Collin Condray’s Blog

Recently, I’ve been working on converting my old desktop into a MythTV PVR. I’m using the KnoppMyth version of Knoppix Linux that has MythTV bundled with one installation CD so you can install both of them in one action. Or at least that’s the idea in theory.

In practice I have been tinkering with the darn thing for a month and only recently have gotten it to mostly work. The biggest problem I ran into was making my Hauppauge PRV-350 show anything on the TV screen. I’ve been able to make the web interface, photo gallery, and music library to work. I think that the web interface is one of the coolest features of MythTV. You can access your multimedia files (videos, images, mp3s), schedule recordings, and download recorded files all using a browser. I can even access it with my Treo.

However, I’m still having problems with console game emulators (I can list all the games but I can’t play any of them, the joystick won’t work, and it says my MAME roms are corrupt), and my video library won’t play any of my .avi files even though I can see them. I’m still searching through the the MythTV forums trying to figure out how to overcome the last problems. I have seen almost all of these problems addressed in the forums so I think that the end is in sight. I hope it will be worth it once its done.

I was only able to get this far by finding a script that someone wrote to set up the hardware correctly. Once I found that script, it set everything up automatically. I wish I had found it sooner, it would have saved me a month of frustration.

The next step, after fixing the current problems, is getting some new hardware. I’ve got an 80 GB hard drive in it which is supposedly 35 or so hours not bad but you can never have enough disk space. I’d also like to put a DVD burner in it so I can share interesting stuff via sneakernet.

So I’m doing some training in St. Paul, MN and I’m getting ready to turn to get to my hotel and what do I see on the lawn in front of it? A FREAKIN’ BEAR! (free registration or go to bugmenot.com to get a shared login).

(I know I said I wouldn’t do any personal stuff, but you don’t see a FREAKIN’ BEAR wandering through the city every day.)

As you can see, the blog has been down for a while. I’m sorry I’ve been gone. I’ve been extremely busy with a new job and I’m also a slow, easily distracted writer.

The next question that I had when decided to restart my blog is what should I write about? I have several friends out there that who blog as well. They each have their own sphere of expertise and they also include what’s happening in their lives. It seems like all of the blogs are a little on the McLaughlin Group side in the passion of their comments. That is something that I didn’t neccessarily want on my site.

I also don’t really want to add a lot of personal life stuff on my blog as well. My life is pretty boring and since I’m a slow writer I want to focus on good content.

So, what to write about? I belive that the blog that I wrote in Japan was the most successful bit of blogging I have done. In my opinion, the content was interesting and I had something to write about everyday. I also got some good responses back from its readers. So, travel should be one of the main topics.

Now that my new job is in retail, I’d like to keep up with what’s happening in my old career of IT. I still like to tinker with computers and I’ll post whatever bits of information that I come across that I think would be interested to people ranging from experienced users to technotards.

So as my first tech entry, let me share some news from the IT community which I think is really great, The Return of the Screen Savers. These are the original guys who were on TechTV’s show of the same name before G4 or whoever they are now changed the format. Its great to hear these guys together again. They really know their stuff and have great on-air chemistry. The current incarnation is called “this WEEK in TECH” or TWIT for short. I think it’s kind of a lame name. I hope they come up with something better soon.

I read a lot of blogs every day so for me, until recently, that meant going to each of websites and looking at the entire site to get the latest news. I knew that most blogs have RSS/XML/Atom feeds (including this blog) but didn’t think much about using them until I realized that I was spending too much time going to sites to check for updates and then not finding anything. So I began looking for the right tool to keep track of my reading.

First I tried to roll my own webpage with RSS Digest. It let me put the content in the format that I wanted, but it was a pain to set up each site in a webpage.

Next, I decided to try to use a dedicated program. First I tried FeedDemon which is usually in the number one spot on any list of RSS aggregators. It seems like it is a good reader if you want to monitor hundreds of feeds, which is a little more that I read. The setup was a little complex as well. It also is not a free solution which puts it right out of my budget.

So, I tried the first first free reader in the standard lists, FeedReader. It was much simpler to set up. However, I didn’t like using the built in browser and the popup messages were kind of annoying as well. I also didn’t like the fact that it was only a solution if I was booted into my Windows partition on my laptop. In public places (such as libraries) or using Portable Firefox off my USB thumb drive on other peoples’ computers I would not have access to the latest headlines.

Finally, I decided to use BlogLines, a web based aggregator. It fit my budget (free) and is accessible everywhere I can get to the web. There is also a Firefox plugin that lets you add new feeds by clicking on a button in the status bar and shows you when there are new posts to read. A great solution for the multi-platform, mobile blog reader.

I was turned on to a neat website today, Today In Alternate History, Important Events In History That Never Occurred Today. Its a neat site, but don’t read it too long or you’ll forget which timeline your actually in.

Daily Galleries Parent’s Farm

Here are some pictures from my parent’s farm.

Daily Galleries Chicago 2004

Since I enjoyed travel blogging in Japan so much, I’ve decided to revive it again for my recent trip to Chicago. Kathleen was attending a conference there, and she used some of her frequent flyer miles to wrangle me a cheap ticket to Chicago for my birthday weekend. While she was enjoying her conference, I was obligated to endure the drudgery of sight seeing, eating the local delicacies, and shopping for cool stuff.

We got to Chicago on Thursday with about half the day gone, so we weren’t too ambitious. We spent a little time scoping out the area around our hotel which included finding the location of Kathleen’s conference which was a few blocks away. At that point, we were starving since our flight was during the lunch hour and our snack on the flight was a little bag of Fisher’s Cheddar Snack Mix. We went to Corner Bakery, a chain sandwich shop around 3:30 PM for a quick snack and had an awesome Chicken Pomodori panini sandwich. After that, our plan was to look around a little bit more and then go to a restaurant recommended by Fodor’s. The local restaurants it recommended were either way too expensive or we just weren’t in the mood for them, so, we went back to Corner Bakery and had another delicious club panini. Yup, they were that good.

