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:

“She’s going to be a slutty eight ball for Halloween?” - Me, hearing my wife incorrectly

Posted over on Blender artist s and told them about the problems I was having with Indigo and getting it to render Suzanne as glass. It turned out that I had two things wrong. One: I needed to set the gain to 2 instead of the standard 100. Apparently this controls the transparency level. Two: I needed to set the absorption color as it didn’t transfer over from Blender. In fact, a quick look on the Indigo forums showed that the materials don’t export over well without some work. Here’s the final result after 28 hours:

The word irreverent is tossed around way too flippantly these days, however, if there’s one site that deserves it, it’s ZeroPunctuation. ZeroPunctuation is a site where a British guy living in Australia reviews video games within a video format weekly. He often makes fun of games and the genres they belong in. The animation is extremely simple, yet remarkably effective. It’s slightly more than xkcd, but not much more than stick figures. The way he does this is brilliant and it must be seen in order to explain it correctly. Just one warning, if you get queasy over profanity, do NOT visit his site.

For nearly a year now, I’ve seen a lot of really great images in the blender gallery. Many of the most breathtaking images are rendered with outside renderers like Yafray or Indigo. Here’s an example of a subtle, but real-looking render made with Indigo.

I already tried Yafray before, and didn’t really like it too much. I decided to give Indigo a shot. So I went to the Indigo website and followed their directions for rendering with Indigo from Blender. The tutorial shows it as coming out like this: