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Looking at getting new cell service

I am currently using a company provided phone.  Due to my job changing I am probably going to be giving this phone back and just getting my own cell phone.  At the same time my very old pda died over a year ago so I am looking at windows mobile phones.  They are not cheap, well some are not bad and others are very expensive.  You know me.  I realy like my toys.  After rebates and what not I think the phone I am going for is really not a bad deal.  That is if it does what it says it can do.  I am hoping in the next week to get the new HTC Touch Pro.  I am almost positive I will be going with sprint service.  The phone could be bought from Best Buy right now for about oh $780.  If that was the only option I am sure I would be happy with the $99 Motorola Q 9c offered by sprint right now.  It sounds like they are phasing the 9c out though.  So the Touch Pro is very new, at least to sprint.  You can order through Telesales right now.  Problem is I would have to pay shipping and activation to go that route.  It sounds like stores and the online store should have the phone on or around Nov. 2nd.  I may just wait to order that way.  I have to find out if there are going to be new rebates or anything.  Right now there the phone should go for $599.  There is a $200 instant rebate if you sign up for a dataplan service (was going to go with the simply everything plan as I should not get any extra charges using that plan) and also another $100 mailin rebate if you keep service on the phone for over 30 days.  That puts the phone at $299 after all rebates are applied.  There is currently a $50 invoice credit if you purchase the phone online.  Not a bad deal when you see what this phone can do.  I just have to see what rebates will be around and when and where the phone will be available and when and try to get the best deal.  Hopefully I will have a new phone in another week.

Update:  I may have a phone later today.  After calling sprint (they call it TeleSales) the person today said the phones will be available sunday morning, call back then.  He was very helpful.  Strange thing is the girl I talked to from Telesales yesterday said I could order yesterday.  Oh well, pretty sure I do not want to go that route anyway.  Called the local sprint store and have setup an appointment for lunch today.  They said they have phones in stock and she took my name so she is holding one for me.  $399 after instant rebates, another $100 rebate.  Said she will work on getting activation taken care of (said she could not wave activation but could take the activation cost out of the phone price) I will also ask about the other $50 credit I can get if I buy online.  So after my lunch break today I may have a new phone.

Posted in New toys.

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By james – October 31, 2008

1080p with the new tv

Last night I finally got around to bringing up an extra myth box.  It has hdmi out.  I got it all setup and plugged in.  Powered it up and bame, it came up on the new vizio.  Wow did it look nice.  So I fired up mythtv and sure enough everything was playing just fine.  Still have to figure out how to get audio out of the hdmi conntion.  I am not sure if it is even possible with ubuntu.  It was nice to see the tv negotiated with the computer and came back with 1080p.  Very nice.  Now to see about the audio.  After I figure that portion out it is off to find a very small formfactor setup as the current box is going to be way to big for that tv, I want something like a mac mini.  We shall see what I can come up with.

Posted in General.

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By james – September 24, 2008

A few changes to the tv viewing habits at our house

We finally have a tv in our living room once again.  A few fridays ago I took the day off.  First thing I did was head to walmart and pick up a 42 inch Vizio.  I had put the wall mount up that week and had run network, power and coax to the wall so all cables will be hidden behind the tv.  It has worked out great.  I just got a hdmi cable in the mail friday so I can hook the cable box up to the tv via hdmi now.  I just have to pull that cable through the wall.  I am going to move a pc up from the basement to test mythtv on the new tv.  The new tv will do 1080p.  I would like to eventually build a mac mini and use that as a mythfrontend.  Not sure how soon I will do that.  Love the tv so far.

Posted in General.

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By james – September 21, 2008

Finally moved the masterbackend to the new case

Today I finally had some time to move all of the hardware for my masterbackend to the new antec case I had bought awhile ago.  I thought I had lost the new 500 gig drive I just bought also.  Not sure what happened to it but everything is working fine now.  Got the replacement samsung drive this past Friday also.  In the new case I have 6 sata drives now.  1.5 TB  of space for recordings with about 1 TB free right now.  Need to think about the backup disk solution now.  It is almost full due to the Olympics.  Need to think about the configuration of that drive now.

The new case is much much quieter and also has so much more airflow.  I wonder if the other drives were getting a little hot due to how that old case was setup.  I have 3 120mm fans in the new case and 1 140mm fan.  Plenty of air movement.

