larg

I recently bought an HDTV (Samsung LN40A630), I thought I might be able to survive for a while with the SD lardvo, but watching 480×480 MPEGs captured from analog cable and displayed over S-Video was unbearable, so time for an upgrade.

Hardware:

• EVGA 113-YW-E115-TR Motherboard
• Hauppauge HVR-1250 Tuner
• Intel E5200 CPU
• 2x1GB Generic RAM

The motherboard has integrated GeForce 9300 graphics, so I can use VDPAU for hardware-accelerated HD decoding, but so far that hasn’t been necessary for MPEG-2. (might be necessary for H.264 and almost certainly would be necessary for Blu-Ray).
Since Debian 5.0 was just released, I can actually get most of what I need with the stable release. I did update a few things:

• Upgrade to alsa 1.0.18a from experimental, to get HDMI audio support
• Configure alsa to output to HDMI by default. In asound.conf:

  pcm.!default {
  type hw
  card 0
  device 3
  }

• Upgrade to NVIDIA driver 180.22 from experimental (This was for VDPAU, probably not otherwise necessary.)

I’m still using MythTV 0.21 that I installed a while ago; I was going to update to an svn version for VDPAU support, but haven’t done that yet.

The WinTV card can get the networks in HD and the rest of the basic cable channels we subscribe to in SD off of the cable. Unfortunately there isn’t really any point in subscribing to any additional cable channels (HD or SD), since they’re encrypted and wouldn’t work with the lardvo. The HD networks all show up with their regular virtual channel number, but the cable channels don’t have any identifying info, they show up with their frequency and program number. (See the HDHomeRun channel database if that doesn’t make sense.) It took a bit of futzing to get the digital channels scanned properly and then to enter real channel numbers and XMLTV IDs for them. Reportedly Comcast will reassign them randomly, but I haven’t observed that yet.

Interestingly, even the old analog recordings look much better displayed over HDMI rather than S-Video. The HD looks great.

My TV doesn’t support DPMS, so I’ll have to settle for…

… xscreensaver in HD.

I recently built a PC-based DVR running Linux and MythTV:

I’ve never actually used a TiVo, so I can’t compare directly. Here are some selling points:

• It has a good system for specifying what to record and the relative priorities of different programs. The scheduler is intelligent; if an episode airs multiple times it will record either showing, and it remembers what episodes have already been recorded.
• It can automatically scan a recording for commercials. It takes some time to run the commercial scan job, but once the job has finished, you can watch the recording and it will skip the commercials automatically.
• With the MythWeb plugin, you can view the TV listings and select what to record from anywhere.
• No subscription. The TV listings are from a free service called DataDirect.

Hardware:

• Hauppauge PVR-350 (hardware MPEG-2 encode and decode)
• P3 650 MHz
• 384 MB RAM
• Antec “Solo” Case
• Seasonic S12 330W power supply
• 80 GB + 120 GB IDE hard drives
• Windows MCE remote

Software:

• Debian unstable
• Linux 2.6.18
• ivtv 0.8 from http://www.hellion.org.uk/
• lirc 0.8.0
• mythtv 0.20 packages from http://www.debian-multimedia.org/

A note about the CPU: for those who know, it is the computer formerly known as dildolicious. A long time ago I noticed the CPU fan wasn’t working, so I bought another, and when it still didn’t work I used some hookup wire to power it from the floppy connector. It probably ran with no fan for at least a year before I noticed. Since it worked fine, I’m running it fanless again to reduce noise. To ease my conscience about running fanless, I plugged it into the dead fan connector on the motherboard and I tell myself that if it gets really hot the fan will start, but I’m not holding my breath.

The noise sources are the power supply (12 cm fan), case fan (12 cm Antec Tri-Cool), and hard drives. It’s barely audible. Overall, however, I’m not very impressed with the Tri-Cool fans. I have one in my desktop as well. On the lowest setting, they are pretty quiet but don’t move much air. On medium or high they make a significant amount of noise.

I bought the MCE remote at Central Computers because it was the only cheap remote they had; it’s also available at Newegg. Despite the warning to the contrary in the newegg description, it works fine in linux. I copied several lirc configuration files from the interweb. The only problem is that sometimes the buttons seem to double-trigger.

