Archive for January, 2008

New Mythbox

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

I think i already told everyone who cares, but just in case I didn’t… I recently performed a major upgrade on the Linux box that I use as a Tivo like thing (DVR, PVR, what ever other name you like) running the open source myth tv software, hence the name. For Christmas I got a new capture card that does HDTV, and when I went to install it earlier this month, I quickly discovered that my machine was not powerful enough to play back the 1080i HD content that it was recording. This lead to a scramble to find some hardware upgrade options. There were a lot of constraints that made the search rather difficult that I won’t go into. The end result is that I now have a very super silent beast of a machine running my TV. I must say that after 3 years of using 3 different, but all under powered machines for this purpose, having a beast is nice! The on screen TV guide actually works now, much to the pleasure of my room mates, who actually use that feature. Without further ado I suppose, here is all the hardware in the current system.


HD-5500 Capture Card PVR150 MCE PVR150 MCE AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Windsor 2.0GHz 2 x 512KB L2 Cache Socket AM2 65W Dual-Core Processor GIGABYTE GA-M61P-S3 AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 6100 / nForce 430 ATX AMD Motherboard SeaSonic S12 II SS-330GB ATX12V 330W Power Supply Kingston HyperX 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Little Serial Port Header Pin Adapter. MSI NX7300LE-TD128EH GeForce 7300LE 128MB 64-bit GDDR2 PCI Express x16 Video Card

Oh and theres a 160Gb hard drive and a DVD drive in the thing, but they are legacy. So whats cool about all this, well its quieter by a lot. The iLab guys were always complaining about the noise the old one would make. It wasn’t even that bad, but now their stuff is louder, so I can complain, if I were to care, but I don’t really. Also, its efficient, the power supply is above average at ~80% efficient, and I’m pretty sure the 65 watt CPU is actually using less power than the older, much slower Athlon XP CPU I had in there before. Also, I can now watch HD shows, complete with automatic commercial removal and all the other Tvio like niceties, just in time for Lost season 34! Mmmm should you expect a lost post, soon, hum, you’ll just have to wait and see I suppose.

Barack Obama

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

You should all head over to blag.xkcd.com and read his latest post. Yes that is right all six of you can make a difference next week. Well, except for the one who’s not voting, and the 3 of you in Ohio who have to wait until March 4th. That leaves 2 of you, humm, did I miss anyone? While you’re at it (and while i’m on this soap box, here’s a little bit from a conservative point of view that was on digg. I didn’t watch the video (follow the link) he mentions yet, but I probably will.

Since I’m already making a political post today, and there is FISA/Protect America Act stuff going down, another link for updates on that.

Liquid Orange

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

As I seem to be holding this liquid orange fort by myself most of the time these days, I feel obligated to share with you all a link that my buddy, Josh, dug up for me. Yes that’s right someone actually made a device to liquefy an orange, and then you drink it! We can only hope that Chris bought liquidorange.com in addition to .net and is now trying to get an exhorbitant fee from the makers of this device for the domain name. That is all for now. Check in tomorrow, to see that I probably didn’t make another update yet.

Did You Know?

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

I ran across two things that i thought would fit into this category today.

  1. My bank was robbed today for the second time in as many years. Just a few minuets before I drove past it on my way home today. That is not a very good track record. The previous time was last May, and I think I was out of town at the time. Looks like they never caught the guy, so it could easily be the same one. No one was hurt in either robbery, and no worries thats what the FDIC is for, right?
  2. That Martian Luther King day “is observed on the third yesterday of January,” this according to the Metro Boston. I know I make a lot of mistakes with my writing on the blog, but that’s just it. Its a blog, I am not a professional. I run across professional writers who make the same mistakes or worse than mine almost every day. Although this is the most egregious one I’ve seen in print (as opposed to online) in quite some time. See for yourself (highlighting added):

    Third Yesterday

Cafe Kiraz

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008

Catching up from last week, the first WND (Wednesday Night Dinner) of 2008 was at Cafe Kiraz, a sandwich and pizza shop sort of in the middle of East Cambridge. I had been there before, and had a good sandwich so this time I ordered a calzone, a Hawaiian large one. It was awful! There was way too much cheese, the ham and pineapple were substandard at best. The crust was strange, not your traditionally pizza bread. I had ordered a large so that I’d have leftovers, which I managed to eat about half of over the next few days, boy was that a mistake. Some of the other guys got small buffalo chicken calzones, which they liked better than I liked mine. Aaron got a sandwich, the safe play, which he said was good. So go there, get a sandwich and you should be set.

Aaron also had some great stories to tell, the best of which was about how his neighbors threw a new years eve party and burned their house down! Apparently the kid, who lives with his grandmother often has parties to which the police are called. This time the grandmother was out of town, and someone at the party managed to start a fire in the garage, which had two cars in it. They quickly exploded and the fire spread. It didn’t appear that anyone was hurt; all of the party goes managed to leave before the firemen arrived. At one point half of the house was engulfed and the lights were on and everything seemed calm in the other half, which I think would have been a strange dichotomy to see. On one hand, I’m glad no one near me’s house got burnt down, but it does make my new years eve party seem just a bit more tame.

