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.<\/p>\n
So – back to the quotidian. <\/p>\n
A week or two ago, a friend at work donated one of his ex-projects to me: a dead MythTV box<\/a>. So, I bought a new motherboard and embarked on a mission to bring it back to life as a useful DVR<\/acronym>. 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nOnce 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<\/i> and got the hack-saw out.
\nIt took me a week to make it fit, but it did<\/i> fit!
\nSort of<\/a>. 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.
\nThe end result is that we now have a cool multi-media player attached to our TV that plays anything<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n