Recent weeks have been busy work-wise, domestically and emotionally. The main downer being the catastrophically stupid behaviour of the mental minority of masochists who think they are libertarian visionaries over here…you know what I’m talking about: healthcare. The anger is still too raw for me to construct syntactically correct sentences.

So – back to the quotidian.

A week or two ago, a friend at work donated one of his ex-projects to me: a dead MythTV box. So, I bought a new motherboard and embarked on a mission to bring it back to life as a useful DVR.
Once the motherboard I’d ordered had arrived I set to work installing it in the attractive case my mate had donated. It didn’t take too long to realise my new motherboard didn’t fit…it was too small. But, being a bloody-minded idiot, I decided that it will fit and got the hack-saw out.
It took me a week to make it fit, but it did fit!
Sort of. And then I discovered that the connector from the front panel (i.e. the power switch, light, hard drive light etc) didn’t fit the motherboard connector and in bloody-minded-move-the-mountain mode I rewired, forced, and glued the connectors until they fitted.
The end result is that we now have a cool multi-media player attached to our TV that plays anything we give it, including our audio and video collection. It is also supposed to work as a DVR but it needs some hand-holding until that particular task is understood fully by all concerned.

I’m mid-way through soldering together a bunch of stuff harvested from broken DVD players, radios, and power-supplies to make an infrared remote control adapter. After this, we will not need the mortal TV service as everything of worth can be viewed via teh internets.

On a less geeky note, we had a wicked time at our neighbours’ “cook-out” last night. To the uninitiated, a “cook-out” appears to be an outdoor party with high quality food and drink. And a barbecue. We met a bunch of excellent people, saw a wasps nest, and consumed way too much. We also got bitten to buggery by little mosquitoes, which is a small price to pay.