Month: April 2007

I finally gave in a bought a mac mini. Microcenter is running a $100 rebate on the cheaper one. I have moved over the Battlestar Galatica episodes I bought on itunes and am loving front row. I have a dvi to hdmi cable enroute that should hopefully solve the wide screen issues. Till that comes I just have to use zoom on the tv to remove the black bars. I also experimented with handbrake to see what it was like to convert dvd’s to mpeg4 files and I can report success. After adding the test file to itunes I can use front row play back movie. This should remove the final laziness of having to take a dvd off the shelf and play it. I am also surprised at just how small the mac mini is compared to the mini-itx box it is currently sitting on top of. So I am happy and I got the thumbs up from the wife.

I am torturing my self again with MythTV. I picked up a Compact Flash to IDE converter last week and managed to get miniMyth installed on my mini-itx box. MiniMyth can be booted from a compact flash card or PXE boot server. After much pulling of teeth I managed to build a minimyth.conf file and get it in the correct place on the flash card for everything to boot.

Now that I have it up and running it, I can finally use the mini-itx box for watching tv from my myth backend server. This is all good but I have a nice tivo that does all that for me already, so what I was really want is a DVD juke box. MythTV has a DVD ripping module built in but I lost some more hair before working out that the miniMyth box needed a large hunk of disk for saving the temporary files before the backed mtd (myth transcoding daemon) would start. I exported a nfs share from my file server to the miniMyth box and I managed to rip a DVD for testing. Since miniMyth is designed to be used with the via EPIA motherboard with hardware mpeg2 decoding it doesn’t include include the transcoder app for converting to Divx. This also means that only options for ripping dvds are perfect or iso. Never of them seem to play back very well on the box so it looks like I may be retiring it for good and buying myself a mac mini to use as a media server.

I have been using the mac port of mythfront end for a while but I still haven’t worked out how to get it to rip dvd’s yet. My file server also seems to have a funky usb controller that doesn’t work well with linux so I can’t use that for ripping dvds from my external dvd drive. So the next plan of action is to move the firewire card to my file server and hook the external dvd drive using that.

Oh and to top it all one of the fans on my file servers power supply has died so the the machine powered off and beeped very loudly a couple times over the weekend so i need to look into getting it replaced.

So over all a successful geek weekend.

Another job scam, seem deal the URL in the message ends in 5992383

“Reecently my assistant saw your resume online and forwarded it to me as a possible candidate for a tutor position with our company”

This time it is goodgradesnow.com

Some time in June I am being moved from Reston to Dulles and figured I would see what options are out there to work a little closer to home. So I updated my resume on careerbuilder just to see. One thing I wasn’t expecting is the amount of scam emails I have recieved.

The first one that looks suspicious was as a web developer for toospoiled.com, then there is one for worldvoicenews.com then today I got one from adminsolutionsgroup.net

What is interesting is they all have the same id at the end of the links 5992383

So in total I have had 7 job descriptions sent to me from these suspects.

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last chance to shop at comp usa in the dc

the comp usa in tysons has large going out of business signs. I had a look round and the are offering 20-40% off the stuff left in the store. They have a some stuff left including a few macs, some motherboards, memory and flash cards, I didn’t see anything that jumped out at me but other people seemed to be picking a lot of stuff.