You know the best thing about cheap, yet wonderfully utilitarian parts? They're cheap and you get a lot of use out of them.

You know the worst thing about cheap, yet wonderfully utilitarian parts? They're cheap and you tend to forget the importance of remembering where you put them.

The MythTV box that I used to have downstairs in the living room used an RS232 IR blaster for the remote control interface. This was great, because I could use one remote control to handle the TV, DVD Player, and the MythTV box. I was using an old Comcast digital cable box remote, because it could control multiple devices and with the help of lirc and irw I was able to capture the codes for controlling a cable box and simply using those to control MythTV. Pretty much the same features as a DVR - up, down, right, left, chan+, chan-, vol+, vol-, menu and select.

Then it was time to upgrade. I upgraded my best MythTV box in the house with a shiny new AMD Athlon64 x2 dual core processor and moved the still-quite-nice Athlon 2800+ system down to the living room. The old living room machine was scavenged for parts and became my wife's new desktop - she finally let me upgrade her from that Dell PIII-750 that she'd been using. Anyway, as is the case with many manufacturers, MSI had assumed that nobody really used RS232 ports anymore, so they didn't put one in the MSI MEGA 180. Ouch. I moved my Firefly USB remote downstairs and figured that would be good enough.

Boy was I wrong. The Firefly is RF only, so there's no way to tell it how to turn off the television. WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) of the MythTV box went steadily downhill. So then I started researching remote control interfaces so that I could try to get a replacement. USB IR receivers cost in the neighborhood of $35-$40, which I thought was just outrageous. Not only that, it wasn't so easy to find them. Then I found the DVICO Fusion MCE Remote for $19 with the USB IR Receiver - I thought I was golden at that point.

Oops.

Even though the DVICO Fusion MCE Remote has a "power" button, it's not programmable. Even though the remote uses IR, the receiver apparently doesn't talk to regular IR remotes. I fear that it may be using IRDA, which a regular remote simply won't do. *sigh*

Then I found a guy in Hong Kong selling USB->RS232 converters on eBay for $.99 each with $3.99 shipping. Ok, fine, I'll buy 4, especially since the retail outlets want $20-$30 each for the things. Finally the converter arrived yesterday and I got it recognized under Linux. All I have to do now is plug in the RS232 IR receiver and load the configuration file!

Now where did I put that cable...? Yep, in this quest to find a usable IR setup for the downstairs MythTV box I managed to lose the receiver. At this point I guess I'll go ahead and order two so that I can also have one for the upstairs PC, but yet again I'm having to wait for a new part. Ugh.

Everybody seems to be focusing on the Logitech Harmony remotes since they'll talk to pretty much everything, but I don't have $250 to spend on a remote (the top of the line) these days. Even the low end models still bring in $60 each on eBay. Just out of my price range.

Machine information
This machine's load average:

* 1 Minute: 0.4
* 5 Minutes: 0.33
* 15 Minutes: 0.52

Disk Usage:

* Directory: mediaroom:/myth/tv
o MythTV Drive #0
o Total Space: 439,418 MB
o Space Used: 88,749 MB
o Space Free: 350,669 MB
* Directory: rohan:/media2/myth/tv
o MythTV Drive #1
o Total Space: 190,743 MB
o Space Used: 99,523 MB
o Space Free: 91,220 MB
* Directory: rohan:/myth/tv
o MythTV Drive #2
o Total Space: 50,560 MB
o Space Used: 2,249 MB
o Space Free: 48,310 MB
* Directory: livingroom:/myth/tv
o MythTV Drive #3
o Total Space: 50,543 MB
o Space Used: 34,530 MB
o Space Free: 16,012 MB
* Total Disk Space:
o Total Space: 731,266 MB
o Space Used: 225,053 MB
o Space Free: 506,212 MB


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Saturday night I cursed up a storm as the 250GB drive I had in my mediaroom MythTV box went belly up. Then on Sunday I looked at the sale ads in the paper and saw that Best Buy had a 500 GB SATA-II drive for $149. Now once I get my 250GB drive replaced (it's still under warranty) I'll have 1 TB available for recordings!

