zen.org Communal Weblog

The phone rings, and E out in the hallway asks if I could please get the call since she’s on her mobile phone at the moment.

“Hello?” No response. “Hello? Hello?” Nothing. click A man’s voice, slightly distant, greets me.

“Hello! I’m with Eircom and we’re just calling to confirm that our customers are satisfied with the current level of service with their broadband connection.” Hmm. When did Eircom start to care? “Have you run into any issues with your level of satisfaction with your broadband connection?”

I look up at E who’s entering the office. Bemused, I hold the phone away from me and ask, “Honey, can you think of any problems we’ve had with our broadband—”

click The caller is gone. And, shock of shocks, they don’t call back.

Is it legal in Ireland to cold-call random people with the sole purpose of finding out who’s not yet got DSL from a specific company? Granted, most of the telecom companies in Ireland are all desperate to overtake the monopoly-sans-punishment that is the predominant provider in the country, but this seems a bit desperate.

Our friend Dolores introduced us to an inexpensive Merlot from Stimson Estate Cellars. It’s 10 Euro when it’s not on sale (approx $12.30) and is drinkable from the moment you open it. Delicious, but I won’t try fake you out claiming I found hints of black current and a certain kind of oak or other wine expert tips; I’ll just encourage you to try it since we are really enjoying it. On the bottle (and at their site) is a fun parallel drawn between their region of northern Washington State in the US and the Loire/Burgundy/Bordeaux regions of France. They claim 300 days of sun in Washington, which is odd if you believe what Meg Ryan told us about it raining 9 months of the year in Seattle (a bit north of this wine’s vineyards).

Last night I spent some time wrestling with trying to tune in a channel but no luck. MythTV has a ‘FrequencyID’ part of the channel page under mythtv-setup, but I’ve not yet verified what it’s supposed to be. I tried putting in the frequency for RTE1 that is shown on the NTL Frequency List. That didn’t quite do it. With a little digging, I then discovered /usr/share/xawtv/ and next tried “ptune.pl -f pal-ireland A6“. Almost! It showed a snowy picture of what I later found to be TV3 with a football match (soccer). But it was really hard to see, and more interestingly it was moving in bursts. Like the system couldn’t keep up with it and was dropping frames. Hmm.

Running MythTV by hand as the mythtv user, I saw:

2004-10-19 19:15:07 Running as SUID root would allow some threads to run with realtime priority, improving video smoothness.
***
* Your system is not capable of displaying the
* full framerate at 720x576 resolution.  Frames
* will be skipped in order to keep the audio and
* video in sync.

That’s what makes me suspect both about what’s in /etc/mythtv/modules/ivtv but also if I’m missing a bit in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4

I’m digging around for the efforts of others, including a helpful HowTo about using KnoppMyth with a PAL signal. With some instructions on installing with the Hauppauge PVR-350, I found that by running tveeprom I’m able to get this in /var/log/messages (or dmesg):

Oct 19 20:00:39 p kernel: tvee: Hauppauge: model=48135, rev=J324, serial#=2760998
Oct 19 20:00:39 p kernel: tvee: tuner=Philips FM1246 (idx=24, type=1)
Oct 19 20:00:39 p kernel: tvee: tuner fmt=PAL(I) (eeprom=0x10, v4l2=0x00000010)
Oct 19 20:00:39 p kernel: tvee: audio_processor=CS5331 (type=9)

Ok, that tells me the tuner type.

I also discovered the /etc/init.d/set_ivtv_params script. It will set the various parts of the video device for me if I put the correct values into /etc/sysconfig/ivtv/cfg-0. So that now has the right values of

	IVTV_TUNER='1'
	IVTV_TYPE='PAL'

That choice is backed up by the header /usr/local/lib/ivtv/driver/tuner.h which lists the different tuners, with my choice being

        #define TUNER_PHILIPS_PAL_I 1

That matches the PAL_I sticker on the replacement PVR-350 card that I got the other day. A step closer?

Well, I think so; with some grepping, I discovered /usr/local/lib/ivtv/utils/videodev2.h, which would seem to suggest I honor the value of V4L2_TUNER_ANALOG_TV which is 2. Hmm. Well, for the moment in /etc/mythtv/modules/ivtv I’ll try out

	options tuner type=2 pal=1

but that seems to contradict the suspected value for IVTV_TUNER. Gahh. Time to read more sources I think. There’s lots of good stuff under /usr/local/lib/ivtv.

I’ve put copies of each of these files online so others can see them, and I’ll be keeping them in sync with what’s really being used:

• /etc/X11/XF86Config-4
• /etc/mythtv/modules/ivtv
• /etc/sysconfig/ivtv/cfg-0
• /etc/init.d/set_ivtv_params

(Any suggestions on how to better offer these are welcome.)

Now /etc/mythtv/modules/ivtv contains

	alias char-major-81 videodev
	alias char-major-61 lirc_i2c
	alias char-major-81-0 ivtv
	alias char-major-81-1 bttv
	alias /dev/v4l ivtv
	options ivtv debug=1 ivtv_pal=1
	options tuner type=2 pal=1
	options saa7127 enable_output=1 output_select=1 pal=1
	options msp3400 once=1 simple=1
	add below ivtv msp3400 saa7115 saa7127 tuner
	add above ivtv lirc_dev lirc_i2c ivtv-fb

Anything look really wrong?

I think when I’m all done and have this actually working, I’m going to create my own HowTo combining the efforts of the others, but also including links to example files for everything. And then pitch to have those included in some future release of mythtv. If everybody wants lots of people to be able to use and enjoy this cool stuff, there are still a few things past the great KnoppMyth packaging that have to happen. At least, for anybody who’s not in the US. Wouldn’t it be cool if KnoopMyth let you choose (or even click on) where you live, and have it auto-configure most of the stuff that really doesn’t need to be done manually? And no command-line mythfilldatabase invocation?

We’re hoping our ballots, which were in decent shape, actually make it back and get counted. They were pretty simple, really. Unlike the experiences of some folks.

A good friend, when pointed at my new blog, responded with, ”I mean this in the nicest way possible, but you are SUCH a nerd boy!” I’m gambling that my love of my wife, son, and even of lots of different kinds of wine all help me wear a mask hiding this fact. Such a label is one earned through effort, anyway. Kinda like not staring too long at the cool plasma screen in the Sony shop up the road or they’ll call security. No, it wouldn’t really work in our livingroom anyway, but why spend so much time focusing on reality? Besides, there’s a Panasonic plasma TV that’s even cooler. (Insert daemonic laugh here.)

When I was in college, I took a cool course about the etymology of words. It touched a great interest I had, and has resulted in me having all sorts of books about word history, the origin of words and phrases, you name it.

You can sign up to receive a daily Word of the Day from the Oxford English Dictionary. (Check out The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester to learn about the history of the dictionary; I got it as a great birthday present and really enjoyed it.) Each morning (relative to your timezone) you’ll get a new word with its complete OED entry, including pronunciation, etymology, definition, and the variety of specific texts that used the word over the last 500+ years. They’re amazing, ranging from swelling to the more recent addition of D’oh.

Tucked away next to the PVR box (nay, tv-box) is a nice tiny Linksys WET54G wireless bridge. It’s a device that lets anything become part of a wireless network without requiring you to have a wireless card or other antenna. A random PC can become a wireless PC just by plugging it into the bridge, as long as the PC has an Ethernet port. (A lot of motherboards now include at least one Ethernet port by default, as do most laptops.) The bridge talks through the air to the rest of our network, and a tiny Ethernet cable goes from the bridge into the tv-box. My 7-meter Ethernet cable gets to be put away and restore a little order to our livingroom.

There are minor steps companies like Linksys could take to make their products so much more friendly to non-Windows systems. They seem to assume that most customers are putting the bridge onto a Windows network, with a Windows PC. Gah. So I had to search Google to find the bridge’s default address (192.168.1.226) to configure it. I presume the CD that comes with it has it mentioned in the docs somewhere, but it’s still silly that they don’t make some note of it somewhere on the single-sheet install doc in the box. (I just remembered that .226 was the same default address for the similar WET11 bridge over in the states. A silly number to think I’d remember.) The default password of ‘admin’ could also be included with the install instructions…

Details: Plug it into my laptop, set the laptop’s address to a 192.168.1.* subnet address, point the browser at the bridge, and go through the steps. Pick a name for it (dora, since that’s who P was insisting he wanted to see on TV at the moment), first enable WEP, make it use a 128-bit key and hit Apply to have it actually accept a longer hex key, give it the key, and let the bridge restart. Then change its address and gateway, Apply, again it restarts. Change my laptop back to its correct subnet, again point the browser at the bridge using the new address. Meanwhile go onto our DHCP server, make the bridge get assigned its own specific address, and also add the name and address to our local nameserver. Now tell the bridge to use DHCP to get its address, and again restart. Yeesh. Unplug everything, put it down next to the tv-box, plug the Ethernet cable into the tv-box, and let everything start again. Laptop can ping both Dora The Bridge and the tv-box. Whew.

