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?
More Myth Progress
Well, today I decided it was time to get the IR blaster working in MythTV. This is the device that controls our settop box, so that we can tune channels in the digital tier.
Now, I decided to purchase an IR blaster (and receiver) from the guy running irblaster.info, and I gotta say, I couldn’t be happier! The blaster works absolutely perfectly, and I haven’t seen it miss a tune yet. Setting it up was remarkably straightforward:
- Plug into serial port.
- Install lirc kernel module.
- Copy DCT2524 configuration into /etc/lircd.conf
- Install channel.pl from [http://www.iwamble.net/IRBlaster_Howto.txt this tutorial] (along with some tweaks to make it behave well with our DSTB).
- Instruct Myth to use the channel change script.
And voila! Works like a charm. Tune times are a bit longer, now, as you’ve gotta wait for the box to get the key clicks and then switch, but overall, it ain’t bad at all.
Of course, this is all just testing. Until the replacement EPIA board arrives, we’ll be stuck watching regular ol’ TV for a while, yet.
Pomtastic!
Ahh, finally, pomegranate season has returned! Okay, sure, there have been US-grown pom’s available for about a month, but… well, they sucked (tasteless, with large, tough seeds). These ones, though… mmmmmm… dang. Sweet, tangy, full of flavour, and the seeds are small and relatively soft.
Now, I’m sure there are many of you out there that have never tried a pomegranate. In fact, until last year, I hadn’t tried them, either. But I decided to take the plunge, and boy, am I glad. Of course, they can be a bit intimidating, thanks to the difficulty in extracting the seeds. But with a little effort, they can be removed pretty easily, and trust me, it’s worth it!
So, how to remove those ever-so-delicious arils? Well, here’s how I do it:
- Start with a sharp paring knife. Score the pom around the top and remove it.
- Now, identify the sections of the pom and score the skin from the top of the pom vertically, to the bottom, along the section boundaries.
- Crack the pom open! Grip it firmly and break it apart. It should split along the score lines.
- Fill a decent sized bowl with water and start extracting the seeds, allowing them to drop into the bowl.
- Once finished, remove the bits of pulp floating in the water and any pieces attached to the arils.
- Strain, dry, and store in a plastic bag.
- Eat!
The real trick, here, is the bowl of water. You see, the arils sink while the pulp floats. Thus, using water makes it easy to separate the seeds out.
Now, how to eat them? Pop them in your mouth and chew! In my case, I swallow them seeds and all, though that’s really a matter of preference (though, they do provide a nice dose of dietary fibre… actually, a lot, which can be… problematic, if you love them as much as I do).
As for nutrition, the juice is loaded with, among other things, vitamin C, folic acid (good for you pregnant ladies), and antioxidants. Good stuff!
Minor MythTV Mupdate
Well, things are a bit stalled on the MythTV project, now. The Fedex guy came and took away the dead motherboard that was originally destined for the Living Room Frontend, so now begins the great EPIA Return Saga (tm). If all goes well, I’ll have a new board in a few weeks, with minimal fees in the forms of duty or taxes. I remain skeptical.
On the bright side, the IR receiver and blaster units arrived, so I’ll probably play with those this weekend. They look very well made, so I’m hopeful that they’ll work as advertised. ‘course, I was also hopeful that my EPIA board would arrive fully functional…
Meanwhile, the backend continues to work well. I continue to record The Daily Show and The Colbert Report during their late night showings on CTV (aka, channel 2, aka, one of the few basic cable channels I can currently access with Myth), and it seems to be doing the job quite nicely. I’ve also been noodling around with different plugins on the frontend, such as MythMusic and MythVideo, and everything seems to work as advertised.
Thus far, the only glitch was a period where the frontend started to stutter and generate prebuffering errors, but that could be related to running over a lowly half-duplex, 10 Mbs connection.