zen.org Communal Weblog

Over the weekend we got to watch a full movie with Patrick for the first time: Star Wars! In the past he hasn’t wanted to see them because at some point he came to the belief that all movies are scary. But someone from his class, I think, convinced him to want to see this.

And, finally, a movie sounded really good in our livingroom!

For a really long time now we’ve been using a Cambridge Soundworks DTT 3500 Digital 5.1 Surround Speaker System to make TV and movies sound better in our livingroom. It worked pretty well, overall, even making the sound from our MythTV PVR system go out through it.

When I had to replace our 8 year-old dead TV, I was hooking up everything and found the Cambridge Soundworks box wasn’t actually usable anymore. The new Samsung LE40R74BD television (absolutely gorgeous) had a single red/white pair of RCA plugs for audio out, and no way to feed sound via the optical or coax inputs needed for the surround sound system. Hmm.

So after a while I finally got a sound receiver to connect everything. The Sony STR-DG700 receiver can do everything. (Continuing a past habit with TVs, cars, and other things, we bought the floor demo model at a discount.) Well, it can do just about everything—the DVD input can only come in via digital coax, not optical. And, the Sony guy is ordering us the proper remote for it because they couldn’t find it anywhere.

I reused the Cambridge speakers for this receiver, since I felt they would work perfectly fine for what we need. The temptation for the expensive Bose speakers was there a little, and then there’s the uber-expensive Bowers & Wilkins speakers available up in Blackrock. But after the TV and then convincing myself to get the receiver, it’d sure be cool to not buy anything else.

The five little black Cambridge speakers did a fine job. The DVD player’s digital coax line went into the receiver and made the sounds of movies jump out at us. It was wonderful, even if there was a missing piece: the biggest part of the speaker set is the subwoofer which gives the happy thundering sounds and dramatic effect. But ours wasn’t working—the receiver has a Pre-Amp Out plug for the subwoofer, which a little reading helped me understand: the subwoofer’s supposed to have its own amp, its own way to take the sound and give it some oomf. Since I was no longer using the DTT3500’s black box of buttons and dials, there was no amp for the subwoofer anymore.

I asked around and looked at some sites and called some shops, but it seems like buying a single subwoofer isn’t a cheap exercise. They were hundreds of Euros, mostly. Not worth it to me for the single device. Natural thought progression tossed my brain back into the Bose-is-so-cool arena. But wait…

Maybe we can make the receiver give its output to the Cambridge box so it could do the work for the subwoofer? Yes!

I discovered that there is one optical output on the Sony receiver: MD/TAPE. I plugged an optical cable into that, and put the other end into the Cambridge box. Plugged its subwoofer into the subwoofer contacts, and played Star Wars.

Oh my. That’ll work for a while. 🙂

Justin Mason has just launched a new mailing list for folks using MythTV in Ireland. Everyone can come out of the dark corners of the bogs and start putting together our collective experience to make really good alternatives to Sky+ or the other commercial products that’re out there.

Watch what you want, when you want.

I found a new CSS trick yesterday. If you have a block of CSS that messes up other browsers but Mozilla browsers stick it it a @-moz-document block, like:

CSS for every browser here

@-moz-document url-prefix()

{

Mozilla only CSS here

}

It would be really cool if every browser had some sort of @ rule to parse out browser specific code like this rather then using tricks.

Sometimes the Chinese are just genus: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6178659.stm

At work I subscribe to about 60, mostly music, podcasts. Some of which probably don’t actually produce shows anymore, but I don’t often notice it. Usually I just let them play in the order they download. For weeks, nay months, all has been well. I pop on the ear phones and away I go, but today I’m running out of shows. Even though Trance Tuesday in three hours long, it’s going to run out soon. Sure tomorrow there will be more shows, but enough for most of a work day?

I guess in the mean time I’ll to run a sort of best of in my head tomorrow.  So No me gusta la Coke, No me gusta la Coke. That you Quiero Club.

I was agonizing about getting a new computer, so Daphne made some command decisions, she used her employee discount, and got a Dell. She got a Dell Dimension C521 with Windows XP Media Center Edition. Though I don’t think she will admit it, she loves it, it works as a great television in the kitchen, it’s even got a remote control! Plus it gets all those extended basic cable channels we don’t pay for. Hello Dr. Who!

