NeutralAxis

I followed the instructions here for getting pyTivo installed on my Ubuntu box and configured it for Movies and Music.  The music part worked perfectly, but I have a bunch of items in the Movie listings for vts-xx-xx, so apparently I don’t have my movies in the correct format.  I’m also not having much success in finding what video formats are supported.

The other issue I’m having is that when I start the pyTivo server from terminal, I never get my command prompt back.

Anyone out there running pyTivo on Ubuntu and know the answer to either of those issues?

I thought I had a nifty money making idea after seeing how many “likes” and “re-pins” I got after putting a few basement renovation things up on Pinterest, but alas, they seem to be onto me. (continue reading…)

Mediacom here has recently been abandoning their analog channels between 2 and 80 and moving those channels to 51.xx, 52.xx, 53.xx, and 54.xx channels.  I just bought a Tivo and have been struggling to get it to find the correct new channels.  Finally, I’ve got it all figured out and it’s working fine. (continue reading…)

It’s the end of an era in my household.  I had withstood the digital TV wave thus far simply because I didn’t want to part with my ReplayTV DVRs.  Alas, they’re analog only, and only worked with my cable company’s analog channels.  Earlier this year there was a short scare where ReplayTV servers were going to be shut down, thus cutting of programming data.  3rd party solutions were hastily put into place to get around that problem until ReplayTV relented and turned the servers back on.  But now my local cable company has delivered the final blow.  This month, they began phasing out their analog channels and going 100% digital.  As of today, I only have access to the basic broadcast network channels and a few others in analog.  No more than about a dozen.  Now my ReplayTVs only record a sad static screen telling me which digital channels have replaced the old analog channels.  I could possibly use the infra-red blaster capability that was meant to control a cable box to control a digital converter, but I’m not optimistic that will work. (continue reading…)

[Updated below]
A few weeks ago I noticed that my AO Smith water heater was flashing a fault message on it’s screen. “Flame Detect Error, A9″. The description says this is typically either from a gas valve that isn’t closing or a bad CCB. I don’t know what a CCB is unless is the “control circuit board”. There were 255 of these errors that had been logged. In an 8bit world, 255 is kind of a special number, so I figure that’s all the errors that it can keep track of.

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I’ll be going dark January 18th in support of SOPA Strike.

While uploading some photos recently for a post from my iPhone, it dawned on me that being taken with the iPhone, they had GPS metadata in them.  Sites like Facebook routinely strip that data from uploaded photos, but I wondered if WordPress did.  Nope. (continue reading…)

Last week, my girlfriend, N, and I embarked on a project to put down an engineered bamboo floor from Calibamboo.com in a basement bedroom and closet area (a total of about 300 sq.ft.) It was a lot of work, but we’re very happy with the results. [Update: Cali Bamboo has put this up for project of the month for December 2011.  You can vote for it at Project of the Month] (continue reading…)

I’d been having a problem for months with my Audiogalaxy installation not indexing all my music.  Some artists where there, and other’s simply wouldn’t ever show up in the index.  Posts to AG’s help forum mainly came back that my music was probably mis-tagged, but that wasn’t it.  I was stumped.  Finally, today, I discovered what the problem was, and it was my fault after all. (continue reading…)

With Firefox’s rapid updates, it’s become increasingly bothersome having to go into that install.rdf file and edit it each time to the current version number (see here). So I tried a little change, and it worked. Instead of updating the maxversion number to just whatever it needed to be, I changed it from “7.0.*” to “*.0.*”. It worked.