Planet Ubuntu

Most people will never know that their MyhTV frontend may be throwing errors after trying to increase audio buffer sizes. You can normally hear clicks or pops in the sound if your audio buffers are too low. I've only ever noticed this myself on sources with DTS-HD sound, but the errors are there for my normal cable sources as well.

With my HD HomeRun Prime scheduled to ship next week, I decided it was a good idea to get a CableCard self install kit from Comcast so that I am ready to go when my tuner arrives. Needless to say, as is with most dealings with Comcast, it was a very maddening experience. I am posting my results since they will be helpful to others, leave a comment if you have any useful information to add or have better results than I did.

In my never ending quest to make the world think that I am crazy, I have been executing a new plan. Anyone who knows me, knows that I have a tendency to fall in love with certain companies for making fantastic products. One of these companies is Klean Kanteen, they make 18/8 grade stainless steel bottles which are leaps and bounds better than any of the competition.

I posted a few weeks back about a SIP project I had been working on, this is the first in (hopefully) a series of posts about neat things I am doing with this setup. Spoiled by my Android phone, the Caller ID on my "house phone" wasn't up to par, so I set out to fix this.

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who offered me an account, I am no longer in need of one.

Apparently I'm the only one in the world who missed out on getting a Gizmo5 account while they were open for registration. Anyways, I am attempting a project based on Mario's Google Voice / SIP Solution. So far everything is working great, but I am in need of a Gizmo5 account at this point. I am hoping that somewhere in the wild world of the internet exists a kind soul who wouldn't mind giving up an unused account to an open source developer such as myself. If that person happens to be you then shoot me an email. I'll be doing a writeup about the system once everything is said and done.

A good portion of my time is spent recommending hardware to users. I figured documenting what hardware I use may save me some time, so here goes. I attempted to find Amazon links for all the parts, but quite a few of them seem to be obsolete by now.

Let me start off by saying hats off to Dell for giving us Ubuntu as an option. Any company that supports and contributes back to the community is always a good thing. With all that said I found the ordering experience to be quite frustrating.

This one should help out any non-technical MythTV user. The most common issue I run into is when my wife goes to control the frontend and it has lost sync with the backend (most of the time because I was working on something and forgot to check on things when I was done). Simply restarting the frontend fixes these issues, but she doesn't know how to ssh in and handle this task, so lets make a button (or series if you want to be safe) on the remote do it for her.

Last night I completed my first pass on packaging the latest HDHomeRun configuration utility (GUI now included). This was my first package using deb helper 7 (boy is it nice!). All of this work will be making its way into the Lucid release, but for the time being I have uploaded it to the Mythbuntu Testing PPA.

MythTV 0.22 introduces us to storage groups across the board. This is no doubt a great thing, no more creating shares for network access, no more worrying about running out of storage space. With that said, there is one drawback to the new storage groups, they break playback of ISO files and VIDEO_TS folders. For those of us who have our DVD collections ready to go in digital form this may be an issue. This issue has been fixed in MythTV 0.24 (but only for unencrypted ISOs), the following work around will help you with all other cases: