Irene - Day 5, still no electricity

Well Ollie, this is a fine mess you've got us in!


Good news, Nstar now projects we'll have power by 10 PM Friday.  Bad news, 10 PM Friday 2.5 days from now.  I suppose I shouldn't complain as the generator is holding up OK.  I'll need to go out today and buy batteries and a couple of bottles of gas for the lantern.  Otherwise we're faring reasonably OK, though I'm desperate for a hot shower.

The whole experience has me thinking about what is really important WRT electricity other than having it obviously.  Refrigeration is at the top of the list, though news is up there as well.  I'm also a bit more aware of the much slower pace of life no electricity sets.  Many things take longer and are far less convenient.

Of course there is the issue of what I'd do if something like this happened in the winter.  While we have gas heat without electricity to run the pumps, blowers, and computers that distribute the heat we'd have no heat.  I think I'll look into what would be required to power that part of the house.

Irene - Come and gone

Irene has come and gone, well, sort of gone.  We lost power 11 AM Saturday.  Now 11 AM Tuesday and still now power.  Fortunately we've a generator and are able to run the refrigerators, make coffee, etc.  Sadly, no power to pumps that allow furnace to make how water.  Therefore no hot showers.  NOT GOOD.  BB definitely NOT happy.

As with most hurricanes once the storm passes the weather is lovely.

Various theories about when power will be restored are circulating ranging from last night by 8 PM (clearly that didn't happen) to by 4 PM next Saturday (the electric company clearly has figured out how to deal with the MA law that requires them to give an estimate).  About 1/3 of the town is without power.  There is power a couple of blocks from here.  I'm hopeful that we'll have power sometime today as there is a crew working nearby.

Lost TV and internet service about 8 PM Saturday.  It returned today at 11 AM.  That's a step forward.

Some photos and videos of the storm such as it was.

Irene - Lots of rain

The storm is still well south of us near NY.  We've had heavy rain and occasional serious gust since yesterday mid day.  So far though we still have electricity and no issues.

Looks like Irene will track about 50 miles east of us.  Even so we expect some serious wind gusts and I'd not be surprised if we loose power.  Unfortunately, the current track takes the storm right over HB and Allen's.  They are on low ground near a river in N Hampton.  I'm a bit concerned for them as they are bound to get some flooding and loose power.  I spoke with HB yesterday and offered my generator.  Of course there is no way to get it to them right now but after the storm I'll drive it out.

No photos as there isn't really much to see except a lot of rain and occasional heavy wind.

Irene - Preparation and waiting

Irene cometh, so says the news and the Sudbury disaster management team per the automated phone call we've just received.  So it's clearly official now, not that Irene really needs anyone to make it official.

I've seen a number of hurricanes up close and personnel over the years.  On one occasion I actually decided to see the storm from the NC Outer Banks.  That particular storm cut the island I was on in half destroying a road and all the buildings adjacent to it.  It also piled up a sand dune about 12 feet high in front of the motel I was staying at and running about 6 miles along the beach.  Hurricanes are clearly not something to mess with.  Seeing one up close as I did is just as clearly dumb.

Fortunately it seems that Irene is weakening as it glances the coast.  The current track has the storm center passing within 30 miles of Sudbury so we expect to get considerable wind and rain.  I've taken in all the outside furniture and anything that seems like might be inclined to visit OZ in a strong wind.  I also brought in the container garden so the plants won't get stripped (we're just getting tomatoes).  Here's what the den looks like just now:



Now that preparations are made I expect the storm to weaken and miss us completely.  Then again, the current weather forecast says we'll get hit.

Fairwell to Windows

I've finally done it.  I've installed Ubuntu 10.04 on the last of my MS Windows machines!  Unless in extremes, from now on it's Ubuntu Linux!

What precipitated the change was the flip video camera Miriam gave us.  Turns out it creates MP4 720p video files.  I made a test recording of a bike ride with BB the other day.  When I went to edit the video using Windows tools it turned out to not be possible.  I moved the file to the TV Ubuntu machine and tried to edit there but doing video editing from across the room is very tedious and just doesn't work well at all.  Soooo ... I've installed Ubuntu on my Sony laptop.  I've left Vista as well, just in case but baring unforeseen circumstances I plan to run Ubuntu exclusively.

I can't say there is much about Windows I'll miss.  There is much about Linux I'm looking forward to.

Installation was, as always, simple.  Just pop the live CD in and install.  I allocated 100 GB for Ubuntu and left Windows with 33 GB of room to grow on the off chance I'll ever need it.

Installed Chrome as a browser since it has a very nice bookmark sync feature supported by Google.  Gotta love the Google folks.

Checked that Windows Vista still boots.  It does though it ran chkdsk after the Ubuntu re partition.

I'll install the rest of my preferred tools as need arises.

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Addenda
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20110827 - Installed Picasa 3 beta.  Released Picasa was generating seg faults.

