Projects

It’s with a heavy heart that i announce the death of my beloved Rover 220TD. My first car, a 2 Litre Turbo Diesel, power steering, electric windows, roomy, remote central locking is soon to be no more. After what i’d call a minor bump where someone went into the back of me, the insurence company have written it off to the tune of £900. They did offer a cash settlement, however, in order to re-insure it, i would have to have undergone (at my expense) another MOT and engineers inspection – i suspect this would have made it far too expensive.

Despite the car being well looked after – full service history from new at 10k mile intervals with all required work undertaken and absolutely no issues, that’s what they valued it at. So i spent some time using all the fuel and stripping it of useful components – the newish Bosch Silver battery, GPS receiver, phone charger/holder, head unit, tweeter speakers, floor mats and other bits and pieces, including the odd momento. It also took me a week to find a new car. I had a plan. I had heard the adverts on the radio for http://www.chapelhouse.co.uk/ – offering 0%/£0 deposit 5 year finance, perfect i thought. I looked at the website, found a couple of lovely Citereon C4 Coupe’s (i think they look amazing), well within budget – one at £7,000 or £116 per month.

So i toddled off to the showroom – “I’m afraid you don’t qualify for 0% finance sir, the total repayment will be almost £9,000″. Normally that would be fine(ish if you don’t mind being stiffed for interest) but similar specification C4′s were on autotrader for £4.5-5k, i had assumed they’d just inflated the cost of the car instead of charging interest, so they could offer 0%. I told them to stuff it, i wasn’t going to pay nearly double. I could have found another dealer, on high interest finance and bought it for around £7k. However, i didn’t have time. So we went trailing around all kinds of back end dodgy dealers before i found a car.

There’s no easy way to say this, it’s a….

Cityrover.

Phew, glad i got that out in the open, i am the not so proud owner of a Rover Cityrover, or rather a Tata Indica with a Rover badge. It’s saving grace is that it only cost £995 and it’s a 2004 car which has 12 months MOT and 6 months Tax. Other than that, theres not a lot else to it, it’s just a simple, basic runabout, hopefully one which works.

It’s not without it’s quirks (let’s be honest, it wouldn’t be a Rover if it all worked), the fuel gague only works properly when turning left and the indicators don’t click in but hey, it works!

Rover made a big mistake asking £7,700 for this car (Sprite model) when they were buying them from Tata in India for £2k and they sell over there for about £3.5k. If they’d just sold it at £4.5k then it would have been massively popular.

It’s going to the garage next wednesday for a service and inspection, watch this space for how much it’s going to cost. If it’s ok then i’ll be re-instating the car pc – it’ll be the most pimped up CityRover in existance!

Bye all for now

Hi All,

Just a quick note to say that i’m on the lookout for a new job, my skills and so on are details on my profile page here

If you know of anything going which I would be suitable for (preferably in the north west of the UK) then please feel free to let me know via email on dave@lewty.org.uk.

I’ve came to the conclusion, that although it’s come on a long long way since i last tried it, Myth TV is a no go. It suffers from a legacy – old code and design which makes it extremely difficult to make it behave like a modern system should – the front end’s are clunky and slow, poorly designed (graphically) and what’s more, Myth is incredibly slow to change channel – according to the forums, this isn’t going to change either. Really, that’s unacceptable, i thought my budget TV was slow, it’s like lightening compared to Myth.

This has led me on to another system – XBMC, which i would say i can’t praise it highly enough, however, it has a massive flaw (for me), it doesn’t (yet) offer PVR/Live TV functionality – however, that is actually being developed as we speak and plugins are already available to use Myth, VDR and TV Headend (whatever that is). These arn’t as polished as they should be, but i don’t think it will be long before they are.

