The Treehouse Blog

A year or so ago, I lost my BT878-based 4-port video capture card, apparently to lightning. The card was connected to a cheap black-and-white camera outside my house, intended for security monitoring purposes. When the card failed, it stopped showing up in ‘lspci’ and the box was otherwise fine, so I didn’t bother taking out the card. That box was decommissioned about 6 months ago, and I finally took it apart this week, revealing this:

Oak had an upgrade this week. It’s been running for years with an AMD Athlon XP 2400 on an Asus A7V8X motherboard. With the new tasks of running a 5-disk software RAID5 array and H.264 video codecs added over the past few years, it has started lagging behind. The processor and motherboard have been upgraded to AMD Athlon 64 X2 5400+ Brisbane running at 2.8GHz and 65W, and a Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4 motherboard. That should provide something around 2.8x the processing power, more disk I/O capability since the motherboard provides 6 onboard SATA ports instead of the two PCI-to-SATA cards I had been using which would max out at 133MB/s, and I’ve also quadruped my RAM from 1GB to 4GB.

Instead of upgrading the OS in place, I opted to do a fresh install of Fedora 9 x86_64 onto a software RAID mirror, replacing the old 10-gig non-UDMA IDE system drive that I had been using. This was relatively painless. A fresh mythtv install combined with importing my old database resulted in a working system. I had to copy over my lirc customizations, of course. The on-board sound with the default PulseAudio configuration works fine for everything including the raw digital output for AC3. One quirk I may need to look into is that when skipping around in a AC3 video, there will be an absence of sound for a considerable portion of a second before it comes back. This quirk is better than the problems I’ve had recently with my (ancient) SoundBlaster Live which would cause the receiver to not switch back to PCM mode on its own after an AC3 stream stopped.

I also upgraded to a GeForce 7300GS-based PCIe graphics card which has allowed me to switch to ‘gl’ rendering for mplayer, which seems to fix most or all of my frame tearing issues that I would experience when using 1024×768 to drive the TV output.

Still some issues to resolve, and I haven’t measured it’s power draw yet, but the upgrade process has been a lot less painful than I had feared.

After the tirade on Ark of Truth, I figured I should make up for it with some good reviews. The season premier for Battlestar Galactica was decent. And a Netflix suggestion that ended up being pretty good was The Island which was sortof a combination of Logan’s Run updated with the look and feel of Minority Report. Not spectacular, but I’d watch it again.

I wasn’t impressed with the SG1 franchise’s first direct-to-DVD endeavor. I would say The Ark of Truth easily makes the bottom third of SG1 two-parters. Instead of ratcheting up quality or plot, everything became more extreme and intense. Mitchell’s lines were more O’Neill-like than ever. Mitchell and the IOA guy were both acting way over-the-top, in a bad way. There was some of the good in SG1 as well, in that some of the issues they had on the ship were of the “let’s rethink this” variety instead of the standard Trek plot of “our first idea is great and has no problems whatsoever.” But really…

• Double-sided Asguard crystals? I’m pretty sure they’d come with a double-sided crystal reader.
• First Contact ripoff? Let’s beam back to the ship because the Repliborg are here, but leave the away team unsupported on the surface because they have the important work to do. And let’s have replicators assimilate people instead of just building them.
• Why did we spend minutes watching Teal’c walk across the Rockies? I mean, he doesn’t have much else to do, but it still seems unnecessary.

The utter destruction of the Ori makes it worthwhile, provided they don’t spend the next movie focusing on the political reconstruction of the ex-Ori universe like they did with the Jaffa. Seriously, I wouldn’t put it past them.

So, at work today we received two boxes from Vendor C shipped via Vendor U that contained identical parts. It was immediately observed that the one box was far heavier than it should have been. Perhaps they shipped both of the items in the one box, and manuals and such in the other? Stranger things have happened. And, well, had. Both boxes contained what they were meant to. The heavier one had a plastic-wrapped white object in the bottom that looked like shrink-wrapped documentation – at least, until you tried to move it. It had a Vendor U shipping label indicating a weight of 37lbs and was about a foot square and an inch thick. Apparently this piece of solid steel encountered the Vendor C box and penetrated it during shipment (judging from the correctly sized hole in the side of the box, noticed afterwards). Vendor U is sending someone to pick up the stowaway package, and the Vendor C gear looks to be undamaged. Still. Weird.