Gale Force

If you checked my flickr stream recently you probably saw some pictures of a beautiful Home Theater PC. My friends and I got a crazy idea to start a new company that will build, install and support home theater PCs. Rather than building our prototype model we decided to buy a pre-built system just to see what components, hardware and techniques the “pros” used. After extensive research we decided to buy our system from PCAlchemy who seems to be a leader in HTPC systems and hardware. We chose their XTE system because we wanted a fairly impressive high-end system that we could use for demonstrations.

Well the system arrived a few weeks ago and has been nothing but headache, anger and frustration ever since. PCAlchemy used the Intel DP35DP motherboard which sports on-board Hi-def audio powered by the Sigmatel chipset. When we first powered up the system I could not have been more disappointed with the sound quality. Regardless of the audio source or quality the playback was stuttered and crackly (is that a word?). I tried everything I could think of to resolve the issue including BIOS updates, driver updates, system reconfiguration, cable replacements and hammer smashing (OK…so it was my mental hammer mentally smashing the thing into little ice-cubed size chunks). I even disabled the on-board audio and installed a SoundBlaster Audigy card to try and narrow down the problem. The SoundBlaster card produced the exact same results…leaving me even more mystified. At this point I’m hoping PCAlchemy lives up to their customer service reputation and helps me get the issue resolved. Last week they were busy fleeing for their lives from the California wildfires so hopefully this will be the week things get fixed. Until then this thing is not an HTPC…it’s an HTPoC (as in HT Piece o’ Crap).

Audio problems aside, I’m liking the HTPC concept very much and I think Vista Media Center is as good a software package as you’re going to find. If you are considering a Vista Media Center PC let me suggest a few additional tweaks and software packages that will turn your system into the ultimate HTPC.

1. Enable “Gallery” (or DVD Library) view in Vista Media Center. I guess Microsoft (and the MPAA) doesn’t want you storing DVD content on your hard drives so this feature is disabled by default. If you plan on ripping DVDs to your hard disk you’ll want to enable the Gallery view in Media Center. This Microsoft KB article has instructions on how to do it.
2. Because you’re putting DVDs on your hard drive, you’ll need a good movie collection management application. The free Media Center plugin MyMovies will fit the bill nicely. Features include: DVD collection management and playback, indexing of movies using online data (coverart, movie synopsis, actor information etc), multiple client support and DVD ripping from within Media Center. Unfortunately the DVD ripping feature will only work with un-encrypted DVDs which leads me to my next item…
3. SlySoft AnyDVD. AnyDVD will remove DVD copy protection on-the-fly allowing you to use nearly any DVD ripping application to store DVD content on your hard drive (including the aforementioned MyMovies plugin). Buy it, install it, love it.
4. CCCP. No, I’m not talking about the former communist regime. CCCP is the Combined Community Codec Pack which is a solid, reliable codec pack with support for every video and audio format you’ll ever likely need. The most compelling reason to install CCCP is for its excellent H.264 and MPEG Transport Stream (TS) support. HD anyone?
5. WebGuide. WebGuide adds Slingbox-type functionality to your Vista Media Center for free! Just install and configure the application and you’ll have the ability to remotely view live TV, watch and schedule TV programs and manage your audio, pictures and videos from any web-accessible browser (including mobile phones).
6. Ninan. I have a love/hate relationship with Ninan. I love the idea but I hate the oft-buggy implementation. Until I can set up a linux machine running HellaNZB, however, Ninan will have to do. So what is it doing exactly? Well, Ninan is a binary news downloading program that uses the popular NZB format. Ninan will automatically download, repair, extract and categorize binary Usenet posts. Because I don’t own a Tivo *gasp* I regularly use Usenet to timeshift my favorite television shows — Ninan has made this process easy. I have set up Ninan to download my TV shows to a “watched” folder in Media Center so all my shows, regardless of origin, are now available from one convenient location. If you want to use BitTorrent to accomplish the same thing, might I suggest Ted.  UPDATE 11/20/2007: Ninan released version 1.1.4 a few days ago which fixed many of the problems plaguing the 1.1.3 version.  Way to go guys!  I <3 Ninan again.

By itself, Vista Media Center is a good software package…but if you’re looking for the Ultimate Home Theater PC you’ll need a little more. I hope these recommendations help. Happy HTPCing!

Special thanks to Grant Shipley for first introducing me to MyMovies, CCCP and Ninan (although I don’t think I should thank him for Ninan just yet…remember there’s still that whole love/hate thing going on).

According to the race results, I am the 8th fastest 30-something year old in Orem. Take that 9th place guy!

I’m not normally one to toot my own horn (at least publicly) but I’m proud of the fact that I just ran my first 5k race ever! After all, a mere 6 months ago I weighed 252 lbs. and I couldn’t even drive 5k without getting tired. Now my scale uses the numbers “1″ and “8″ to tell me my weight and I’m signing up for races as fast as I can find them…I feel unstoppable. And hungry.

Sorry about the self-aggrandizing post…I couldn’t help it.

We went all out on Jachin’s birthday party this year. After being inspired by another mom who put on a sweet Mario party I was confident I could do something similar (the confidence faded quickly).

