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I’ve searched but found I never actually noted the equipment I’m using for our small under-the-TV MythTV box. I’ve got more than one reason to note it:

• Shuttle SN45GV2 Barebone PC, Socket A (uses an AMD CPU instead of Intel)
• AMD Sempron 2600+ 1.833 GHz processor
• Corsair Value S. PC3200 DDR-DIMM 512MB memory

We’re having some trouble with it, and I’m not yet sure if it’s the Hauppauge PVR-350 card or if the system’s motherboard is failing. For a good year I’ve found the system’s Ethernet port is unreliable; for a while I was using a USB wireless dongle, and then switched to a Linksys USB200M adapter (which sucks, crappy little plastic door thingy keeps the cable in—until your 1 year-old bends it til it snaps off, at which point no matter what effort and tape you use, you’ll not get the thing to stay connected). But in the past few months we’ve found sound dropping out, so there’s no sound watching live TV and some recordings are missing their sound. (Permanently.) I’ve restarted the NTL Pace box but it makes no difference. Only a system reboot actually corrects it.

Some friends on the MythTV-Ireland mailing list suggest perhaps the motherboard’s dying. Since sound on the system (aplay KDE_Error.wav) still works I’m suspicious of the Hauppauge card.

I’m just making this post so I’ve got the specs of the Shuttle box and its processor written down somewhere other than obscure email archives. Just in case. 🙂 Next possible step: take the PVR-350 card out of the Shuttle box and see if it works differently in my desktop PC. Problem is time to do anything like that. 🙂

At 2008-12-31T18:59:59-0500 (2008-12-31T23:59:59+0000) there is going to be a leap second! Anybody have a good cocktail suggestion to celebrate this? If you are in Japan, perhaps something to stave off the hangover from the previous night’s party.

It’s a good thing my systems use ntp.

I was reading that extreme leftist web site, Daily Kos, the other day. I was confused as they kept saying GOTV out of any context. I was thinking that it must be this really cool new television channel I don’t get! Well, while there is a mobile phone content provider called GoTV, it didn’t seem to be worth all the comments. Perhaps I was seeing the fnords!

Alas, no, it means “Get Out The Vote”. Even if you don’t like anybody on the Democratic or Republican ticket, vote Green, or Libertarian, perhaps Nader. Or even (shudder) Constitution Party. Write in Ross Perot!

What’s up with Google News – Most Popular. The US version is usually filled with drivel. I visit today and I see items on Canadian politics, Somali pirates, and ever have to scroll down to see items about the election! Are Americans reading international news? Has the caducity of gossip finally reached its limit? Did Google Change the algorithm?

I’ve had the odd problem where the numeric keypad keys on my keyboard just don’t cause anything to happen. I run xev and I can see the keypress happening, but nothing appears where I’m typing.

A great blog entry by Peng Barthelmess has the workaround until Gnome does the real fix:

Go into the Keyboard Preferences (System >Preferences > Keyboard) and go to the Mouse Keys tab. Simply uncheck the box for Allow to control the pointer using the keyboard. (I know the grammar sucks on that sentence. I need to find a bug for that as well.) That will let users of Ubuntu Hardy, and other distros that use GNOME 2.22, to regain the use of their numeric keypad.

Worked like a charm!

Well, I didn’t watch much, but I just read what FactCheck.org said about it. According to them, the only outright lie seems to have come from Mr. McCain, McCain was way off the mark when he said that earmarks in federal appropriations bills had tripled in the last five years…In fact, earmarks have actually gone down. I really wanted an outright lie from Mr. Obama too, but there was not any last night.

Then, these bugged me:

…McCain repeated a misleading line we’ve heard before.

Obama was out of date…As we’ve said before…

McCain repeated an exaggerated claim…

McCain repeated the false insinuation…

Each with a link to past articles that that showed the correction. It’s one thing to goof, but to do it again? Ok, perhaps the log is in my eye for there splinter, but I’m a simpleton, they are going to be in the position formally known as the most powerful person in the free world. Mr. McCain forwent correction three times, and Mr. Obama once. So I guess the Dems win this one too. Most of the others corrections, though worthy of FackCheck.org, where trivial.

As I think both Democrats and Republicans politician have been sticking it to fellow Americans for decades, I really wanted the misinformation to be more even.

My Irish passport expires in a few months. I figure we’ve no plans to go anywhere for the remainder of the year, probably, so why not look into getting it renewed? I visited the Official Site to get the scoop.

If you pay An Post for Passport Express, you’ll get it in 10 days.

If you don’t, and want to be frugal since there’s no rush, you can do it via regular post—accepting it will take “at least 4-6 weeks” to get it back. Which instills the fear in the reader that something may come up in the next two months which would make you need it, and you’d of course be screwed without it. So I’d guess most people go via An Post.

I wonder: what’s the functional difference between the Passport Express delivery box and the Stupid Shit Regular Post box? I expect they sit side-by-side in the same building, and the Regular Post box also serves as a great place to rest bags full of those completed-and-barely-shredded Passport Express applications awaiting recycling.

Want to make your browsing go really quickly? Unless your host is running bind/named itself, you can make it stop asking another computer (possibly over in your ISP) every time you try to visit a site or download your mail. Sometimes there’s a pregnant pause at it’s looking it up—again.

The dnsmasq program is really fantastic and keeps a local cache of the addresses you’re asking about. Your computer has its own local place to scribble down things you’ll probably ask for again soon.

Instructions for setting it up are also available on an Ubuntu blog, with the quickest steps in its first comment.

P.S. It’s not just Ubuntu, actually—you could put it on all sorts of systems, including Macs running OS X.

Some work I’m doing involved using a bunch of 3rd party tools. They come with .HLP files for user documentation, but I’m doing my development on a Linux host. I discovered a great tool called helpdeco which produced a few different files, on the basis that you may want to change things and regenerate the .HLP file.

For me, the RTF file it produced was exactly what I needed. I was able to get at the info I wanted, and didn’t have to reboot my laptop in order to read the help file. (It occurs to me that invoking some command under the wine emulator may have also worked. Another time. 🙂 )