Well, it's nice to be back in Calgary. I've got by some what gangly
looking bike unpacked and I've been riding it to work most days, even
though it really needs some bar tape. Handle bars with tape on only
one side looks kind of ugly, and it's not very comfortable
either.
I set up a MythTV box last
weekend, using Tamara's old desktop computer, which she now longer
uses now that she has Chinook. I went with a Hauppauge
WinTV PVR 250, since that's what people seem to have the most
success with in Linux. I think I would get a card with dual tuners
such as the 500, since then it would be possible to
watch one channel and record another at the same time. That might not
be possible on the current MythTV box because the motherboard is kind
of old and the bus might not be able to handle that much traffic.
The pausing of live TV sure comes in handy when someone phones in
the middle of a show. It's a little slow to change channels, but we
don't really surf that much, so it's not a problem. The other thing is
that the card encodes to MPEG2, which produces biggish files. MythTV
has a transcoder thing, but I haven't gotten around to setting it up
to automatically transcode to MPEG4 or something yet. The remote that
came with it also works very well through lirc. mplayer can also use lirc, which is
nice since the MythTV video player plugin uses mplayer.
I finally have an office all to myself. The web server and MythTV
box remain downstairs where the cable modem is, but it was either a)
have Shaw put a hole in the wall and put the cable modem in the office
upstairs and get a wireless card for the MythTV box, or b) just get a
wireless card for my computer. We didn't feel like running cat5. So I
picked up a DLink DWL-G520, which is based on the Atheros chipset. The
madwifi drivers support
it fairly well and seem to work fine. Once I got the modules compiled
and loaded, it picked up an open network in the neighborhood. Setting
up WPA using wpasupplicant was
a little difficult, mostly due to the fact that I couldn't remember
the pre-shared key for my network. The administration screen cleared
that up for me though, once I though to look there. I was surprised
that it was in plain text at all. I think it should be a password
field.
Tamara and I are baby sitting Tamara's Aunt's cat for a
while. She's been hiding under the stairs a lot, but she came up and
sat on the couch with us last night as we watched Lost. Sometime last
week we were down in Kensington and came across a cat/kitten thing
that was wandering around looking kind of lost. I picked it up and it
had an address written on it's collar, so we walked it
home. Apparently the owners had been looking for it all day. It
reminded me of when we were in Seattle
with Marli
and Walter,
and Marli helped a little dog find its way home.
I learned to play texas hold-em on Thanksgiving weekend, from my
minister cousin-inlaw, which was
quite a lot of fun. So if anybody wants to play, Tamara and I know how
(basically, well, more or less) play now.
Well, that's a little update for now. I'm sure I'll find more time
to write about other stuff as less and less needs to be unpacked.
