Migration to MythTV 0.21

I decided to upgrade my MythTV setup to version 0.21, the new release. I had taken my MythTV setup off-line last September to wait out the free scheduling shakeout. Turns out the guys of MythTV at Schedules Direct have stayed true to their word and the price of a yearly subscription has dropped to $20 a year and it can support many other DVR platforms. Allowing for an easy exit strategy if I decide there is a better free DVR. Which I haven't. Even though I took a good look at what the competition had to offer before I performed the 0.21 upgrade.

I had a little trouble getting MythTV working with my Time Warner digital cable box using the firewire connection. I was a little skeptical of the advice given in the wiki about MythTV being incompatible with the firewire modules of kernel 2.6.21 or later because of changes to the modules. The proposed solution to this "problem" was to change the makefile for the 2.6.21 or greater source and recompile the modules. After playing around with the firewire off and on over a period of two weeks I found the real source of the problem. The raw1394 and video1394 kernel modules were not being loaded automatically on my Ubuntu box. A quick couple of modprobes later and everything was working fine. Although I find I have to change to channel 1 after changing channels with the cable box remote to get video recording again. I also had to use an external channel changing program instead of the built in one.

I like the new robustness of the firewire connection. I was previously unable to change channels while they were being recorded using the cable remote without crashing MythTV. Now I can check the mythbackend.log file and if I see repeated unable to get video errors I simply change the channel to 1 then back to the previous channel to fix the problem. No stopping and starting MythTV over and over. And no firewire priming scripts! :) I still have my originals but they are definitely unnecessary. In fact I replaced the mythprime program that comes with 0.21 with a simple script the resets the firewire by first unloading and then the reloading the firewire module stack.

I had bought a FreeAgent USB 500GB external drive a while back and had resorted to the never spin-down method of keeping the drive from going off-line forever after spinning down. I had noticed recently that the drive was staring to get louder. But it is not as loud as some other drives I have set to never spin down. I decided to look for a solution to the FreeAgent USB spin-down that didn't involve burning up the drive and making it unreasonably loud. Luckily it had been months since I had looked for a solution and things had improved. I found a perfect and elegant solution here. It reduces the problem to a udev local rule file that sets the allow_restart attribute through the sys file system. Excellent solution! :) I'm impressed! ;)

That completes the upgrade on my MythTV backend. My MythTV backend is not powerful enough to record and display and play at a reasonable frame rate. At least not with the video card on the motherboard the last time I checked. I need to revisit using the backend as an all in one box after performing some tests and potentially adding a more powerful video card or switching to a more powerful machine and giving up on the PCI only small form factor box I'm using. I have a dual processor Pentium 3 motherboard with AGP and a Radeon 9700 that shouldn't have any problems delivering better performance than the Pentium 3 MythTV backend I'm currently using.

I've become extremely sensitive to the volume of noise produced by my computers and DVR. I originaly assumed most of the noise was coming from the fans. Turns out the most egregious sounds were being generated by loud drives that had become loud from never spinning down. My MythTV frontend is a Thinkpad notebook with a slightly loud hard drive.

I replaced the hard drive and use laptop_mode and a 30 second spin-down timer to keep the currently tested as quiet replacement notebook drive from getting as loud as the notebook drive it is replacing. Note to anybody that is reading this: notebook drives are not meant to run continously. They are designed to be spun down many more times that desktop drives. Notebook drives also have a much shorter spinned up life span. I wish I had done my research before I destroyed all those drives over the years! ;

More to come.

Update:

I using one of my Wiimotes as a bluetooth remote and loving it. The Wiimote has easily replaced my completely lame Sony T610 bluetooth phone hack as a remote setup that I was using before the rebuild.

Pipes: Rewire the web

Pipes: Rewire the web

I bet this is why Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo so badly.  Yahoo's web based visual designer is the next step in programming.

Why invent the future using in house "geniuses" when you can just buy the next gen tech from someone who actually knows what they are doing.

I'm sure the first change they will make will be to charge for it and add proprietary extensions destroying it's Javascript only, cross browser, cross platform capabilities.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Solar Power

We are told so much junk about everything we are and how things work and our place in the universe. I found these video podcasts about our stuff and consumerism here:

The Story of Stuff Part 1

The Story of Stuff Part 2

It pretty much lays out the lies about so many things we are told and how most of it ties together. I say buy a farm and be self sufficient.

We are constantly being sold that solar power will never be able to provide the energy needed to repace oil. What a racket! Solar power just doesn't work unless you are Las Vegas and you have a desert with tons of sun and space. Then solar power is a very practical way to generate electricity. Look ma no solar cells. Just mirrors used like magnifying glasses to heat water to run a turbine. You know like you used to use to burn ants and start fires when you were a silly little kid!. What a joke our lives have become that special interests come before common sense.

Check out the solar power here:
http://www.eere.energy.gov/news/daily.cfm/hp_news_id=102

They call it solar power concentrating.

Here's the results of using solar panels:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellis_Solar_Power_Plant

Solar panels are much more expensive than just converting that heat into energy. It looks like it is also producing more power, using less space, and doesn't require expensive equipment.

Let's see.

Solar Concentration:
$3 million to generate 64 mega-watts at a cost in pennies per a kilo-watt hour.

Solar Panels
$100 million to generate 15 mega-watts at a cost of 2 dollars and change per a kilo-watt hour.

Guess what. The department of defense created the solar concentration power plant as research. While the Solar panel power plant was created for a military base.

I like this article:
http://www.palmbeachdailynews.com/biz/content/business/SOLARUPDATE1213.html
177 mega-watts in one square mile. They call the technology solar thermal.

This is just crazy talk:
Jimmy Stewart & Jean Arthur on Solar Power in You Can't Take it With You


End Diatribe.

Here's some solar resources I found while researching this post. I might play around with one of the kits.

http://del.icio.us/danplawson/solar