20110827 - Installed kdenlive to do video editing
20110827 - Added vinegra remote desktop viewer to task bar
20110827 - Installed VLC media player (it's get a better collection of codecs and I like the UI better)
20110827 - Installed Sabnzdbplus (usenet NZB) and configured
20110827 - Installed Pan (usenet)

20110903 - Installed CUPS (printer) support and Brother MFC-465CN drivers for network printer.

Fire ComcastTV - Bring up new MythTV backend

There have been some buffering issues with the current MythTV backend (AMD Athlon, 1.2 GHz, 750 MB).  A combination of memory and processor limits is the likely issue.  I'd finished building a P4 3GHz 1.5MB machine (tiber - I like the name particularly since tiber is liquid cooled) a couple of days ago so went ahead and installed MythTV backend and frontend and configuring to make the recordings.  Hopefully that will resolve the issues.

I decommissioned Amazon and moved its recordings to the 1TB drive using MythLink (http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Mythlink.pl).

I added /usr/share/doc/mythtv-backend/contrib/user_jobs to PATH in /etc/environment per https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EnvironmentVariables (stumbled on the fact that /etc/environment holds name value pairs and is NOT a sh script).

I added

mythlink.pl --link /var/lib/mythtv/pretty --chanid %CHANID% --starttime %STARTTIME%  --format '%T-%oY%om%od-%S'

as a user job on RecordingStart so that going forward there will be links if they are needed and the recordings can be moved with reasonable names using cp.

Anniversary and bike ride with BB

Next week is our wedding anniversary.  Only seems like yesterday but it's been 11 years.  We went out to Allura, a semi Italian restaurant, for dinner last night.  They've patio dining and it was very very nice.

Today we went for an early bike ride around the Assabet reservation.  It was a bit warm by the time we got back but we had a very nice ride.  I tried out the new Flip video camera.  It works well but i messed up the controls and managed to shoot over an hour of the inside of my pocket.  Not really that interesting as videos go.

Sailing with Marc and Miriam

BB and I went down to MMs over the weekend.  Had a great sail Saturday and a good visit.  Here are some photos.



Miriam gave me an interesting Flip video camera.  It might make an interesting bike camera.  I'd hoped to try it today but it's gone very rainy.

Cindy, one of BB's pugs, has been sick.  Took her to the vet and she seems to be on the mend.

Fire ComcastTV - OOPS, destroyed Ohio TV System

Bit of a mostly self inflicted setback.  I'd bought a second mobo and am in the process of building it.  I'd decided to remove the 37 GB SATA from ohio (tv machine) and use it in the build.  When I did so, ohio would not boot. It turned out the MBR was on the 37 GB drive.  In the process of trying to create a MBR on the remaining 200 GB drive I managed to corrupt the install.  So ... reinstall and reconfigure ubuntu on ohio:

• Reinstall ubuntu 10.04
• Run update manager
• Use synaptic to install chrom browser, mythtv front end
• Install xbmc per http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Installing_XBMC_for_Linux
• Configure chrom browser
• Enable all installed plugins in chrome
• Upgrade adobe flash player so can access youtube.  Notwithstanding adobe docs you must install as it is NOT part of chromium on linux.
• No audio.  Set preferences->sound->output to internal audio analog stereo. 
• Verified that can watch youtube and have audio.
• chmod /usr/share/icons so I can easily write custom icons there
• Set custom icon for mythtv and xbmc so they are more visible
• Configure mythtv
• Set password
• For some reason can not watch live tv.  The DB also appears to be corrupt.
• Not sure what was going on but a reboot seemed to help.  There were many 0 length recordings.  I've deleted them.  I'm somewhat suspicious that there was a power issue and the machine went down leaving a lock on a file outstanding.  It bears watching.
• Along the way I foolishly enabled OpenGL on Amazon.  This breaks the UI so it's not possible to unset it.  After MUCH work discovered that the fix is to  "mythfrontend -O ThemePainter=qt" and reset it to "Qt".
• Configure xbmc
• Configured weather for Sudbury, Charlotte, and Seoul
• Configured picutres
• Installed and configured Picasa
• Installed and configured Facebook
• added pictures_nas0000
• Configured music to music_nas0000
• Configured videos
• Added videos_nas0000 & recordedtv_nas0000
• Installed and configured mythbox addon in videos
• Added a source for mythtv per http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=MythTV
• Set system->preferences->visual effects to extra to jazz up the interface a bit
• Enabled remote desktop
• Set screensaver preferences to AntSpotlight, 2hrs, unselect activate and lock.  This will hopefully stop the screensaver and lock when watching tv with no interaction.  Set power management preferences to never/never with spin down enabled as default.
• Installed and configured hulu desktop.  Not sure I really like the way it works but we'll see.
• Setup desktop applications for 
• XBMC & MythTV
• Pandora & Art Bell
• Hulu desktop & hulu
• Netflix (but can not watch on demand)
• Weather - Intellicast, NOAA, Weather Underground
• News - PBS Newshour, CNN, ABC, You Tube
• Networks - USA, Syfy, ABC, NBC, TNT, WB
• Went to medibuntu (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu) to get some help with playing dvds.

