Month: August 2008

MythTV easy … Comcast HD over Basic Cable not so.

On August 27, 2008

HDTV

So, I’ve been configuring my Mythbox as I have time. Some of my hardware arrived late, but I put together the basic PC the first weekend, installed Ubuntu and did a burn-in (I am very happy with how quiet it runs). My HDHomerun arrived a few days later and decided to interrupt my burn-in. I installed Mythbuntu and attempted to configure it. I hooked up my coax cable to the HDHomerun and ran a Cat5 to my switch and I was able to see it immediately in the MythTV configuration utility. I did a channel scan and was surprised to have 80 unencrypted hits. My jaw dropped, I had 80 HD channels over basic (analog) cable?
I need to backup here a bit and explain what I had learned through the internet and from a flier that I picked up at the local Comcast office, but even with the flier in my hand, I could not get a Comcast salesperson to give me a straight answer. It clearly states in the brochure that:

HDTV broadcast signals are included with subscription to Limited Basic Service. To receive other HDTV signals provided by the Company, an HDTV capable television set (not provided by the Company), Standard Service and an HDTV digital converter and remote are required. In addition to receive Expanded Service, Digital Starter, Digital Classic, Digital Preferred, Sports Enterntainment, Package or premium (i.e., HBO, Showtime) HDTV signals, a subscritpion to that service is required. (sic)

Mythical TV … can Open Source tinkering be any cooler?

By Sid Boswell

On August 20, 2008

In Blog, Life, Linux

Mythbuntu

My DVD player, which is a Sony and only about 5 years old, is on the fritz. My Tivo, likewise 5 years old, is showing heavy pixilation which I’m going to assume is related to it’s hard drive being 5 years old and having run 24×365 and starting to go (over 43,000 hours). My (current) TV is standard definition, but I plan on upgrading to HDTV this Christmas (or sooner if my plans pan out). I wasn’t looking forward to the price of a set-top Blu-Ray player nor an HD Tivo, both of which would be limited to playing content only on the TV they were attached to, so I decided to go it alone and build a media center computer.
I poked around a lot and have setteled on an Ubuntu implmentation of MythTV called Mythbuntu. I seriously considered adding some stuff (a video capture card, larger hard drive, HDMI output, etc) to an older PC which I had just decomissioned and was planning on donating (wiped the hard drive and installed Ubuntu Hardy). However, after doing some research I decided to build a decently powered frontend/backend combination which will later be the hub of my content. I’m going to be assembling the system this weekend and plan on tinkering a few days with it before moving it into the living room. I did my research and setteled on the following hardware:

Is Comcast blocking large HTTP POST transactions?

By Sid Boswell

On August 18, 2008

In Blog, Life, Linux

Comcast

I’m not sure when this started happening, but I can’t seem to isolate the problem and I’m assuming that Comcast is to blame. I’m running this blog on a PC in my house connected to the interWeb via Comcast residential high speed Internet. I’m keeping DNS humming along using DynDNS even though my “dynamic” IP address (via DHCP) has not changed since the Adelphia to Comcast migration (and hadn’t changed on Adelphia prior to that migration). Even before I was running this blog, I had a wiki using MediaWiki running (it still is).
Here’s what’s happening….I can add a comment or a new wiki page (which is an HTTP POST transaction) from home or remotely (outside of my LAN). However, I’m limited to the size of my comments (or wiki pages) when I’m remote (outside of my LAN). Once I get more than a paragraph or so in a comment (or a wiki page) and hit “send” my browser just hangs. Incidentally, this also happens when creating a blog post while logged in to WordPress.

Internet radio rocks (or rolls, or raps, jazzes, or even countrys for that matter…)

By Sid Boswell

On August 15, 2008

In Blog, Life

Internet radio

Internet radio has come of age. For my birthday this year I asked for a slacker radio and got one from my parents. I have to admit that it’s a pretty cool toy. I haven’t bothered to subscribe as the advertisements aren’t too burdensome. We just leave the slacker player attached to my stereo and sync it every day (or so). It’s nice to have music playing all the time. It’s usually playing jazz or blues on the weekends and something livelier on weekday afternoons and evenings. Every once in a while Stacie or I run into the room where the stereo is and nix a song (Colby Caillet anyone?). It’s that interactive feature which is what’s improving Internet radio beyond the broadcast model which I’ve been listening to for years on iTunes or WinAmp (or even FM in my car….imagine that).
Slacker allows you to “favorite” a song or ban it with the touch of a button on the player or on the web player. A favorite will play more often and a banned song will no longer play on that station (like Colby Caillet). Slacker has over 10,000 stations and the possibilities are endless. Slacker has a good selection of indie stations. The drawback of Slacker is that it contains audio advertisements inserted into the stations, which you can do away with if you buy a subscription.

Apple, MobileMe, and the eeePC (and all other Linux distros too)

By Sid Boswell

On August 4, 2008

In Blog, Life, Linux

It seems that Apple’s cloud computing push teknology for some reason decided that only Mac OS X and Windoze would be able to use their nifty cloud computing push iPhone teknology. In other words, they have either left the open source community hanging or they intentionally pulled the plug on compatibility across platforms. Try to browse to the www.me.com from any Linux PC (unless you are running something under WINE) and you’ll get a big fat, “it ain’t like that.” This includes eeePCs, the $199 gOS netbooks sold at GoodEmployeeBenefitsmart and anybody who decides not to back down to the evil empire or use an iPhone. For all their embracing of open source, Apple seems to have left the open source community hanging.
What I’m getting at is that MobileMe does not support Linux. I’m pretty sure it isn’t a compatibility or a features issue as if you spoof your browser using a well known FireFox extension (user agent switcher) you can get it to work, but why bother? What is Apple saying to the non-Apple Hardware, non-Microsoft crowd out there?
I have an iPhone and a MacBookPro for work, but I’m pissed that I can’t have access to my address book from my eeePC or from any of my other Linux boxes.

Virtual Hosts

By Sid Boswell

On August 3, 2008

In Blog, Linux

In an effort to clean up my URLs for my personal Web site as well as the wiki I have been running, I decided to add virtual hosting to my Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) box. The most difficult and time consuming part of it was keeping what I was doing straight. I was frustrated as hell with it until I realized that I had to continualy clear my cache of my Firefox broswer when I wanted to test a new setting in the /etc/apache2/sites-available directory.
The process included:

enabling the virtual hosting module (a2enmod vhost_alias)
creating virtual host config files in /etc/apache2/sites-available
enabling the new virtual sites (a2ensite sitename)
restarting apache (apache2ctl restart)

iWeb to WordPress

By Sid Boswell

On August 3, 2008

In Blog, Linux

Wordpress

So, I decided that I would move my blog from iWeb to WordPress. One of the reasons I decided to do this is it will give me the capability of hosting more blogs and even doing content based blogging. I also was dumping my iWeb folder onto my Ubuntu box and therefore didn’t have the ability to allow comments on my blog. I will still keep my personal Web site based on iWeb (at least for now), and will work on integrating them together if at all possible.
I installed WordPress on my Ubuntu Hardy (8.04 LTS) installation. I initially used the package from the ubuntu repositories (apt-get) but after my initial spin, I decided to go with the most recent tarball from WordPress itself. Installation was a breeze and consisted of:

unpacking the tarball (tar -xvf filename)
changing the ownership of the wordpress directory to allow the Apache user write privileges (chown -R user:group wordpress)
creating a wordpress user and database in phpMyAdmin
browsing to the wordpress directory

Month: August 2008

MythTV easy … Comcast HD over Basic Cable not so.

Mythical TV … can Open Source tinkering be any cooler?

Is Comcast blocking large HTTP POST transactions?

﻿Internet radio rocks (or rolls, or raps, jazzes, or even countrys for that matter…)

Apple, MobileMe, and the eeePC (and all other Linux distros too)

Virtual Hosts

iWeb to WordPress

Internet radio rocks (or rolls, or raps, jazzes, or even countrys for that matter…)