This weekend I was able to finish up much of the finish work on the shed. It is ready for winter. I was able to finish up the siding on the sides and the front and built the doors and got a second coat of paint on all wood on the outside of the shed. I bought one more sheet of sofit so I could finish that up and caulked all corners of the fascia. There were some notches that we had to cut out of the floor to fit around the frame of the shed and some of them are quite a bit larger than they needed to be. It made fitting the floor much easier. Now that it is all together I need to fill these wholes somehow. I bought a roll of roofing tin and will roll that out and cut very tight fitting notches out of this and that will fill all of the holes. I just don’t want animals getting into the shed if possible. I plan on putting some mothballs under it to try to keep as many animals away anyway. After I take care of this last item I hope to get most things out of the garage and into the shed. This will take a few hours probably. I also bought a few 2x4s today. I plan to build some shelving and also some brackets to store the chairs from the deck in the winter. So a bit more to do but if I can’t get out to do any of it due to being busy with Emma, no big deal. The shed is weather proof I believe and ready for winter if it has to be.
Upgraded WordPress
Just finished upgrading this blog to wordpress 2.3. Let me know if you see anything acting up.
Posted in Blog Stuff.
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– September 25, 2007
It has been awhile since I have posted
Many things have happened in our life lately. On Sept 1st at 11:36am jen and I had our first baby. Her name is Emma Kathryn Newcastle. You can see updates and pictures here. Needless to say there will be fewer posts here and probably not much happening with mythtv and linux at our house anytime soon. I was just glad to get everything switched around before Emma arrived.
Posted in General.
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– September 17, 2007
Well the new dell switch looks like it is on its way
Just tracked the dell switch and it looks like it will be here tomorrow. Can’t wait. Hope that it works when I get it and all is fine with it.
Posted in New toys.
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– August 28, 2007
Stupid Charter and redoing their digital channels
I came home today to a whole new digital lineup and different qam recievers/subchannels. So it is nice to see they are redoing the channels. Hopefully this means simulcast is not far, and even better I hope they don’t encrypt all of the channels they are planing to simulcast. But right now they have all of the old digital channels still, just on totally different major and minor channels and not getting the correct psip info at all. Only 2 channles give any digital channel info at all so our tv has everything up in the 100 range. Myth I was able to setup and get all corrected before a few shows started tonight.
Posted in Mythtv.
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– August 28, 2007
Upgrade and listings conversion went very smooth
Over the weekend I signed up for schedulesdirect and setup the 3 listings I would be needing. I upgraded to the latest version of mythtv .21 at atrpms.net in the bleeding repo. Everything seems to be running smooth. I had to rescan all channels after I removed the old listing entries and added the new ones. After I scanned on my qam tuner, ota tuner and cable tuner I went ahead with the first mythfilldatabase and all was good. Everything came in just fine. I did a little background tweaking in mythweb for the channels that I wanted to be a higher priority and then took a few channels out of the lineup on the scheduledirect website and then did a mythfilldatabase again and everything is back to normal.
First recording after the change happened last night and all was good. Now to make it through the week without any major problems and I will be very happy.
On a side note I still have not gotten the new switch I won on ebay. I have started the dispute with paypal and my credit card company.  Hopefully this week I will get that resolved or actually get the switch.
Posted in Mythtv.
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– August 27, 2007
A fix to my switch problem posted before
Well after looking around locally and on ebay. I lost a few really nice switches because I did not want to go to far over 100 bucks for a switch. I ended up getting a switch that is a bit overkill for me but the price was right. When I say over kill I mean total overkill. I got a Dell 3348. Many more ports that I need at home but for $115 shipped I could not resist. I found that 16 or 24 port gig switches were just a bit above what I wanted to pay. I really wanted to get a managed switch this time. This way I can see what is going wrong at home if there are major problems. I wanted at least one gig port on the new switch. This has two so I should be set. I can plug my current 5 port gig switch into one of the two ports on the 3348. I could always get a second gig switch and plug that in to the second gig switch on the 3348. I figured when I want to get rid of the 3348 and 48 port switch will probably sell for more than an 24 port switch. I could get a 3324 for about 10 bucks cheaper. I would have loved to have found a 24 port gig switch but did not want to pay almost $200 for a unmanaged switch. The $115 I paid was a bit more than I wanted to pay already. Hopefully the new switch will be to my house by the end of the week.
