I'm running MythTV (Subversion Trunk) on a Ubuntu 7.10 box. After the daylight savings time changeover, my mythtv box had the correct time, but the Program Guide data was still off by an hour. Manually running a mythfilldatabase didn't fix it. After checking to make sure that my timezone xmltv settings were set to Auto, [...]
Saturday, February 2, 2008
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 [...]
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
On our van trip across the country my aunt and uncle gave us two hand crank (dynamo) LED flashlights which are really useful to keep in the van. The self-charging nature of the flashlights are very nice, in that we can leave them in the van and just wind them up when we need light. [...]
Thursday, January 24, 2008
My IBM X31 laptop has the capability to drive an external VGA monitor in addition to it's built in XGA (1024×768) Laptop Video Display Screen (LVDS). The new xrandr extension allows non-privlidged users to change monitor layouts on-the-fly. And now, thanks to my friend Tracy, I know the "extra magic" to make it all work.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
The St. Moritz SMX Diver (a discontinued watch) uses a Silver Oxide Cell battery, Maxell SR927SW (generic 395 button cell) which is a 1.55v battery.
Monday, November 12, 2007
I added a new hard disk to my MythTV box, specifically for storing movies copied from my DVD collection. Because this disk will be used for storing mostly files that will be in the 1-4GB size range, and because it is NOT going to be used as the root (/) drive of this computer, I [...]
Thursday, November 8, 2007
I built a perl script that can be used as a "User Job" from within mythtv to convert a recorded TV program into a cell phone (.3gp) movie. It makes uses of mythname.pl to get the show and title (for the filename) and mplayer/mencoder and ffmpeg to do the actual transcoding.
Unless you want to drop [...]
Human powered generator
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 [...]