The Blog of Harald

My “new favourite show”:http://www.tv.com/eureka/show/58448/summary.html has a products page!

Made in Eureka

I want a laptop transporter :-)

* Battlestar Galactica has been picked up for a “third season”:http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/7518.html . Also, the “Season 1 DVD”:http://www.battlestargalacticadvd.com/ is out (it includes the miniseries, in case you were thinking of purchasing both).

* “Serenity Cast Signed For Sequels”:http://scifi.com/scifiwire2005/index.php?id=32468 (if the movie proves popular enough, that is!).

Space is showing all 22 episodes of “Stargate:SG1”:http://www.tvtome.com/StargateSG1/ “Season 6”:http://www.tvtome.com/StargateSG1/season6.html on Christmas night/Boxing Day.

With my “MythTV”:http://mythtv.org/ box, 22 hours is about 48Gb, which I should have free by then, since every other show will be in re-runs.

Of course, I’ll still have to find time to _watch_ them… :-)

_Update_: I made enough space by deleting old shows, and moving about eight hours of stuff to an old 20Gb harddrive. I’m exactly halfway through watching season six now. Season seven sure makes more sense when you’ve seen this stuff!

I could never have done this with the VCR, at least not without staying up all night to change tapes. Woo hoo!

For the Star Trek Geeks in the crowd:

Gizmodo : Bluetooth Star Trek Communicator

So I bought the “PVR-250”:http://www.hauppauge.com/html/wintvpvr250_datasheet.htm (on sale at “Best Buy”:http://www.bestbuy.ca/” :-), and slapped it into my P933 to play. The install was easy, and the hardware looks nicely designed. But the software that comes with the card sucks. I don’t know how hardware guys manage so consistently to ship their products with truly crappy software. Simple stuff like you can’t tab between fields, if you set a record time before you change the date the time quietly resets itself (because you can’t record in the past, I guess), and so on. It’s very _pretty_ though; if they had put all that skinning effort into usability…

Anyway, that’s not important, since I also downloaded “KnoppMyth”:http://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html in order to try out “MythTV”:http://www.mythtv.org/. I picked KnoppMyth figuring that I could find out if it worked and I liked the system, and then I could build from scratch if necessary later on. I’m glad I did; building a MythTV system from scratch is not for the faint of heart (and this from me, who likes tinkering with Linux :-).

First problem was getting the “TV-Out on my Matrox G400 to work properly”:http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/dev/2993#2993. After several tries with various different X drivers and configurations, I finally discovered the real problem: the KnoppMyth kernel comes with the vesafb framebuffer driver compiled in, so my Matrox G400 modules were never getting loaded. One kernel rebuild (and several hours) later, I had TV out.

The next problem was the network. My on-the-motherboard, Intel-based network interface (from the 82801 chipset?) kept “freezing”, with a timeout: “eth0: wait_for_cmd_done timeout!”. Lots of googling revealed that this is a known problem that apparently still hasn’t been fixed. Fortunately, There is an “Intel provided e100 driver”:http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scripts-df/Detail_Desc.asp?ProductID=61&DwnldID=2896 that supports this chipset, and _that_ one works. Download, build the module, and install.

Next was sound. After every reboot, the audio out would be muted, and I would have to login remotely and use alsamixer to manually unmute the Headphone audio out and then pump the volume up. Again, it turns out that this a known problem, and that the usual fix (alsactl save/alsactl restore) doesn’t work, because the ALSA software doesn’t save information about the Headphone output? Strange, but one again I found a workaround. Running

/usr/bin/amixer sset Headphone unmute 100

would unmute the Headphone output and set the volume to max; I stuck this in /etc/init.d/local so that it would run on every reboot.

Finally, the machine kept crashing with out-of-memory errors. I never did figure this one out, because I made two changes at the same time. I downloaded and installed the “latest ivtv drivers”:http://67.18.1.101/~ckennedy/ivtv/, and I also discovered that the MythTV cache file I had configured was larger than the cache filesystem (this would cause mmap() based access to fail with the aforementioned out of memory errors :-). I’m not sure which fixed the problem, but the box has been up and recording for a week now with no problems.

Now to figure out all of this transcoding stuff…

(Oh ya, and Richard Dean Anderson was very young when MacGyver was produced :-)

This one has been sitting in my to-post pile for two weeks now. *sigh.

From “My head just exploded”:http://www.xoverboard.com/blogarchive/week_2004_10_03.html#000967

bq. So this website, by means of a Kevin-Bacon-style relationship of crossovers, has logically linked one hundred and sixty-two television series as existing in the same universe of continuity… and therefore are all the creation of the autistic Tommy Westphall.

Check it out…

I remember being skeptical a few years ago when I heard about the technology, but it sure has taken off!

I missed the season premiere of “Joan of Arcadia”:http://www.tvtome.com/JoanofArcadia/. I fumbled the VCR programming and taped from 7:59 until 8:01. (Note to self: build “MythTV”:http://www.mythtv.org/ based Media PC ;-).

Prompted by a “recent entry”:http://rae.tnir.org/archives/000671.html on “Reid’s blog”:http://rae.tnir.org/, I “seached the web”:http://www.google.com/search?q=arcadia+bittorrent, “found a torrent”:http://torrent.youceff.com/download.php?cat=107&ref=0&subref=4, downloaded “Azureus”:http://azureus.sourceforge.net/, and about 2 hours later had a copy of the episode on my disk. In testing, I found that I had to find a copy of a “XviD binary”:http://www.xvid.org/, which was also straightforward (thanks to Google :-). We plan to watch the episode after the kids go to bed tonight.

There are days when I say “I hate computers”, but today has been a good day for technology!

Encounter at Farpoint is on Spike TV tonight. I had forgotten just how _bad_ ST:TNG was at the begining! I think the only reason we kept watching it was that it was the first Star Trek we had seen in decades.

Well, that and John DeLancie as Q :-)