New Myth hardware and Myth 0.21 finally running..

Well I finally got enough spare minutes to get off my butt and get the new MythTV hardware in place. I rebuilt my TV stand specifically so it could accommodate my largish (aging) receiver and the new (even largerish) MythTV gear. Anyway, it's quieter and much more powerful and the new changes to MythTV seem pretty nice. I have a bunch of configuration to do yet and and I have to rebuild the old machine to take over for the failed HD encoder / remote frontend machine that failed. That's another reason why I just had to get this new box into position; I'm down to a single encoder and that doesn't make for much flexibility in scheduling. Plus, all the network shows we watch are broadcast in HD and that is a much better viewing experience than down-converted 480i HD that I get from the S-Video output of my DirecTV rx feeding my PVR-250 in my master backend / frontend.

I'll post some images of the new home once I get channel changing and the old schedules sorted out - I'm having an issue where the new Mythbox has forgotten all most of the Lost episodes that we've recorded in the past. For channel changing, I'm hoping to return to using the USB->USB trick that I used in the past so that I have a direct connection between the new Mythbox and the DirecTV box.

MintyBoost!

I bought a MintyBoost kit from Adafruit because I've got so many devices that charge via some sort of USB cable (4 different phones, multiple Sansa e200's, etc.) I meant to have my 2 daughters help me solder up the circuit board part so they could put their electric shop skills to good use. (See included Mr. Blurry Cam photos) But I just couldn't wait! Sorry girls.

The device can output up to 500ma at 5v so it will charge devices that my lame car USB charging adapter won't / doesn't. Apparently there is a low power USB spec that will output up to 100ma of current and a newer higher output spec.

I've included an action shot of the charger attached my Sansa e260 (booted into Sansa's firmware, which I only use for transferring files since my current version of Rockbox doesn't support full USB functionality yet). If you look closely in the lower left of the screen, you'll see the charge indicator on.

I really expect I'll get some use out of this for my T-Mobile G1 which is a big battery pig if you turn on all the wizzy extras like satellite tracking. A pair of recent NiMH AA batteries have about 2500ma capacity so should be able to charge up the G1's 1100ma pack at least a couple of times before they drop too low to push any more electrons over the USB charge cable.

Things I Learned While On Vacation At The Beach

When I was in middle school (Jr. High we old-timers used to call it) and in high school, my family took to going to some beach area for summer vacations. It was Myrtle Beach for a year or two, then we went to north Virginia Beach for a year and finally ended up going to Sandbridge (south of Va. Beach). In any case, when you're young and living at home you don't think much about vacations, what they cost and the thinking that goes into them.

This year, my wife and I decided it would be good to take our family of 6 to the beach for a week. Here are some things I learned in no particular order:

1. The pictures you look at on the rental web sites make rooms and houses look much larger than they are in reality. What looked like a set of very large rooms in the living area, turned out to be a set of medium sized rooms when we got there.
2. Being across the street from the beach makes medium or even small sized rooms a lot less of an issue. To get to the beach we had to cross the street on our cul-de-sac and cross over a couple of sand dunes and we were at the ocean. If you stood on the deck on the ocean side of the house you could hear the waves crashing on the beach. Hard to beat that.
3. If you aren't careful to plan when you'll arrive at the beach you might just end up sitting on the road in your car crawling along for hours on end. And there very well might not be any other option for getting there. (In our case we needed to get onto the string of islands that make up the outer banks area in North Carolina. While technically, we could have headed further south and taken a ferry over from the mainland, in practice it was too late by the time we got stuck in traffic.)
4. You can get a really bad sunburn by trying to teach 4 kids to windsurf in a single day using 2 rigs.
5. Whatever sunburn you get teaching your kids to windsurf is totally worth it.
6. Avon, NC is a pretty good place to visit if you like the water. There is a great place to launch your windsurfing gear just south of Avon (about a mile or so). It's formally named the Haulover Day Use Area, but generally known as Canadian Hole. What's really nice about sailing in Pamlico Sound is that the depth of the water is generally under 5' in depth. Except in the Canadian Hole; there it gets deeper since it was formerly used to haul boats from the sound to the ocean (hence the name Haulover). Shallow water makes it very easy to jump back up on your board when you fall off and it doesn't tend to freak people out that aren't used to being in deep water and away from shore.
7. It costs a lot more to go to the beach for a week than I would have thought! There's more to it than just the rental unit (duh). Although we did do a lot of fun stuff like rental of ocean kayaks and wind surfing gear.
8. When there's only 1 convenient grocery store to choose from, it's going to be crowded at all hours of the day and night and not have particularly good prices.
9. Buying expensive groceries and cooking for your family is WAY cheaper than eating out all the time.
10. Restaurants at the beach where there are mostly rental houses don't have to have very good food or service. (As one of my daughter's quipped "Fast, cheap or good - pick none!")
11. If you wear eyeglasses and you're playing in the surf with your kids without Croakies, even if the surf seems to be gentle, you're likely to surprised by a big wave. In my case, I managed to hold onto the Waboba ball ($8.25) and not onto my glasses. Duh!
12. A Waboba ball is lots of fun to play with in the ocean or the sound or the pool. Although you need a lot of space to play in.
    

