Hot under the collar

It all started a week or so ago when I was minding my own business watching TV and my wife and I heard a sharp bang in the room. Since our daughter's room is directly above the living room, we thought she may have fallen out of bed but no blood curdling screams followed. I bravely went up to investigate anyway but found nothing amiss. Chalking it up to "something", we returned to our show.

Cut to this week

My MythTV system has been acting very strange lately. I had recently taken the plunge and upgraded the system to the latest development code while my wife was out of town for a week. This all seemed to go well with minor issues but lately things had been getting out of hand. Major studdering during HD shows, even lockups while the kids watched cartoons. Very unusual. The system had always run hot so I blew the dust out of the heatsink (pictured above). Still it got worse. So I did some reading on the proper way to apply thermal paste to find that it does
not involve spreading it on like butter. So, figuring that this was a heat issue, I ordered some new Antec Arctic Silver and waited.

Cut to last night

I opened up the box to reseat the heatsink and CPU and what do I find?

The bracket that holds the heatsink on the CPU was broken off and the heatsink was barely even sitting on the CPU.

Remember that bang?

Hmmm....

A little paste (properly applied) and now the CPU appears cool as a cucumber. Of course, I had to scavenge pieces from my son's computer to fix this promptly so a quick trip to eBay and a new plastic bracket is on the way to the house. I'm sure he'll understand...

I (heart) Virtualization

I use it everyday in my job and it provides a wealth of opportunities for our business, but tonight I found one more reason to love it at home. After my last project of removing the hard disk from my MythTV frontend, I still have an issue of migrating my backend system to CentOS. A blind upgrade is a scary prospect on a fully working system so I'm loathe to just stick the disk in and see what happens.

Enter VirtualBox

The free virtualization software from Sun. In no time at all I had installed that old noisy 10GB hard disk into an external USB case, attached it to my PC, and allocated the drive to the virtual machine and booted to the CentOS installation DVD. With this I can test an upgrade from Fedora Core 6 to CentOS 5 on a system that is reasonably similar to my backend and see if there are any major issues. If something goes horribly wrong, no harm done and none of this testing required any hardware on my part other than the drive itself.

I'll report back later on how the upgrade goes...

Well, that was easy...

I finished my "quiet the living room" project. It was actually alot easier than I expected. As I noted before, my goal was to remove the somewhat noisy hard disk from my home theater PC and replace it with a silent compact flash card. I ended up choosing the Ridata 8GB 233x CF card as my drive. It seemed to get good reviews and I was impressed that the company took the time to respond to people's problems on the newegg.com website.

Once I got the drive, I was pleased to find that my card reader that I had installed in the machine that used a USB connection was supported quite well as a boot device. I had also decided to change from Fedora Core to CentOS as my operating system. This was done mostly because Fedora is a quickly moving target of releases and updates while CentOS goes through less transformations. Since I don't update the OS of the PC often, this fit better in my plans. Other than that, they are nearly identical, having both stemmed from the venerable RedHat distribution.

Installing the OS was simple and I was again pleased to find that the 233x CF card performed nearly as well as my aging 10GB hard disk. With the OS installed, getting the drivers and applications reinstalled was simple (I've done it so many times now it's old hat). We watched two nights of So You Think You Can Dance in HD on it now, and haven't had any problems. The only question now is whether I can turn down the CPU fan any to reduce that noise. Maybe with less heat in the case from the drive that might work.

All in all, not a bad $40 upgrade. The only issue is that sometimes on boot, the drive isn't recognized or has some kind of error. I think this is due to the aforementioned USB reader not being initialized quick enough during the boot. I will probably end up buying a CF to IDE adapter so that the flash drive appears like a normal hard disk to the OS. This should eliminate that issue or at least remove that as a possibility and point me towards other possible causes.

Things I'm working on

It seems in my tech life that I always have some little project I'm working on. My last was a Linux router/firewall/proxy server to use to manage the Internet access at home for the kids. It seemed to work rather well except for one day it freaked out and just quit connecting to my AT&T DSL. Ultimately, AT&T provides a decent set of parental control software that lets me manage not only websites but instant messaging contacts that ended being a better system for me than the Squid access lists. So much for the Linux router project. The hardware now sits in the basement waiting for a new lease on life.

So now I'm searching for my next project.

I have this long standing idea of making a digital picture frame out of an old laptop. The idea lingers but my motivation fades. So instead, I've decided to convert my MythTV (read: homebuilt Tivo) system attached to our TV to boot from a flash drive. I've become obsessed lately with the noise coming from the unit so I'm looking to drop the hard drive from it and boot from the silent flash memory.

We'll see how that goes as the memory should arrive later this week...

Internet TV and me

Last night I think I became a convert of this whole Internet TV streaming thing. I'm a subscriber to the most basic of basic cable, 12 channles in all, and yet I still find enough things to watch to fill my 1TB MythTV. But because of this, I miss important shows like Battlestar Galactica which air only on the premium channels. Thanks to hulu.com, I can now watch my BSG without resorting to downloading it from online sources. It works great on my TV set to full screen.

A few months ago I also rigged up my new HP Media Center PC to my TV so I could use the Netflix Watch Now feature (only works on Windows so my MythTV is out). Not only did I watch the latest BSG episode last night, but I found that the CBS showing of the latest Dexter episode I was watching was delayed, probably due to some sports, and I missed 45 minutes of the show. No problem, Dexter Season 1 is on Netflix Watch now and I saw it in all its uncensored glory.

Now I certainly wouldn't want to watch all my TV this way, but in a pinch, getting episodes of two shows I really like from online sources was a huge benefit to me and I didn't have to resort to any nefarious schemes.

Now if we can just get this all a little better integrated with the TV rather than rigging up an expensive Media Center PC...

Two sleepless nights later...

Sometimes it seems that I have a compulsion to do things the hard way. The other night I began considering how I could integrate hulu.com content onto my MythTV. I think I have come up with a workable method using Firefox as the assistant, but it required me to upgrade my system to the latest MythTV version (more on this later). I had been holding off on this because they had made a recent transition to QT4 which can be a big change on Linux systems. My master backend upgraded with virtually no issues so I moved onto the frontend attached to the TV.

This is where the bottom fell out. My backend had been upgraded recently to Fedora Core 6 and my frontend was still left at Fedora Core 4. I am always loathe to touch this machine because it is a sensitive small form factor PC that I had finally gotten working. But, no matter, I installed the QT4 packages and began to compile Myth only to find that the QT4 version for FC4 was 4.1 and I needed 4.3. Well, I thought, no problem, I'll just compile QT4 myself.

Now, at this point, I should have said: "I should just install FC6 from DVD and be done with it" but no, I was knee deep in packages and source code and felt compelled, despite the late hour, to conquer this.

After a long compilation, I compiled MythTV and found it simply crashed. Great. Again, I should have reached for the DVD but instead I thought, nah, I'll just do an in place, over the network YUM upgrade. No problem.

Another late night later and here we are today, having used the DVD, now updating and patching to get the system current. So I'm right where I could have been 2 nights ago only with far less sleep but a new appreciation for KISS.