Hello Rewind has to be one of the coolest ideas I've seen¹ in a while... they take a t-shirt (your t-shirt) and use it as the outside of a laptop sleeve. they use some of the proceeds to support Restore NYC and also employ women rescued by Restore NYC.

how cool is that? I've got a grey EFF t-shirt that might make a nice sleeve. or maybe something from t-shirt woot? or maybe a t-shirt from your alma mater? the possibilities are endless, and it's for a good cause!

¹ in the interest of full disclosure, I first saw Hello Rewind while browsing engadget, can't take credit for finding something this cool...

it's come to my attention that the new svg logo at the top of all the pages on this site doesn't work quite right in webkit browsers (safari, chrome, chromium...).

the slight blur effect on the shadow doesn't work. I haven't managed to find a webkit-specific bug for that one, but chromium seems to have an unoptimized fix, hopefully they push it back to upstream so other webkit browsers benefit as well.

also, the transparent background comes through as white. looks like they had this one fixed and then it regressed. hopefully they'll have a fix soon.

I had tucked the nav and story content up a bit, and the decender on the 'g' in '.org' was overlapping the top of the first story box. looked pretty good, in firefox anyways... but really pretty broken in other browsers, so I've reverted that change... for now anyways.

our tivo died on wednesday. it was an original directv series1 tivo, made by philips (a dsr-6000).

it lasted a lot longer than I had any right to expect... it survived nearly a decade of constant use; I bought it in early 2000. I'd replaced the hard drives twice. once to expand the capacity, and the second time when the expanded drives developed problems due to age. I also replaced the fan years ago... so, no real surprise.

sadly, directv doesn't have actual tivos anymore. there are rumors of a new collaboration between directv and tivo to be released sometime next year, but that doesn't help us now. so, for now, we're going to give a directv dvr a try. it won't be a tivo, but we'll see how it goes... I've heard mixed reviews from former tivo owners. frankly, we use the mythbox for most of our tv recording and viewing, but there are some things that just aren't available over-the-air...

and thought hey, what a good idea

do the government folks lining up behind this even see the parallels and the irony?

I've always maintained that it really isn't a good sign if a Dilbert cartoon resonates particularly well with your life. after all, Dilbert is a caricature, a worst-case if you will.

so, imagine my chagrine when I saw this cartoon and realized just how perfectly it sums up how I'm feeling lately... :-(

fresh from google docs, mileage over time for ruby (our 2005 prius)

the chart covers september 2005 to now. I haven't figured out yet how to get google docs to include the values in the date column as labels along the X axis, then again I'm not really a spreadsheet sort of guy. ;-) (note, the problem here is that the date is not in an adjacent column, and can't figure out how to do disjoint ranges when defining the range for the chart).

mfd mileage is direct readings from the computer in the car at the time of the fillup (I reset those with every tank).

calculated mileage is the number of gallons used in the last tank divided by the number of miles driven.

calculated mileage can be a bit rough because of the flexible bladder in the tank (smaller tank when cold, etc.), so the 4 tank rolling mileage is the gallons used in the last 4 tanks divided by the miles travelled on those tanks.

she's currently averaging ~46mpg for her lifetime (calculated, not mfd). and even the calculated mileage has been less spiky recently.

yet another new linux box.

this one is a new mythtv frontend, based on a little mini-itx nvidia ion board. sinced it's an ion chipset, and I needed a "big cat" name (io triumphe!), this one is lion. ;-)

the ion is actually pretty slick for a mythfrontend. it's got an intel atom, an nvidia 9400M, hdmi and optical audio outs... the 9400M is new enough that it can use vdpau for playback, definitely gives it a leg up over the appletv box in the guest bedroom.

it's been able to playback almost everything I've thrown at it. 720p and 1080i ota hd, no problem. 720p divx re-encoded from the ota hd to save space, no problem. dvds, no problem. the only thing it couldn't handle was a 720p ogg theora file of big buck bunny but I wasn't really surprised by that, vdpau can't do ogg theora in hardware (yet? hoping...).

I installed mythbuntu on lion, which is a bit of a departure for me. the rest of the linux boxes in the house run gentoo. but JYA has backported the vdpau support from mythtv trunk to the 0.21 fixes branch, and he maintains an ubuntu repo with his builds. so I decided to go this route rather than try to build his 0.21 backport in gentoo, or try to track trunk. so far it's working really well...

did I mention that lion is really quiet too? the board itself is fanless, and the case I chose has a DC power supply with an external brick for AC/DC conversion. the case has a small fan that I had removed at first. but since we're heading into summer, and the den is the hottest room in the house, the fan is back in for now. but I think the tivo is still the loudest thing in the room, and it's not all that loud, so I think the fan will stay in for now.

things look pretty much the same here, but under the covers a lot has changed. I just finished rewriting all the database interaction using Rose::DB and Rose::DB::Object

back when I first wrote the code that handles these pages, I was really frustrated by the depth of the dependencies involved in getting create/read/update/delete dynamic model classes working. so I wrote my own. and it worked, but it was a bit clunky. Rose does everything my clunky class ever did, and more, and it's a lot cleaner. the real evidence of that is that creating model classes and porting the controllers to use them really wasn't all that hard. a half day of hacking, if that.

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... ;-)

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. :-/