Kevin's musings

Did some playing around with some music systems today.

First up was
MythTv. It seemed like it should
be pretty easy to install as I noticed that all the components
were available from the
atrpms
repository. So, I added the atrpms yum config to my yum.conf and
did a ‘yum install mythtv-suite’. Immediately I ran into some
issues. The atrpms has a lot of overlap with the
freshrpms folks, so there were
conflicting rpms I installed a while back. I ended up having to
go and just remove all the freshrpms ones I could find and then
try installing from atrpms. For some reason atrpms didn’t get
it’s kernel and kernel module rpms to detect right, so yum kept
wanting to download the i686-smp kernel and modules for my
single processor athlon box. I finally just downloaded and
installed the correct kernel modules myself. Once I got the rpms
all figured out
mythtv was pretty easy to
install. Loaded a mysql database and started the setup
program. It downloads about 9 days of tv guide listings by
default, which I wish it would have an option to just skip. The
interface on it is very slick. Pretty easy to navigate, you can
get weather, view videos, view dvd’s, play music or the like. It
scanned in my 10,000 mp3′s in about 25minutes. The music player
looks quite nice and has all the functionality you might
expect. One anoying thing is that putting all my mp3′s in the
playlist results in it taking litterally 3-4minutes if you exit
the music option and go back, or change something in the
playlist. Looking on the mailing list they have a fix in CVS for
this now. Another thing thats kinda anoying is that when you
leave the music menu area (for example to see what else is there
or look at the weather) it stops playing music. It would be nice
to keep going until something else that needed the audio was
launched. Also, there isn’t any easy way to control it from a
remote machine. For example, to skip a song from a laptop. There
is a web interface, but it’s only for recording tv shows and the
like.

As a suggestion from
tkil I took a
look also at the
Slimserver
software. This is the stuff that comes with the
Squeezebox
device. It basically streams audio to the squeezebox and it
plays it out your audio device. Someone has written a package
called
slimp3slave
that basically act’s as a squeezebox in software and uses
madplay/splay/mpg123 to play it on your computer. So after a bit
of fiddling with the software I got that all working. The
slimserver comes as an rpm so it’s very easy to install. It does
need the ‘perl-Time-HiRes’ package, and anoyingly (as tkil
points out) starts on install instead of waiting to be run, but
its pretty slick. It has a nice web interface, all the functions
you can think of. Will have to play with it some more in the
next few days and see.

Went up thursday to the beer store and helped jeremy make some
wine. It was super duper easy to do. We go back in 2 months to
bottle it. Then it has to age a long time.

Hacking Society was fun. Played with the 2.6.3 kernel and software
suspend. I didn’t manage to get it working there, but I did get
it working today. The trick was no himem support. Something with
himem is hosing it up. Since it was snowing in boulder there was
1$ ice cream at boulder ice cream too, which was nice.

Pretty unplanned weekend coming up. Need to go help archer move some
computer stuff sometime, and petsmart saturday to man the
greyhound table. Looking forward to relaxing.

I have been fighting off a cold the last few days. It had sort of been
hovering around sunday, and monday after the spankers left it
really tried hard to hit me. So, I took a nice big dose of Q and
went to bed at about 8pm and didn’t get up until 8am tuesday
morning. I think that really helped to nip it in the bud. I
think it’s already pretty much gone now.

Eariler tonight went down to the therapy dog class and had kurt
graduate and get his paperwork (which I need to send in). Here
is some pics of the graduate:
Kurts graduation and therapy dogs

Spankers left around 1:30 or so. They were a nice bunch…glad to have
them visit. I think the dogs enjoyed all the additional people
to pet them and such.

Well, yesterday was pretty fun as well. Had the spankers descend on my
place around 3pm. We watched a movie (they live) and they played
gauntlet and sampled my last homebrew batch. About 7pm they
jetted off for the show and Jeremy and I went down and picked up
greg and got a bite to eat and then went to the show. It was a
nice crowd, if small. They played a good set. Similar to the one
in boulder, but they added some new things on to the end. The
show ended about 1am, I got home around 2am, and some of the
band got back here around 2:30 or so.

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