I ended up with a Gigabyte GA-G33M-S2H motherboard. It’s a nice little micro-ATX unit with some PCI-Express slots and HDMI and DVI video output, as well as S/PDIF optical sound output. Those little details are always important. I nearly went insane looking for a proper case. When I built a budget gaming rig about 4 years ago, I found some nice case with clear sides, which of course meant lots of lights had to go inside. What I ended up with was a computer that lit up the room and sounded like a jet engine. And that 2.6GHz Pentium 4 certainly gave some competition to the oil furnace. Enough of that, I need something quiet, unobtrusive, and if possible not terribly ugly. Well, most of the cases they sell now are pretty damn ugly if you ask me. I finally settled on a Cooler Master Elite 340. Newegg happened to have the Corsair VX450 power supply which had decent reviews for a low-noise PS(strangely they don’t seem to have it anymore). For the CPU I went with the Core 2 Duo E4500 at 2.2GHz. It certainly isn’t going to break any records, but it will make keeping the system cool a little easier. I put a Scythe Ninja Mini cooler on top, that thing is just amazing. And HUGE. The mini barely fits the case, as you can see in the photo below. I’m not sure what kind of case the full size version goes into! You can also see the oversized 130mm Thermaltake fan. Very quiet, and moves a decent amount of air. But it IS oversized in certain areas. I had to take a hacksaw to the outer edge of the frame to make it fit the case. Toss in 4GB of RAM and a DVD-R that was laying around, and we’re just about ready to roll.

Since this is going to be an HTPC/Tivo-wannabe, I needed a TV tuner card. This turned out to be quite a challenge, since I had no idea what I was doing. After a week of reading everything I could find, I finally decided to take a risk on the Hauppauge HVR-1800. I needed something that would do HD, and while this card isn’t quite fully supported under Linux, I figured I would probably end up running Windows anyhow. So I fire it all up and start installing…

As usual, Windows is quite a headache for me. Yeah, I’m a hardcore Mac fan. After installing WinXP, I found out that most of the TV software doesn’t really work too well. I knew Hauppauge’s software was questionable from earlier experiments with a USB tuner on my laptop. I’m not even sure what I was using anymore, but I think SageTV was the only one that really worked under Windows XP. Since I was doing some crazy stuff to this poor computer and reinstalling the OS about every 6 hours, I finally got ahold of a copy of Windows MCE to try, since everyone said it was the best Windows solution. LOL. It NEVER worked. Never even got it to recognize that there was a tuner card installed. Go figure.

Onward to MythTV. I’ve never done well with *nix on a PC. In fact, I had never been able to get more than halfway through the install process with either NetBSD or FreeBSD on my older PC’s. But a few years of MacOS X had me feeling a little more brave about wandering over to Linux. I’ll spare the details of a week of switching back and forth, but I finally decided to stick to Mythbuntu. A lot of things aren’t entirely supported, or supported at all, but I finally got the TV part working. If you are having trouble with this part, here’s the process that works for me – Install Mythbuntu. Once you get to the backend config, just skip it all and restart the computer. Once you are running on your new install, use apt-get to install linux-headers-somethingorother, build-essential, and mercurial. Once you finish that, use mercurial to download the v4l-dvb source from linuxtv.org (they have some nice directions there on doing that). Compile and install V4L, then you can continue with the backend configuration where you should be able to select the TV tuner that it otherwise doesn’t think exists. The rest of it is a bit of a pain and probably more dependent on your own setup. One thing that does NOT appear to work at all is sound via HDMI. For that I finally gave in and used the optical output to an external receiver, which is also handling the sound from my DVD player and TV.

So finally the thing appears to be working, and just in time. I set it to record, and it seems to work. It does. I sit back and watch a replay of the Superbowl. Hooray!
And then something else happens. Oh yeah, these lovely little settings that no one tells you about.
Yep. The damn live TV recording auto-expire was set to 1 damn day…

Sometimes you just can’t win against a computer.

I also installed iTunes 7.4 and reinstalled my old custom ringtones without the annoying hack part. OK, so I still don’t have the Apple logo instead of AT&T in the corner, and no FieldTest application sitting there, but it’s a start.

I’m also looking forward to this $100 Apple store discount mentioned in this iPhone open letter from Steve Jobs. Time to get one of those new 160GB iPods! I just wish they still had Firewire.

Yep, the glass is nearly completely shattered. The LCD and digitizer still work, if you don’t mind slicing your fingers up in the process. I’m trying to figure out a way to keep from killing myself while using it until I get around to calling a few places to see what it will cost to repair. Looks like the glass/digitizer/LCD assembly runs about $250. You would think they could just replace the glass front if nothing else was damaged.

One thing is for certain, though. The rubber case from speck that I’ve been using is going in the garbage. The rubber case kept it from getting scuffed up, but the belt clip part really sucks. The phone is held in by a small shelf that sticks out under the bottom(blocking the dock connecter), and is held in place by two small rubber knobs that fit into slots on the clip. I guess the rubber knobs are wearing down? It just doesn’t hold it in place anymore.

http://www.natch.net/stuff/TSA/

Groom Dies in Collision with Cow

http://www.koin.com/Global/story.asp?S=6750108

BURNS, Ore. – A man returning home from his honeymoon died Tuesday after his car collided with a cow.

Police say just before 11 p.m., 19-year-old Ramiro Gonzales of Nyssa was eastbound on Highway 20 in a 1997 Pontiac Grand Am when he struck a cow.

The car left the north side, then crossed over to the south side of the highway where it went through a fence and caught fire.

His wife, 18-year-old Italia Gonzalez, was asleep in the back seat at the time of the crash. She was able to get out of the car and help remove her husband with help from a passing motorist. Italia was transported by ambulance to Harney District Hospital in Burns for treatment of minor injuries.

Ramiro Gonzalez was transported by air ambulance to St. Charles Medical Center in Bend. He reportedly died from injuries the following morning.

Both were using safety restraints.

The cow died as a result of the collision.

7/5/2007

So I’m adding some old stuff in, I guess it doesn’t make sense to be posting stories about being buried in snow in the middle of July… Or fire stories from 4 years ago… But I’m too lazy to edit the timestamp right now.

The iPhone was released at 6pm. I arrived just before 7pm. That’s a long time to sit around doing nothing! Especially since I had left the headphones for my iPod at home, and the mall wouldn’t let us plug our laptops in(tripping hazard). My MacBook Pro died after about 3 hours of use. Steve had managed to arrange delivery of a fresh battery after several hours, so he was online all day.

We were in the first group let into the store at 6pm, and being in a hurry that turned into a mess later, I was back out pretty fast with my iPhone. At 6:09pm I was pulling out of the mall parking lot.

After I got home I plugged in the iPhone and started the activation process. I recieved an email telling me that my Verizon service would be terminated within 24 hours, and that the activation process was pretty much dead in the water until the number was ported over. That would have been around 6:58pm, at 12:13am I recieved an email stating that the phone was activated, and a half hour later another notification that the number porting was complete and my iPhone could now send and receive calls. I haven’t been able to put the thing down since.

This is simply the best phone I have ever had. In typical Apple fashion, the user interface is simply amazing. Everything is easy. Well, except maybe figuring out how to share my EVDO connection over wifi from the laptop. EDGE data can be a bit slow. The pinching in/out to zoom is incredible. Flicking to scroll is addictive. I find myself cursing at my MacBook Pro for not behaving the same way with its trackpad.

So, when does the next version with 3G and GPS come out?

Parked on a street in ABQ waiting for I-40 to re-open.

A Swift truck stuck in the median on I-40 east of ABQ.

A street in Denver on 12/22