MythTV Install Woes

I’ve been trying to get MythTV of one form or another setup for a quite a while. I’ve only been trying on and off, but the difficultly in setting it up is surprising me. I haven’t yet found a good install guide for any of the distributions of MythTV.

I’m trying to use a video card that has to have the driver told which card/tuner combination your using, but no guide tells you when to set this up. I mustn’t be the only person to need to do such a custom step, the card I’m using is reasonably common and the driver it uses supports many popular cards. My proficiency with computers and Linux is great enough that I can find how to set my card up, but I know too little of the MythTV setup processes that getting it to go smoothly is very hard.

Now for the next distribution to try. I hop this one is easier.

Terry Pratchett: Calling All Nuerosurgeons

Terry Pratchett has announced on the his artists web site that he has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

Apparently he feels that there is plenty of time left for him to write a few more books, and would only life offers of help “from very high-end experts in brain chemistry”.

I hope the next few books are just as great. In other news an author has been selected to write the final Wheel of Time novel.

A Better Registry Editor

I need, and my google foo has failed to find, a registry editor that lets me deal with a very common problem I have. The root problem is I don’t want manual steps in the setup of an application I am involved with creating. It relies on IRQ to be enabled for the LPT on a windows PC, but scince Windows 2000 Microsoft has decided that they shouldn’t enable them by default.

Due to where Windows stores the setting for this:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Enum\ACPI\PNP0400\4&4b018eb&0\Device Parameters\FilterResourceMethod=dword:00000002

Its all in the timing

We finally got our Internet connected last night. After having to wait a full week for the phone to be connected before we could actually order the ADSL2+ service. Then being told that the ADSL2+ can take 10 to 15 business days (only took 4) it was finally installed.

So what does iiNet do yesterday? They announce that they will start to offer a ‘naked dsl’ package. So we’d get 50% more downloads (although they would start to include uploads in that figure) for $10 less every month. Oh and its super easy and quick to go onto these new plans.

Well, unless you are already on ADSL2+ with iiNet, like we are, because for some reason in that case you can be without the Internet for 2-3 weeks and without phone for 1 week, although we don’t mind having no phone.

Why do the Internet gods hate us so much?

Please let me back in!

“The email address: gareth@cerberos.id.au is no longer a part of Church Ministry.”

According to MinistryHelpSite.com my email address is no longer apart of Church Ministry eh? I beg to differ.

People should think more about how they name mailing lists.

Focus Follows Mouse & Borland C++ Builder

I just changed from a pair of 19″ CRT monitors at work to a single20″ wide-screen LCD. I am loving the added desktop space, but the drop in screen space is annoying. I was using 1 19″ CRT and the LCD for a short while, but the terribly mismatched pixel sizes and colours pissed me off much to quickly.

Trying to make better use of screen real estate I have now undocked the sub windows from the Borland Builder windows. Which to my great surprise has fixed how it interacts with focus follows mouse. I am a huge fan of focus follows mouse as I love to look at one document while typing in another. Also the ability to go hours without clicking the mouse while multi-tasking is fantastic.

Borland Builder though has always ignored the focus follows mouse setting of “raise on focus” and raised it self instantly. But now that I have undocked its sub windows it is sitting patiently in the background when it gets focus and doesn’t raise it self till clicked.

This does make me very happy.

Dwarves for the Win

My CAD Magnetic Poetry #1 arrived yesterday, it was the fast shipping version sent just last week.

Now I wonder if I’m going to receive the slow shipping one soon. :)

Fixing eBay

eBay is broken, sellers are not getting the best value they could for their item. I don’t feel I need to qualify that statement as the efficiency of snipping application is clear proof that a large portion of people bidding on eBay don’t get the concept of the auction style it uses.

Currently the following is true:

• Ignorant people put in 20 bids on the same item, each time putting in a minimum raise.
• Reasonably smart people place 1 bid which is the true highest bid and hope no one out bids them.
• The smartest people use sniping software to place their true high bid in the last few seconds (I have mine set to 4 seconds).

Ninjai’s?

Just received this in my email box:

We thought we should let you know that your order has been shipped! This is the 3rd time we’ve had the distinct pleasure of shipping you something, and frankly we’re going to need to hire some more ninjas, monkeys or dwarves to supplement our Japanese packing specialist Jr. if you keep ordering like this from us.

Pop Quiz

What is wrong/confusing with this answer, the question was “what is the coordinate system you are using”:

x east
z south
y up

NB: there are 2 major things.

Shipping

Two months ago I brought from Split Reason two Cyanide and Happiness t-shirts and a CAD Magnetic Poetry set. About a 2 weeks later the two t-shirts arrived in a box with documentation claiming that all 3 items were in the box.

So I emailed Split Reason and they quickly replied apologising for the error and promising to send the magnets as soon as possible. A day later I received an email saying that the magnetic poetry had been shipped. Thinking nothing more of it I put the whole idea on the back burner and awaited my magnetic poetry.

Power Saving

I’ve just stumbled upon a little tool that Intel has released, PowerTOP. Named as such as its sort of ‘top’ for power consumption. It tells you which applications are causing the CPU to consume the most power, when a PC is idle this is caused by applications that frequently wake the processor out of its sleep state to do something.

The Intel site makes 2 interesting claims:

• A Gnome desktop can be run with as few as 3 interrupts per second!
• A Intel employee managed to increase his laptops run time from 4 to 7 hours.

I don’t know about you, but if I can get my laptop up to 7 hours of run time, I’d love it. I will probably waste more time getting that number up than I will using it, but thats neither here nor there.

Linkage.

Google Codes Good

It is good to see that Google tests changes to their production code before deploying it. (that should be a list of recent docs)

Ads Be Gone

I really dislike ads. I also hate bloated applications. So it is quite a pitty that MSN Messenger (Live) is such a useful app. Those adds and videos that constantly grab my attention in the corner of my screen really annoy me.

Naturaly someone has taken the hard work out of removing the adds. So if you use A-Patch you can get you contact list to look like this:

Which is much much better. What is slightly weird is that A-Patch is being used as an evangelistic tool for the Muslim faith. I’m not exsactly sure if I think that software is a good tool for such purposes, but its not over the top or annoying so go ahead and download the appropriate version for your messenger and enjoy a much more streamlined option.

Download Linkage

A Knight With Shining GPS

I smell a rat.

Many media outlets have been reporting on a man in NSW who has beaten a speeding fine partially because of GPS. If you read the article fully (SMH) you will notice that how much weight the Judge gave to the GPS data is not specified only that it was admitted as evidence by the defendants. Also of note is that the Police under questioning admitted that they hadn’t relied on the radar completely as they didn’t have long enough to get a full reading, so they were using judgment to issue the fine.

What doesn’t stack up is why the man would bother to spend lots of money defending a $200 fine. His father recently spent $20,000 defending a $160 fine, without the help of GPS data, so it definitely runs in the family.