The Treehouse Blog

Since Oak has never had a DVD drive, and likely never will, I haven’t been able to play DVDs using MythTV. Unlike TV cards, MythTV has no means of sharing DVD drives between machines. Using GNBD (thanks to its inclusion in FC4) has given me the ability. GNBD works perfectly as advertised, however since the means of reading CSS keys from DVDs is apparently odd (ie, it generates errors), that part would not complete. For some reason, running mplayer on the machine with the DVD drive caches the data (apparently) allowing the remote mplayer to then play without difficulty. I demonstrated the process last night, and I scripted it tonight… ready to watch DVDs now! I had been going through Nemesis-decompression-scene withdrawal.

I’ve added the first WAN link to the thtech network: 802.11g to Chris‘s house. We used garden hose as conduit for about 250’ of CAT5e from my shed to the WAP. The WAP was mounted on a pole inside of a tupperware container. Ethernet handled the distance fine, but a trivial POE implementation arrived at by splicing the power adapter that came with the WAP into the CAT5 didn’t work. There was too much resistance on the line for the 5v power to overcome. So, we tried stepping up to 12v with a DC-DC converter on the other end. This would result in the WAP partially powering up, but continually rebooting. I figured that this was due to the WAP drawing too much power when it tried to power up the radio. I purchased a higher capacity DC-DC converter at WalMart, and all has been well. We’re currently getting 600 KB/s, but earlier tests had us at about 1.1MB/s. We’ll have to do some antenna tweaking to try to remedy that.

UPSes are great things. During the storm today in the Shippensburg area, my house lost power. When I got home from work an hour later, the UPSes were still running fine, but the Internet connection was down. When power returned, all was well, so it would seem that Kuhn has either no or insufficient backup power for its equipment… great.

In other news, Intel seems to be pretty good about warranty returns. Despite the fact that they don’t accept RMA requests online (only by fax or mail), they have acknowledged my RMA request by mail, and receipt of the broken NIC, almost instantly by e-mail. My replacement NIC is now on its way.

No overly interesting things, just a bunch of little stuff. The job situation is still pending, but I think there has been some positive movement in both areas.

I’m looking for a new GPS, currently leaning towards the Garmin GPSMAP 76S. My old GPS currently gets signal too weak to be useful (most of the time no satellites). It might be possible to fix that (maybe a broken antenna lead, or something), but that would involve breaking into the gasketed case, which might limit its portable use in the future. Things haven’t changed substantially since my brief search last summer. I’ve had to keep my walks limited to less adventerous excursions, but the GPS might still have to wait behind an air conditioner and freezer in the purchase queue.

And Lannic ’05 is this Saturday. I gave the firering a test by throwing a minor picnic for the family this evening, and all went well. Now I need to get the high-speed NetMRG configured, and get the rest of the logistics taken care of. Should be a blast though.

Well, I didn’t end up going the HD route. When I began thinking about the fact that <1 % of my existing media is HD, that HD-DVDs are aways off, and that I have no interest in paying for cable/satellite HD service, the option began to get far less appealing. I ended up going with a 27″ flatscreen RCA from Walmart. It’s got decent picture, but crappy sound, which didn’t matter as that will be handled separately. Lot of TV for not much dough, which is pretty much what I needed.

In the sound department, I knew I wanted to do something that supported SPDIF, but was wary of the price of most home theater systems. However, as it turns out, I went to the Silver Springs Flea Market on Sunday, and there was a nice looking, complete, Kenwood home theatre set for $150. Obviously, buying anything like this at a flea market is a gamble. But, I estimated the stuff to be worth at least $250 or so, and offered the guy $125. Looking it up online, it turns out to be a Kenwood HTB-503 which retailed for $500ish. So, what was wrong with it, you ask? I wish I could say nothing, but the front left and right speakers were blown out (four speakers in two boxes are ‘open’, but the tweeters work). So, I moved the rear speakers to the front, used the rear speakers from my computer set, and I’ve got decent sound for not all that much.

The MythTV project is still a work in progress. I got an ATI RF remote control that is interfaced with a USB dongle that acts like a keyboard. It works alright, but not perfect. Some misses and repeats. I still need to get a capture card (gave my old one to Chris earlier this year), and need to do more hardware juggling. Still trying to get xv working right in tv-out mode on the Geforce 2 MX 400 I’m using, but it’s livable in x11 mode for now. This project has been eating up way to much time, but its costs have stayed relatively low so far.