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. :-)

Time for a (cool) change

I have had a Linksys WRT54G wireless AP/Router in my network for sometime. When I first put my current server in place I didn't have any wireless gear. That server had a pair of NICs; one for external / internet connectivity, and one for traffic on the internal lan. That server, which is WAY overdue for replacement, has served as just about everything you can think of as a network service: proxy, content filtering (for my kids), web server, mail server, firewall, samba file / print sharing, ldap authentication and authorization, extra workstation in a pinch, etc.

It's time to utilize the equipment a little better. Thanks to my buddy Duke, I have a new(er) box to fill the majority of server roles. Hopefully, even though it has more power (cpu, memory and disk), it will use less power in operation. The diagram below should help to illustrate how things will be after the cutover. Basically, I'll have the server in a DMZ'd subnet, with restricted access to the internal network. The internal wired and wireless LANs will be bridged together into one segment. The WRT54G is running OpenWRT and will serve as the firewall, dns and dhcp server. The DMZ'd server will fill in all the other roles mentioned above. This article on DMZ and
this one on network interfaces were a big help.

Here's the diagram to help clear up any gaps:

An overview of my current MythTV infrastructure

I was replying to a friend about my MythTV setup at home and I realized that it's hard to keep things straight. So since he's been putting the details of his system on his blog, I thought I'd do the same.

I have 2 backends, each has 1 tuner. The master backend is running MythDora 4.0 on a Via EPIA SP13000 motherboard with 512M of RAM. The slave backend is also running MythDora 4.0 on a Via M9000 motherboard with 512M of RAM. The slave backend has a 1st generation Air2PC ATSC card in it and picks up whatever signals it can grab off the omin-directional pizza dish antenna from the roof. This includes most of the locals in Pittsburgh now and some of the locals from Youngstown and a few channels from the Johnstown market. (It varies a bit by season and weather it seems.)

The master backend (which has been a bit flaky especially when under very heavy disk i/o loading) has a Hauppauge PVR-250 and is connected to the S-Video output of my DirecTV H20-100 receiver. Amazingly, the H20 sends some sort of signal over that S-Video link even when I'm tuned to an HD channel. I know it's not real HD signal b/c the S-Video specs say that it can't handle that bandwidth. I think what it does is decode the signal and then down convert it to 720 x 480 while keeping the original source aspect ratio.

Both machines above have frontends running and are connected to 32" CRT TVs. The master backend machine connects over S-Video at 800 x 600 to a Samsung that can do 1080i. I'd like to connect to this TV using my master backend's DVI output and connect to the TV's DVI input. But I've never been able to get what the TV considers a valid signal from Xorg and my motherboard chipset. (And the H20's HDMI to DVI cable is plugged in here to boot.) However, I do know that this motherboard, when using it's built-in MPEG2 decoding support, can decode and playback either 720p or 1080i HDTV content and do it with very little CPU effort (maybe 30% max). I've done this with the xine included in MythDora which has support for the Via Unichrome MPEG2 decoder. (I use the following: xine -V xxmc -f )

I also have 2 Ubuntu 7.10 machines that have the frontend software installed. One is a laptop (old 700 mhz PIII Thinkpad T20) so it's like a portable 12" LCD TV. The other is a dual core Pentium machine that's in the office. It has Ubuntu with Compiz-Fusion and a very Mac-like theme and it can also decode HD streams with no effort.

I don't even use OS X but..

I'm in favor of having a Java 6 JVM on OS X because I don't want to ever have to think about whether some Java program will run correctly on OS X or not. So I support the 13949712720901ForOSX movement!

Truly Green Initiative

So it turns out I'm old enough to have a son who started college this fall as an incoming freshman. Two somewhat unrelated events got me to thinking about a true green initiative.

By 'true' I simply mean that if you look at the entire process or event that it has a net positive effect or outcome. Unlike turning corn into ethanol for example, which, when you take into account the fertilizer to grow it, the fuel to run the farm equipment to plant, tend and harvest it, the amount of energy you can get from it afterwards is less than what you had to put into it's production. See Steve Wozniak's interview for a more thorough example and further background into applying engineering to energy usage and green thinking.

Back to the events. The first thing to happen was that we needed to pick a few things that my son forgot to take to school and in doing so ran across the new Sony electronic book Reader. The second thing to happen was for my son to have the pleasure of spending some of his hard earned summer job funds to purchase his books for the fall. The total for the books wasn't all that much more than what I remember having to spend all those many years ago, but that's not the point.

Why do university professors require students to purchase books at all? Why not have the school inform parents and students of the option of getting their books as electronic books for something like the Sony Reader? Imagine having a single slim device that you could take to every class and have all of your books with you? The cost for the books would/should be lower and there wouldn't be the whole buy-use-sell dance at the beginning of each semester of school. I mean it is the 21st century isn't it? Why, with all the technology we have at our fingertips, do we still insist on kids lugging around paper books when there are alternatives that make more sense?

Just a thought. Probably too much money being made to have it change any time soon, but you'd think all the 'environmentalist/activist' university professor could get behind something like this, wouldn't you?