• sudo wget --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list && sudo apt-get --quiet update && sudo apt-get --yes --quiet --allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get --quiet update

  sudo apt-get --yes install app-install-data-medibuntu apport-hooks-medibuntu

• sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2

• Upgraded mplayer components
• Installed vlc.  Mplayer will not play DVDs.  VLC will.
• Installed acidrip, dvd::rip, and vobcopy to support dvd rip
• Had some issues ripping DVDs I'd previously ripped.  These were resolved by installing medibuntu and libdvdcss2 above.
• Recopied DVDs that were lost

Things are now back, more or less, to where they were before.  I'll still need to make show links but otherwise things are well.

To DO

• Upgrade roku to use http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/ROKU_HD_Frontend
• Build new system
• Finish the tivo slide support
• Setup mythnettv properly
• Buy and install blu ray drive in Ohio TV system.
• Finish freenas install
• Improve antenna.  Bow tie is better but could use better still.  Also consider array of fractal and large fractal.
• Remove passwords that popup

Fire ComcastTV - New case for Ohio TV computer

Moved the Ohio TV PC components into the Antec 300 case.  This will give me LOTS of space for additional boards and drives if or as that becomes necessary.  Things generally went well but there were a couple of issues:

• DVD drives I'd wanted to use were to large to fit.  The issue is the length of the drive.  I've a number of older working drives but generally they are around 7" to 7.5" long.  There is only about 6.5" of space in the Antec chassis before the drive hits the mobo.  I managed to get one DVD reader in so I'm ok for the time being.  Long term I'll buy a blu ray drive and replace things.
• I wanted to pull the 37 GB sata drive and use it in another system.  Much to my surprise the boot tracks were on that drive and the 200 GB drive with the OS etc would not boot without the 37 GB being present.  I'll need to pick up some other SATA drives for the new build or make the 200 GB drive bootable.

To DO

• Upgrade roku to use http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/ROKU_HD_Frontend
• Build new system
• Finish the tivo slide support
• Setup mythnettv properly
• Buy and install blu ray drive in Ohio TV system.
• Finish freenas install
• Improve antenna.  Bow tie is better but could use better still.  Also consider array of fractal and large fractal.
• Remove passwords that popup

Fire ComcastTV - Refine network shares, DVD rip, new computer

Continuing to work on the Fire ComcastTV project.  I think I'll be able to do so sometime in the next week or so.  Verizon has pulled fiber and they should be contacting customers soon.  As soon as they do Comcast is gone.

Spent some time refining the configuration.


Refine network shares

The network shares for the 1TB USB network drive are a bit difficult to use.

• Create share on 1TB drive for /Public/Media directory as media_nas0000 
• Create share on 1TB drive for /Public/mythtv as mythtv_nas0000
• Install smbfs
• On ohio create permanent mount for media_nas0000
  
  sudo mount -t smbfs //192.168.1.2/media_nas0000 /media/media_nas0000 -o password=,uid=rbell01824,gid=rbell01824

For reasons I don't understand this is not working.  I'll look at permissions and try a sleep to allow the mount to happen.

DVD rip

• vobcopy -I to get info
• vobcopy -l to copy title with most angles  clean and simple

Also downloaded thoggen and acidrip.  Tried both.  They both work.  thoggen is simple but rips at about playback speed so it takes a long time.  acidrip is much faster.  Where vobcopy is fast the output doesn't always play well.  One issue is that fast forward/back doesn't work with vobcopy but seems OK with thoggen and acidrip.

Had some difficulty with one DVD and found that dvd::rip worked OK.  Looks like you need to sometimes play a bit.

After experimentation I think acidrip is the pick of the litter.

2nd disk drive

There is a second sata drive on Ohio.  It's a 37 GB WDC that was probably previously a Windows drive.  There's no real reason to mount it so I'm going to just leave it alone for the moment.

New computer


Picked up a case (antec 300, http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129042) and power (antec 750, http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817371026) supply yesterday.  The case has 3 external and 6 internal bays so there is lots of expansion room.  I think I'll move the core 2 to this case and use the other case for the intel mobo I recently bought.


mythlink.pl


Tried this utility.  Links made in a directory owned on nas0000 owned by mythtv.  nas0000 mounted uid/gid mythtv.  Remounted as uid/gid rbell01824 and deleted directory.  This needs additional investigation before using mythlink.pl.

To DO

• Upgrade roku to use http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/ROKU_HD_Frontend
• Build new system
• Finish the tivo slide support
• Setup mythnettv properly
• Finish freenas install
• Improve antenna.  Bow tie is better but could use better still.  Also consider array of fractal and large fractal.
• Remove passwords that popup