Cafaro’s Ramblings

Well, I decided about a month ago that the old Treo 650 was getting old and needed a little refresh, I generally keep my PDAs for about 3 years before upgrading, and that’s about how long it’s been. Unfortunately, there wasn’t really anything compelling to upgrade to. None of the new Treo’s out provide much improvement over my current 650 on GSM networks. The iPhone is cool and all, but the lack of third party apps and no 3G network, really doesn’t make it a compelling upgrade to my old 650 (I can do already do just about everything the iPhone can do, just not in as cool a way). With no sight of the Linux based palms and a 3G iPhone or Blackberry, wasn’t sure what to do.

Well, decided for now I’d just do a minor upgrade when I found a real good deal on a used but practically new Treo 680. It gives me a slightly smaller and lighter form factor, no antenna stub, more onboard ram, and better bluetooth than the Treo 650. Minor improvements, but enough hopefully to hold out till Palm, Apple, or Blackberry put out something compelling.

Oh and for the record, I’m not very impressed with any of the Windows or Symbian based smartphones out currently. The few Symbian phones that look cool are only available overseas and lack the US frequencies I need.

So I have a little more breathing room to wait for the smartphone of my dreams, and keep dreaming…

Well, I finally got MythTV all setup and running how I would like. Thanks in part to the work of Jarod Wilson’s Fedora Myth(tv)ology and the MythTV.org Wiki I’ve installed all the software and configured everything to work with my hardware. I’ve also converted over to the new TV listings supply from Schedules Direct since Zap2It labs is closing the end of this month.

Here are the specs of my MythTV Box:

• Fedora Core 6 (may migrate to CentOS 5)
• AMD Athlon 64 x2 3800 CPU
• 2 GB DDR Ram (512MB x 4)
• 2x Seagate 400GB SATA 300 HD in Raid 1 (will migrate to Raid 0 soon)
• nVidia 6150 Chipset motherboard with built in HD scaling component video out
• MCE USB IR sensor
• Hauppauge PVR-500 Dual Analog Tuner (NTSC)
  
• Silicondust HDHomeRun Dual High Definition Tuner (ATSC/QAM)
• NMediaPC HTPC 200 Case
• Logitech Harmony 880 Remote (makes it all easy to run).

LiveTV and programmed listing recording works perfectly. I have about 360GB of space dedicated to Media storage. I’ve found that even Analog TV takes a lot of storage space (about 1GB per 30 minutes) to get good quality video that scales well to the 1920×1080i resolution I’m running on my HD TV. I’ll probably play with the analog recording settings more to try and find the optimal quality to still create nice images, but right now the picture of analog TV looks better through MythTV than it does with the TV’s built in Analog tuners. My only complaint is fast action shots show a little tearing/pixeling, but that’s more an artifact of 1080i than the MythTV. Wish the TV accepted 1080p or even 720p, but it’s an older Toshiba CRT HDTV that only does 1080i, 480p, and 480i. Still, the picture is beautiful!

Well, once again, I seem to be sparse on the posts. Maybe it’s because I’ve been busy with LinuxWorld Summit NY, or trying to get a new software project at work finished, or maybe cause I’m devoting my free time to my new Nintendo Wii. Well truthfully it’s a little of all the above (and a lot of getting my new software project working), but I did run across this little interesting tidbit:

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/newsArt.cfm?artid=12687

I hadn’t seen this published broadly, but it appears that the version of opera currently under beta testing to Wii users (any Wii owner can download and play with Opera 9 on their Wii for free) has a vulnerability that can at minimum cause the Wii to hard lock. Currently there is no reported exploit that can run code on the Wii, which would normally be a threat from this exploit, and not clear if it ever will given that Game Consoles are usually pretty strict in what code is or isn’t allowed to run.

Anyways, interesting to see how the age of the desktop vulnerability has come to the game consoles world, even Nintendo. Wonder how long it takes them to issue a fix?

Well, here’s an interesting one, a cell phone Java based trojan. It’s not a huge threat at the moment (requires a lot of user interaction), but good to know about anyway:

Description of Trojan

This just means that like your normal computer, you should not open files that you don’t know about or trust 100%. It will only affect phones with Java, and only if you let it (i.e., you click on the link and say yes to it sending SMS messages).

What’s more important are the possibilities, this isn’t as much a failure of technology as a failure of user education if this goes anywhere. Get used to this, it’s the future.

Ok, I figured I’d post this since I need some content, but I love my Treo 650. At some point I’ll add more information on what I’ve done with it (like syncing with linux and such), but for now, let’s just say it’s very cool.

Oh, here’s a good site for support and information on them:

TreoCentral