Thursday night I attended the only event of Kathleen’s conference. It was a German show at the Adler Planetarium called Sonne, Mond, Stern & Co. (Sun, Moon, Star & Co.) Run screaming.

Friday morning I slept in late while Kathleen went to her conference. I stopped in at a local comic book shop called Graham Crackers Comics. The store was well stocked. I’m not a comic coinsurer but it seemed like they had a lot of comics I usually don’t see in local stores. I saw a lot of recent stuff but not as many graphic novels as in local stores. One thing that I did finally see was a PVP collection.

While I was there I asked if they knew of any other places to go for geeky fun. They pointed me to one or two book stores on the Magnificent Mile and a variety of bookstores on Clark Street which is in the northern part of Chicago.

For lunch Kathleen and I met up with an old friend from college, Jen, for lunch. We walked up Michigan and went to a neat Thai food stand called Wow Bao. Their culinary claim to fame are their bao, or Asian dumplings which were very tasty. The dumplings are filled with a variety of meats. I had Kung Pao chicken and BBQ pork and both were quite delicious.

For dessert, we headed to the Ghirardelli Soda Fountain & Chocolate Shop. Kathleen was in heaven but Jen and I were a little worried. We both remembered the time Kathleen had a chocolate OD and didn’t want it to happen again. Fortunately, the shakes, sodas, and sundaes that we had hit the spot. We only overate a little.

After lunch Kathleen headed back to her conference and spent the rest of the afternoon walking up the rest of the Magnificent Mile. I spent most of my day in bookstores with side visits to Comp USA and Niketown.

The book stores were hit or miss. The dedicated gamers shop, Gamers Paradise, was pretty well stocked. They had a ton of board games with a smaller selection of RPGs (no GURPS though). The Borders was great. I found a lot of graphic novels I hadn’t seen before and read through them. I found a nice seat on the second floor that let me look out over Michigan so I could watch the crowds.

The Virgin Megastore was a disappointment. Since I had last visited it, it had gotten rid of a big hunk of its books and replaced them with music and DVDs which didn’t do much for me.
www.virginmega.com

Later I caught up with Kathleen and we went to Buddy Guy’s BBQ. I got a rack of ribs there and it was quite good. The BBQ was different from southern BBQ. It was vinegar based and not as sweet as I used to. However, I still managed to overeat there. Fortunately, I gotten lots of exercise by walking everywhere. I easily racked up 5 or so miles worth of walking everyday, so I didn’t feel too guilty about eating too much.

On Friday, I trooped up to North Chicago and walked down Clark Street, another shopping area. To get there, I took the elevated train or “El” train. Although I have taken a lot of different kinds of public transport, the El was a new experience for me. Since you’re a couple of stories above the ground, it is a great deal for a tourist since you can see much more of the city than you can on a bus. I recommend it.

As I mentioned before, Clark Street is a long strip of small stores with a smattering of department stores. I also think that there must be a college nearby since I saw lot of students with laptops and piles of papers. I didn’t find anything too special. There were a couple of comic book shops that were well stocked but I didn’t find any good gaming shopss

There was a wide selection of restaurants in this area including Mongolian BBQ, Spanish tapas, and African, Ethiopian, Moroccan cuisine. Fodor’s suggested a sushi restarant called Matsuya’s. It had a very traditional look to it and was the first real sushi I had had since I was in Japan. I ordered a combo sushi plate which surprisingly, cost about the same as a similar meal in Japan. The quality was not as good though. The sushi didn’t have a very good texture, it was kind of soft for my palate. I think Japan has ruined me on sushi. The waitstaff also had kind of an attitude as well. Not all was lost, I did get my green tea ice cream fix.

One last word of advice if you plan on visiting Clark Street, make sure you pee before you walk down Clark Street since public restrooms are few and far between. At one point, I had to buy a donut at Dunkin’ Donuts to get access to a bathroom.

Later that afternoon, I hopped a bus back to the hotel. This was not such a pleasant experience as riding the El since there was a parade going on downtown and the bus made horrible time. It took the bus about an hour to cover the same distance as the El did in only half the time.

I did make it back in time to meet Kathleen and one of her fellow conference attendees for dinner. We went to an American restaurant called the Grillroom. It was very good and not too pricy, about $20/person. As their name indicates they do grill steak but all of us opted for other fare. I had a great spinach fettuccini plate that I couldn’t finish.

After we ate dinner, we went to a play at the Storefront Theater called Shakespeare Kung Fu. The idea behind the play was to take lines for Shakespeare’s body of work, come up with a new play, and add a dash of Bruce Lee. Unfortunately, it was not so good. The title and the concept implied that the presentation would be light hearted and have a type of quirkiness about it. Instead, they played almost the entire play as a straight Shakespearean tragedy of a king betrayed by his power hungry queen and her lover. It just didn’t live up to the strangeness that it should have been. I wish we were going to be there next month when Monty Python Spamalot reopened down the street.

Sunday morning it was time to go back home. I had decided to take the subway back to O’Hare since the trip length was supposed to be the same as the airport shuttle and cost $20 less. I also wanted to see what the Chicago shuttle was like. I was a little worried about how safe taking the subway so early in the morning would be. Chicago is a pretty friendly place for a big town, so I didn’t worry too much about it. All went smoothly and I made it to my plane and back to XNA with no problems. All in all, it was a good trip. Chicago is a great place to visit and I recommend a trip.

One last bit of advice, bring a coat one step heavier than you think. They don’t call Chicago the “Windy City” for nothing.