On Friday my MythTV server (my DVR software running on my server) had major audio and video artifacts and skipping during Dollhouse. This isn’t the first time this has happened and is particularly annoying since the TV upstairs rarely, if ever, has issues with Fox. Well, this was the last straw for me. ( WTF is [...]
BigCat’s Blog of DOOM
My name is Ben Catlin, and this is where I rock out on topics like my life, technology and faith.
Browsing Posts in Tech Nerdery
You may have heard some of these questions (some from me) or thought of them yourself: Why does only the iPhone have visual voicemail? If I can make calls for free using skype from one computer to another why can’t my phone automatically know if I’m calling a computer and switch to that when wifi [...]
This is a quick test post to verify that my LJ sync’ing tool works when I generate my wordpress post from my iphone. If this works it will be pretty sweet, and I’ll be contributing back to an open source project. Double-win for me. \n
Lauren and I have been trying to do better at recycling (unfortunately Minneapolis makes you sort it, so I forget a lot) and we have probably cut our actual trash in half or better in the last 6 months. Also, I’ve been doing a lot of work over the last year for the solar market [...]
To most people computers are about accomplishing a task. Getting from A to B as simply as they can, so to speak. Almost no one reading this really cares much about what file format you are saving that word document in as long as the person you are sending it to can read it. Likewise, [...]
This is a CD filled with some high quality free software. http://softwarefor.org/ I can speak for the windows one in saying I use almost half of those programs on a daily basis, and have about 2/3 of them installed on all of my windows machines, and most of the cross-platform ones I have installed on [...]
Current Mood: nerdyNow that MythTV works (but alas, it still doesn’t output to my TV, and the HDTV signal is choppy as hell on the P3 1GHz machine), I am thinking beyond it to move my home to the next level. For a while now I’ve talked about home automation, integrated with the computer network, [...]
Current Mood: nerdyOver at Tom’s Guide Daily they are doing an article on switching to Ubuntu. Link to article While this is nothing new these days, I was particularly enjoying it even in the first page because of this paragraph. Have you ever been some place you really didn’t want to be? I mean, have [...]
New Antenna is completely built, and working. I had to buy nothing, I had everything in the house that I needed to complete the design from the lumen labs forums that I linked to earlier. The Pentium 3, 1GHz even with the GeForce 6200 isn’t exactly down with decoding the HDTV stream and displaying it [...]
I received the Kworld 115 Tuner on Tuesday. I tried to use this guide on mythTV’s wiki, but that alone didn’t give me everything I needed. Instead, if you follow my path and buy this card and run ubuntu, start here and follow the first 4 steps (ignore the modprobe step) for the ATI HDTV [...]
Current Mood: nerdyI’ve been rambling a lot lately about MythTV, which is an open source project that aims for something akin to Microsoft’s Media Center application for Windows XP (MCE edition) and for Windows Vista Home Premium and Ultimate. But it is a lot more than that, with an amazingly flexible client / server architecture. [...]
Yes, that is right ladies and gentleman, after many years of Intel bashing, and hating them because they are the microsoft of the hardware world, I am going to jump camps unless AMD pulls something amazing out of their ass. ( Nerdy explanation of why I was an AMD fanboy ) So, now I like intel again, [...]
I’ve just started this super-nerdy project and I need some advice from my more linux-literate friends. ( Don’t read if you don’t want to be nerded out ) In other news, Kyle and Ellen are going to be here this weekend, and Saturday Lauren is having a girls night, and I’m taking Kyle out to do something [...]