Once XBMC is mature with Live TV i will almost certainly migrate to it. I was very impressed with it – fully set up with the remote control – even connecting to network shares, auto meta data download for TV and film, ‘pooled’ TV/Film etc virtual directories (logically merge the contents for display). It does require a slightly different TV episode naming scheme however, but i think i can cope with doing that (use bulk rename utility – www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk).

At the moment i’m stuck with Windows 7 Mediacentre, which doesn’t playback properly because it can’t keep audio and video in sync…. (not a CPU load problem).

As for other things, i have reached the end of an era, all my servers, apart from the fileserver have been turned off. I originally put them in under the ‘professional development’ banner, enabling me to learn and expand my technical knowledge on a variety of systems. However the truth these days is i spend my PD time at home reading technical books and learning the theory instead of practical. To some extent i’m learning about problems which i have at work and so i apply the practical knowledge there instead.

Getting rid of things didn’t go entirely to plan – the mail was actually the easiest, i simply signed up to a hosted exchange account with www.simplymailsolutions.com their pre-sales staff were very helpful and it’s only £5.99/month (on the now ‘Classic’ package (was previously named standard when i signed up). I get 2Gb Exchange 2007 mailbox and a free copy of Outlook 2007 (both free upgraded to 2010 when they get around to it). It’s been great so far, no more pesky VPNs for checking my mail and Exchange 2007 instead of 2003 too which is a bonus.

As for the other servers, web hosting duties have been with TSOHost for over a year without issue but i needed somewhere to put my SVN server, at the moment it’s just file-based on the fileserver but that’s good enough for now. I’ve also lost the download box i had but it wasn’t really being used, PBX has also gone – no need for it really, it was just overkill to have in the house, i can always fire it up if i want to have a go with another version of Asterisk though.

The most difficult part of the migration was getting rid of the router VM, i thought i’d just be able to use the free Thomson speedtouch that came from my ISP – i logged in, had all the right options – WPA2, editable DHCP server, but it’s no so much lacking in features as…broken, i tried to configure the DHCP server and unless i wanted it on 192.168.1.0/24 there was basically no chance, it just wouldn’t work properly. So i put it in bridge again and used my DD-WRT/Linksys WRT54G device as the router/gateway with DNS, DHCP and wireless. A bit annoying that it’s a two box solution and i wanted one, but nevertheless it’s solved.

All of this has brought my background electricity useage down from over 600W to less than 200W (this being the fridge/freezer/switches/fileserver). My eventual plan is that if a new version of Opensolaris is ever released, i will upgrade the fileserver and put a VirtualBox, CentOS VM on it which will handle downloads and SVN, but Opensolaris is looking iffy at the moment and i may have to migrate – i considered a dedicated NAS but i also want to run SVN and things, maybe an Atom based system would be a better idea.

All this is in the aim to cut down the amount of stuff i use on a day to day basis so i could place it into storage as i’m planning on moving from my 3 bedroom house into a 1 bedroom apartment to save money, placing everything that won’t fit into storage (i have a lot of stuff). One quote i had for storage was £50/month for 50sq feet for a min of 6 months, which isn’t bad at all, i don’t think i’ll need that much so it should be even cheaper.

CarPC wise, the software is finished (more or less) i just need to sort out a battery for the laptop before i re-fit it into the car, i’ve already re-fitted the radio as i wanted to be able to play MP3 CDs, but i need to fit the laptop, USB Hub and Car2PC adaptor, i’ll attempt to make it a better job this time instead of all just shoved behind the dash.

Anyway, i think that’s about it, i tried to cover everything as i don’t blog anywhere near enough about the detail of some of my projects.

So it’s that time of year again, the time when i  think to myself that maybe, just maybe, it’s worth trying Myth TV again.

I’ve always been wrong, since 2005, every time i have tried it i’ve hard problems with hardware support, flaky software, wobbly codecs and so much more that is just hasn’t been worth the effort with Windows Media Centre outperforming it in every regard.

