Home Sweet Home
Life's been a little crazy lately. Tim, his girlfriend Natalie and I moved into an apartment a couple blocks off Broadway and Commercial and we're still in the process of unpacking (their stuff) and finding a place for (all of their) things, a glacially-slow venture which seems to take two steps forward and one step back on a daily basis. Part of the problem (actually, the entire problem) is that Natalie is a pack-rat and can't bear to throw out anything she's formed a sentimental attachment to - ie: a receipt from a shopping trip from three years ago where she bought a pair of shoes that she really liked. It's a little alarming, really.
Anyway, we don't actually have enough room in this apartment (which, incidentally, is not a small place... The master bedroom is at least twice the size of my room, and I'm more than comfortable with the amount of room I have; we have a large storage area off of the bathroom; and we probably have more closets than any other apartment I've ever lived in) for all of her things. So the task we've been dealt is to somehow convince her to throw out all of these sundry items, which requires an item-by-item assessment and a lot of exasperation ("Do you REALLY need this broken pencil-case that you had in the third grade?") Like I said... It's slow going.
For my part, I've spent the last couple of weeks either in class or setting up the home theatre area. At the moment, everything is running into the TV, but in a few weeks I'll be ordering up my projector and screen - in fact, as soon as there's room in the living room for it. Audio-wise everything goes through a set-top switcher-box to my monstrous old solid-state amplifier and from there out to a pair of ancient but high-quality speakers. Video-wise, running into the switcher and then out to the TV we have a DVD player, Playstation 2, VHS deck (for Natalie's childhood Disney videos, sheesh) and the MythTV linux box which has been the primary focus of my efforts all week.
I'm hardly proficient when it comes to linux, so I put myself through a self-directed crash course whilst setting up first Ubuntu then Mythbuntu. It's been a really positive experience, although much more frustrating in the short term than setting anything up in Windows. The main problem I've encountered (and have NEARLY solved) is output to TV. After much mucking about in xorg.conf and the BIOS, I finally got the video card (a Radeon 9550) to properly output via s-video in 640x480@60, but I'm still struggling with consistent diagonal scrolling lines. I suspect they're interference, but I've tried a high-quality shielded cable with the same problem, while none of the other components have that issue with the same cables. There are other possibilities (s-video out on the card is 7-pin, in on TV is 4-pin, and I have no adapter; ground loop electrical problems; linux driver won't accept refresh-rate changes for that particular card; &c.) but I think what I'll do in the end is pick up a VGA-to-RCA cable on the cheap and see how that plays out. Once I get my projector it shouldn't matter too much, because I'll run DVI-D out to the HDMI in on the projector and with any luck that will resolve any quality issues conclusively.
The cool thing about MythTV is that, even though we don't have cable TV here and have no plans to get it, it functions really well just as a basic media box. I set up ssh so it can run as a household file-server, so we can just pop .AVIs and .MP3s on there and watch them or listen to them without having to worry about any kind of physical media transport. It has a built-in option for console emulators, though I haven't set them up just yet, as well as streaming media from the internet. At the moment the software configuration is kind of bare-bones, but I'm sure in time once I get the hardware working right I'll whip it into shape.
Anyway, we don't actually have enough room in this apartment (which, incidentally, is not a small place... The master bedroom is at least twice the size of my room, and I'm more than comfortable with the amount of room I have; we have a large storage area off of the bathroom; and we probably have more closets than any other apartment I've ever lived in) for all of her things. So the task we've been dealt is to somehow convince her to throw out all of these sundry items, which requires an item-by-item assessment and a lot of exasperation ("Do you REALLY need this broken pencil-case that you had in the third grade?") Like I said... It's slow going.
For my part, I've spent the last couple of weeks either in class or setting up the home theatre area. At the moment, everything is running into the TV, but in a few weeks I'll be ordering up my projector and screen - in fact, as soon as there's room in the living room for it. Audio-wise everything goes through a set-top switcher-box to my monstrous old solid-state amplifier and from there out to a pair of ancient but high-quality speakers. Video-wise, running into the switcher and then out to the TV we have a DVD player, Playstation 2, VHS deck (for Natalie's childhood Disney videos, sheesh) and the MythTV linux box which has been the primary focus of my efforts all week.
I'm hardly proficient when it comes to linux, so I put myself through a self-directed crash course whilst setting up first Ubuntu then Mythbuntu. It's been a really positive experience, although much more frustrating in the short term than setting anything up in Windows. The main problem I've encountered (and have NEARLY solved) is output to TV. After much mucking about in xorg.conf and the BIOS, I finally got the video card (a Radeon 9550) to properly output via s-video in 640x480@60, but I'm still struggling with consistent diagonal scrolling lines. I suspect they're interference, but I've tried a high-quality shielded cable with the same problem, while none of the other components have that issue with the same cables. There are other possibilities (s-video out on the card is 7-pin, in on TV is 4-pin, and I have no adapter; ground loop electrical problems; linux driver won't accept refresh-rate changes for that particular card; &c.) but I think what I'll do in the end is pick up a VGA-to-RCA cable on the cheap and see how that plays out. Once I get my projector it shouldn't matter too much, because I'll run DVI-D out to the HDMI in on the projector and with any luck that will resolve any quality issues conclusively.
The cool thing about MythTV is that, even though we don't have cable TV here and have no plans to get it, it functions really well just as a basic media box. I set up ssh so it can run as a household file-server, so we can just pop .AVIs and .MP3s on there and watch them or listen to them without having to worry about any kind of physical media transport. It has a built-in option for console emulators, though I haven't set them up just yet, as well as streaming media from the internet. At the moment the software configuration is kind of bare-bones, but I'm sure in time once I get the hardware working right I'll whip it into shape.