Starting my MythTV project

I'm finally going to do it. I've been looking at building a MythTV box for over a year now. I just never could motivate myself to take the first step.

Last week I purchased a PVR-250 Model 980 from buy.com, and just last night I saw a $70 200gb harddrive on Outpost.com, so I went ahead and bought that as well.

I've already discovered by reading in some forums that the PVR-250 I bought which I thought would be an easy match for Myth is a newer model chipset (980) and they (Myth coders) haven't worked out all the glitches with it yet. Hopefully the great open source coders that are working on Myth will have it solved by the time I get all the hardware in place. The PVR-250 is the most widely used card of Myth users, so I think they'll be on top of it fast. I was trying to avoid the MCE chipset because I read about problems with it, but it seems those are all resolved now. The issue currently is around the 980 chipset that I just bought. Oh well, my first miscalculation, I'm sure there will be more to come.

I still need to buy a case, motherboard, processor, ram, and video card (output). I'll keep you up to date on my progress.

Hacking Defined

I found an interesting site just the other day. It's called Hacking Defined. They do a nice demo of cracking a WEP key in just a few minutes here:

http://whoppix.hackingdefined.com/Whoppix-wepcrack.html

I've seen a similar demo done on From the Shadows StashBox 3.0, but this attack was super fast.

How to become a millionaire

I found this very nice presentation the other day. It was very inspiring. I think all I really need to do to become a millionaire is try. I just have to get off my lazy butt and do it. :)

http://marshallbrain.com/million.htm

Digg

I'm still working on ways to balance life and blogging. :) In any case, I've added my diggs to the right column. Digg is a very neat site that I've been reading for sometime now. I don't even read Slashdot anymore.

Digg stories bubble to the top based on how many people are interested in them. So when I digg a story (and it shows up in my right column) I basically +1 the story's score. So not always the most recent news is front page, sometimes it takes a few days to bubble to the top.

Speed up Firefox

I found this neat article on "hack a day" that will speed up Firefox on broadband connections.

I haven't been able to notice a tremendous difference, but here's the text from the tip with some slight modifications by me:

1.Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows by double clicking on the entry:

Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"

Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"

Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0". This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

Welcome to the world: Abigail Kalea Rymer

I want to welcome my daughter Abigail Kalea Rymer into the world. She was born Dec 15th, 2004 at 1:31am EST. She weighed 6lbs 8.4oz and measured 19.5 inches long.

Just as I figured...

Just as I figured. After the music industry lobbied so hard for the DMCA, made examples of poor teenagers who just wanted to listen to their favorite artists and sued them for thousands, guess what?!

Monday (12/6/2004) a survey of recording artists revealed that the internet has padded their pockets. 43% of the artists said that peer-to-peer networks actually helped promote their work!

Creativity should be free to express itself... viva la restistance!

Robojo Speaks

My friend Robert Jones just started a new blog. His rants are entertaining to say the least!

URL: Robojo Speaks

Neat remote hack

I just discovered a very neat hack I have to tell you about. With the help of a Griffin Total Remote you can record IR remote control signals as sound (wav file for example). Then plug the total remote into any audio playback gadget (mp3 player, iPod, PocketPC, etc) and control devices 100ft away! That's awesome!

I saw a video of someone on engadget.com using the device to record a TV-B-Gone device's signals and then save it into his iPod. Suddenly his iPod could turn off any TV in 100ft.

New pictures on shutterfly

We have some new albums available now on shutterfly:

Tate Lewis' birth 11.14.2004
Pumpkin Carving 10.24.2004
Baby Shower 10.02.2004