Followup on my one green initiative

I saw the following story about Amazon looking at getting into the college textbook market. This was exactly what I described in an earlier blog posting. Let's hope that this and Sony's recent move to open up their reader to more formats leads to a revolution (or maybe a revolt against the publishers) in the college book market. If you've never (unwillingly) participated in that market, consider yourself blessed.

My New Mythbox


I'm building a new machine to be our main MythTV frontend / backend. I want to be able to decode HD content - both standard MPEG-2 ATSC captures and also MPEG-4 h.264 encoded content, I want it to be pretty quiet and I need it to be available for the fall.

I decided to embrace a much larger footprint case (no pun intended - see photo above). I went with a Silverstone LC17B. It's a pretty big case - 17" x 17" x 7" with a black anodized aluminum front panel. It should look right at home next to my receiver which is also black anodized aluminum up front. The case has a good amount of space: 6 - 3 1/2" drive bays, 2 - 5 1/4" bays, and plenty of space for a full size PSU and either a flex ATX or micro ATX motherboard. In the shot above the motherboard and PSU are in place, but the CPU heatsink and fan are missing.

I picked up an inexpensive PC Chips A13G+ motherboard with on-board NVidia 6100 graphics, an AMD 5000+ Athlon XP 64 X2 CPU, 2 G of PC6400 DDR2 RAM and a ThermalTake A4022 TR2-R1 heatsink & fan. The CPU and memory were only $80 after a $30 rebate from TigerDirect. The case seems to have pretty good cooling and is very solid. It has a pair of 80mm fans at the right rear of the case and the PSU goes in the other side of the case with the top of the fan facing the vent on left side of the case. (My PSU was a gift from a good friend and is a very quiet Antec with a fan up top and on the back.

I put the whole thing together and loaded MythDora 5 onto it to checkout the components. At first I couldn't get it to sync up with my Sony 46" LCD, but after going back and getting the NVidia proprietary driver, it recognized it just fine.

My next task will be to figure out how to migrate all my existing data from my current main frontend / backend machine and get this into place under the TV on stand. In theory this shouldn't be too difficult, but since I'm jumping up to a new version of MythTV (version 0.20-2 to 0.21) there could be some database migration headaches. First I need to get some other things done around the house, getting this machine online will be my carrot!

Porter House Brew Shop in Portersville, PA

First of all let me state for the record that I am a lame blogger. With that out of the way, I recently told some friends at work that I would make a report of a visit to a brewing supply retailer in our area, here is that report.

Here's my report from the field (as promised):

The shop is located on PA 19 on the left side going north. It's beside an old hardware store and the parking is either on the street or in a lot before and beside the hardware store. It's a new place with a decent decor. He stocks a wide variety of both dry yeasts in typical packaging and liquid yeasts in glass vials. They don't have a great quantity of any particular item probably due to shelf space, but they seem to have just about anything you could want or need. He did have Fuggles hops, but didn't have Progress hops. He had malt extracts (in cans), kits (with yeast and malt extract), dry malt in 1 and 3 lb bags and a number of malt grains with a grain mill for cracking. I didn't get any prices other than for the dry malt - 1 lb was $4.25 and 3 lb was $11.50. He also has all the stuff you'd need if you want to go the route of using cornelius kegs rather than bottles.

There was a customer in the shop when we were there and he offered that the owner was a very helpful guy. We sampled two beers he had on tap and both were pretty darn good, so from that I'd guess he knows what he's doing as a brewer.

The shop also has wine making supplies, fair trade custom coffees, various loose teas and extracts for making root beer and other flavors of pop.

I'm glad it was only a reconnaissance trip as otherwise I think I would have probably dropped $100 on the spot. Add this place to the list of dangerous places (to my wallet) to shop. :-)