First I made the invitations using some awesome graphics I found on the Nintendo website and the ever-cool Super Mario Bros. font. I also created some “coin boxes” using 4″x4″x4″ boxes that I purchased from Uline. I used this Question Mark Brick graphic, scaled it to 4″x4″ and printed them 4 per page then attached them to the boxes using a glue stick. Once the boxes were done I put the invitation, some easter grass (don’t ask me why) and some bubble-gum coins (chocolate coins were preferred but too expensive) inside and had Jachin deliver them to all of his friends. While I was going I made several extra boxes to use as decorations for the party.

Whew…invitations done…on to the cakes!

Being the lazy efficient person I am, I chose two Mario characters that would be easy to re-create in cake-ity goodness. First, the innocuous Goomba. He’s brown (chocolate icing) and he’s mushroom shaped (no artistic skills required). Next up, Blooper. He’s white (vanilla icing) and squid-shaped with few defining features (again…no artistic skills required). Perfect! Here’s the inspiration and the final product:

You should know that I have neither expertise nor skill in the area of cake decoration. For those of you who actually know how to decorate cakes, I apologize for my amateurish foray into your world. Case in point…the ultimate Mario cake. /bow “I’m not worthy”.

Invitations, check. Cakes, check. On to the piñata.

Desirous to have all aspects of the party stick to the Mario theme we decided to make a Chain Chomp piñata. We found a basic round smiley face piñata and painted it to look like a menacing Chain Chomp! The kids loved it.

Invitations, cakes, piñatas oh my. By this point I was exhausted and frankly I had lost some of my ambition. I had big ideas for cool party games but we just didn’t have the time to do them justice. In the end we let the kids decorate their own “coin boxes”, we played “pin the star”, we broke the piñata then we let the kids play some old-school Super Mario Bros. (including a “who can complete world 1-1 the fastest” contest).

Overall I think it was a big success. The kids had fun and I’m sure Jachin will remember this birthday for years to come. I have posted all of the party pictures online in the Gallery so feel free to browse them there!

“I’m sorry but our princess is in another castle….”

At work last week I set up some MRTG reports to monitor our MySQL servers. I used the handy mrtg-mysql-load utility to get queries/slow queries information but I also needed to monitor the number of records in a particular table and graph it using MRTG. For those unfamiliar with MRTG, graphing “custom” data is very simple. All you need to do is write a script that outputs 4 lines:

Line 1 -current state of the first variable, normally ‘incoming bytes count’
Line 2 -current state of the second variable, normally ‘outgoing bytes count’
Line 3 -string (in any human readable format), telling the uptime of the target.
Line 4 -string, telling the name of the target.

So I created a simple script to get the record count from a particular table:

Which I would call passing the MySQL database host as the first argument. Once I had the script I added a new MRTG target like this:

You’ll notice that I’m adding the totals from 3 different servers to graph a single sum value in MRTG. Any mathematical expression can be used to generate your graph values. From the manual:

You can also combine several target definitions in a mathematical expression. Any syntactically correct expression that the Perl interpreter can evaluate to will work. An expression could be used, for example, to aggregate both B channels in an ISDN connection or to calculate the percentage hard disk utilization of a server from the absolute used space and total capacity.

For a graph like this you’ll want to use similar options to the ones I used above. nopercent disables percentage display, growright tells the graph to read from left to right instead of the default right to left, gauge tell MRTG that the data points are “current status” measurements rather than ever-increasing counters, noi tells MRTG there is no “input” data to compare against “output” data and a few cosmetic display options. The resulting graph looks something like this:

So there you go…a quick and easy way to monitor entries in a MySQL table using MRTG.

OK. my dad poured cement with three other people.helicopters are blowing in it.

I’m a manly man. OK so I sit in front of a computer all day and I occasionally put that smelly stuff in my tub, but I’m all man! That’s why I was so excited to find this little gem on Amazon. Holy titanium hammer batman! As you know, I’m about to build a shed and I can’t imagine a more suitable tool for the job. Sure it’s $220 and I’ll probably swing it fewer times than my 9-iron this year…but it’s TITANIUM! I’m pretty sure the $6 million dollar man was made out of that stuff!

(Note: honey, if you’re reading this please don’t run out and buy me this hammer for my upcoming birthday *cough* June 20 *cough*. I’d much rather have some of that purple smelly stuff I had in my tub last night)

Warning - very poor acronym incoming
Project SHED (Shed-building Helps Everyone De-stress) is now under way at the Gale home.  Yesterday my dad and I poured the slab for our new shed as the first step in beautifying our dirt and weed patch we call our yard.  As soon as I find my digital camera I’ll snap some shots and perhaps even create a shed building time-lapse movie for your viewing pleasure.  For now be content to know that it will be an architectural marvel — Frank Lloyd Wright himself has nothing on my shed design.

Specs:

• 12′7″ x 16′7″ (208 sq ft — 200 sq ft if Orem City asks)
• 9′ walls
• Loft / Attic area
• 9′ overhead garage door
• Man door
• Power overwhelming (+2 pts. for throwing in a Starcraft reference)

Should be fancy!  Stay tuned for more.