However, today i tried MythBuntu 2010.04 and finally, finally, it works. I still think the setup is far too complex – a simple tuner wizard would suffice and for sat tuners it should download the transponder information automatically. As of writing it’s currently broken – my DVB-S2 tuner doesn’t work – it’s detected but it wont scan for any channels in Myth (DVB Tools manages ok) and now it all seems to have fallen apart.

However, when it was working i had dual tuner DVB-T, in-band guide information, fast and smooth playback of MKV 1080p, (and everything else) as well as DD and DTS passthrough to my AV amp.

For the first time ever, i think it will be worth the effort to get working fully and look nice, so i can take advantage of multi-channel single-mux recording on one tuner and the front-end back-end design.

Watch this space.

AHA! EDIT:

After a reboot and re-configure of the tuners from scratch my sat tuner appears to be tuning! Fantastic, will report back if i get to see the channels and if BBC HD etc is working nicely.

EDIT 2:

Just had BBC HD running and looking lovely, however it was stuttering – another process on the box has excessive CPU i’m trying to trace down why, it appears not to be uncommon, but hey, the headline features of the system work which is a major first!

So it would seem i too have succumbed to the fiery ball of death associated with laptop Lithium ION batteries. Tonight i wandered into my study to the smell of chemical burning – after a lot of wondering and worrying i eventually figured out it was the battery from the laptop whic is my Car-PC (currently in my study as i’m re-writing the software – a bigger post coming on that later)

I extracted the battery and placed it safely outside in my yard, then i set about neutralising the acid left on the laptop chassis and docking station. Pictures attached…

Just what i needed of an evening.

It would appear that if you add more than 11 items to a play.com basket, it will forget them! I was putting in loads of DVDs to see what the total amount was going to be and it stopped going up at about £60 when i checked the basket, loads were missing, so i tried to add them again and they just disappeared!

I’ve finally silenced my HTPC. It’s been through a few changes over the years, the spec as it stands now is:

Silverstone SST-LC17 Case
Seasonic S12-430
Intel Pentium D E2180 2x 2Ghz
Thermaltake AXP-140 Passive Heatsink
2GB DDR2 RAM
Asus P5B Mobo
Passive Geforce 9400GT GFX
Lite-On Blu-Ray Drive
Avermedia A16D Hybrid Tuner
Hauppage Mytv.t Tuner
160GB Seagate IDE HDD
Windows 7 Ultimate

If it wern’t for the HDD it would be completely silent, it’s made a massive difference – this system is in my lounge and it’s the only device which makes any noise at all. I’m undecided about the HDD solution – SSD would be ideal, but expensive as it’s the TV recording HD, so would require a good 128Gb at least really. I am probably going to try using a spare old 80GB SATA disk see if i can get away with it, if so i may be able to pick up a 64Gb SSD and problem will be solved. This also means i can head toward a smaller case in the future – the current one is 4U!

I may as well mention the blu ray, since i’m here. A bit disappointed to be honest, i had expected by now, that playback would be fully integrated into Windows Media Centre, however, it is not. The system wouldn’t even begin to play at first – just like the old Windows XP MPEG2/DVD problem. So i installed the enclosed Power DVD 8 BD and tried again – it just minimised Media Centre and launched PowerDVD – with a message saying it won’t run under 1024×768, FFS – my monitor is set at 720p of course it is, and how many other people will have done this!?! I was forced to raise it to 1080i whereby the text on the desktop looks awful, films look good though as does Media Centre. So now it runs, but not full screen, remote functions are basic at best.

So disappointed, i wanted the experience to be seamless, i’m strongly considering moving the drive to my PC and just ripping every film i get. It’s no wonder people pirate films, its a right pain to do it properly. On that subject, i was ripping my CDs – all originals. And i have a ‘Copy Controlled’ CD in my collection. Can’t rip it. Bloody annoying, i can pirate the album no problem, within minutes, but can i rip the CD? No. People who have paid full price for films and music are coming off worse. If it wasn’t such a pain then i wouldn’t mind – CSS on DVDs was never this problematic, sure you had MPEG2 licencing issues, but that was a different game.

