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Tonight was the first chance I got to play with my new toys. I got iButton and 1Wire starter kits from Dallas-Maxim and have been itching to see if they all work. And they seem to!

What is all this stuff? It’s little chips and button thingees that can be put on a very simple network that can do things like measure temperature etc. And eventually, if I can find, remember, or learn enough electronics, control things as well. They can also act as electronic keys too. One small step on the home automation highway.

The first “experiment” will be to see if I can get things sorted out enough to be able to record temperatures from around the house and get the web server to print out nice little graphs of it all. Shouldn’t be too hard, I hope. Not much in the way of other electronics or fancy software required. I’ll post a link when I finally get it all working.

Now that it’s all nice and warm outside, that may be longer than I had originally planned though…

New toys are always fun! The latest is a small media viewer that I scored off ebay for a really good price. I’ve had my eye on one for a while, but they were always going for more then I was willing to pay. But then one popped up with not much interest in it, and I got it for a lot less than some of the same units that had auctions finishing just before and after this one. Odd, but I’m not complaining!

The unit is a Hauppauge MVP, which is a tiny little box that gets plugged into the network, and can be used to output movies, pictures and music to a TV. I’m using it to be able to watch the programmes that we’ve recorded on the MythTV  superbox up in the bedroom.  A much better idea than trying to sneak a proper PC in there.

It downloads an operating system that has been built to connect to MythTV, MVPMC , from a server and away we go. The technical stuff around getting it to work is on this page .  

If you want an easy way to check if there is anything new on this site, and assuming you’re using Firefox or any other browser that has this feature (Internet Explorer doesn’t yet) then you can add a “live bookmark” to this site as easily as a normal bookmark that will show you if there are any new posts, and take you to them if you want to read that new post.

A good explaination of how to do this and what they are all about is here. Just note that if you have a different theme installed for Firefox, then the little orange icon may actually look like something else, but it will still be in the same place in the address bar.

This feature is really handy for all sorts of sites, especially news and blog type sites. The icon will appear for any site that lets the browser know that it has such a live bookmark feed.

The superbox got an upgrade last week. A version bump up to .19.

The new mythweb is great, and jumping forward now seems a lot crisper.

I’m still not sure that I’m making the best use of the box by running it at 1280×768 when all the video is at 720×576, but I’m too lazy to change it to see what happens. It runs fine anyway though, so I guess I’m worrying over nothing….

Well, ok, it’s not a car, more’s the pity, it’s only an external USB hard drive that I can now use to transfer files between the superbox and the faster computer upstairs so I can edit the recordings and burn them to DVD there. But it apparently was designed by Porsche. Made by LaCie. I have to say I can’t quite see all the design work has come in. It’s pretty basic, and was cheap, but seems to do the job.

One small thing about it is that the drive activity LED is orange for idle, and, errrr, yet another orange for working. It would be a little more helpful if they were a little more different. Maybe that’s was the design feature.

Waiting for a 2 gig recording to come across a 14Mbs network was doing my head in. Let alone what it would be like to wait for 5 of them! Life’s too short. A 160 gig drive means I can fit all the recordings to transfer on if I want to. I can see that one day I’m going to have to upgrade the drive in the superbox too.

Setting it up on Linux was a doddle, with the help of several web pages. How did we ever do this stuff without the friendly web?!

Setting it up on the box upstairs was a pain in the butt though, as it just would not work. I tried (almost) everything, but it just would not connect properly. After about an hour I finally decided to try using the USB connections on the back of the box, rather than the front. And guess what? It worked first time. So now I know not to bother with the front ones… Hey ho. Who knows why.

That was almost as bad as trying to put printable DVDs through the printer. I was trying for about an hour, and nothing was working. Even reinstalled the printer driver and everything. No luck. The printer would error every time.

And then I worked it out. The printer was too close to the wall, and the DVD tray could not go back far enough for the printer to get to the front of the disk. Did I feel stupid?! Well yes. Quite. But now I know…

Finally got around to another little system admin job that I should have done ages ago. All the system clocks on the Linux boxes should now be all syncronised to the “real” time from an internet server.

They all connect to one box on the network that gets it’s time from central net servers. I thought that was a nicer way to do it than to keep bugging them for every box.

One box gave me a bit of giref though. For some reason it just wouldn’t sync right, and the time daemon would just disappear without a trace. Finally worked out that it was due to the system being an hour fast, and so it was too far out of sync to allow it to automatically fix itself. I don’t know how long I stared at the apparent time before I actaully saw what was right in front of me.

Probably a good job I got around to this if it was that far out!

And yet more interactivity between the boxes. Now I’ve set things up so that the programme schedule and control of recordings on the superbox shows up on the other web server. At least to anyone on the internal network currently with a bit of .htaccess goodness.

Seems to work pretty well, although I suspect there is still a bit of configuration missing on the web server for it to work perfectly.

But then I know that I can set it up to allow me to record shows from wherever I happen to be in the world if I’ve forgotten to programme it all before we go anywhere….

Finally! I’ve managed to get a mailserver set up that actually works!

When I had to reboot the server so that they could replace the electricity meter downstairs (which annoyingly made me miss the target of having the server up for a whole year with no kernel issues) I had a small surprise. Appearing in my gmail account were some emails from this blog system about users and posts. How the hell were they appearing?!

Investigation showed that on the reboot the mail programmes were back up and running, after I’d given up and turned them off a while ago, and in the meantime some parts of the system had been updated and sending mail to the outside world worked.

Getting the receiving of mail to work took quite a lot longer, and a few more hairs being pulled off the head, but I think I’ve finally cracked it. Even with anti-virus and anti-spam measures in place too. Yippee!

And I can even collect it from the server using the Thunderbird email client over an encrypted connection too.

Finally, all up and running, and all from an accident!

Finally worked out how to stop lircd messages from filling up all logs except the one I want. Simple really if you know how (or RTFM)….

Putting flags(final);at the end of the log line like log { source(src); filter(f_lircd); destination(lircd); flags(final); }; stops that filtered line from passing to any other destination logs, regardless of their filters.

Voila. One more annoyance down….

Stumble Upon is a great extension for the Firefox Web browser.

It lets you “channel surf” the net by throwing up random web sites that others have liked. Great for when I can’t think of what to look up. You set a number of categories of things that you’re interested in like multimedia, cats etc, and whenever you push the button, you get a random site of interest. You can also vote for the sites you like or don’t to help others.