Okay, Drunken Housewife, most awesome blog ever or totally the most awesome blog ever, you decide. I can’t even remember how I got here, but nearly every post had me laughing. And as a side note, please God please, if you will grant me only one wish, let it be that this is the next internet meme. Crude, yes. Stupid, sure. Laughed so hard I fell out of my chair, also true.
A long time ago, I built up a Debian MythTV box so I could stop watching commercials. Gradually, it kind of took over the TV, since it did basically everything from watching DVDs to scraping newsfeeds to playing videos from the internets to video games and more. It even lets you manage your Netflix queue from your TV, which is kind of neet. I always had to wrestle with the thing, though, for two reasons:
First, it had this problem that it always wanted to break because the repositories for all those packages were in different places maintained by different people, and so even the most cursory compatibility checks were neglected. Every time I decided to patch the thing up to date, I had to count on a couple of days of no TV while I worked out all the bugs.
Secondly, the video card in the thing was an ATI. The driver was consistently buggy and trashy and incompatible and hacked together. nVIDIA cards are much better on linux, but there was no space to put one in the appliance-like case I picked.
Well, I finally bit the bullet and bought an AMD based case of the same type, which has nVIDIA graphics integrated. This solved problem 2, and for 1 I decided to go with Ubuntu’s new release, which has everything I needed in it without any hacking required. The results have been nothing short of phenominal. The entire setup process took me about 10 minutes, no hacking required. The output is amazing — I didn’t know my encoder card could look this good. In the final analysis, I modified only a handful of config files, and installed only a single custom package (a special version of ffmpeg so I could get my machine to encode shows for my PSP automagically).
The overall cost of the system was pretty high. I’d estimate something like $800 if I had started from scratch. I didn’t set out to build a PVR here; I wanted a full server that could do my TV and also serve as a test bed for my hosting company sideline as well as serving a wiki for my friends, a photo gallery, and a few other PHP webapps thrown in. I didn’t want a few dozen users hitting the box to cause me a problem watching House. I also just like a frontloaded toy more than one that bleeds me slowly, and as far as I can tell there isn’t a TiVO with a 320GB capacity anyway.
So there are places in Vermont where the let you pick your own apples, which is possibly the coolest thing ever. Fresh, pretty Macintosh apples, plus cider. I think it’s time for a fun trip, and then a pie. I don’t know if I can pull it off in the amount of time I have, but it’s pretty close and would be so very worth it. Yum.
Shockingly enough, it seems that some people in our government might be not only kind of dishonest, but also might not be as competent as they claim to be. Film at 11. I’m not sure what to make of this, but my initial reaction was not terribly surprised. When you create a culture that actively frowns upon “intellectuals” (read: smart people) as being “elitist,” you encourage this kind of disdain for education. Let’s all agree: we’re better than this.
Performancing for Firefox | Performancing.com
It’s a pretty neat little tool which has a great right click to blog on this feature and a cute editor embedded that doesn’t make you worry quite so much about losing a post if you lose a connection. An overall good find.