If this change has no problems the next change will be to put the faster processor in this box.  If that goes smooth then I will plan on building the box with a fresh ubuntu amd64 build to take full advantage of the 4 gigs of memory.

Posted in Linux.

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By james – August 17, 2008

Emma is not spoiled!!!

We could not resist getting this for Emma over the weekend.

{wp-gallery-remote: gallery=0; rootalbum=48375; imagefilter=include:48702,48697,48692,48687,48437,48432,48402,48387,48382;}

Posted in General.

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By james – August 11, 2008

Myth boxen did great for the big olympics weekend

The myth boxes are doing great after the update I applied last week.  They made it through a bunch of recording over the weekend.  I think that is the most they box has worked in a very long time.  The olympics keep the hdhomerun pretty busy.  Never recorded 8 hours straight before.

27 hours recorded all hd, over the weekend.  Still recording now.  Recorded another 4.5 today already.

169 gig so far and still counting.

After the olympics are over I hope to get back to moving the master backend into the new case and then rebuilding it as an ubuntu hardy 8.04.1 amd64 box instead of the i386 box it is right now.

I have started a test build on another box and everything is straight forward so far.  Just trying to remember all of the little things I did before so when I actually make the new build it goes as fast as possible.  Took about 6 hours today but about 2 hours of config for the current text box.

Posted in General.

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By james – August 11, 2008

how to manually run the backuppc nightly process

If you by accident setup backuppc to do something you did not mean to, and you really do not want to wait until the next day to get the disk space back(after nightly cleanup) you can run the job manually by running
/usr/share/backuppc/bin/BackupPC_nightly 0 255
as the backuppc user.

It may take some time as in my case where it needed to clear out about 250 gigs. But it will finish.

Posted in General.

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By james – August 11, 2008

A little attention to our mythtv boxes

Since I moved to the 0.21-fixes branch of mythtv and also updated all of the boxes to ubuntu 8.04 I have not done much to anything.  They have been running great and there has been no need to really make any changes.  About a month ago I noticed one of the backend drives that stored most of the shows stated to show signs of problems.  I moved everything off of it and used it as the local ubuntu mirror as that gets updated nightly and is not mission critical as far as I am concerned.  Well this past week I kind of got lucky.  I have been wanting to replace the case of the masterbackend server.  I ordere up a new antec case and at the same time I ordered another seagate 500 gig sata drive to replace the samsung drive that is going bad.  The parts came in the other day and I imediately made the swap.  Only took about 2 hours to move the data and I was back up and everything was great once again.  Smartd was happy again and I was glad to see no more emails with error messages at reboots.  I hope to start putting things in the new case in the next few weeks but I am glad I now have about 1.4 terabytes of storage available to myth if needed.  I have setup myth to record anything in HD as far as the olympics go.  That should eat up some space really quick.

So I thought I would work on the myth boxes a bit more the past few days also.  Finally got around to downloading the latest svn of 0.21-fixes, there has been quite a few bug fixes since I built last.  Looks like everything is working great so far.  In the coming weeks I want to totally rebuild the master backend.  I want to put the current motherboard and drives in the new case and put the new processor (an amd x2 5000 instead of the amd x2 4200 that is currently in that box) in the masterbackend instead of my test box.  At the same time I want to totally rebuild the os if time permits.  I want to start running ubuntu 8.04 amd64 instead of the current ubuntu 8.04 i386.  the box has 4 gigs of memory in it but the os only sees about 3.2 gig.  Other than that I hope to leave things alone.  Later I probably will rebuild the frontend boxes to be amd64 also.

I just want to get most of the changes made before the fall season kicks in and the box really starts to get utilized again.  It has been a long time since all 6 tuners have been in use.  I just tested all 6 to make sure they were all working fine after the the update to latest -fixes and they did great.  The box should get a pretty good workout in the next few months I would think.

Posted in Mythtv.

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By james – August 8, 2008

WordPress updated

Just updated the blog to wordpress 2.6.  Let me know if you see any problems.  Looks to be working fine.

Posted in Blog Stuff.

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By james – July 15, 2008

Packages needed to build mythplugins .21 on hardy

apt-get install libmad0 libmad0-dev flac libflac-dev libcdaudio-dev libcdparanoia0-dev libtag1-dev libcdaudio1

Posted in Mythtv.

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By james – July 12, 2008