Mon 26 May 2008
With the price wars on TV’s as of late… alot of the vendors have come out with new models. With the fears of production shortages early next year ( I know… next year is 6+ months away ) it might be the last Holiday to truly get a good deal. We wound up buying a Panasonic TH-50PZ800U
Too see more of our adventure on getting this TV… read on
(more…)
Sun 25 May 2008
Recently, a certain network of mine has come under a series of unwarranted traffic patterns. Much of it has been disruptive in nature. I’ve done a fair bit of forensics during the incidents and have come to realize that my custom audit shell scripts, interfacing with TCPdump, just don’t cut it anymore for real-time proactive/reactive monitoring.
Tue 8 Jan 2008
After talking with some folks about my MythTV box and their ‘digital’ HD use of grabbing channels, I wanted to see what I could do in getting HD channels for recording on my own MythTV box.
First place I visited was Antenna Web. Here I was able to see what and where the HD signals were coming from. I also was able to determine what my antenna type needed to be to get that signal. A quick tutorial site on using Antenna Web’s info was Solid Signals Choose an HD Antenna page.
The second site I visited was HDTv Antenna Labs page which has a good review of the various antennas out there. I was able to view the antenna types and directional type for the antennas. Some other helpful info was the number of reviews for all the antennas listed. It helps to gauge an antennas worthiness from users experience as some perform well under certain conditions.
All of this info has given me a opportunity to hunt more info down over the weekend. Stay tuned for more HDTv enhancement for my MythTV box.
Sun 2 Dec 2007
My friend and fellow brewer, Eric, introduced me to a beer the other day, while visiting, that was very very delicious. It was called ‘Samichlaus’, translated from switzerland to mean Santa Claus. My experience with this beer was by sharing half of the bottle with Eric. Reading the label, I saw why: 14% alcohol.
How could such a potent beer taste so smooth and creamy? It’s due to the long maturing process of keeping the beer bottled in a deep cellar for 10 months. Nature takes it’s time to make this perfection. It’s brewed on Dec 6th of every year and distributed out before December of the coming year. What a treat.
When asked, “Where did you get this?”, I was shocked to hear, “QFC.” QFC is a grocery chain own by Kroger (I believe.) I had the leisure of trying out the QFC by his house on my way home and bought a bottle. At $6.95 for 11.5 oz, it isn’t cheap. I’ve been saving it for a rainy day and today is certain a combination that justifies this brew more… snowflakes the size of grapes, and nail biting cold, mixed in with some rain and wind (Seattle Salt and Pepper, I like to call it.)
I tried to buy this bottle at Seattle QFC’s, but I have had no such luck. It looks like I’m going to have to hunt this down at BottelWorks, Inc. in Wallingford.
*update 01/12/2008*
I was able to find a stash of this bottled beer at Ballard Market in Ballard.
Sun 14 Oct 2007
Tammy has pledged to be a NYC tourist. What a better time to do it than at Christmas and New Years Eve! We are planning to be in NY December 22nd to Jan 2nd. Check back here often to see updates on our travel itinerary and fun stuff that we have planned.
For flight, events, and other info just click here:
Sat 15 Sep 2007
So, with the upcoming change in fetching tv listing information, it’s no longer free, I’ve decided to upgrade to the latest mythtv. I’ve also signed up for SchedulesDirect. The upgrade was rather easy since I had all of the requirements already in place with my previous install. I think sometime in the near future I will rebuild mythtv setup.
Currently, I have my mythbackend/frontend all on the same system. The storage was local, but with the upgrade I’m attempting to use my nfs server which is a hardware raid setup sitting in the garage. This current mythtv system is located in my living room. With all the moving parts and such it does create a constant whine in the living room. It would be nice to move the backend back into the garage and get a thin client or ultra slim pc in the living room.
What would even be better is to have the ultra system in the living room and the harddrive be a solid state disk. Think of how much noise and heat you would remove from the system.
Upgrade Time:
Here are the steps I took.
With this in place… rebooting the server… and everything came up. But there were a couple of cleanup steps I needed to do to make things perfect. Look for Part II coming soon.
Next on the list is to get MythWeb working.
Sun 19 Aug 2007
So, now that I have MythTV in place, I am very very eager to schedule all the new tv shows this fall season. The task ahead of me is to keep me reminded of when the shows start, frequency, and time of day/date. Here are a few of the headline shows I will be tracking. They’ll be crossed out when I have scheduled them:
Conflicts:
To help out with conflicts, I’ve placed a priority label for each one. The interesting thing is that usually, if a new season is starting, we would record the unseen conflicting shows. So, not record show we are watching live.
The priority number in mythtv’s eyes is the higher the #, the more important the show is. So, if we are watching a show live, then the the priority should be lower. You could leave it to chance with remembering to set the priorities. I think the better thing is to choose not to record a show if you are watching it live.
Hopefully this works.
Mon 18 Dec 2006
In a previous post of mine “Skype for Mac” I talked about the desire for a black box unit that would connect to the ethernet jack and you could dial out using your skype account… It turns out that Linksys has done better than that… they made it wifi 802.11 b/g!
The full product series iPhone Product Series.
Of course they have the ‘usb’ black box I mentioned in my earlier post.
The phone seems to be a HUGE hook into reaching users and new customers. Google is trying to get into the foray with potentially a gPhone. But I still don’t get the fee that Skype plans to charge, $29.95 for unlimited calls in the US and CANADA… No more free skype landline calls 
Oh well.
Fri 15 Dec 2006
More to come
Sun 10 Dec 2006
Tammy and I are heading to Victoria for Christmas. We figured it would be a great way to travel, but not get caught in the high travel season of the airports. We are staying at the Days Inn in Downtown Victoria. We are going to arrive December 23rd and return on the 26th. Below are some of the possible things we are going to see: