It's been awhile since I moved to Teksavvy, things are running good and very stable. There was once a schedule outage, but it was announced ahead of time. I am impressed with their service.

Meanwhile, I checked on Speakeasy to see how fast my DSL is.

A picture worths a thousand words:

There has been a lot of hype out there about Slingbox, which allow one to stream their cable TV over network. People are able to watch their own cable TV from mobile.

Being a 1/4 geek, I like to play around to see how it works. On the other hand, I am a guy likes to re-invent the wheel (but cheap). So, I often like to try out cool open source alternatives.

I finally get around to find some time to try out TV streaming over network like what Slingbox does.

My Linux server at home already equipped with 2 TV capture cards. I use one of them for TV recording, which leave the other one for streaming TV.

As for software, there seem to be many choices out there; ffmpeg, VLC, Flumotion, and Helix DNA server. From this list, I picked ffmpeg. It has the complete solution to stream from TV capture card to asp/flv/mpg and other formats. However, I found its document is somewhat lacking. Fortunately, with some help form the mailing list I was able to get a basic setup working.



Even with the streaming working, I am still ironing out some issues; Audio/video is not in sync; Stream is not reliable over Wifi; Unable to stream outside my home LAN as the stream seem to consume too much bandwidth. (??)

Hopefully, I can eventually able to stream it to work and my cellphone over GPRS (or EDGE). Also, I might try out other solutions as well in the future.

The saga continue. Most recently reported bugs are not resolved yet, but we are making progress while they are being investigated.

The latest problem I reported is about mail-notification eat up CPU while connection down.

Network Manager has updated, those scary logs are mostly gone, but still not as stable as it can be.

A problem on thunderbird is fixed temporarily, after a search to bugzilla.

On the other hand, I am still trying to setup DVD viewing, mplayer seem not playing the DVD properly yet.

A good piece explains why DRM won't work. Those people struck in the past should realize that. Period.

Unless users are denied the right to the material physically (refuse to sale me that Harry Potter movie) or the mean to access it (do not manufacture DVD players), someone will find a way to get those bits and bytes to the open.

Please join the post-Internet world/economy.

Why DRM won't ever work | Tech News on ZDNet

Finally start using my Lenovo Thinkpad T60 after install Fedora 7.



I upgraded the RAM from 1GB to 2GB.



Good:
- The laptop is lighter, thinner than T30
- It's quiet and cooler, thanks to the Intel Core 2 Duo CPU
- Brighter LCD screen, compare to T30
- With Intel's VT, I can run XP in QEMU, which is newly included in F7
- Battery able to run for ~2 hours

Not so good: Even through it's still a solidly built laptop, but I found it slightly filmsy (maybe I am just too picky).

1) The palm rest on the left side (above the PC card slot) is quite thin and I can feel its flex as my hand pressing on it



2) The side of the palm rest has some rough edges, which keep irritate my hand as I type.



3) I found the LCD screen somewhat filmy. There are two pivots on both side of the laptop, but I found the screen bend slightly when my hand holding it in the middle. I guess that's why the latest T61 has screen roll-cage to better protect it.



4) The battery slot is not snug and I can feel it sliding around in the slot when it rest on my lap.



5) The Ultranav looks the same when compared to my old T30, but the buttons for the trackpoint no longer paint on the tip. I found it looks somewhat cheap.



6) It reminds me of those HP laptop managers have at work..... I thought a Thinkpad should be special.

7) The firm keyboard is a bit too firm, and need to take sometimes to get use to.

8) The indicator on the outside of the screen does not fit perfectly, light is leaking out on the side.



Yet to try: fingerprint scanner

I've been playing around with ushare and GeeXboX for some time to setup a HTPC in my room.

I start with my old AMD Duron 950, with 256MB RAM, a DVD drive, small 6GB HDD, and a 14" LCD. I installed GeeXboX 1.1 on it, which is small and easy to install. Most important, it gets the job done.

Then, I installed ushare on my server. I setup a directory to store the UPnP media I want to share.



The end result is great, it just work. Now, I can watch my recorded TV directly from my server (which has a TV capture card).

The PC is a bit noisy because of the fan and missing a remote, but it will do for now. GeeXboX is not able to show filename in Chinese, and the file open interface a bit low tech. I hope it will get better in the future.

Ok, next step is to get a TV real-time streaming (via a 2nd capture card on my server) on this setup.

[update Oct 19, 2007]
Update to the progress
[/update]

Things been settled down for a bit now, I am getting used to F7.

A new bugs found:
- Nautilus memory leaks
- Insert CD no longer starts gnome-cd somehow, and the audio-cd icon struck and won't go away after eject. It was working before...
- CD copying didn't work on brasero, but it works on F6 on my server

Meanwhile, read an article about how to make GNOME better. There are some cool suggestions in there and hope it implements eventually.

The gdesklets and panel problem I was having seem to be fixed now. So, I turn my attention to setup KVM to run XP so I can VPN to work.

After a day of hacking it, I get XP running finally.



After installing XP, the vm reboot. But after that no CDROM access somehow. So, I have to delete the vm and create a new one with the XP in CDROM drive so the install can continue stage 2 install. It looks like the CDROM somehow lost over reboot.

Then I encounter a bug that IP forwarding is not enable for net access in the VM, a change to /etc/sysctl.conf to set net.ipv4.ip_forward + a reboot fixed the problem.

Now, I can watch TV, surf the web and go to work at the same time on my T60.