Lots of people have built human powered generators. I like this one for two reasons:
1. It's designed to harvest waste energy. (It helps your body stop your knee from swinging at the end of the forward swing, something your body uses energy to do anyways.)
2. The evaluation included serious medical studies to determine the amount of metabolic energy it "takes" from the human. (to get a watt of power, it increases the human's load by less than a watt. By comparison, a hand crank generator takes 6.4 watts from the human for each watt harvested)
I upgraded my Mythtv server from Feisty to Gutsy for no good reason (other than I like the pain).
Gotchas I ran into when trying to get MythTV working again:
1. The upgrade lost/removed the libqt3-mysql support from my computer. This resulted in the MythTV applications (frontend and backend) giving "unable to connect to database" errors. As the upgrade had also upgraded my MySQL install, I spent a good amount of time checking that the mythtv user still existed and had the proper permissions before I figured out it was a QT database library problem.
apt-get install libqt3-mt-mysql fixed it.
2. LIRCD stopped receiving commands from my HDHomeRun receiver from SiliconDust. Turns out you have to change the LIRCD_ARGS="-d 5000" line in the /etc/lirc/hardware.conf file to LIRCD_ARGS="-H udp -d 5000". After this, typing irw showed that LIRCD was now receiving the command codes as it was supposed to.
3. The module name for my D-Link GWL-G122 usb wifi-adaptor have changed, so I had to change entry in the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file to reflect the new name(s) of: rt2x00usb and rt2500usb.
Lots of people have built human powered generators. I like this one for two reasons: