Things are always changing and some surprising shots can make it to the top sometimes.  Here are my top 20 shots on flickr by views:

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.

I think that the single largest source of mirth at the Thanksgiving dinner was Dan’s xkcd tshirt.  Dan and I were the only ones who knew what this meant.  Dave was the only other person capable of grasping it.  Everyone else kept asking Dan to explain the shirt over and over.  No matter how many ways he tried to do it, the response was always “I don’t get it”.  Later on the response was a sarcastic “OK”.  Later on in the evening/night everyone was sudo ordering people to do things even though they had no idea what that meant.  The person who was ordered to do something would invariably answer “OK!”  IT was hilarious and maddening at the same time.

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.

from the brilliant mind over at xkcd who captured exactly how I feel when I’m apart from my better half:

Since I don’t have any animation needing to be rendered for a few months, I decided it was a great time to upgrade Dr Queue to the latest version.  I’d heard that a lot of improvements had been added since version 0.60.  So let’s see how the upgrade process goes:

On Mario, my Fedora 8 machine, I had to install scons first as it’s now used to buld dr queue.  I also had to build it on my FreeBSD machines, starting with KingKoopa, the render master.  This also required python to be installed.  For Mario, it was very easy, I just ran the install script and it wrote over the old stuff and appears to work.  I’ll probably need to copy the new directories over to the common hard drive.  Peach and BulletBill already had python installed so they didn’t need scons installed.

In order to get my title bars back, all I had to do was run compiz-fusion in the terminal. To get it to persist I had to do SYSTEM–>Preferences–>Personal–>Sessions. Click on add, name it whatever and the command should be compiz-manager and to get all the awesome plugins you’ve been seeing since the merge with Beryl, just download ccsm. If you have any problems, check out this linuxquestions.org forum, that’s how I figured it out.

I had to uninstall a few more multimedia packages, but it eventually upgraded. After rebooting I arrived at GDM just fine - yay! I’m not sure if it’s just me, but the bootup time on Fedora 8 seems to a A LOT faster than it was in Fedora 7. I feel like I got to GDM a lot faster.

Compiz is working and so is dual screen - so far this live upgrade has been better than any of my DVD/CD upgrades. Due to either updates in Compiz or in Gnome or in Fedora’s changes to Gnome, I finally have something I’ve wanted since Fedora Core 6 - on the desktop switcher, when using Compiz, it would not show the dividers between the desktops. Now it does show the dividers, making for a better experience. It’s easier to click on the exact desktop I want. Then again, at least on this first boot, I seem to be missing the top-most bar on my program - where the max, min and close program button are. Not surprisingly, there are no updates to install.

Mario is my main Linux box. I had to uninstall x264 this comes from the fact that I mixed livna and freshrpms. I never intended to do so, but I started with freshrpms back in the day, but nowadays I use livna for my graphics card. That plus freshrpms relative lack of updates compared to livna means that it’s slowly sliding off my computer. The only bad thing is that livna does not carry binaries for Cinelerra. I’ll have to investigate what I should do there. So far, for dependency errors I’ve had to remove: