Category: Day to day life

Updates on what’s going on with us

MythTV — Part II — Giving KnoppMyth A Try

My battle continues with MythTV installation and configuration.

There’s no question in my mind as to why MythTV is MythTV. I just can’t get the stupid thing to run right.

Just earlier I wrote about my troubles with MythTV under Fedora Core 3. So I said I’d give KnoppMyth a shot. I couldn’t wait for a couple of days, so I forged on with the saga.

10PM, sitting there thinking this KnoppMyth should work. It’s an auto-install wonder.

Think again. Stupid KnoppMyth got stuck with trouble writing to the disks a few times. I had to use Fedora’s partition/format utility from the boot disc to reformat the disks before KnoppMyth would even run properly. So that took me about an hour to resolve.

To be fair, KnoppMyth installed and auto-dected a good majority of everything right away. And the install went relatively smoothly — everything from the OS, MySQL database, MythTV and almost everything else. ALMOST: PVR 150, audio card and ethernet cards got left out.

So before I invest more time on KnoppMyth, I decided I’ll try it on Kyung’s old Optiplex GX110. Maybe I’ll have better luck on his machine. If all else fails, I will go back to Fedora and deal with problems I already am familiar with.

Those guys at Systm definitely oversimplified KnoppMyth’s ability to solve everyday-man’s problems. But then again, I do have a pretty old system to boot (Dell Precision 410; circa 1999).

Better luck next time.

Animal Instincts

Even animals have feelings. Unfortunately I can’t say the same about some humans.

Last night I accidentally discovered a mother cat with two tiny kittens by our front door. Fearing that I might harm her babies, the mother instinctively hissed at me continuously and refused to abandon her kittens. I opened the door to take a closer look at the kittens (must be around 5 weeks old), one kitten followed the mother and dashed towards the garage (back of the house).

What happened to the other kitten?

I looked around the front lawn and found her hiding in a ditch used to collect the water hose. Thinking she’s trapped, I tried to grab her with my right hand, but of course, animals don’t need pathetic human’s help. At 5 weeks old, she leaped upwards, with her claws barely hanging on to the side of the relatively deep ditch, and helped herself out of the hole in a hurry (but unusually calm manner). As my eyes followed her “escape” towards the garage, I realized that her mother and sibling had not abandoned her after all. They were waiting anxiously for me to disappear so that they could return to find their kin.

Even animals, cats in this case, have the instinct to stay behind to make sure their troubled kin would be fine, I wonder why some humans run the opposite direction as soon as they smell trouble with their friends or relatives. Worse, Grace and I are disappointed there are those who would do all they can to STOP others from helping those in need.

What kind of sick human nature is that?

Stupid human beings.

Nosy Neighbors

Neighbors are moving in. Or so it seems.

Neighbors are moving in. Or so it seems.

Our house is getting ever more popular with all the cats in the neighborhood. Almost every other day, we find a new cat at our back porch, staring through the sliding screen into hour house. Obviously they are not interested in me or Grace — they want to know who their new catty neighbors are.

Our two cats are not too thrilled about the inquisitive neighbors though. Usually Baobao just hisses and walks away with puffy hair. Mesmerized, one black cat in particular, even tilts her head as she gazes at Baobao’s unprovoked irritation. The word’s out, there are two female cats with questionable personalities in the hood.

MythTV — Part I — Struggle Begins

My battle with MythTV installation and configuration.

In light of my newfound cable service, I decided to put one of my spare Dell boxes to work in doing a home-grown TiVo. So a few days ago, I ordered a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 150 capture card to give it a shot. It’s a relatively new card with decent performance for the price (after a Buy.com 10% off coupon — roughly $85).

I spent most of the weekend tinkering with Mythtv running on Fedora (Core 3). I got most of the information from Jarod Wilson’s site (excellent documentation). But last night at 3AM, I finally gave in to Mythtv and called it a defeat (for now).

There are a few problems concerning my set up; one of them being that Fedora Core 3 is not particularly happy about the onboard Crystal sound card (it worked in Core 2 though). Topping that off, WinTV-PVR 150 seems a bit too new to get a stable driver. I spent a lot of time just getting the module to load into the Kernel during my first install. It turned out that the latest Linux Kernel doesn’t like the module. I had to roll back to the older 2.6.11-1.27FC3smp to get the damn thing to just load.

Then there’s the problem with the IR transmitter and receiver. Apparently lirc 0.7.0 doesn’t support PVR 150. Though I’d installed the new lirc 0.7.1 (which supposedly does support PVR 150), the receiver still did not produce any output despite hours of Googling and trying out new settings.

Frustrated, I finally completely erased the setup and started fresh again on Sunday. But this time, something happened to the partitions which Kernel 2.6.11-1.27FC3smp didn’t like and freaks out at boot. Does it have anything to do with the fact that I installed VMWare 4.5.2 (thanks, Kyung!) prior to the reboot? Speaking of VMWare, it runs beautifully smooth under Fedora Core 3 with Windows 2000 on it. Very very nice.

In the coming few days, I might give it a shot again. Last night just right after I gave up, I found a clip from Systm that demonstrated a clean install using KnoppMyth — a ONE disc install wonder. The only problem, again, is that its lirc driver is still at 0.7.0 and won’t like my PVR 150 card. But on KnoppMyth’s discussion forum, someone posted a patch that’s claimed to have made it work. Hopefully it’ll finally work so I can finall grow fat and old on Simpsons episodes.

Stupid MythTV… Stupid PVR 150 card… Stupid Fedora Core 3 and its new Kernel…

The Big Move

Moving sucks. But it has to happen every now and then.

After consulting the Great Chinese Calendar (per my mom’s advise), we decided to schedule today as the “Big Day” for our pending move to the new apartment. Today’s supposedly an acceptable day for not only moving household items, but also bed setting. There’s a school of philosophy that believes in the proper positioning and settling of the bed. And of course, that includes the time and date on which the bed is to be moved.

The scheduled move time was between one and four in the afternoon (looks like our friends from the moving industry picked up on this long time tradition of the phone and cable guys!). But instead they showed up at five (after several phone calls). As I am typing this, they (two medium built foreign-speaking men) already moved all the boxes into the truck.

Argh! I hate moving.

Jai called earlier to see how things were going thinking we’d already moved. He calls from time to time to check on us. Though we haven’t seen him in a few months, it’s still nice to hear a friend’s voice once in a while.

The cats didn’t take the move too well. One of them (Baobao: the fat one) we managed to shovel into the bathroom like we’d ingeniously planned. The other one escaped from the bathroom and hid herself in the closet. Sucks to be cats.

What sucks more are cat owners. Our arms and chests were scratched up like Jackson Pollock‘s “Galaxy”.

After the movers unloaded our stuff at the new apartment, we went back to fetch the cats. It was easy to convince Wawa to load her up in the car. Baobao was a very different story. The first challenge was to hold her (at which she hisses). Another challenge was to be able to hold her AND carry her all the way to the car — impossible. You may be saying “use the pet carrier!”. But noooo. She’s already associated the pet carrier with “going to the doctors and get jabbed with a needle”. Just seeing one makes her nervous, let alone getting her into one.

At the end, we spent 20+ minutes dancing with her and cornered her at her favorite lookout window. It was over when we got her front paws into the carrier. No animals or humans were hurt in this exercise.

Baobao ended up spending the night exploring the new apartment. Wawa took the night off and hid herself under our bed. As for us, we dropped like a couple of dead flies on our bed after shower. Perhaps it was the new place; or perhaps we were too disoriented from the move, neither of us slept well.

I hate moving.

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