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.
29
Mar
181 Days Until I’m Back At Staffs
Just checked Uni email to find I was suppose to have filled in my option module form for next year by Friday 26th. Well that has been and gone. I must get a few emails a month to my uni email address while on placement so I pretty much check it every couple of weeks. I dislike going on there as the uni still uses Exchange2003 with its ever so featureless weboutlook in anything other than IE.
Anyway I had a look at the booklet for my course and it gave a start date. 27th September, seems ages away but honestly I bet that won’t take too long to come around.
The modules are not very good this year. In the list they include options like 3D Computer Graphics. Although it sounds awesome being on a network course it is no use to me. Even if I wanted to go on that module I would have had to have done related modules the during the past too years, which I haven’t.. because I’m on a networking course.
A cisco module caught my eye, Advanced Wireless but I’ve decided not to go for that as I’d rather not do too many cisco modules. I feel like it would restrict my horizons too much plus I didn’t do the second year wireless module as I took Network and Grid Computing instead. That was a good choice I think I bagged a 1st in that module and really enjoyed the work, would recommend it to anyone. Anyway another module, the only one that seems justifiable to be honest caught my other eye, Ubiquitous Computing. The description sounds interesting…
This subject looks at the current and future of anytime, anyplace, anywhere computing. It includes areas such as pervasise computing, mobile devices, located based services, and allows the student to look at the future of computing.
I did wonder the other day as the weather was warming up that I could actually take my iPhone get a few apps, SSH, RDP, etc and sit on a nice park bench or even the beach working remotely from the office…
Seems I’ll be back to Stafford this weekend to get some books for some backgrounding reading and also maybe a house party or two what with it being a 4 day weekend for the 9-5 type.