped all of my CDs, but I wanted to make sure that if for some reason, I go nuts and use Apple as my primary system, that I could use my ripped tracks on the phone. Seems to be fine.

Incidentally, I'm probably going to stick with Windows Media Center and just deal with the OTA subchannel nonsense or maybe go with Media Portal or some other free replacement on our DVR box. It's working very well, and syncing playlists and such seems like it will be great with our phones. Sigh... I've given up freedom for convenience, so I guess I deserve neither. I'll learn my lesson and come crawling later, I'm sure.

I'm also going to try to get my phone updated, and I guess I need to call in to customer service and grab those spare extra capacity batteries that are supposed to be free, but couldn't be sent to customers subscribed for less than thirty days... Sigh.

I'm also going to try to install moBlog, and see if I can try to use my camera phone and post directly to my blog, making some of those life moments more publically available. Maybe then I can justify having this fancy toy, rather than simply saying my wife needs to keep a schedule with her, and I just got one too.

We'll see how it all goes. Good luck to me.

Okay... went to lunch, came back... lunch was just awful, food-wise. My PC is getting re-imaged at 1:30, and I've got training to finish up. moBlog just didn't work right for me. I couldn't get it to work, and I gave up. I do wonder why Wordpress.com has a mobile client for iPhone, and not for Windows Mobile, but there's no real guesswork. Announcing a client on iPhone is bigger news...

I did manage to get the T-Mobile update installed. Avril Lavigne and Dave Matthews Band now emenate from my phone... very nice indeed. There's some better text input stuff too.

I think it is just time to sit down this evening and rip discs on the big box... WMA or MP3?

MythTV Media Center

I finally put a box with MythTV installed next to my TV. It has been a long time coming, but I managed to cobble enough spare time and spare parts together to get something somewhat functioning. I ended up building the box in the spare room upstairs, while running a wired ethernet connection from the loft computer area, and hooking it up to VGA monitor.

Unfortunately, I didn't get a network connection downstairs with the TV working, and sound doesn't come out of the rear audio jack... so, I won't get guide updates, and I have a audio cable coming out of the front... but, it works... it officially works, and my son and I watched part of an episode of Zula Patrol and Marvin the Tap Dancing Horse. Zula Patrol even got commercial flagged, so I could skip with a button.

Here's the particulars:
AMD Athlon BE-2300 CPU
1 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS
120 GB SATA hard drive
2 Hauppauge HVR-120 tuners
DVD+/-RW drive
SilverStone LC03 ATX case

Stuff that I need to fix:

• I need to get a wired connection downstairs, or get a wireless adapter of sufficient speed hooked up to the box. The PCI 802.11G card wasn't detected, and the USB g adapter works, but the root user has to run the Wireless Assistant. Garbage... maybe MythDora will rebuild on Fedora 10 and get some better networking options.


• I need to set up sound to come out of the back. Probably just a setting on the sound. I did notice that the task bar applet said "front". Maybe I'll just stick that Audigy 2 ZS I have in. It is quite ugly at the moment.


• I need to fill the open 5.25 bay with something. When I got the case, there werent' face plates, but hey... it doesn't look too bad, especially since there's a door that covers up the drives when closed.


• Right now, I'm using an Apple Airport Extreme to serve printers, provide wireless, and run Internet to other comptuers. I'd really like to move some or all of that to ClarkConnect, and then get remote access working. Oh, and gigabit ethernet switch... I'll need that too. it might just be time to give up and go with the Apple Time Capsule.


• I'd love to get some more tuners in the box. Two is good, but if I ever connect another frontend-only box running on the HDTV upstairs, or run a frontend on my Linux Desktop machine, I'll want to watch some more stuff. I've got some ideas, but I'd like to see how my OTA situation works out with the set-top amplified rabbit ears. I've got a 4-way splitter attatched now.


• I really am not getting WISH-DT at all. Everything else I care about comes in fine, after positioning the antenna, but that whole UHF/VHF deal pisses me off. Could everyone in town go the same way, please?


• The machine is a bit loud. I have an 80mm fan in the front that just really needs to be replaced. Surprisingly, the two 60mm fans in the back work fine. I might have to replace the fan on the video card too. It could probably go heatsink only. XvMC doesn't work on Linux for 8-series NVIDIA cards anyway, maybe I'll just get a 6-series PCIe card with passive cooling.


• There's a bunch of buttons on my Windows Media Center remote that don't do anything. Programming them is going to be a real pain... Maybe the LIRC improvements in Fedora 10 will make this better. Then again, I imagine upgrading my machine to Fedora 10 instead of using MythDora would be very painful as well.

Right now, this sucks. I'm not opposed to getting windows back on the box, or even dropping the money on a "real" Tivo. It'd be worth it if I had it. For right now though, I'm going to try and ride this out. The seperate backend and multiple front-end functionality, not paying per machine Windows License fees, and more than two tuners and getting sub-channel guide info out weigs convenience right now.

But, hey, other than it being ugly, inconvenient, and loud, it works great! LOL.

FAIL

Geez, I'm failing at computers this week:

• I finally get a new computer at work. The old one was slow, and the support staff were even slower at getting me one that was up to the task for my new work. I manage to get it and start installing the software I need, and my machine won't take the install... Apparently my box needs to be "re-imaged. FAIL.


• I get around to the weekend, and start working on my media center... having missed the first two episodes of Smallville already. Previously, I suspsected that the box I had built with Windows Vista Media Center didn't start up because my daughter thought it would be cool to turn it on and off repeatedly. A bit of diagnostics and grumbling and attempted installations of MythDora and Mythbuntu reveal... my largest 250 GB drive isn't working. I hadn't really prepared a backup strategy. FAIL.


• I replaced it with a 160 GB drive in my "quad box" that I'm not even using. The machine was suspended not off. FAIL. (You should turn your computer off before removing hardware from the insdide.)


• I decided to give Mythbuntu a go ahead of Mythdora, since it has a LiveCD, and I won't need to do anything with a hard drive. But I test it out on a machine with VIA Unichrome graphics... the boot splash works fine, but when it's time to get down to business, the screens all wavy and I can barely make out the icons and text... Sigh. I put it back in the "real" media center box that has an nVidia 8400 GS in it... but the CD I burned it on is from a "flaky" stack of printable CDs. Boot just keeps choking on the media... FAIL


• So, I get Mythdora installed on the VIA Unichrome box... because I don't know if the DVD drive I had in my "main" media center is broken or not. And I can't seem to get it working. Channel Lineup is all FUBAR. I go back to the "quad box" to figure out what's up, and it turns out I have *no* lineups added to my SchedulesDirect account. The webpage kindly tells me that I probably want at least one, and I can only have 4. I've had the account for a month and didn't know. FAIL.


• I finally get around to trying to do my rebate for T-Mobile, since I got those Shadow phones. I needed to have mailed it in by August 31. FAIL.


• Oh, and Mythdora is based on Fedora 8. 10 is a week from beta, and there's no Live CD, so I go post a blog note while this thing is installing, on a machine that has no video output other than VGA. FAIL. At least I can use the monitors I have laying around as a TV.


• Oh, and I finally get around to cleaning up my file space on FastMail... I'm downloading stuff, zipping it up, and putting it on a flash drive. But, the only important thing... I delete it... "employment" folder... resumes, work history, etc... Sigh. I e-mail support for a backup... $25 for a restore per folder.... 7 days.... I want a file... Can't restore... I'm now a "guest" not enough space. FAIL. New resume and dropbox FTW. Then, the genius move... I formatted the flash drive that had the files that I did manage to download... to install World of Warcraft on my PowerBook. EPIC FAIL.


• Wonder what happened to my flash drive... here's my son. LOLCat style:
  
  [caption id="attachment_146" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="All your flash drive are belong to me!"][/caption]

Kiss... Daddy... Cheese

A quick one before I start work, since the training class I was supposed to go to got cancelled (and I bothered to check my messages before I headed over... good thing.)

Anyway, my son bit his tongue yesterday, eating shredded cheese. He asked me to kiss it to make it better. Nasty... He was eating shredded cheese, because he chewed up and spat out the cubed chese he had eaten earlier, but also refused earlier... Julie is a good eater, she ate them all up.

The gym sucked today... I could hardly lift the weights, I just wasn't focused... I was a bit short on time, trying to make sure I got out of there in time to get to this training session at work... only to find out it got cancelled. :( I did speed up the tredmill today though, it was fast enough that it actually recommended that I not use the hand grips to measure heartrate... Yikes, I might be running sooner than I thought.

I weighed myself today, and I actually gained 3 pounds... must be all that muscle I'm putting on... or the two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I shared with the kids on Tuesday, LOL.

I think I'm going to like the Shadow well enough... XT9 predictive text messaging is okay, for not having a full QWERTY layout. The phone doesn't make me look like a nerd, and I think I'll go ahead and get those bluetooth headphones for me and holly to work out with. That might push me over the edge to stick with Vista Media Center on this computer too.

Oh, speaking of which, I found colorcase.com through copious, extended google searching... They have an eBay store that has the Ahanix cases (302, 303, and D4). Then there's the Moneual Store, which basically has the Ahanix MCD303 with a stamp and iMon for $300... uh, no thanks. The colorcase eBay store might work out though. I'd love to get a D4 and a couple of 30x cases... but that really brings me back to the front-end/backend scenario with MythTV. I might just have to do MythTV, and have some sort of music synchronization scheme worked out with the phone, or get back on the freedom pony and get a Cowon iAudio 7 and go with .ogg files... I dunno at this point...