Linux-Meister.com

Home Theater

The Home Theater is complete! All that remains is to move the popcorn machine upstairs. Robyn and I broke it in the other night watching Iron Man 2. Good movie! Oh, and it's pretty awesome for watching baseball and football games, too. We watched the South Carolina vs. Georgia football game last Saturday in 10 feet, 2 inches of diagonally measured glory !! A short video is here on YouTube.

Home Theater

The new home theater (I'm reluctant to call it a "man cave", as Robyn will probably get almost as much use out of it as I do!) is almost complete. Last night I finished up the attic work, running speaker and electrical wire and HDMI cable for the ceiling-mounted projector. I'll post photos soon, I just forgot last night in my rush to finish while it's still relatively cool outside. It sure was nice of Mother Nature to give us a cold snap to keep me from roasting while up in the attic crawlspace...

Tonight I'm going to (hopefully) install the rear speakers and subwoofers and terminate all the wiring to the new boxes, including the Satellite feeds and external Over-The-Air (OTA) antenna, phone, and Network cables. Maybe I'll even have time to move the HDDVR up from downstairs and hook up the new components, a new 7.1 surround receiver and 3-D capable blu-ray player. I'm thinking now I need to rent a 3-D blu-ray movie from somewhere to do the final tests... Or I could just watch a bunch of football instead !

Where Does the Time Go?

I've been working on the Football-pools.org website, playing a bunch of disc golf, and now we're preparing to head to Edisto for vacation. I'm sure I'll have time to upload photos and jot a few more lines when we get back...

Silvia Project

It's been a while, I'm still around... Now that the weather is warming up (HAS warmed up!), I've finally been able to do some projects around the house. One more to go, replacing some weathered wood on the house, and I'll be in a position to start the Silvia engine rebuild project. With a little luck and a little more cooperation by the weather, I'll start pulling wires and bolts and such on Sunday. Hopefully I'll even get the wireless camera working again for a live feed on the goings-on... Stay tuned !

Disc Golf Video Game

And here I thought I was done buying gaming consoles.... After watching this video, I think I might have to buy a Playstation Move... Skip to 3:18 in the video:

Server Hardware

I'm in the process of moving extents in a logical volume under LVM2 from a stopgap 1-drive raid array (long story) to a new 2-drive raid 1 array. What that means to you: the drive where all the pools website info is stored is reading data as fast as it can to move it to the new drive array. Thus, performance of the website might be a bit slow for the next few hours. All this is being done so the old drive can be freed up to add to the new array, providing a mirrored copy (again) in case we have drive problems. Odd, seems it happens every year. Last year, the Raid 1 configuration saved us, even though there were some tense moments running on one drive until the replacement for the failed one came in. This year, I have a spare 750GB drive on-site, just in case... ;-)

Busy, Busy

Where to start.... Well, bought an RV last month, ran the Alabama Sports Festival Disc Golf tourney and almost got killed by lightning, bought another Lenovo T42 laptop because the screen was/wasn't bad (long story in itself), went to the 2010 PDGA Amateur World Championships (53rd in Adv. Masters), and started migrating the Football-pools website from PHP-Nuke to Drupal, When I finally come up for breath, I'll write more....

CarPC Progress

Progress! I took a step back, to make a leap forward... After a horrible experience upgrading Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 on the CarPC, I decided to scrap it all and go to LinuxICE... A distribution developed with the CarPC in mind. It took a few tries (over a few days) to get the install to work properly; turns out a properly-burned DVD is a must. ;) Then some issues with peripherals were apparently making the install crash; I believe it was the HD radio being attached but I won't open a bug report on it until I get an opportunity to test that theory further.

After getting the install completed, the final setup steps were simple, including calibrating the touchscreen. I'm now in the process of copying music and videos over; I will investigate the settings for the radio and HD radio controls next. I'll also have to customize the skin, couldn't have one without my Sylvia logo! I've noticed a few issues with some of the buttons in the skin as well, overlarge/misplaced confirmation buttons for hibernate/suspend/shutdown. Those aren't such a high priority as the CarPC should auto-hibernate when I turn off the ignition, but I'll put them on my to-do list anyways....

I also made a horrifying discovery a day or two ago; the space under the front seats is not nearly enough for the CarPC. That means I have to go back to the original idea of a trunk mount, and all the cooling problems that entails. I'm still hoping to have everything installed and running before the Jacksonville Open road trip that starts 9 April... :-D

Feldberg on Conan

Awesome!

Happy Birthday to me!

Awesome birthday yesterday! Uneventful day at work (mom says everybody's birthday should be a National holiday; I told Dad if I took everyone's birthday off I wouldn't get paid!), a nice little nap, and then the family drug me out to Target to buy my gift, a Blu-ray player. The 32" TV for the bedroom should be delivered today (my gift to myself), so I should be able to get it all hooked up and viewable this afternoon. After Target, we went by Best Buy, picked up a couple of Blu-ray movies, and then by Papa John's to pick up supper. We sat around in the living room, watched a movie and ate pizza and cake! Now that's my idea of a birthday party!