Here’s an incomplete list of configuration changes and gotchas:

• I’m using the ivtv-fb driver for X11. The driver didn’t play nice with the default VGA console driver; I had to add “vga=768″ to the kernel command line to use the vesa framebuffer driver for the system console.
• I created a file in /etc/modprobe.d containing the following line to autoload the ivtv-fb module when the ivtv module is loaded: “install ivtv /sbin/modprobe –ignore-install ivtv && { /sbin/modprobe –quiet ivtv-fb ; : ; }”
• I set up gdm to automatically log in the mythtv user, and the xsession file runs mythfrontend.
• I’m sure I did much more than this, but I didn’t take notes.

There are more photos here.

Online TurboTax refused to serve me PDF files because I did not have the Acrobat plugin installed. Since I have mozplugger, I can view embedded PDF files fine. I shouldn’t need to have Acrobat.

Here’s how I built a fake Acrobat plugin to fool the detection script. Some of the more arcane steps I got from here.

1. apt-get souce mozilla
2. cd mozilla-1.7.12
3. make -f debian/sys-build.mk source.make
4. Edit build-tree/mozilla/allmakefiles.sh. Search for “plugin” and change the “windows” references in that section to “unix”.
5. debian/rules build. Presumably not all of this is needed, but I don’t know how to prune it down.
6. cd build-tree/mozilla/modules/plugin/tools/sdk/samples/common/
7. make
8. cd ../basic/unix/
9. Edit the Makefile. Add -I$(topsrcdir)/dist/include/plugin to the LOCAL_INCLUDES line. In SHARED_LIBRARY_LIBS, change $(DIST)/lib to ../../common.
10. Edit plugin.cpp. Change fine PLUGIN_DESCRIPTION to #define. WTF?
11. In plugin.cpp, change PLUGIN_NAME to Adobe Acrobat. Change PLUGIN_DESCRIPTION to 0123456789_10_456789_20_45678_6.0. (The TurboTax JavaScript reads the Acrobat version number from offset 30 in this string.)
12. make
13. Copy the resulting libnpSDKbasic.so binary to the Firefox plugins directory. If it worked it should show up in the about:plugins page.

Be warned that even though the resulting plugin .so is only 19 kB, the mozilla tree is 550 MB. There is a mythical “plugin SDK” that allows plugin development without a full source tree, but I couldn’t find it.

Typically I don’t like software with a “do what I mean” interface. I prefer a “do what I say” interface where my input is 100% unambiguous.

Examples of DWIS:

• command line anything
• graphic design software (Visio, Pagemaker) with a good alignment grid
• PrimeTime giving an “invalid start (end) point” warning if you report timing from (to) a cell instead of a clock/data pin as appropriate, rather than assuming you meant the clock/data pin

Examples of DWIM:

• Outlook changing “RSX: subject” to “RE: subject” (instead of “RE: RSX: subject”) for replies. I assume it’s guessing RSX means RE in some other language?
• the subtle difference between the parent and child window “X” buttons in Office applications
• anything involving advice from an animated paperclip

Today, I had a DWIM epiphany, in PowerPoint of all places. I think it helps that PowerPoint makes me feel dirty, so I want to get in, get it done, and get out before the smell sticks to my clothes. I probably end up overlooking sloppiness that might usually bother me.

PowerPoint did all sorts of crazy stuff on it’s own, which on the whole I actually found useful.

• “Click to add text” labels that actually go away when you click, instead of getting highlighted. Bonus points for not saying “Click to add text” in the preview pane.
• Bullets that appear and disappear in a rational fashion, instead of sticking to text whenever you don’t want them to

This entry is dumb but I might as well post it since I’ve written it already.

csh is an aptly-named shell. It is an acronym for “crappy shell”.

bash is not an aptly-named shell. I want to bash things when I am using other shells. When I use bash, I don’t feel like bashing things.

I suppose that reversed meaning could be the intent, but it’s bad marketing to promote any negative associations with your product.

Sometimes I get excited about the idea of writing a program that is similar to a spreadsheet, but is less “fuzzy”.

Then I realize that the program has already been written, and is called Matlab (alternatively octave), and if I converted the I/O timing to use octave, I would be stuck doing it until the end of days.

I am surprised that, other than the commercial version, nobody has integrated SSL with VNC.

The international standard unit of 1024 bytes is called a kibibyte.

I’m fairly certain that if I started talking about “kibibytes” it would sound like I had a speech impediment.