Eblo

Falling Behind

I flew on Wednesday. Still have to do a write-up on that. 7 take-offs and landings. Woo!

I'm embarking on a new project. MythTV. I ordered a Hauppage PVR-250 today. Picked up a 160 GB hard drive from Sam's. Going to try slapping the Hauppage into ye olde' PII-400MHz Gateway. The specs say it won't work, but some stuff at MythTV suggests it will since the card does all of the hard work. This stage is just tinkering/testing to see what I can do with middle-aged hardware and to try to get an idea of how I should build a dedicated box. To view any recordings on a decent display, I'll need to pull them to my laptop and play them there. But one half of the puzzle wouldn't be bad to get worked out.

Still trying to figure out what architectire I want to go with - where I'd put a powerhouse backend, and where the lighter frontend(s) might be. Right now we only watch TV in the living room, but if/when the basement gets finished, the entertainment center will get moved down there. But we'll probably want TVability up here, too. We'll see. My current thought is to build a pretty hefty, machine, and perhaps migrate eblo and other web tasks to it, since load is low, it'll be running mysql anyway, and it'll be on 24-7. But I don't want the machine too crazy-jacked up, because the humming of fans might distract from my viewing pleasure.

Another question is what kind of case to use. There is some really cool stuff out there, but the cooler, the more 'spensive, and I don't pay for my style ;-). Someone suggested building a custom case out of wood. I'm not a master craftsman or anything, so I pretty much brushed that off. However, I did recall that I have a dead Pioneer A/V receiver sitting around. I wonder if I could shoehorn an ATX motherboard into that. Might be fun. Would be cool if I could use some of the panel buttons and lights, too, but since I have no clue how to even PRETEND to know how to hack that, that's not likey. Could probably manage to stash the IR receiver in the front window and perhaps light some LEDs at the very least.

And ewww - motherboard/CPU. It's been a long time since I've looked at mobos. Too many options. My head spins just thinking about it. And then there's making sure it's all linux-friendly. . . .

And HOLY CRAP, when did DVD burner prices drop so far? Sam's has a Pacific Digital DVD/CD-RW burner for $130. My wife paid about twice that for my Plextor 10x12x32 CD-RW burner about 2.5 years ago (I still love that drive, by the way)! I only found one review of the drive, but that person seemed happy. According to them it's rebranded NEC, so it can't be all bad, can it? Anyway, by the time my box gets to the point where I'm going to burn DVD's off of it, perhaps they'll be down under $100. Wow.

Ok, I'm off now. Need to straighten up the house and get some sleep tonight. I'll try to be better about posting. But not this weekend.