Anyway, i’ve ranted long enough.

PS don’t pirate, support artists and film makes, buy CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays (but use eBay and Amazon market place, don’t get ripped off!)

Sods Law. Curse whoever gave it a name. My Be* Pro ADSL2+ connection has been running constantly without outage since July when it was installed – modem has never been powered off and the internet has never been down. 3 days after i go away for christmas – my VPN goes down. Since there has never been an issue with the connection i immediately thought my house had been flooded/on fire/broken into. The next day i drove down (7 hour round trip, in the thick heavy 15mph on the motorway kind of snow) to find that all i needed to do was reboot the modem! Shock horror this has never happened before. Few days later, it happened again, i gave up this time, since it was Christmas Eve i just took out home insurence instead (which i had been meaning to do for a while).

I got back a few days later and again, rebooted the modem. Weird. Went onto the Be* forums and it appears as of 20th December, many many people who previously it was fine, have been having issues. Could it be the cold? Maybe. Personally, i think that there has been some firmware updates on the DSLAMs/Line cards and it’s causing a problem. That said however, i did notice there was noise on my voice line when the internet went off – it’s been on and off like a yoyo for the last few days. Not had to actually reboot the modem yet though, it’s been coming back up on it’s own.

I think i’ll wait it out for a little while, given so many people are having problems which has not attributed to the usual bad filters/cables etc i’ll see how it goes. On the plus side, Be*’s customer service is faultless – on Christmas Eve i was in an IRC chat with someone who helpfully – although i’m not running their modem and couldn’t swap any plugs about, checked the connection status to see if the modem was online, re-training etc.

They have also announced that line bonding will be available starting end of January – BONDING!!! At a price of around £55/monthly, total. 44meg down 5meg up (max). Yes please!

I have decided that a suitably long period of time has now elapsed since i completed my degree in Audio Technology at The University of Salford for me to publish my dissertation. I’ve also noticed that i get quite a lot of search hits on my site for people looking for dissertations. Rip it off if you want, really, go on, if you can’t be arsed to do your own work and you can sleep at night stealing someone elses work which has had literally hundreds of hours put into it then go right ahead. If you can live with that.

The focus of the project was to find a new means of creating MIDI data, i chose to use the Nintendo WiiMote and convert user movements into MIDI data – how is that different from WiiDrums/Guitar Hero etc. well i’ll tell you how – this system is spacially aware. That means that the physical position of the controller affects what data is generated, not just relative movments from the accelerometer and button presses. When i wrote the dissertation, no one else had done this. I suspect that is no longer true as both the commercial and hacker markets have exploded in development for the WiiMote. Anyway, heres the link for you to enjoy, sorry no CD-ROM but i’m not just going to give away the source code… you’ll have to ask nicely

http://www.lewty.org.uk/dissertation.pdf

Recently i bought a CD player listed as broken on eBay, on it arriving, it read cd’s and played but the audio was broken up, distorted and the cd was skipping.

After some consideration i decided it could be the laser assembly, so i attempted to swap the transport with my other Sony CDP, alas i was foiled as the two transports are not interchangeable. However, the laser assembly is, so i did that.

Success i thought – except it wouldn’t read any cds, knowing this was a good laser, i did a bit of searching about and all i needed to do was adjust the laser focus by turning a small pot on the side of the assembly.

In the picture below under the large red letter ‘L’ is the adjustment pot, making minute adjustments to this and re-testing enabled me to fix the CDP back to full working order. Annoyingly i could have done this with the original laser assembly, and saved myself the bother of swapping them all about.

So theres your tip, if your CDP has started skipping or not reading cd’s, try adjusting the laser – if you’re resigned to getting rid of it anyway, you’ve got nothing to lose.