myrddin.org: weblog

After last weekend’s unfortunate internet outage I experienced with my ISP, and a pain in the ass week at work, this weekend I’ve updated and put some of the old howto’s back online Those people that emailed me to tell me that they were getting 404 errors will be pleased to see them back.

What I have done this time however is remove (or am in the middle of doing so at least) the old and redundant howto’s… Some of the howto’s that I wrote were quite old, going back to 2001 for some of them, and for Linux distributions that I certainly *hope* people are not still using, due o their age and no doubt resulting security issues. If they are for that matter, they should seriously look at upgrading.

Filed under: m.o

Why is it that when you come back from having some annual leave, or time off work in general, that the week that you come back is always the worst?

Filed under: m.o

I don’t believe I’ve mentioned it and I’m sure some people are wondering about the ‘Linux Media PC’ link under projects is all about, but I *finally* set myself up a linux media pc downstairs in the lounge room where I can stream media content over the wireless network to my tv/hifi system. It really is quite cool
Basically the long and short of it at the moment is that I’m using the Linux distribution Debian ‘unstable’ on the media pc which is connected solely via S-VIDEO in to the tv. It is working really well so far, thought I did encounter a few hiccups that pissed me off for a little while until I realised my mistakes.

I’m essentially using Gnome’s Totem player to play movies as well as internet radio streaming. I had originally thought of using mplayer, but I had to make it easy for the ‘other half’ to use (yes she still uses that Windows XP rubbish so I had to give her something clickity and with big gumby icons)

Using Totem isn’t really all that bad for both types of media mentioned above, I’ve configured both movies and audio streams to fire up totem fullscreen from Nautilus. Fullscreen invocation of totem is preferred so if its not a movie, the totem visualizations fill the TV screen which is very cool looking
For the time being I’ve also decided to leave the HDTV card upstairs in my main pc as I have grown quite accustomed to watching TV up here while I work and/or play I think I will just get a HDTV set top box for downstairs, I can’t really see myself recording shows anyway, besides, by the time any decent TV series gets to free-to-air TV in Australia, it would have been made available on the internet 6-9 months if not longer…

Anyway, the idea is to document what I’ve done with the media pc in the projects section (when I get around to it that is) so others that may embark on a similar ordeal can see how I’ve done it and may be able to use it as a basis on designing their own Linux media pc configuration

Filed under: m.o

6pm on a Saturday night, of a 3 day long weekend coinciding with the end of my week of annual leave…, the f$@#ing Telstra equipment in my local telephone exchange decided to b0rk itself rendering me unable to authenticate my ADSL connection. This also happened to be the time when I was updating and slowly fixing all the issues with the new interface to this site
As suspected the phone call to my ISP revealed that they would log the fault with Telstra only the sla was 4pm of the next ‘business’ day.. *arugh pulls out hair* Turns out they fixed the issue this morning so when I got home everything was back to normal but hey, 3 days without Internet is oh so painful

Filed under: m.o

My 2 little babies turned 2 today! *hip hip hooray!*

Sam and Jesse, my 2 awesome little(?) cats are now grown up! Though it would hardly seem so the way they act sometimes They are currently enjoying their new presents and treats.

Filed under: m.o

As you can no doubt see, I’ve concocted a new interface to the site. I got a bit bored with the other one let see… a rather *long* time ago. I sat down a few times and attempted coding a new layout but as always I either got side tracked or got the shits with css. This time however I got a little further.

It was quite amusing really, I’m sitting here on one fo the last days of my week off, indending to do some shopping and all that jazz however I started reorganising my firefox bookmarks. I then embarked on a mission to have a look for any debian or open source packages in general for storing bookmarks on a web front end similar to del.icio.us however I ended up starting to *finally* geting around to setting up ldap here for adressbook storage and/or pam auth. Somewhere along the line I got caught up in the css links that I stumbled across while browsing del.icio.us and had thought in the back of my mind; “how about I attempt coding a new interface to myrddin.org again..”

That of course was it, game over, I’m now sitting here after 2am in the morning fixing lots of my self induced bugs… Needless to say, things like the howto’s and a lot of the site links are broken considering I’ve simply deleted them until I can smooth things over and make everything look all nice and pretty again. Don’t worry, I’ll have them up when I get a good night’s sleep, I’m too tired to really think at the moment..

Mind you I never ended up leaving the house today, funny thing that

Filed under: m.o