29
Apr
Out and About
As the summer is pretty much here my flatmates and I have taken to our bikes and adventured out in to the surrounding areas to take advantage of the pleasant weather. I’ve been surprised by what we have come across. As it is quite near, we headed to Summerfield Park a stones throw from my house, I’d not been there before in the past for walks I tended to go around Edgbaston Reservoir instead. I was amazed at how big it was and instantly thought I would bring my Nitro Buggy here next time it was in working order. We had a nose about and quickly found a small path leading off which we ventured down it. It must have been an old railway line as a lot of them have been converted into paths I believe.
It was pretty cool, we actually ended up somewhere near Harboure not sure where but we ended up coming back via the reservoir.
We’ve been out and about a few times and the second we stumbled across another park near Asda, its amazing how much you don’t notice when your driving around in the car. This park had a play areas for kids, the standard things, swings, slides etc but it had something else, something different, it had an outdoor gym. It was pretty cool, we had a quick workout that trained various muscles. The machines where quite clever as they mostly required your body weight as a weight for you to pull. I was impressed, I’d say this sort of thing makes taxes worth paying but I suspect this was funded from something else as it was cover in Olympics graphics and logos.
20
Apr
Happy Birthday Blog
Been though numerous face lifts and names but today Tom-Lawrence.co.uk is 3 years old…
15
Apr
Spring Clean
I was going to wait till the 20th April the 3rd anniversary of the site but I didn’t. I figure this place needs a bit of a spring clean, the old theme had became unsupported and wasn’t supporting the latest browsers.
Anyway, I think it looks pretty fresh and clean.
Thoughts?
6
Apr
MythTV – First Encounter
Over the bank holiday weekend I’ve set myself up with MythTV. A Mythbuntu install to be precise. I’ve been quite impressed with it although its taken a little trial and error effort over the weekend but though no fault of Myth.
Firstly I had it setup on my laptop that is slowly dying. Using the laptop I wasn’t really impressed with the DVB-T adapter. I was using a AVerTV DVB-T Volar. That Wiki link helped a bit by suggesting to upgrade the firmware but I was only getting one channel. I was using the aerial on the roof in which I have a handy socket to connect to in my room (Although that’s what I thought!). I was only getting BBC parliament which was no good at all considering the amount of other channels I should be receiving.
I’ve now set it up on Tucker, a computer I use for random things. Tucker has an AMD AM2 X2 5000+ and 4GB which is a bit OTT for Myth but its what I have. I had popped in to town on Saturday and decided to spend an Argos gift voucher I had. I got an amplified indoor aerial. I hooked it all up and did a channel scan, made a cup of tea and to my surprise Myth had found a whole load of channels, BBC One, BBC Three and even some Radio channels if not all of them.
Maybe a cup of tea does solve everything. I didn’t expect much as every time I set-up the AverTV DVB-T Volar stick with Windows it would fail completely, the software isn’t the best in my opinion.
Anyway it was great I could watch live TV, pause it and rewind it I’ve even integrated XBMC so I can watch other TV Shows and Films.
I only downside so far is that I don’t get any channels on MUX2. That’s ITV, Five, etc. This isn’t surprising as according to ukfree.tv the rating for the local transmitter for MUX2 is quite low. I figure because I am using an indoor aerial and between the two is at least a house the signal must be getting blocked. I thought I’d check out why the roof aerial was performing badly. I have a nose outside and I find this…
The two cables should actually be connected. Not too much of an issue really, I plan to set this up properly when I move back to Stafford but its been a good little exercise so far and I hope to write up some more detail of my experiences with it on here.
Although I say that with a lot of things.
1
Apr
Hosting Issues!
I’ve been having some issues with my co-lo host, ukshells, over the past few days. The issue was the server would just lose connectivity. Every so often a ping packet would get though but nothing else. Weirdly the control panel provided by my hosting supplier would flicker between status’s, for example among other things, it would read the power port to be online and upon a refresh of the browser it would not know if its on or off. As this is all network based I suspect some form of DOS attack but don’t know many details.
Today I put a ticket in and it was fixed very quickly. Didn’t give to many details but appears to be caused by another customer on the same switch that my server is on. They have now been moved..
So uptime on Teamspeak etc should be a lot more stable now.
On a lighter note because it wasn’t a power issue the server has reached an uptime of 125 days.