One may ask why I would need that much space unless I was pirating movies. One look at the 500+ real DVDs in my office and the 'pirate' part of that question goes away. Anyway, simply put, my son loves Sesame Street, and therefore, we love Sesame Street. Soon that will grow to another show, and another, but for now it's a good thing to have. Right now I've got about 20 of his favorite episodes saved, but still, that's not that much space. However, take the number of hours in a weeknight that we're home - roughly 4. Now subtract out the time spent feeding him, cooking dinner, and feeding ourselves - we'll call that 1.5 hours. That gives us 2.5 hours left to watch tv - but wait, he's in the room with us and even if he's playing, as responsible parents (yeah, right) we can't put on that episode of CSI that was recorded the other night... So we watch Sesame Street until he's ready to go to bed.

Right now we're back in the thick of shows starting back up after the winter break, so I'm recording a lot more than I have time to watch. The shows that I really like (Heroes, Jericho, Las Vegas, etc) get recorded in HDTV, which is up to 8 GB per hour. SDTV is about 2 GB per hour. Yes, I know, I could have it automatically transcode to a more compact file, but that takes so much time to do.

So it all comes down to this - Sesame Street.

I made some corrections to some problems that I found while giving my presentation on Friday and have posted the file online here.

I have decided that we need more technical content during the Nashville 2600 Organization meetings - rather than just the social gathering and the logistical meetings for PhreakNIC. So, in putting my money where my mouth is, I'm starting off with the first one. This Friday I'll be giving a presentation on using digital certificates (PKI) in a practical manner. I'll show getting a CACert client certificate added into Thunderbird for email; generating a certificate signing request and getting it signed by CACert for apache; and finally setting up OpenVPN using a pfSense firewall. A lot of what I do should be pretty easily translated to other similar systems - for instance, Outlook can easily use the same certificate that Thunderbird does. Anyway, I look forward to giving the presentation on Friday.

In case you're not a regular, Nashville 2600 meets the first Friday of each month at JJ's Market, 1912 Broadway, Nashville, TN, beginning at 6 PM and usually last about an hour. The meetings are open to anyone that isn't disruptive.

Yeah, yeah, I know... I haven't bothered to update this in a while, but now that the holidays are over I no longer have an excuse of being too involved in preparations for them.

I had a great "Craftsman Christmas", if you know what I mean. I loves me some tools from Sears. My wife's family bought me a really nice socket set, an extra set of deep-well metric and english sockets, and a ratcheting wrench set. My parents got me a really nice nutdriver set in a handy carrying case. Between this year and last year I'm getting enough stuff to really fill out that tool box!

This was the first year that my son could really get into Christmas, though he's still not quite old enough to get super excited about it. He did enjoy ripping the paper off of presents this year, and definitely enjoyed playing with his toys, but there were so many that he got overstimulated and we had to spread the gift openings across several days. Right now he's loving his little synthesizer keyboard more than anything. Every time we go over to my parents' house he immediately waddles his way over to the organ and makes granny give him another music lesson.

Last week my son turned one year old, so we had to have a party. I'm pretty sure that the look on his face is similar to a crack head after getting his fix.

I'm simply gobsmacked by this notion:

A confidential analysis of Internet search queries and a random sample of Web pages taken from Google and Micrsoft's giant Internet indexes showed that only about 1 percent of all Web pages contain sexually explicit material.
San Jose Mercury News

I suppose that the internet is for big business. Perhaps this is some crazy way of trying to garner support for the FCC to allow ISP's to create a tiered internet.

My Dream'eo PVP E320 combination portable media player / GPS device arrived today, so of course I had to immediately grab it when I got home and go play with it. My initial review? It cost $199, so it would have to go really wrong for me to say that it sucks. Just like with any device, though, there's good and bad.

