Posts in category 'mythtv'

  • Suckers!

    So a few weeks back, a buddy of ours received notice from a friend that Dell had an incredible deal on their website: $160 off a 500GB external hard drive. Price after rebate: $80. Yes, 500GB for 80 fricken dollars. Well, it suffices to say we ordered a bunch. I bought two for myself, expecting to be able to extract the drives from their chassises (can you even make that world a plural?) and stick them in my MythTV Backend. Of course, most of us figured it was a pricing error on their website and the orders would be cancelled or the price amended and a correction issued to we, the customers. A suspicion confirmed when we discovered, later in the day, that the discount had been reduced to a mere $60 (if I recall), and another hard drive, far more expensive than the one we ordered, now tagged with the $160 price cut.

    Anyway, fast-forward a couple weeks, and lo and behold, much to our surprise, the drives start showing up! Pretty nice ones, too. Snazzy aluminum case, nice little stand, the whole works. And today, mine arrived! So this evening, I extracted the drives from their cases (turns out they were Deskstars in a straight-up USB HD enclosure) and installed them in my backend. Voila! Another 500GB (they’re set up in a mirror), or 206 hours of recording time, available for our enjoyment! Great success!

    Oh, and Jen, if you find this boring… piss off! ;)

  • Zombie EPIA

    So, you remember that dead EPIA board, right? Yeah, the one I was going to use in my Living Room Frontend as part of my MythTV project? Well, after shipping it Fedex some time last week, it finally arrived at Logic Supply yesterday morning, and underwent testing. And can you guess what happened? Oh yes, I bet you can! The board booted just fine for them! Oooh, surprise surprise.

    But, how can that be, you ask? Didn’t it exhibit some odd behaviour, such as powering up without the power switch being hit? Well, according to the support guy at LS, the board comes with AC loss auto-restart enabled by default! What this means is that, if it notices the AC get connected, it will automatically boot itself (which is good for a system you want on all the time). This mislead me into believing something was going wrong, when in fact it wasn’t. This, coupled with the fact that the board simply won’t POST without RAM installed, lead me to believe the board was toast when it was, in all probability, the RAM the whole time.

    Damnit I hate hardware hacking.

    Anyway, the bright side of all this is that Andy, another co-worker/buddy of mine, was visiting Princeton, New Jersey (where our corporate head office is). So, on the return path, I had LS overnight the board to Princeton for $25, and then I had Andy bring it back across the border. Result? Three day turn-around on the cheap!

    Unfortunately, now I have a problem. I need to test my RAM. However, I’m not yet aware of a DDR2-compatible box that I can utilize for the purpose. And until I can verify the memory, I can’t really move forward on the FE. Did I mention how much I hate hardware hacking?