::tap::tap::tap::

is this thing on? OK, maybe not as much as it should be, but I’ve got two things to say I never thought I ever would…

Thing One: I ran five miles this morning! I took a couple days off because 1. I gave blood on Thursday so I didn’t run on Friday and 2. I slept late yesterday and, long story, I just didn’t get a chance to run later.

Thing Two: When I got done running, I was a little surprised that I had sweated out about three pints of water… But fair’s fair — I always weigh myself after my morning run, just to keep things more or less equal. And when I weighed myself this morning, I was down 90 pounds! I know, it was just temporary, since I drank some water to make up for all of the sweating… But still, 90 pounds!! :)

And I know I haven’t been around much, here or visiting around or anywhere… but I’ve been working on this project and it’s been kind of all-consuming. One of these days maybe I’ll share it but for now it’s hush hush, you know?

If eBay wants to stop the long tradition of feedback for buyers, fine.

But I’m going to stop leaving feedback for sellers. If sellers don’t like it, and they won’t, they can complain. And they should. Because they’re the ones paying the bills. And that’s the only way things will change back to the way they were.

Why not join me? No more feedback for buyers? No more feedback for anybody.

Just in case I need to refer back to this article on Mac OS X Tips…

Luckily, if it is a cocoa application, you can hide the Dock icon yourself. To see if it is possible, right-click (Control-click) on the application icon. If “Show Package Contents” is in the menu that appears, you can hide the icon in the Dock.

If this is the case, select “Show Package Contents” and look for the “Info.plist” file inside the Contents folder. Open this file using TextEdit by right-clicking on it and choosing “Open With - Other” from the menu.

In the file, paste the following two lines just after <dict> on the 6th line:

<key>LSUIElement</key>
<string>1</string>

Save the file and close it. For the changes to take effect, you need to move the application to the desktop and them back to its original location (OS X keeps a cache of the file, so you need to trick it into checking it again).

Now when you open the application, no icon will appear in the Dock. I wouldn’t recommend doing this with your regular applications like iTunes and Safari as this also has the side-effect of disabling the menu bar. This means that you will have to quit the application using the keyboard shortcut Command-Q. If the application doesn’t have any windows, you will have to quit it from Activity Monitor (in Applications/Utilities).

Of course getting back to it involves going to the Finder and clicking the application’s icon. But it’s a handy way of keeping that blogging-only browser away from the prying eyes of co-workers and other ne’er-do-wells.

If you’re back-to-school shopping and haven’t gotten your new computer yet, let me help you out with that…  :)

The all-new iMac. Beautifully redesigned 20- and 24-inch models from $1199.

If you’re not building a MythTV DVR, just skip on by.

I had some trouble over the weekend I figured I should share.  If you are reading this in the future because you’ve googled for trouble with MythDora, Hauppauge PVR-150, LIRC, serial IR, mode2, irw, etc. — well, welcome to you, time traveler.

Here’s how it started.  I bought a Hauppauge PVR-150 tuner card because it has the IR blaster built in.  The new DVR I’m building is going to drive my cable box (Scientific Atlanta Explorer 2200, I believe) so I need a way to change its channel and then suck the signal off of channel 3.  The PVR-150 has such an IR blaster that you connect and point at your set-top box.  It also has an IR receiver, and it comes with a remote control, and MythTV is easily configured to use this remote to control the operation of the DVR as a whole.

And that’s how I set it up.  First in my office, I got everything working with this one tuner.  Then I moved the system to the basement.  I got all of the S-Video stuff set up (Radeon 9600 — be sure to comment out the VideoOverlay line and replace it with an OpenGLOverlay line).  I got all of the IR stuff set up.  And a tip of the hat and thanks to Techie Bytes and Mark’s Braindump for the how-to on getting that set up.  It seems that the Hauuppauge PVR-150 can’t control the Scientific Atlanta 2000 without some tweaks, which are very straightforward and easy.  I was using the gray Hauppauge remote to control the system and the system was controlling my cable box.

But as most of you know, I don’t live in my basement, and I don’t watch TV in my basement.  So I’ve got S-Video and audio lines running up to the living room and and an IR extender (wired, that I built myself, thank you very much) running down from same.  So I took my remote control upstairs, pointed it at said gadget and… NOTHING.  Something strange about the Hauppauge remote, it does NOT work with my IR extender.  Huh.  And thinking about it now, that should have been a red flag, right?  Huh.

But that’s OK, because I needed to move the other two tuners from the existing MythTV system and I really needed to put a new 320 GB hard drive in there to replace an older one (yeah, I should have known better, and it was, in fact, giving Smart errors).  And while I’m robbing the old system, I take the serial IR receiver and install it on the new system.  Don’t ask me where I got it, I think it was from Germany.

