Technology

This is a good page if you are interested in adding Girder (or have been afraid) to your HTPC setup.

What is Girder

Getting ready to install the Microsoft® “Avalon” and “Indigo” Community Technology Preview. If my system crashes and I don’t post for a couple of days, that is what the problem is.

Sweet. Now that I am not running the blog on my own server I don’t use MySQL for alot, but I do use it a bit, and have plans to use it even more later.

Slashdot | ‘Most Important Ever’ MySQL Reaches Beta

This looks very cool. Exactly what I want for fathers day. That or a decent iPaq to hack and use as a remote for Meedio (and really all of my HA stuff). I could use netremote and girder probably. I know I can on the pocket PC’s, but will have to wait for some enterprising kids to hack the PSP for it first. Hell, even a nice tablet PC would be pretty cool, just a bit more bulky than what I really want.

Amazon.com: Electronics: Sony Playstation Portable (PSP) Value Pack

Finally got Meedio to play M4P’s purchased using iTunes. I ended up using a Meedio plugin that uses Winamp as it’s music player, rather than the stock music player. Then I downloaded the M4P input plugin for winamp and installed that. I also had to do a new import that would find the music in m4p format, since the stock plugin does not. Sounds like a lot of work, bt it actually was not. It is much quicker than the stock player, and I have always loved winamp.

I would have preferred native support for M4P, but I think that they are more worried about the TV crap than something only a few people have requested. I am using BeyondTV, which blows away MeedioTV.

Update – The only problem I have found with this is controlling it when the music library is across a network. I am in the process of miving all 24 gigs of music onto my htpc, that should speed it up greatly. I am getting ready to go to bed, may post more tommorow on this.

I’ve added this link to my blogroll as well. desktopian.org was my main site for skinning news at one point in time. Blogging before blogging was mainstream. Still head over every once in awhile, but it has not been updated in several months. I am still into skinning, but not quite as heavy, and not into replacement shells as much as I used to be either.

I really like using BeyondTV, but hate it that when I move shows out of the default directory, most of the information about the show is lost. I could move them using the web interface, but that is a pita, have to do it one at a time, and it is slow. I wish that the information was retained differently. I keep my videos spread out on five different drives, and when I go to move them into each shows directory would like to keep each shows info.

I am going to go ahead and start porting my Home Automation pages over to IIS again pretty soon. Right now they are accesible on port 8080 using the HS web server, but I much prefer being able to get to it on the standard port 80. Rather than actual control, which would require that I expose the COM interface, I may just export the data to static pages in a virtual directory using php. Will have to take a look at it on my days off.

Finally got Anna’s PC on the internet. For some strange reason I had her wireless access point listed as a gateway, rather than my router. Oh well, got it working anyway.

My Wife and Daughter sort of share a PC, mobo fried itself last week. Finally got around to installing an Abit NF7, Athlon XP 2400+ the other day. Had to go through the whole reinstall/repair from my XP cd. Everything is fine, have network connectivity, but can’t get OUT of my intranet. I am fucking pissed. It’s not a DNS issue, as I cannot ping any outside IP’s either. The in-house sites work (HA, Web server), but I cannot hit anything outside. Thought it might be a routing issue from the wireless network (her PC is the only one wireless), so I added a static route, but that is not working. I hate fucking wireless. I have had nothing but problems with it here, possibly because I have so much RF flying around the house with my HA setup.

If I can’t fiugre it out today, I will just have to run a new fucking length of CAT5 to the kitchen (one of the few rooms without it) and enable the onboard net jack on the mobo.

This really pisses me off because I should be able to figure out the problem.