A review of 2022

So a quick review of 2022. Not done one for at least a decade.
I started writing this during Christmas, then a few updates. I wanted to add links and photos. But hey, it’s now February and I have not. I should learn from this. I either blog lightly, or not at all!

So I got more and more into regularly gaming. From starting again after not playing anything since Quake (the first), during the pandemic, to this year regularly playing games, and even treating myself to a Steam Deck (which is wonderful). Witcher II, Fallout 4, Elite Dangerous, God of War, and of course Minecraft with my daughter. I’ve got her into gaming as well. Starting the year with games that she’d played on Apple Arcade, Sneaky Sasquatch, then moving onto Minecraft with me (and others), then onto the Steam Deck. She loves Alba, Sonic, Stray and Slime Rancher. Other games she’s tried but failed to get into are Planet Zoo (which her cousin plays),

Apart from a new GPU (see above for the reasons, AMD RX 6600XT) and Steam Deck (also see above), then I’ve not done hardly anything. no RPI’s Arduino’s or anything properly geeky. However, we did upgrade to Gigabit FTTP which is very, very cool. I also switched my office switch from a dumb Netgear 16 port GS116 to a Netgear GS724t. Old tech, but quite reliable (and at £20 on Facebook quite affordable!). This is linked with two aggregated links between the house switch. Same router but an earlier hardware version.

I did switch most “home services, TVHeadend, Minecraft server, Motion cameras and a few other trivial things to Docker. I also moved these from my Gentoo workstation to a new headless Debian box made from bits and pieces I had lying around (well I did upgrade RAM and CPU from eBay!). I guess on that topic I also finally switched from Mythtv to TVHeadend, when I added a second satellite dish as I found that all French TV services are broadcast unencrypted on multistream feeds from the 5W satellite. I also switched from a pair of TBS tuner cards to using a completely separate Digitbit R1. That broadcasts the four tuners as DVB>IP, which means TVHeadend can use those as tuners over the LAN. TvHeadend also acts as a recorder. TVHeadend just does not have the legacy baggage that Mythtv does. Much less functionality, but much simpler to configure (no need for a Mysql db to store settings and recordings, just a fairly simple HTTPS interface).

The Digitbit’s firmware is quite ancient. but it is trivial to boot for a new firmware via a USB stick (without having to flash the onboard storage) and there are a quite a few forks of that older firmware that support Multistream.

Clients are a number of RPI’s (running OSMC) and a dedicated client from OSMC called Vero 4k. Which is a lovely bit of kit
I also got a Quest Pro II. Facebook blah blah but it’s cheap and standalone. I’m not easily impressed but some of the apps are pretty wonderful. Downside is that our house is quote small and we have so few spaces to walk around in VR! I could use the garden, but then I would look a bit of a tool! Resident Evil 4 in VR is bloody scary, but I’ve yet to acquire my VR legs and can only play for 20 minutes before nausea takes over.

I carried on with the outdoor kitchen and added walls (using rural style corrugated sheets) plus completely weather proof kitchen cabinets (using treated wood and marine ply. All exposed cut edges were soaked in epoxy, and topped with quarry tiles. I need to do the other side. but perhaps when it’s warmer.

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In sadder news our dog died. Zorro, our ten year old black lab, started wheezing and it turned out he had a mouth melanoma that was affecting his breathing. Treatment was possible but would have meant removing most of his jaw and chemo for months. Nothing you could put a dog through. Sadly he was put to sleep in the boot of a friend’s car and died in my arms.

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I had a pretty bad year for growing stuff. Potatoes, cabbages (in poly tunnel), strawberries and tomatoes (grow bags on the balcony) were great. But everything else did badly I can only blame my laziness in watering during the heatwave. Even our courgettes failed! Better luck next year.

Finally managed to get camping, both for a fortnight in France (super warm), and also at Bluedot festival (brilliant music, shitty weather! Again see below).
I also upgraded our camp kitchen, with a brilliant foldaway kitchen, and a camping stove (Cadac) that has double burners, two griddles, and connects to a gas unit that uses three cheap, ubiquitously available, aerosols gas canisters. It provides a regulator for them too. I’ve always thought they are a little on the dangerous side. But with this bit of kit it makes them very usable and very safe.
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We also had a good year for boating. The boat needs a LOT of work doing still. But we had a good few outings including one with the village.

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Our own health is decent. LN had Covid over NY (which made that quieter). I’ve still not had it (that I am aware of).
The world continued to become a scarier place. Both nationally and internationally. What is happening in Ukraine is beyond horrendous. However, I decided that ranting at the news is pointless. Whereas I’ll never forgive any unrepentant Leave voters, I guess I’m used to it. Still I had a good day out on the Rejoin March back in August.

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It was a good year for live music. Made the Bluedot festival, which had too many decent bands to list (although Yard Act are brilliant!). saw Billy Nomates, Fontaines DC, Scalpings and Working Mens club.

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I properly made the move to Mastodon. Twitter was only ever a pleasant social media community in the early years. For some time it’s been both essential to keep up to date with local and national news, but also very unpleasant to be in. Mastodon is some time away from replacing that function, but by being a pleasant place to be in, it works for me. I think Elon Musk has done us all a favour. Back when I joined Twitter (2006) I thought it was a bad move to put all our communication eggs in one company’s basket, but in those early years it seemed to work and before long everybody and their rabbits had an account.

Finally I decided I need to stop doing as much “community stuff” as I have been doing. As well as the village newsletter which I have done for over ten years, I am also a school parent governor and part of a local campaign to prevent a sewage works being built on Greenbelt just outside the village. I find myself spending a hell of a lot of time, but both those latter two tasks have a lot of frustration. One for an incredible lack of communication and the other for manipulative people that are quite incompetent too. If either were paying jobs I’d have left both a while ago.

manually running mythfilldatabase needs new options for Mythtv 0.25

I download my French TV listings from a great website called Kazer.

