03.27.06
Did the Sopranos take a 2 year vacation to Hawaii?
I swear the writers have been watching too much Lost lately.
-ajb
03.24.06
Does that seem a lot for a rainbarrel?
I mean, $135? $150 if you want the cool extra tap.
Granted, they look solidly built, and would do the job, but still.
Especially, since I have 5 downspouts, which would equal $675 for a full set of the cheap ones.
I don’t know exactly how big my roof is, but some BOTE calculations suggest an inch of rain would produce 900 gallons of water (1 inch per 1000 sq. ft. equals 600 gallons), divided amongst 5 downspouts is 180 gallons per barrel per inch. Seems like they’re gonna overflow on a pretty regular basis up here in the PNW.
I suppose I could make my own, but the’d likely not be as polished.
Gotta think about this.
-ajb
03.14.06
The Sopranos
Did anyone spend the first half of the season premiere saying “Who are all these people”?
I’m going to have to dig out Season 5 just to refresh my memory.
A lot has changed in 2 years, the product placement was a lot more blatant than I remember it being. Who the fark goes to Stewarts for lunch? That’s sure as hell not going to impress a mob boss.
-ajb
03.12.06
That went…poorly
(It helps if you use a Knight-of-the-Holy-Grail-in-the-Last-Crusade voice for the title of this post.)
Resurrecting the myth box was the plan for this evening. Here follows the much abbreviated version of tonight’s festivities…
The temporary myth box was using my regular workstation (gobo) during the Olympics. Obviously that situation wouldn’t work on a permanent basis, hence the switching.
The plan was to move XP from gobo to the tower formerly known as sprocket.
Since gobo is a desktop, I figured it’d fit better into the entertainment cabinet.
First step was to remove the HD from gobo and transplant it into sprocket(well, the second step, the first step was to remove all the video drivers and such from XP so it doesn’t have a screaming fit when it wakes up in a new body). With that accomplished, I boot up sprocket and…nothing. Finds the HD, finds the boot sector and…nothing.
Well, Sh…crap.
Poke around in the bios a bit, find nothing obviously wrong.
OK, plan B, transfer the myth installation into sprocket. This means getting a new CPU fan for sprocket, ’cause the existing one is..well, loud and that’s not going to fly in the living room.
So, we pull out the HD, put it back into gobo, and move the myth HD into sprocket.
The good news is that sprocket boots right up into myth.
Gobo, on the other hand, gets the old “can’t find NTLOADER”.
Well, we’ll fix that later…
Back to sprocket. Put in the nvidia TV out card, boot it up and…yay, the output is still on the integrated video…into the bios, wiggle the settings…nope, not gonna happen.
OK, it’s an old motherboard, and a new video card, so let’s flash the bios.
Put in a boot CD to get gobo back up, and go looking for information on the motherboard.
Of course, sprocket is a no-name taiwan special, so spend about an hour or two tracking down the manufacturer (If you care). Well, technically, it’s the ecs version of the same motherboard, but let’s not get into that, that was another 45 minute adventure.
So, having found the bios, we need a floppy disk. Have I mentioned I don’t have floppy disks? Reach into the back of the closet, dig around, come up with a floppy. Find a bootdisk image online, rawrite to floppy…crap, can’t write the last sector.
Try second, even grungier looking floppy, hell, can’t even write the first sector.
Sigh…dig around in magic closet, find old 4x cd-rom, boot bootcd with cd-rom, copy flash.rom to first, less grungy floppy(it’s only 256k, so doesn’t hit the last sector), flash bios, reboot.
Fiddle with bios, yay, nvidia output now works.
Of course, now gdm won’t come up because the gobo (remember gobo, this story is about gobo) has an ATI card. Into XFconfig we go, hacking all the way, cross fingers, restart, ok, now we have X output….but why isn’t mythbacked coming up…because mysql isn’t up…why isn’t mysql up? Ah, nic drivers..what nic is in here?
Commence digging into lspci, find driver, find modules, edit, reload, reboot.
Ok, now we have video, nic…no sound.
Fire up aumix, change the settings…nothing…wtf…do it again for good luck..nope.
Ah, wait, it’s alsa sound…swear a little, try to remember alsa commands…find alsamixer, change settings and…yes, sound.
Do some small configuration changes to myth, “secure” the hard drives (one screw will hold ‘em, right?), slap on the case, shove it under the TV, and it’s…
Well, it’s working, but the tv input doesn’t look right, the color is faded, and it’s not as sharp.
Though, as a bonus, the airplane at takeoff CPU fan isn’t nearly as obnoxious once the cover is on and it’s stuck in the cabinet. It'’ll do until Monday (since all the computer type stores seem to be closed on weekends in Eugene and Fry’s is…too far to go when I need to return the defective fan I’m sure to get from them).
Now, I remember why I stopped doing this crap for a living. =)
Have I mentioned the computer room now looks like a yard sale for Obselete Computers R’ Us(r)? Those floppies really were at the back of the closet, now I keep stubbing my toe on that 286 laptop.
The moral of the story? Don’t ever build a myth box so your wife can record 36 straight hours of curling. She just might get used to it and want it back…
-ajb
03.04.06
Car Rentals
In a move that would cause Michael’s wallet to seal itself shut, I went looking for a luxury/premium car rental today.
Cruising the usual suspects (Avis/Budget/you know the rest) I noticed they all seem to have tacked mileage charges onto the cars. Some folks gave you 350mi, some 450. Enterprise was generous enough to give you unlimited miles…unless, you left the state, in which case your whole trip reverted to a mileage charge. Nice, eh?
When did this start happening? I must have missed the memo. Maybe it’s a just a Eugene airport thing?
Sorry, guys, but when you are charging me twice as much for the rental already, I’m not too amenable towards paying mileage charges on top of that.
-ajb
03.02.06
No more stats
No more myth stats for the time being, as I’ve turned the box back into my main workstation.
I do believe I’ll try to cobble together a replacement, as the TV card seems to have recovered it’s sanity.
:edit: Holy bad grammar, Batman. :edit:
-ajb
02.28.06
Domino
I’m not sure if Domino is the worst movie I’ve seen in the last 10 years, or only the last 5 years.
Regardless, it’s very, very, very bad.
-ajb
02.23.06
Recording Schedules online
An upgrade to Apache2, a little mucking about with Python, a nifty rss script, and voila, you can now live vicariously through the PVR.
=)
It should be noted that I had to add another 250gb drive to satisfy TheWife’s addiction to curling, eh. I think she’s planning on running away to her relatives in the Yookon and learn all aboot it.
-ajb
02.17.06
PVR downsides
One of the downsides of repurposing your main machine as an Olympic recording tool is that you tend to forget the passwd to your own site.
Also, you realize the 250gb drive you are using may not be big enough to record a week of coverage.
-ajb
02.09.06
Island of the lost operating systems.
Playing with the VMware server beta:
1.
2.
3.
The load wasn’t so bad after it stopped swapping. I don’t think I’d want to do anything CPU intensive though.
-ajb