Just to make sure badger has enough things to
spend money on.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Primus tonight. Should be interesting.
Couple of interesting shows coming up.
Battles (aka, guitarist from Don Cabellero, and drummer from
helmet plus other weirdos). aka, bring the math rock
Kings Barcade
Next Monday
FREE TEXAS FESTIVAL
3 day noise/experimental/rock freakout ++++
April 30th-May 2nd
PS211
Subscape Annex
Ps211 winston salem
march 23
DON CABALLERO
Go room 4
March 28
I attempted to accomplish very little this weekend, and
actually accomplished even less.
Saturday attempted to hit schoolkids on hillsborough, except
of course, it isn’tt there no more. Went to record exchange instead.
Picked up a handful of cd’s ( new Trans Am, new Descendents, a
Elliot Sharp, an Eno I didnt have, the melvins/fantomas cd,etc).
Eventually wandered over to Kings to see The Weather and
The Loners and to hang out and whatnot.
Sunday went over to badger‘s place to play
a bit. Decided to take over the guitar since I have
barely played in the last year.
Ended up playing it the whole time. I apparently at
least vaguely recall how to play. Even got in a
fun “turn up the amps and let everything feedback” interlude
for a while. Some nice ambient swirly stuff, some loud
harsh stuff, and a little bit in between. I liked
the results, I might try playing guitar more often.
For no obvious reason I’ve been thinking it might be
fun to do some sort of guitar/drums duo thing. Figure
I’m only three years late on that being cool, so why
not. Don’t really know any drummers though.
Thought about how a new depsolver for up2date would work.
Primus show tomorrow, trying to figure out plans.
Fiddled with mythtv again. It’s tempting to get a box specifically
for it. Or maybe use the old 1ghz celeron box I have (albeit, with
a mere 20gigs of drive space or so).
Historically, I tend to get these type of projects to the point
they work, then realize I don’t really need it. Aka, the remote
controlled mp3 box I built and never used. Or the proxy/firewall/mail/dns/etc boxes.
Or the mame box (though that never really made it to “working” state..).
I might try installing the cvs code and seeing if its any faster
(commits messages seems to indicate fixes for various performance
problems I’ve seen in 0.14 are fixed). If not, I’ll probably
wait another year ;->
One of the somewhat annoying things about
mythtv is they used mysql for everything. For some reason, I’ve
always hated projects that use sql dbs. Most of the mp3 jukeboxes
being prime examples. But for mythtv, it also seems to be
one of the primary performance bottlenecks. Things like all the
config settings are stored in the db, and queried every time they
are needed. And if I’m reading correctly, there is a db connection
build up/tear down, every time a setting is accessed.
And the music app, for example, queries settings for every song.
Maybe I just have something configured wrong, as it’s pretty
close to being usable and lots of people are using it without
too many complaints.
Heh, had to write an “artist statement”. Thats an interesting
exercise. Oddly, there are about 20 “how to write an artist statement”
links on the web. Weird.
Now I need to figure out if I want to sell anything, and if
so, what insane prices to put on it.
In the meantime, I think I’m going to try to rewrite the
up2date depsolver. I’m pretty sure I can make it significantly
faster. And it could really use it.
Also, I want to here William Gurstelle speak. I’m trying to figure out who to bribe
to try to get him to come give that talk at work. That would
be interesting.
Whee.
Just hung up 8 “pieces” on the 3rd floor here at Red Hat.
First time I’ve had any art up for public display (at
least, not on the net) since high school, and I don’t
think that counts.
Kind of cool.
Looks like there is going to be a Art Reception/Open House
March 26th 7-9pm.
I tend to fall into the same behaviour everytime I get a cold.
I’m okay during the day, but I can’t sleep at night. I typically
end up going to sleep between 5 and 7am (usually with more than
a little help from our friend benadryl). Luckily, I’m not
typically a early riser, so noone cares too much if I then
decide to sleep to noon and come into work late.
So monday night, I picked up a new small bookcase during
the day, and then ended up rearranging my books starting
about 4am. They are sort of organized now, by the
Aklikins Decimal System.
At which point, I noticed I have 14 shelves of non-fiction
(including 4 shelves of computer books) and 1 shelf of
fiction. Actually, more like half a shelf of fiction
and half a shelf of sort of fiction (for example, david
sedaris and sarah vowel books, etc…). I’m not
really the literary type it seems.
Tuesday I decided I was gonna play with a Myth Tv setup. So
I picked up a wintv pvr-250 capture card on the way
home. I’ve only got the one working machine, so I
just installed it on my 9ish desktop. I used the
packages from atrpms
to install it. After sorting out some package
conflicts (why oh why must every 3rd party package
repo vendor decide to package up mplayer and related
tools in completly different ways…), managed to
get it up and going.
Killed an hour trying to figure out why it wasn’t
getting any video (hint: mythsetup configures mythbackend,
and it helps to restart that after you change the config…).
Killed another 45 minutes or so getting the remote to
work (apparently the latest lirc release breaks the
hauppage remote I had, so had to downgrade that).
But then it seemed to work. Tv/web/news/image/video/audio
seem to work okay. The dvd stuff didnt work, but I
didnt even look at the config.
All in all, kind of spiffy. Except for one problem.
It’s slow. Considering its an 2ghz athlon with half
a gig of ram, it should be at least as fast as an
underpowered tivo, but that doesn’t seem to be the
case. In particular, changing “screens” is much
slower than I’d like, and flippy channels has about
a 3 second pause. Enough to be annoying.
And it seems to be storing the video in “nuppelVideo”
format, which seems odd to me, seeing as the card
has a native mpeg-2 encoder. But maybe thats just
what it does.
the xmltv listing don’t seem to be as accurate
as the tivo data either.
I seem to have a cold. Lovely.
Chuckle.
anyone ever done any high speed (aka, Edgerton style) photography?
From what I’ve been reading, it doesn’t look like it would be too difficult. Seems to
be even doable with a good digital camera and the right equipment
(aka, hold the shutter open in darkness, then a very quick flash set off
by some sort of trigger, etc).
From poking around, it looks like hiviz.com
has about the right level of stuff for what will probabaly be another two month
long fixation of mine. And HiViz seems to be vageuly associated with the North
Carolina School Of Science & Math in durham, which is kind of cool
I supposed.
They’ve got kits for building flash triggers and delays, and some useful
looking docs.
I know several folks who are mild to serious photography nuts, anyone
tried this kind of stuff before?