I download these using wget then insert the listings manually using mythfilldatabase run using cron ever few days.

With Mythtv 0.25 this has changed and there are new options for Mythfilldatabase:

$ mythfilldatabase --file --sourceid  --xmlfile belgium.xml

Previously it was:

$ mythfilldatabase --file  belgium.xml

I strongly recommend Kazer if you need French listings. It’s free although every other year I donate 20 Euros or so.

New mythtv frontend setup

I’ve just setup a new Mythtv box. Although the previous system was relatively quiet, it was in a big box, and I want minimalism now rather then obvious geekery in the living room.

So I’ve got myself an Acer Revo r6310, found at a cracking price on the superb UK Hot Deals. This is a Nvidia ION dual core Intel Atom powered beasty. The old Mythtv box is now up in the loft.

I was going to try out one of the Mythbuntu releases. But it took ages to download, so I ended up putting a Gentoo minimal installer on a bootable USB stick and went from there. After setting up distcc on my main Linux box (also 64bit) the compilation took about 36 hours.

Using VDPAU with the binary Nvidia drivers. playback is awesome. So far the largest 1080p sample I have (The trailer for Alexander) plays perfectly. Although I seem to be unable to get WMV audio to play.

Video output is via the HDMI > DVI and audio is purely via SPDIF to the amplifier.

Very pleased so far.

Running Jive on Mythtv

Just got Squeezeplay (the new replacement for SoftSqueeze) working from
Mythtv! .. and it was dead easy.

– Check out the source code from Subversion:

svn co http://svn.slimdevices.com/repos/jive/7.4/trunk/squeezeplay

– compiled it (if you are doing this on a 64bit box you need to specify just the app)

% cd src
% make -f Makefile.linux  app

– copy it all into /opt (there’s a tarball in ../build)

– Edit the Mythtv Media Library by adding an entry to the Library.xml file

/usr/share/mythtv/Library.xml

Here’s the entry

	< button>
       	< type>SqueezeBox
       	< text> launch Jive
       	< action>EXEC /opt/squeezeplay/bin/squeezeplay.sh
       < /button>

(Spaces added as I cannot work out the HTML to now parse those metatags, Doh!)

It works great on my Myth box (also running Squeezecentre) and syncs with my Squeezebox AND the other linux box running Squeezeplay.

Mysql binary logs

How to clean old binary logs

Here’s a little quick tip on cleaning your MythTV box of space cluttering binary logs. These are generated for every transaction that Mysql does. So if you have any corruption you can redo the tables. However, if you have a lot of listings data being imported into the table, then these can be pretty large.

mysql -u root --password mythconverg
Enter password:
Reading table information for completion of table and column names
You can turn off this feature to get a quicker startup with -A

Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 53 to server version: 4.1.21-log

Type ‘help;’ or ‘\h’ for help. Type ‘\c’ to clear the buffer.

mysql> show master logs;
+——————-+———–+
| Log_name | File_size |
+——————-+———–+
| mythtv-bin.000001 | 79 |
| mythtv-bin.000002 | 79 |
| mythtv-bin.000003 | 79 |
| mythtv-bin.000004 | 50504 |
| mythtv-bin.000005 | 2767417 |
| mythtv-bin.000006 | 42523 |
| mythtv-bin.000007 | 79 |
| mythtv-bin.000008 | 7099399 |
| mythtv-bin.000009 | 60102 |
| mythtv-bin.000010 | 23028247 |
| mythtv-bin.000011 | 13157557 |
| mythtv-bin.000012 | 3300816 |

mysql> purge master logs to ‘mythtv-bin.010’;

Screencasts of Installing MythTV Via MythDora 4.0

Slashdot | Screencasts of Installing MythTV Via MythDora 4.0

Seen on /. a new @boot and install from a single CD” MythTV distro. This time based on a more mainstream RedHat/FC one.

I’ve been using a MythTV box as my ONLY TV for about a year now. With 2 Freeview (UK DVB-T) tuners and a single tuner connected to a dish with multiple LNB’s pointing at Hotbird and Astra. I can wholeheartedly recommend it. A fine piece of software

User Manual:Periodic Maintenance – MythTV

User Manual:Periodic Maintenance – MythTV

There are two things I really need to do.  Do regular backups of my MythTV box, and start doing regular maintenance of the database. I have a script that will back up, compress and then use key atheticated SSH to store the backup on my main server.  However, I never run it!  I also spend time very infrequently repairing the MySQL database.  I must set up some cron jobs to do both of these!!!

DVI-d vs DVI-D, or LG 32″ TV vs Radeon 9250 card

“My Mythtv box is currently outputting to a LG RZ-32LZ55 32” LCD TV using a Radeon 9250 card. Currently I’#m using a DVI-I cable from the DVI of the radeon to the DVI of the TV.

Now I have a much longer DVi cable that I want to use. However, the cable is DVI-D. When I plug in this cable I get a picture OK, until XORG starts, then it goes black.

DVI-D is supposedly digital only, and I found that apparently the TV will only accept a DVI analogue signal. Which to be honest I do not understand as it’s supposedly HD (1080i) and used HDCP in the DVI input (the newest version of this TV is HDMI instead).

I also don’t understand this as I can get a console picture fine. It’s only when XORG loads that the picture goes.

So my question is, am I just lacking sufficient knowledge of DVI signals, in expecting this longer cable to work, or is there any options to XORG which would help?

I don’t really want to spend 30/40 UK pounds on a new 5M DVI-I cable.”

(note this was initially posted on the Gentoo Forums)