Now since I had everything configured to work with the Hauppauge remote and the SA2000 blaster codes, I just kept that in place and continued, but configuring the serial IR receiver in place of the one that’s built into the PVR-150 card.  No problem.  I used mode2 to test that it was working, and indeed, I was getting a good stream of numbers, indicating that the signal was being received.  Next step is to test with irw to make sure that the buttons are being processed correctly.  NOTHING.

I’ll spare you the sweating, the swearing, the twelve fucking hours — YES, just about that long — of configuring, re-configuring, sweating and swearing some more.  Let’s just cut to the revelation I should have known all along.  You see, when I copied over the lircd.conf from the old system and I set that all up and then I grabbed the remote I’ve been using with that old system (it’s actually a remote from an old PrimeStar satellite box, codes copied over to a really fancy learning remote).  When I tested with mode2, lots of numbers.  When I tested with irw… YES!!  So to make a long (weekend-long) story short, the Hauppauge remote DOES NOT WORK with EITHER the IR extender I built OR with the serial IR receiver.

Like I said, I should have known when it didn’t work with the one that it might not work with the other.  But here’s the lesson I’m sharing: DO NOT ASSUME THAT ANY REMOTE WILL WORK WITH ANY IR RECEIVER.  It turns out it’s just not the case.

A couple more things while I’m at it.  I mentioned the Option “OpenGLOverlay” “on” that belongs in xorg.conf for the Radeon 9600.  I should also say I was having performance problems and seeing all kinds of errors when I ran mythfrontend interactively — something I do very much recommend so you can see if you’ve got any other fixups to do.  The system warned me that I was going to have trouble displaying video at 1024×768 resolution.  Oh shit, I thought.  And I’ve changed the screen resolution to 640×480.  But I was still getting audio dropouts and seeing the dreaded “prebuffering” warnings.  So in the playback settings, I’d never tinkered with this setting, but I thought I’d give the separate GUI/video playback modes a try.  Turns out that you can set the resolution of videp playback down to 320×200 — I think that’s the default.  When I did this, it was like magic.  Playback still looks great and the audio is superb as well.  So if you’re having video jitters and audio droputs, consider the lower playback resolution and that might solve all of your problems.

Well that’s how my weekend went.  I hope that posting this might save somebody some time and trouble down the road.  And if not, at least I’ll remember all of this for next time!  :)

Note to self…

# If you want to enable PAM authentication, uncomment the following line
# PAMAuthentication yes

# If you want simple Unix (/etc/passwd) authentication, uncomment this
UnixAuthentication yes

Before I did this, I couldn’t FTP into my DVR.

Oh, the file is in /etc/pure-ftpd/pure-ftpd.conf, by the way.

OK, not really. I decided that the scale in the gym at work is probably more accurate than the one I’ve got at home. Both doctors’ scales, but mine hasn’t been calibrated in some time. So yesterday on my way home, I stopped and weighed myself and then right when I got home I weighed myself again. Turns out my scale at home weighed me three pounds lighter than at work. Damn! So now I’m three pounds heaver than I thought I was, but I’ve still lost as much as I thought I have. And how much is that? I’ll let you know next milestone! :)

P.S. Wordless Wednesday hit its bandwidth limit so I’ve had to upgrade it to the next level of hosting service. With any luck they’ll do that in the next couple of hours and I’ll put up this week’s welcome.

And this week’s sponsor? It’s Netflix, who have lowered my price — cool!

P.S. After my workout, I weighed myself… and then I did the math… and then I did some more math… and now it turns out that since mid-April, I have lost ::drum roll:: 41 pounds!  Yay me!

Don’t worry, I’m not dead. That’s in case anybody was curious or concerned.

Anyway, I need to test something, so bear with me. Or is it bare with me? That’s a whole nuther story.

Any day now…

Every now and then I peek at my spam folder to see if there’s any really good pornography.

OK, just kidding about that, but what I do find from time to time is false positives. Yeah, sometimes the spam filter is too aggressive and puts NON-spam in the spam folder. This morning I had to retrieve three perfectly good messages from spam-ness.

So just be on the lookout for real messages hiding among the weeds. Who knows, you might have already won the Nigerian lottery!

Please play along…

Perhaps we forgot to mention that the word on Mister Laptop (what is his blog name again?) is feeling much better, thank you!

I did reinstall the OS and that left all of the files in place, but the next two reboots both crashed. This was not encouraging. But I tried a few different things, including logging into my backup account, and I was able to get the upgrade OS installation done. And it hasn’t crashed since! ::knocking wood::

So maybe the thread of the shame of restoring backed-up files was enough, but he’s back and feeling great! Yay!!