d'oh! The Eels in this hovercraft have eaten the engine!

Still struggling with the media centre damn it! I am really impressed by the video capture its fantastic, ok its the one thing that has taken ages to get working but it does seem bullet proof now. I drilled a few holes in the back of my TV cabinet and posted all the wires through and set the centre up plugged into the TV it worked brilliantly, the text was so much more readable than when I was using windows on the system. However... I had been using the wired network connection whilst making sure it was setup, but with it being downstairs I had to resort to using the usb wireless thing I had. I had previously confirmed that this works with Ubuntu and got it all configured and expected it to just work after setting everything up in my sitting room, but it didn't. For some reason, that I am yet to investigate, the driver stops working and needs to be installed almost every time I restart the machine. I thought that maybe the drivers weren't in the init.d and so wouldn't be loaded on startup, but every so often the drivers are loaded and everything is fine. When the drivers are up and the connection made it lasts for anywhere from 30 seconds to a few hours before the connection just drops, again I am yet to investigate this!! Plus I want to play around with the resolution so that it fills my widescreen TV but I think the net connection is a more pressing matter. Other than that all that is left to do is learn GTK+ and make a nice little interface for it. Oh yes before I forget, I can't play DVDs directly from the disc to the TV, I think this maybe a strange copyright thing that occurred when using windows, to get around it I installed DVD43 and imagine I have to do something similar here. On a side note I made some bread at the weekend, no its not a weird tecno word for anything I do in fact mean flour water yeast e.t.c. anyway as first attempts go it wasn't great, not a complete failure but I didn't know stuff had to be 'proved' anyone that knows about bread will realise that I ended up with a crusty loaf the size and shape of pitta bread :)

mini-itx system

I made a few rubbish purchases; 1) I bought a SATA hard drive for someone who required an IDE one...durrr 2) I bought DRAM when I needed DDR2-RAM...fool! Anyway rather than try to sell these two items I decided to try and build something, so I also purchased a mini-itx motherboard ( a jetway j2f7...I think ) this was around £85-90 from mini-itx.com, a very good website for seeing other peoples projects and get ideas and kit. I spent a further £45 on a case and psu, then using a slimline dvd-rom/cd-rw from a broken laptop I was ready. To start with I just wanted to check that everything worked so I installed windows on the system. This worked so I then decided that I could turn the unit into a nice little PVR, this was before they started to drop in price. In order to play dvd's I used a copy of power-dvd and in order to watch dvds on my tv using the unit I had to install dvd43, as for some strange reason a copyrighted dvd won't play...go figure. So that I could use the unit to play all of my dvds from the hdd I used a piece of software called autoGK and another called DVDShrink this did take around 12hrs+ to rip and compress a single DVD which means to convert my whole collection would take a million years. Around the same sort of time I was experimenting with Linux so I wondered if there were any similar programs on there, well shocker there is and its called AcidRip and that took just 2 hours to turn a 1hr30minute dvd to a 700Mb avi file FANTASTIC. Since then I bought a cheap £20 usb video capture device from KWorld, who I since found out are a cheap Korean hardware manufacturer that tend to sell stuff in India-- or so I've been lead to believe. Anyway it took a while to get the video capture to work on ubuntu 7.10 but now it does finally work in mplayer, turns out the GStreamer drivers aren't mature enough to use it but the xine stuff did work whoopee. I might write a little project build guide up and submit it to mini-itx.com as possibly the cheapest PVR project ever. I have also discovered DynDNS and have decided that the media device can be made into a simple energy efficient server, and now I have just discovered that it is ideally suited for being a vlc server :) so I am still experimenting

here's to getting old

I don't know when it happened, but I have to admit I am officially old! At the ripe old age of 26 I have recently found myself a) wanting to find a quiet pub on a Friday night. b) no longer find fun in 'getting bladdered' c) can't easily distinguish 2 pop songs from one another. d) if I have a heavy night out the following night has to be an early one. e) upon seeing 'kids' in a pub you think, are they old enough to be in here? I guess all this should make me feel sad at the thought of my youth disappearing in what seems like the blink of an eye, but I don't. I feel quietly satisfied that when I look at a chavved up boy racer sh!t mobile, (some £400 corsa with a grands worth of body kit making it look like a caricature of its former self ) all I see is a childs toy and feel pity.