1. It's a Chinese made product from a European company. If you need instruction manuals to make something work, this isn't for you.
2. There's no status screen for the GPS like on my Garmin Rhino 120, so you don't know if you've acquired a decent signal or not.
3. It cost me $199
4. The GPS unit is a CF card sticking out of the top, which is both a plus and a minus. The plus is that it's a very well reviewed unit and has a 10' antenna extension so that you don't have to mount the unit in the windshield. However, it does stick out a bit, so it's not the most aesthetically pleasing design. The GPS on this seems to be a bit more accurate than my Rhino 120 in terms of where I am in relation to the interstate. The Dream'eo has US/Canada road maps loaded but the Rhino only has major roads, but it sometimes puts my house on the wrong side of the interstate.
5. The video player doesn't downscale! If your video is higher resolution than 352x240 it simply won't play. That does kinda suck.
6. MP3's play perfectly fine as long as they're encoded at 192kbps or less, which all of mine are.
7. This thing looks to be totally hackable. 400 Mhz proc with 32MB of RAM and a 20GB hard drive. I wonder if I can put a bigger drive in it without the BIOS freaking out. May have to borrow someone's spare drive (Mirage) and try that.
8. Braindead designers supply you with a stylus for the touchscreen, but no slot to slide it into.
9. Transfer speed over USB 2.0 is nice and swift, unlike some devices I've seen that are "compatible" but nowhere near the top speed.
10. Just because I needed 10 things. The fact that this came with all of the car mounting accessories rocks.

All in all I give the PVP E320 a "good buy" rating for the price of $199. Maybe even up to $250. Anything over that price, though, and I'd start shopping more on features.

Day care. Ah, the wonders of having someone to take care of your child while you go off to earn a living, allowing you to provide the best of things for your family. The joy of knowing that your child will learn vital social skills so that he or she can interact with society in a rational manner. The ecstasy of knowing that by the time your child makes it to kindergarten, they will have experienced every virus known to man.
This Saturday my son was out and about with us and we noticed that he didn't have much of an appetite. Little did we know that was the precursor to his interpretation of Linda Blair in The Exorcist. All over the car seat. All over Mommy. All over Daddy. Sunday was spent in Daddy's lap while I and my wife watched the clock and how much Pedialyte we could get him to keep down, hoping we could keep him hydrated enough to stay out of the emergency room. By Sunday night he was drinking a bottle again, so we thought all was well.
Monday my wife and I both went to work and by lunch time had that feeling of nausea. We coordinated our route home so that she picked up our son and I stopped off at the store for a giant sized bottle of Pepto-Bismol, because we both knew what was coming next. Over the next 24 hours of toilet hugging and sitting, I lost a total of 7.5 pounds and my wife lost 5. Now I know what Nicole Richie secretly goes through after ever meal, only I experienced a month's worth in a single day.

I went to Tang Soo Do class last night and today I feel like I was run over by a Mack truck. We worked a bit on take-downs and some sparring, but did I get matched up with someone else of similar skill? No, I got to spar with the highest ranking instructor in the dojang. Actually, I usually pretty good until I hear the instructors call out "ea-dan", which means "jump". It's one thing to be able to maintain your center of gravity and lift up a leg to do a kick when you weigh over 300 lbs. It's a completely different situation once you start trying to add flight to the mix. So today my left leg is definitely letting me know that it's still there. I guess I'll have to go grab a knee brace to start wearing.
I also found out last night that the do jang is going back to "old school," meaning that the beginner class will truly be just beginner material. Even though the majority of the people showing up have been green belt or higher, the content will strictly be what you would learn as a white or purple belt. I like that in that it will give me a chance to focus on the stuff I have to catch up on, but on the other hand I'll have to start doing the later class to learn the material I'll need to advance. Master Rose placed me as 4th Gup, meaning that the first test I take in Tang Soo Do will be for red belt. That's actually closer to red than where I had gotten with Tae Kwon Do, but there was a whole other belt in that style - white, yellow, green, blue, red, black as opposed to Tang Soo Do's white, purple, green, red, black.
Oh, I found a good link to the Korean vocabulary here.