Archive for October, 2005

Posted on October 31, 2005 - by jono

It works

Well, its been a hectic week and the fruits of my MythTV efforts are present and correct. I now have pretty much the entire remote control working (apart from the directional buttons which I have a few bugs with), the LCD screen is fully working and is remarkably cool. I have ordered one of Joseph’s little boxes which should arrive tomorrow, and my PVR-350 should hopefully arrive tomorrow, if not, Tuesday. My channel listings are all working and thanks to a chap on the MythTV IRC channel, I also have icons installed for the Freeview channels. The final steps are to fix the directional remote buttons, install the PVR-350 and configure the channel guide to use the sky switcher to flick the Sky box to the right channel. With all this complete, I will set the box to automatically boot into MythTV and the geek medal will be mine.

You know, I never knew that mplayer does not support DVD menus. That sucks. After a few hours of trying to get to the DVD menu I just could not make the damn thing work. When I discovered this nugget of information, I decided to use Xine instead for DVD viewing in MythTV. I am surprised mplayer is suggested as the default with this limitation. Anyway, after a bit of poking with Xine command line options all is good. I also have it working with lirc.

On Friday night Sooz and I went out with Aq, Sam, Matt and Lyne and a few of Matt and Lyne’s friends. It was a charity fancy dress party designed to raise some cash for a local hospice. I went as Dr Death, Sooz as a naughty nurse, Aq as an Adam Ant prince charming, Sam as a princess, Matt as a vicar and Lyne as a naughty Nun. Great fun was had by all and despite dancing to Chesney Hawkes with Sam, there will be photographic evidence available. I will stick the pictures online tomorrow for you all to cackle at.

Today at the Seraphidian band rehearsal we discussed plans for our follow-up album. We are hoping to record around late Feb. We will probably hit the studio for a week this time, and we will no doubt lay down 8 tracks. The new stuff is sounding absolutely awesome. I can’t wait to get out and gig it. There are gonna be some mean pits to this stuff…

Wow, LUGRadio Season 3 is released tomorrow. Can’t wait. And, we record the second episode this week.

Oh, and as for you spammers. Why don’t you bugger off and spend your time badgering other people’s websites. Considering this site is mainly about computers, Open Source and digital rights, I am 110% sure that no-one will even consider responding to your spam, so don’t waste your time.

Posted on October 27, 2005 - by jono

MythTV, Frankie and pants

I have this week booked off and have decided to dedicate it to the pursuit of walking around in my pants, eating flapjack and watching Diagnosis Murder. In addition to such important duties, I have also continued work on my MythTV masterpiece. The bits are now fitted inside the machine. For those will a penchant for circuitry, here are some cheap frills:

After some initial problems getting the hardware installed (things have changed since 1999 when I last built a computer), I installed AMD64 Ubuntu:

It seems the MythTV packages in Breezy are broken. I considered setting up a bounty to get them fixed, but then I was reminded that I can install the normal x86 Breezy. So, I installed it and the packages were all available and ready. Everything installed fine, and it seems the DVB card that is in the box is working fine too. I then set out to fix some last remaining problems.

The first issue is the TV listings. I have managed to get XMLTV to sync up with the Radio Times site, but it has not downloaded the listings yet. I am going to work on this tomorrow. The next issue is the VFD/IR that is built into the case. For the benefit of Google, my case is a Silverstone LC14M and the LCD and IR unit is an iMon PAD. It took a bit of hunting around to discover this page which provides drivers. This contains a patched LCDProc and the latest version of Lirc now contains the patch for the iMon IR unit. I have consequently got the hardware working, but not had time to make MythTV talk to it. This should be fairly trivial.

So, most of the hard stuff is working, and I am pretty pleased with it all so far. I still need to pick up a Sky channel changer and add a few quieter fans, but its all hanging together pretty well. Its great fun setting something like this up.

In other news, Frankie arrived at Castle Curtis-Bacon (Sooz is making sure I don’t call it Castle Bacon, and probably reading this to check ) and he is doing fine. To see some pics of him, Banger and my Fluendo t-shirt, check out this page. Banger is a little nervous around him, but they seem to be getting on pretty well. Banger also went into the docs to have the nuts off on Monday. He is healing up pretty well, and I am taking him to the vets tomorrow to check everything is fine.

Finally, Season 3 Episode 1 is recorded, mixed and ready for release on Halloween. Its great to be back, and it was awesome fun recording the show. Its nice to know the community is so excited about Season 3, and we are looking forward to the crazyness to follow. Hey, and go and add yourself to the LUGRadio Map that Ade set up.

Posted on October 21, 2005 - by jono

Funky dog TV

Wahay! The case for my MythTV super-machine-of-insane-coolness came in and it looks dang good. The first interesting point is the power supply – a specimen of epic proportions:

I stuck the supply in and took a few shots of the delightful case:

The board is not in there yet (I am still at work), but check out the cables hanging around the case already:

Finally, here is the case closed up:

I can’t wait to get all this running together.

In other news, I have fixed up some bugs in Recreant View – thanks to mrben for some pointers on a CSS problem. I have also been informed that the site is fairly broken in IE. I don’t tend to use IE all that much, so if anyone wants to take a look at the CSS and fix it, you would be doing me a great favour and earn yourself a pint.

Finally, look who we are picking up tonight:

Posted on October 20, 2005 - by jono

Recreant View

Another fun day at EuroOSCON. Saw some great talks. The greatest was certainly from r0ml who gave a stunning talk on the parallels of Open Source from around 400 years ago. There was also the makers fair – an exhibition dedicated to homebrew DIY hacking. This was awesome and I saw some incredible devices that people have hacked up such as wearable computing, week long TV recording, toy hacking, RFID safes and more. I also saw a pretty scary MMORPG and met a guy who spends 12…yes…12 hours a day on it. Wow.

Tonight we went out for some beers with Scott and Paul from OpenAdvantage, kNo, Dean from GLLUG, Simon Willison, r0ml and some other chaps. Had a few nice beers that hail from all over Europe and then we headed out for a wander to grab some food and poke fun at the red light district. I amazingly saw a friend of mine wandering around the district too – quite a strange experience seeing your pal in such an obscure place.

Today I also wrote the Mozillarization of OpenOffice.org which discusses how OpenOffice.org could benefit from some Mozilla like love to slim it down and tart it up. The word Mozillarization does not exist, so you heard it here first. Go check it out and let me know what you think. It was also picked up on OSNews.

Last, and by no means least I can finally announce my brand spanking earth shatteringly bootilicious new music website called Recreant View. This is the new, dedicated home for my music, and it also includes a podcast feed as well as new song and blog RSS feeds as well as new features such as song ratings, user accounts, song comments, avatars, FAQs, studio pictures and more. There are still some wrinkles to be ironed out, so let me know any bugs, but I am quite chuffed with it.

Posted on October 19, 2005 - by jono

Microsoft in license shocker

Interesting. Microsoft announced about an hour ago here at EuroOSCON that they are releasing three new licenses that may actually be OSD compliant. Although the last thing we need are yet more licenses, it is a pretty impressive fact that Microsoft are bending to do this sort of thing. It will be fascinating to find out more about what is going on with this. The licenses have not been through the approval list at the OSI, but apparently Lessig has had a look at them.

Posted on October 18, 2005 - by jono

EuroOSCON

Currently over at EuroOSCON in Amsterdam. I had a beast of a trip getting over here. I missed my alarm for 3am to get over to the airport for 5am. Missed my flight at 6.10am, so headed to the airport and arrived at…6.10am. Booked onto the 8.10am flight which was then delayed by a couple of hours. Finally got over to Amsterdam, and while clenching certain unmentionable parts of my ass with the need to drop some friends off at the pool, I waddled around Amsterdam trying to find the hotel. Found the hotel, defecated and then run the conference. Phew!

The conference is interesting, and I saw a great talk about hardware hacking which has got me really excited – tomorrow there is also a talk about hacking the PSP. Tonight I went to dinner with jdub, kNo, Treenaks, Paul and a few others. It was fun, ate some odd pancakes, drunk some beer and I am now back at the hotel with its complementary wireless access. Nice one there.

Good to see some familiar faces at the conference such as Nat Torkington, Simon Willison, Bruno Bord, Jack Janssen, Gervase Markham, Dean from GLLUG, Josette from O’Reilly, Jeff Waugh and some others.

All in all – running pretty smoothly so far.

Posted on October 17, 2005 - by jono

Back in black

Some of you may have noticed its been a little quiet around here for the last few weeks. This is because I have been away on holiday for two weeks in Florida with Sooz. We had a fantastic time over there and I recharged my rather depleted batteries. It has been pretty hectic recently and has included:

• The week before jetting off to Florida I went to the CNET awards and got horrendously drunk on wine and felt rather ill for three days.
• The day after the CNET awards (still feeling rough from the night on the sauce) I headed down to Heathrow to meet up with Cliff from IBM ready for a keynote the day after. The morning of the keynote I felt much better and it was a good event.
• The following day we flew to Florida. Spent two weeks taking it easy, eating a huge amount of food and having fun.
• Got back from Florida on Saturday and met up with the LUG on the evening. Jeff Waugh was supposed to be coming over to give a talk but unfortunately could not make it due to an early flight the next day.
• Last night I got no sleep at all and spent the night watching Everybody Loves Raymond and reading my book. Gave up trying to get to sleep at 6am and got some breakfast. This morning I gave a seminar about Podcasting at 8am.
• Tomorrow Scott, Paul and I head over to EuroOSCON. After no sleep last night I was overjoyed to hear our flight is at 6am. Happy happy joy joy.
• Get back on Thursday and the day after we pick up Frankie; our new pup.

While I was away, a few interesting things happened. I was invited to join the Open Document Fellowship and was then elected part of the 6 person committee. O’Reilly published a few of my articles – Open Source Advocacy for the Enterprise (my latest advocacy piece), What Is the Linux Desktop and also the latest installment of My Favorite Projects. There were a few other interesting mails drop in that I will announce when things are a little more concrete.

While in the US I bought myself a Sony PSP. Pretty sweet device and the battery lasts ages. Today when I got into work Scott also presented me with a bunch of components he has given me for building my MythTV box. I bought this beast of a case and a power supply and all I need now is the RAM. Its gonna be an awesome box.

LUGRadio Season 3 starts on Halloween! Go get excited.

So, EuroOSCON is next. If anyone is going and wants to meet up, drop me a mail. Oh, and spammers…piss off.