I’m officially on the hook for competing in Iron April 2009. It’s an interesting event organized by a real Ironman, Kevin Haugh, that takes loads of folks who normally don’t triathalons and convinces them to do the distance of an Ironman over the course of the month of April. It’s an informal sort of competition where you’re motivated by the other folks who are also trying to accomplish the same thing.
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As I mentioned in my previous article about using a Drobo as primary MythTV storage, the optimal solution for using a Drobo in MythTV is to record to an internal hard drive and then migrate the recordings later to the Drobo. When migrating recordings care is required because the recording could be in use, either as a result of someone watching the recording or because transcode/commercial flagging jobs are running on the recording.
Advertisement from mwave.com billing Drobo as your new Primary Storage
In October 2008 I purchased a 1st generation Drobo to provide additional storage space for my growing collection of recordings from MythTV. The plan was to use the Drobo as primary storage for MythTV recordings, something I believed to be acceptable because recording high-definition television maxes out at a couple of megabytes a second. The Drobo is equipped with a USB2 connection and should be able to push well more than that.
On Monday, March 9th I successfully defended my Ph.D. thesis. I haven’t finished all the little revisions yet, in fact I haven’t even opened the email from my advisors yet, but I’m largely finished with grad school. If you’re interested in the thesis or the presentation, you can take a look at my Patrick’s Awesome Thesis Defense Page that is part of my academic home page.
One nice aspect of grad school is that it afforded a reasonably flexible work schedule and the ability to travel a fair amount.
The United States House of Representatives [voted 264-158 to extend the DTV Transition until June 12th](http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s111-352). The vote went largely along party lines with a handful of each party switching sides, but it wasn't enough to be called a bi-partisan approval. However, it fails me why this should be a partisan issue in the first place. In approving the delay, the House left in the provision that allows TV stations to switch over before June 12th if they choose.
Almost every modern CPU supports the ability to dynamically change its clock frequency – typically done to save power when there are lesser requirements placed on the system. While the benefits for a laptop are obvious, more battery life and less heat, they may be a bit harder to understand for a desktop machine. One application, however, where you should be particularly aware of CPU frequency scaling is with media center boxes.
For the last 12 months American's have been incessantly pounded with messages about the upcoming DTV transition. In simple terminology, if you've got an old TV hooked up to rabbit ears, it's going to break in the very near future. The history of this problem is long, and complex, but it generally amounts to the fact that HDTV provides better quality in a smaller swath of frequency. Frequency that is very valuable and can get the government a couple of billion dollars at auction.
Since getting an iPhone I’ve put a bit more care into making sure that all of my music is ripped and available. My music resides on a Drobo plugged into my Linux box and shared via Samba to Windows and iTunes. I’ve chosen to have iTunes organize my music folder automatically. One down side of this is that iTunes then names files slightly differently and moves files around. This resulted in hundreds of directories laying around with no content.
I have just wiped away eight years of internets content!
One of the more interesting aspects of the inauguration today was how the website at whitehouse.gov switched over from the Bush administration to the Obama site right around noon. Shortly thereafter folks noticed the drastic contrast in robots.txt files between the two administrations. Some folks are saying this represents a difference in attitudes between the administrations, which may be true, but it’s much more likely a result of a differences in information architecture and the smaller amount of content on Obama’s whitehouse.
I’m five and half years into my journey with MythTV, and in that time I’ve managed to upgrade my system several times. Back in 2006 I wrote a tutorial on installing MythTV under Ubuntu with a pcHDTV card and a firewire tuner. While some pieces of the machine remain the same, most of the pieces of hardware have changed pretty radically since then.
The Case I use an Antec Overture 2 desktop ATX case.