The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife Are Some Jive-Ass Slippers

Mon, 14 Nov 2005

Samba Network Interfaces

There was a bit of chatter about using Samba with multiple network interfaces on the main mailing list recently, so I decided to write an article about it: Multiple Network Interfaces with Samba. It was also a bit of an excuse to fool around with Docbook. It's quite neat, although quite hard to get to grips with. I ended up using xmlto instead of any of the more complicated solutions available.

Thu, 03 Nov 2005

Tool of the Month

After installing Breezy Badger on a new machine the other day, I downloaded some ISOs and was suprised to discover that ISO files are now supported in Gnome's archive manager application, File Roller. Just right click on an ISO file in Nautilus and select "Open in archive manager". Very cool, although it has apparently been supported since May 2004. (-:

Wed, 02 Nov 2005

External Antenna

Woot - finally after years of procrastination we have an external UHF/VHF antenna. I am hoping that when the sun goes down, the traditional time when the television reception starts to get crappy, we will not have to worry about wiggling those stupid rabbit's ears around. I haven't tried out the DVB-T reception. That should improve as well.

Tue, 01 Nov 2005

New MythTV Box

My wife convinced me that a new mythtv box would be the way to go, as my old desktop is slowly dying, and my attempts at a small, separate front end didn't work so well (hello Zensonic). I withdrew a wad of cash on Saturday morning and headed down to the bi-weekly computer fair. I ended up buying the following:

• ASUS A8N-E (socket 939, dual-channel DDR, PCI-e)
• AMD64 3000+
• 1GB dual channel DDR400
• Gigabyte 6600GT PCI-e (DVI out, funky heat pipe cooling)
• 1x 120GB PATA disk for OS
• 1x 250GB SATA disk for recordings (will add another 2x or 3x of these later)

I moved the DVD burner and the two DVICO FusionHDTV-Lite cards across from the old machine.

I also splurged on a Sonata II 450W quiet case and power supply which, I have to say, is pretty neat. For the extra $100 or so over the price of a regular case, you get a quiet power supply which is good in itself, and also funky things like drive rails and a backplane that holds the PCI cards without any metal having to be bent. That was a strange experience given that I usually buy dodgy cases.

I'm sure the last time I built a PC that installing the operating system was the hardest bit. This time I popped in a Ubuntu CD (after swapping around the IDE cable - I installed it upside down) and Linux practically installed itself while I was cleaning up the boxes and ripped open plastic bags. Didn't get a chance to install MythTV just yet. Maybe later on in the week.