The Results are In

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

and in 2007 Paul once again topped the list of people I talk to on aim. One advantage of keeping logs of every aim conversation I have is that I can pull out fun but meaningless statistics and blog about them.

The results from 2007

Rank Bytes Name 2006 Rank
1
4261221 Paul
1
2
2088617 Kelly
3
1782259 OSU Paul
7
4
950551 Josh
2
5
871658 Jed
10
6
682480 Beth
3
7
615125 Rob
8
8
294982 Matt
6
9
268387 George
11
10
247025 My Parents
12

Lets compare the 2007 results to the all time list:

Rank Bytes Name 2007 Rank
1
14142297 Paul
1
2
9390234 Beth
5
3
4807056 George
9
4
4350718 Josh
4
5
4167148 OSU Paul
3
6
2956684 Matt
8
7
2457418 Kelly
2
8
2282025 Christy
9
2067038 Jessica
10
1839941 My Parents
10

The Moral of this story is that Paul better watch out or least he lose his top spot in 2008. Although, Beth and Paul’s all time placements are not yet in jeopardy everyone else may need to take notice. These are the numbers for the last quarter of 2007:

Rank Bytes Name
1
1627836 Kelly
2
1131700 Paul
3
250167 Josh

The last time Paul didn’t take the top prize for a quarter of the year was Q2 (April – June) 2005:

Rank Bytes Name
1
843586 Josh
2
701362 George
3
640133 Paul

Anyways, hope you enjoyed the random charts and tables. Making all of this reminds me of the girl’s comment in frame 4 of xkcd 314. Oh and the bash script that grabs all the data (sorry for the bad formating):

match="2007-*"; for f in `ls /home/liryon/.purple/logs/aim/liryon`; do du -scb home/liryon/.purple/logs/aim/liryon/$f/$match | grep total | sed -e "s/total/$f/"; done 2> /dev/null | grep -v aolsystemmsg | sort -n -r | head -n 10

Spelling

Friday, January 11th, 2008

I wrote a quick little email today, and attempted to send it. The text was:

Sorry for the later than usual email. Gaming will occur tomorrow at the usual ~2pm time at my place. Optional dinner to follow and stay for the Pats game if you like.

Now, I have my email program, Thunderbird, setup to check spelling when I hit send, but this time – low and behold – there wasn’t a single spelling error. So what does Thunderbrid proceed to do? It proceeds to crash of course. Even my email program knows that I can’t spell, and when faced with a user who could spell it attempted to prevent the sending of email by an obvious impostor in the best way it knew how.

Family North Carolina Trip

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

I feel like I haven’t updated the blog in a while. I don’t know, I’m thinking maybe a change in formats/coverage is in the works, but I’m not really sure. Anyways, I was checking out our winter vacation spot in North Carolina on google maps when I found something really surprising. Our cabin was only about 3,400 feet away from the Smokey Mountains National Park.

~3,400 feet

I wish I’d know that when I was there, it would have been cool to drive all the way up the road to the ridge. The trip was otherwise fun. I won 2/4 poker tournaments, none of which were played for money, much to my dismay, but that was really surprising given the crowd, although I’m sure had money been on the line I would have done worse, cause it changes everyones play style. Lets see, what else, I spent at least half a day playing with my cousins who are finally old enough that I feel like I can relate and play fun games with. We played sardines and sharks and minnows and some other stuff. Oh, we also played the Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader board game, I was on a team with my cousins and we as a collective (total grade level totaling ~30 between the 4 of us) were indeed smarter than a fifth grader.

Oh I got connecting to the internet on my laptop via a usb cable to my cell phone working in about an hour in preparation for the trip. I used it a little bit as it was the only connection available, but I tired not to use it too much because I’m unclear as to what the billing repercussions of doing so are. Although from what I can tell, since only the verizion 1x network was available I didn’t violate my terms of service. You only violate the terms of service when you “tether” to the EvDo network (the faster one)without signing up for overly expensive data plan, which I didn’t do, anyways we’ll see in a few days when I get my bill.

North Carolina Cabin Panorama

The above image is a badly reconstructed panorama from the front porch of the cabin. It was raining then as it was most of the trip, which was no problem, we just played games inside the whole time. It did clear up enough for a night of casual stargazing and a fire complete with smores, yum.

This cabin was not too far from our previous family reunion type thing in the mountains of NC about 12 years ago or something. It is also close to the Nantahala river where I’ve gone white water paddling many times. And of course, I perennially take my summer vacation on the other side of the state, clearly North Carolina is getting more than its fair share of my tourist dollars.