ruby rolled over 33333 miles at the end of may, while we were on a road trip to visit my in-laws. 22222 was the end of march 2008, so 11111 miles in 14 months. all things being equal, not really too bad. certainly below the california average.

so, I read this post on mythtvnews about hacking an appletv to run linux and a mythfrontend, and I just had to try it. a 40GB appletv arrived at my office last friday courtesy of amazon. after some hacking and a bit of frustration, I've got things mostly working...

• continuing the oxy tradition of naming boxes after cats, this little guy is caracal.

• getting gentoo installed and running was simple, possibly because I run gentoo on some other boxes.

• with a 2.6.24 kernel, nvidia driver 169.09 and a wired network, everything just about works. I still don't have the internal IR working though.

• wireless networking doesn't want to work under 2.6.24, which is a bummer because I want to set this up on the tv in the guest room.

• with a 2.6.25 kernel, wireless networking works.

• nvidia 169.09 won't build with 2.6.25, and the driver that does (173.14.09) doesn't seem to work. I get a flash of green and then nothing... black. X is running, mythfrontend is running, but nothing outputs to the tv.

all-in-all, the things that are working work well... playing 1080i and 720p recordings from the backend works just fine, with maybe the occasional buffering pause in 1080i.

next I'm going to try the 177.13 nvidia beta driver under 2.6.25 to see if that works any better than 173.14.09.

edit:
177.13 does the same thing that 173.14.09... quick green screen followed by a bunch of nothing.

I just ordered a ethernet over powerline kit and a second streamzap (identical to the one I use on the main mythbox). with that hardware (wired network and external IR input) the appletv should be ready to move to the guest room.

for the past month or so, I've been trying to quiet down the computer noise in the den/tv room/office. bigger heatsinks, bigger/slower fans, that sort of thing. no rocket science involved, and silent pc review is an invaluable resource.

after all that, it turns out that the loudest computer left is kitten, an aging mini-itx with a via edan processor. but here's the strange bit, kitten is fanless. the only moving parts in the entire box are in the harddrive, and the noise isn't the skritch-skritch of a harddrive. after some reading, it seems to be singing capacitors. there are some things we can do kernel-wise, which is what that link is about, but singing caps can also signal failing hardware, and since kitten is approaching 6 years old, and all of that time without cooling fans.........

so, last night I swapped kitten out for lynx, an asus wl500w running openwrt, a stripped down linux distribution for wireless access points. seems to be working quite well so far. it's doing most of what kitten did, and anything that was too heavy has been moved to boxes behind lynx on the internal network.

with lynx in place managing the network, things are much quieter. there are a couple of things I can try to quiet the other computers down a bit, but they're pretty quiet as-is. currently the loudest thing in the room is the fan in the tivo, and I'm not sure how much we can do to mitigate that...

ok, enough geeky talk for now. maybe more later... ;-)

for easter this year, karen and I went to the bel air presbyterian service with our friends david and marian... in the hollywood bowl!

it was all a bit weird. not the service itself, but being in a church service in this venue where I've seen so many concerts. rock, classical, jazz... I've even sung along to the sound of music a few times.

all said it was a pretty cool, though surreal morning.

ruby (my little red prius) rolled over 22222 miles on the way to work this morning. that's a bit of a milestone. it will very likely be a while before 33333, I just don't drive all that much.

rest in peace tomcat. long live tigger.

the server (tomcat) that handled the database and application server that makes this site possible (and a bunch of other services on the internal network) died last week.

I've built a new server (tigger), and recovered almost everthing that was on tomcat. the only thing I was unable to recover is the database, so we're stuck with this very old and out-of-date backup. I think I took this snapshot right after I set things up on tomcat years ago. I'll clean things up a bit in the next few days. and I'll start taking decent backups... I suppose it is true, the cobbler's children go shoeless. :-/