I was agonizing because I wanted to get a computer that I would not have to fight with the hardware to run Linux. Daphne wanted a television in the kitchen. I wanted Linux to play audio files, and a video podcast or two. Daphne wanted a television in the kitchen. I wanted to stand up for my libertarian rights to have no corporate software on my computer. Daphne wanted a television in the kitchen. So Daphne won three votes to two. Zoë just wants to be able to visit Elmo’s web site. To be honest, I’m not giving 余艾蕾 full credit, but this is my post not hers.

Zoë happened to be sick the day the system was going to show up so my Father came over while I tried to get some work done. In came the new Dell, I was going to leave it until the evening but my father wanted to see the TV card working. After the set up, and two or three reboots to get all the security updates installed, Zoë and Papap where happily watching Fox News.

Then came Linux! That will have to be a post for another day, as it’s time to get some work done.

I’m not one for gadgets as far as a computer geek goes. I got an iRiver player, and a old mobile phone, and they rarely get used. I try not to leave home! Having said that, the Sony® Portable Reader System PRS-500 looks really cool. The interface seems what I’ve been thinking about for years! Decades from now, when I’ve finished most of the books I have at home, I’ll get one to read Project Gutenberg titles again. I wonder if it works on Linux.

No, I don’t want one for Christmas! …this year.

Apparently they don’t like people who have had problems with their services talking out about it. How rude. CW is trying to take away the domain TalkTalkHell from a former customer who had MANY problems (and from the look of the site, they’re not the first!), and has decided to blog about it.

How about using that time instead to fix the darn service? No, that would make sense.

I submitted a patch to the GNU Core Utilities mailing list to allow wc to print byte count in human readable format (563G instead of 603519039483).

A few years ago I sent a patch to GNU documentation system that added an option to the info command to print out the default $INFOPATH, I got a very nice thank you but there is still no way to extract the default $INFOPATH without doing something like: strings /usr/bin/info | grep /info:

Using to MythTV 0.20 under FC3 appears to be going well so far.

After the “smart upgrade” and a reboot, I found that mythfrontend wasn’t coming up. It failed to start, as did mythbackend, because of

2006-09-14 15:14:10.068 Connected to database ‘mythconverg’ at host: localhost
2006-09-14 15:14:10.070 Upgrading to schema version 1136
2006-09-14 15:14:10.071 DB Error (Performing database upgrade):
Query was: ALTER TABLE program ADD listingsource INT NOT NULL default ‘0’;
Error was: Driver error was [2/1060]:
QMYSQL3: Unable to execute query
Database error was:
Duplicate column name ‘listingsource’

new version: 1136
2006-09-14 15:14:10.072 Database Schema upgrade FAILED, unlocking.
2006-09-14 15:14:10.072 Couldn’t upgrade database to new schema

Even though my full dump of mysql before doing all of this doesn’t actually have ‘listingsource’ in the program table it emitted. Weird.

To fix it, I had to do

mysql -umysql -p mysql mythconverg
> alter table program drop listingsource;
> quit;

and then make mythbackend do its stuff in front of me so I knew it’d actually succeeded:

sudo mythbackend

Once that was happy having done a bunch of upgrades to schema versions incrementing to 1160, it finally calmed after emitting

2006-09-14 15:20:19.384 AutoExpire: Required Free Space: 2.1 GB w/freq: 10 min
2006-09-14 15:20:21.298 Reschedule requested for id -1.
2006-09-14 15:20:21.795 Scheduled 260 items in 0.5 = 0.15 match + 0.35 place
2006-09-14 15:20:21.801 Seem to be woken up by USER

With that, I did a Ctrl-C and restarted it with

sudo /sbin/service mythbackend restart

Now it’s up and humming. Almost happy; bugs include:

• the preview play of recorded shows has a very blue-tinted color now
• mythmusic fails cuz libmythmusic.so can’t resolve mm_support (possibly cuz of libexif and the fact I’m running FC3 vs FC5, supposedly)

Otherwise, so far so good. Others are having some trouble with this new version, though, so I wouldn’t jump on it yet.