Written Friday, 2 May 2008

Today I decided to upgrade my Mythdora to the latest verison, 5.0. I downloaded the CD media and booted into the install. I had to do a text install to be able to watch it on my TV. Then I just needed to yum install the kmod-nvidia drivers. (Although, first I had to uninstall the previous nvidia drivers - they were neither automatically upgraded nor uninstalled) I started at about 1930 and was able to be completely up and running by 2055, just in time so that I didn’t have to missmy 2100 recording of “Best Week Ever”.

One of the new features of Gnome 2.22 is the fact that Totem now has a plugin to access your MythTV programs. I installed the plugin and found myself wondering what to do next. I checked on Google for totem mythtv and didn’t find anything until today when Google finally got around to indexing a forum post about it on the Ubuntu Forums. I followed the directions about editing Gconf and had success!

Joost recently (within the last couple of weeks) came out of Invitation-only beta.  It’s a program developed by the same people who brought you Kazaa and Skype.  Like those programs it also harnesses the power of peer to peer (P2P) technology.  (Another reason for advocating net neutrality!)  Joost is meant to replace cable TV and provide the viewer with programs on demand.  There are a lot of other people trying to work on the same goals, but a key difference is that Joost actually has deal with content providers to legitimately provide content.  Both The National Geographic Channel and Viacom Channels are available.

Recently, a coworker of mine showed me the website Hello Kitty Hell.  This is a website created by someone who’s wife sells Hello Kitty items.  If there is a young girl or, occasionally, woman in your life who is into the Hello Kitty Phenomenon, you doubtless know how much crap there is that can be branded with Hello Kitty and her various companions.  Well, you probably haven’t seen many of THESE products.  These are, as far as I know, REAL Hello Kitty items and all of them were featured on the Hello Kitty Hell website.

As you’ve no doubt heard, the US will be discontinuing Analog TV transmission in February 2009. They’ve actually already auctioned off the analog spectrum (and I’m not too happy about who ended up buying it, but that’s for another post). So, if you have cable TV you don’t need to worry about this and if you have satellite TV and you get local channels via satellite, you also don’t need to worry. If you currently get the nice, free, over the air (OTA) channels, then you need to worry - unless you have a new HDTV. But, for some reason, I don’t see the HDTV crowd overlapping with the OTA crowd. If you bought an HDTV, I assume it was to watch your cable or satellite provider’s HD sports package or HD HBO or HD Discovery Channel (which is beautiful, by the way). So you probably need a converter box.

On Hardball on MSNBC they were talking about Barack Obama’s poor bowling performance during his campaigning in Pennsylvania.  One of their political commentators quipped, “Perhaps he should have stuck to shooting hoops.”  I absolutely couldn’t believe they would say something like that on the news.  And it wasn’t some random yahoo, it was someone that I’ve seen on MSNBC making political commentary in the past.  If it matters in how you think of this, this commentator was white.

Today I was reading an article about protecting kids from seeing bad things on the Internet. The author pointed out that there’s bad enough stuff on Conservative Fox News and pointed to this link.

Well, almost.  I got everything installed and configured for the remote to work.  However, there are currently some buttons that don’t do anything - so I need to go into the config and get those buttons to do something.  There are definitely some things that I need to program into the remove to get full functionality out of it.  However, it’s pretty much done.  If Danielle were to pick up the remote tomorrow, I think it would be self-explanatory how she would begin to watch live tv.

Well, I’ve have my MythTv box for about 24 hours now.  I have figured out everything that was bugging me about the system except for the remote control.  I hear this may require some compiling on my end.  Not something I’m fond of, but I’ve done it before, so it shouldn’t be too bad.

So I went from not knowing what to record last night to now having 16 programs to record over the next two weeks.  I’m not too worried about filling the drive because I can hold approximately 250 hours of programming before the hard drive gets full.  Most of these episodes are things I would probably only watch once anyway, so I’ll probably be deleting them once I watch them.

I’ve wanted one for quite a few years now.  I’ve really wanted one since I got my Jetway MiniQ case about 2 years ago - almost to the day.  Now I finally got all the necessary parts today and put it together.  If Jetway was still selling the MiniQ (it’s discontinued) I would DEFINITELY recommend AGAINST using them for a MythTV setup.  The Hauppauge PVR-500 just barely fit in there.  In fact, I had to move a badly placed capacitor slightly out of the way to fit the card in.  I also had to remove the DVD burner (temp for the installation) and unplug the hard drive.  But I finally got it up and running.