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.