UPDATE: After thinking about my current setup and what I have I really don’t need to use the small 5 port gig switch if I don’t want to. I need to plug my mythtv master backend into one of the gig ports. I guess I should plug the slave backend into the other gig port. Plug both of the hdhomerun’s into a 10/100 port on the new switch (they only can do 100 meg anyway). I have two other computers that have gig ports but don’t really need to be hooked up to a gig port. One is a frontend and one is just a windows box. I can plug both of those in to 100 meg ports and they should be just fine. If I wanted to plug more devices into gig ports I could just hook the 5 port gig switch to one of the gig ports on the 3348 and that would be fine to. I think I am going to try the new setup without the 5 port gig switch first and then add it back in if I see I need it. Only thing I can think of is backups might go a little faster with the additional gig ports. Probably not though. It is time to look into setting up my master backend box to load balance between two gig ports and see what I can get going there. Maybe setup two vlans, one for the hdhomrun and master backend and then another for the rest of the world. I have more thinking to do.
Posted in New toys.
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– August 20, 2007
The good and the bad
Well I got two shipments this week. First thing I ordered was another hdhomerun. I have been totally happy with the current hdhomerun I have so I ordered a second. It came wed. Did not have much time to hook up but I at least got it on the network. Last night I finally got around to getting the static ip setup for it and setup in myth the way I wanted it. I also upgraded both hdhomeruns to the latest firmware that came out yesterday. Both are up and running now. The original one has 2 cables from charter cable hooked to it and the new one has one cable from charter and one from the antenna I am working on in the garage attic. I have heard rumors that charter will be getting simulcast going in our area some time in the next few months. I have seen a few strange things with qam channels in the past 3 months so hopefully the rumors are true. When they simulcast I will be able to record many more channels with the hdhomeruns. Right now I have about 15 channels available. Most of them are the network hd feeds. I would love to get discovery hd (not hd theater) and a few other stations like the history channel and tlc, etc, in hd.
I also ordered a hdmi switch and 3 dvi to hdmi cables. I am working on getting the mythfrontend, oppo dvd player and charter stb all hooked to our projector via the hdmi cable. I found a switch on buy.com for 35 bucks with free shipping and no one complained that they had problems. I hooked them up last night and it seems to do the job. I just have to work on getting our logitech remote programed to control the switch. That should make using the projector much easier.
The bad news is after all of that work last night, I woke up this morning to feed our dog and I normally check email real quick at that time. The computer I use in the basement had not network connection. Actually said cable dissconnected. This can’t be good. Well it was not. The 16 port dell 10/100 switch that most things in our house plug in to was all lit up. It is dead. I was able to pull out an old 5 port 10/100 switch to help out. I have most of the myth network plugged in to a 5 port gig switch, that is plugged in to a linksys wrt56gs that is running dd-wrt. I also have the 5 port dlink switch plugged into the wrt54gs. I have 2 other dell 2300 wireless routers running dd-wrt in other areas of the house. So between the extra 5 port dlink switch and the main wrt54gs, I was able to plug all active devices on the network in. Now to find a good gig switch to replace the dead dell switch and get things back to normal. Right now I am pretty much maxed out on ports so I hope another switch does not die on me.
Posted in Electronics, Mythtv.
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– August 17, 2007
New shows or movies I want to check out this coming season
Tv shows
- The Bionic Woman
- The IT Crowd
- Tell Me You Love Me
- The Carpoolers
- Chuck
- kville
Movies
- Â Finding Neverland
Posted in Lists.
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– August 14, 2007
Good news on the mythtv front
After a long wait there was an official announcement from the good group of people over at schedulesdirect. We will continue to get guide data for our tv listing. The good group of developers have been working hard to keep things going for the much needed guide data for the us and canada tv listings. It sounds like they have signed a contract with TMS and have things almost set to start offering accounts so any opensource project can still get precious guide data for tv listings.
After seeing the few announcements and also seeing that the price structure is not bad at all. I have gone ahead and ordered my second hdhomerun. I figure I should get all of this taken care of before our new little one comes along. I probably won’t have time and or money this time next month.
Posted in Mythtv.
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– August 10, 2007
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