The Treehouse Blog

When things are working well, my PVR box is supposed to wake-on-LAN about the time I get home, and be ready for use.  Since the LCD, the box wouldn’t be driving the display after boot.  I would have to kill and restart X with the LCD powered on.  Apparently this is due the NVIDIA driver needing to read the EDID from the LCD to figure out what resolution to use.  I tried a variety of ways forcing it to work without validating the resolution, but I ended up downloading the EDID to a file (using the nvidia-settings gui) and having the driver run against that.  Not that inelegant, I think.

Section "Device"
        Identifier  "Videocard0"
        Driver      "nvidia"
        VendorName  "NVIDIA Corporation"
        BoardName   "GeForce 7300 GS"
        Option      "UseEvents" "True"
        Option      "CustomEDID" "DFP-0: /var/lib/mythtv/edid.bin"
        Option      "ConnectedMonitor" "DFP"
        Option      "MetaModes" "DFP: 1920x1080"
EndSection

After sitting on the todo list for a year, I have finally taken the plunge into the world of HDTV.  I purchased a Samsung LN40A550 which is an LCD 1080p display.  It arrived on my birthday, allowing me to watch the season premier of LOST that same evening (happy birthday to me!).  I’ve subsequently had to upgrade a few things – replacing my video card so that I have less tearing, and buying an HDhomerun for capturing QAM streams from my cable provider.  (Note to the internet: Kuhn Cable does have 6 channels of QAM!)  I still need to clean up the cabling to the HDhomerun, and fix an issue I have with not being able to seek recorded HD content, and assorted other Mythtv issues, and some playback stuttering, but I have a bigger, HD-er TV now.  Doug did a lot of this stuff just before me, so many thanks to him for being the trial run.

Update:  My seeking problem was due to a crashed “recordingseek” table.  I repaired it and then ran mythcommflag –rebuild to regenerate the information for the recordings that wouldn’t seek.

I’ve decided to drop my use of AIM, and switch to Jabber/XMPP exclusively, on the arbitrary date of 2/17/09.  I might even setup a work account if there’s any interest.  Despite AIM being pretty darn stable, and not as evil as before (no need for the AIM binary lately on non AOL clients), I’m not a big fan of the lack of decent privacy features (at least, that I know of), and open protocols/systems are always nicer.  So, if you have any interest in IM’ing me ever after 2/17, make sure you’re XMPP-enabled.

As you may have heard from other sources, Majel Barrett-Roddenberry passed away today.  She was the  “computer voice” for the majority of the franchise (and also on Family Guy), and appeared one way or another in each Star Trek series, and also in the upcoming movie.

If you can put aside your predispositions for a second, give this article a chance. It agrees with my view of a portion of the “mortgage crisis” – the view that news coverage is apt to preface with “the McCain campaign says” while it reports Obama’s talking points as “news.”

And the “editors note” doesn’t do justice to the uniqueness of Orson Scott Card. This guy is a prolific SciFi writer – I’m reading the third book in his Ender series right now. He holds many positions that don’t fit comfortably at all into our two party system.