Next time I can work on this, I should be able to configure channels without worrying about plugging the tv-box into the network. That’s really the big task coming up: selecting “Watch TV” from the MythTV interface and making it actually show a channel. Don’t care what. 🙂

We decided to build our own PVR (personal video recorder) to make it easier to enjoy TV when we want to. With a son nearly 3, we’ve long known that our ability to watch random television programs is controlled by how tired we are. Since TiVo doesn’t have any service in Ireland, and we don’t want to buy the alternative service that is around Ireland and the UK, we’re rolling our own. (The privacy addict that I am hesitated mentioning Ireland here, but there’s already enough evidence on public record about our existence in Ireland, so why not.)

The goal is to make a device that’ll save TV shows for whenever we choose to watch them, but with more convenience than usually comes from a VCR. In particular, we don’t want to be restrained to the length of the tape that happens to be in the VCR at the time. But we would like to be able to save the programs we enjoy watching so we can take advantage of recreational time when it presents itself. (Our current favorites: The West Wing, CSI, Law and Order, and Gilmore Girls.)

Right now in the livingroom is a Shuttle SN45GV2, which is a tiny (SFF — Small Form Factor) PC. It’s got a 250Gb disk (from the states for $139, tho E just found one for $80 that’s even bigger), 512Mb of memory, a Radeon 9200 video card that I got near home with my friend Declan, and a Hauppauge PVR-350 tuner card to actually get at the TV signal. The PC has a long Ethernet cable at the moment, but it’ll soon be using the Linksys 54Gbit wireless bridge that I got today to let it be on our network without a wireless card in the computer, and without stringing a cable along the floor in front of our fireplace.

The tuner card is interesting because there’s nothing on its packaging to suggest that it matters where you buy it, Europe or the US. (TVs in one area use different signals than another, making them not work from one place to the other.) A friend was over in the US and brought one back for me; everything looked great. In fact, if you visit the link for the card you’ll see the page that says, ”Note: The WinTV-PVR-350’s TV tuner and S-Video/composite video inputs are for either PAL or NTSC.”. That’s actually wrong; the tuner, when you take it out of the box, has a big sticker on it that says “NTSC / NTSC-J”. Gah. I verified that it will not work properly with PAL-I signals coming over the wire here in Ireland. So I had to go get another from someone here. Voila, no markers on the box, but on the card is a “PAL-I” sticker.

In goes the card, up comes the computer, and after booting and some bit-tweaking (to be detailed later) I saw a successful test pattern on the TV screen. Yay!

Now that it’s working, and I’ve gone through the steps with mythtv-setup to make it understand the basic parts of how I’ve got everything set up (also to be detailed later), I have to make it grok the frequencies of the NTL basic cable. Haven’t had a chance to do that yet, and I start some work tomorrow (11 days of fun C++ stuff), so I suppose I’ll be working on it in the evenings somehow. Or maybe the weekend, though typing in the livingroom around our son is an exercise in futility. What time I may have had today was eaten up by making this blog exist, getting a toner cartridge, and the wireless bridge.

Tsk, tsk, it’s all about time management.

To finally do a blog, I first started playing with my friend Sven’s cool hacks. I also fiddled with b2evolution though that was 10x the complexity I needed. Then I happened upon WordPress which looked more like a book or magazine text. A big fan of nice fonts, I’m going to give this a shot too. Who knows what I’ll finally settle on? At least I’m learning MySQL on the fly. Now I need to figure out stylesheets and understand how to modify wp-layout.css to make this whole page look better. And if I’ve got the ability to register or do comments disabled, why does it still say “Comments (0)” there:

I was reading news and I stumbles on the article Delhi tastes ‘slow food’ revolution, and I wondered what slow food was. Two seconds later Google showed me Slow Food® and Slow Food USA® web
sites. Though not really online, I’ve been on about eating locally grown food for years! I was also excited when a Whole Foods Market® recently moved in and actually labeled where all there produce comes from. All I need is a couple local Slow Food® restaurants and I’ll be all set.