So our water heater has been leaking just a little the last few weeks. After some observation and well placed pans, I determined it was the cheap plastic drain valve that was the problem.

Turns out after doing some research these plastic "cone valves" frequently leak, and are easy to replace even without draining the tank.

Here how I did it:

1. I bought a 3/4" ball valve with a hose connector on it at Lowes.
2. I turned off the gas to water heater.
3. I turned off the water supply to the water heater.
4. I opened a hot water faucet to relieve the pressure by letting it run until it mostly stopped, then closed the faucet. Its very important no one tries to turn on the hot water from this point on!
5. I unscrewed the old plastic valve. It loosens counterclockwise until its cleared the threads on the outer pipe, then you need to turn it clockwise to get the rest of it out.
6. I put some teflon tape on the drain pipe and screwed on the ball valve.
7. I closed the ball valve, turned on the water supply, and re-lit the pilot light.

Well we finally have out MythTV box up and running. Our hard drive in our Directv Tivo was dying, and since we couldn't buy a new Tivo for Directv, only lease an overpriced imitation Tivo, we decided to leave and build our own.

I'll be setting up a separate MythTV page soon.

So far our configuration is:

1 HD QAM tuner for local stations in HD.

1 Analog cable input.

1 Digital cable STB. Currently not HD, may upgrade, we'll see how it goes.

500 GB storage, about twice what we had on the Tivo.

Everything seems to be up and running correctly now.

Doc Searles commented on this recently. And no, The Linux Show isn't coming back anytime soon.

I've been getting into Digg lately, and while it is cool, it has exposed this trend of highly ranked articles often being in the "top 10" list format. I've been getting lax in adding things to my blog, so I figured I really should comment on this.

Myspace, Linkedin, etc, etc all show how much fun it is to reduce everything to popularity contests, and I guess this is something along the same continuum. It might not even necessarily be a bad thing, David Letterman has kept coming up with hilarious top ten lists since practically inventing the form many years ago.

You would think in something as large and diverse as the internet there would be more unique things to read though...

Powered by ScribeFire.

The site is here. I was a bit surpised to find Dennis Kucinich was the closest match for my opions, and both Clinton and Obama where rather far down the list.

Now back to pointless bits of tech trivia... :)

Here's a one liner to get a list of hostnames your server is listening to:

ifconfig -a | grep inet\ addr: | awk '{print $2}' | cut -d : -f 2 | xargs -n1 host | awk '{print $5}'

Works on Linux, should work on most OS's with a little tweaking....

Some changes over the last few weeks:

• First, we finally ditched the land-line and have gone cell only. You do have our cell numbers, right? So far so good, but had the usual headaches with rebates, etc. with Cingular. Eventually though, they did get everything fixed. The trick is to choose "cancel my account" on the customer service voice menu apparently.
  
• Second, got two of my wisdom teeth pulled. Had the gereral anesthetic, and that worked exactly as advertised. Highly recommended for all medical/dental procedures. I was surprisingly sore and swollen 9 days later though. Finally feeling halfway decent today. I guess this is why you shouldn't put wisdom teeth extraction off until your 30's. Had really good pain drugs though, Darvocet is cool...
  
• Third, the home server, techno, had another drive die. I took the opportunity to replace the 4 disk raid 5 array with two 250GB drives doing raid 1. Also upgraded to Scientific Linux 4. The previous drives were bargin basement samsung 60GB drives that were at least 5 years old. The drive that failed ironically enough turned out to be the 1 replacement Western Digital drive I had installed about three years ago. I must say I'm still pretty happy with my backups via external usb 160GB drive and rsync. I suppose I should do a write-up on that one of these days.
  

postqueue -p | cut -c 42- | grep -v ^\$ | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

Now I need to find intelligent and entertaining radio elsewhere. If anyone knows of a good replacement, let me know...

Replacement #1: The Skeptics Guide to the Universe

We picked up an electronic dart board at Target with some of our holiday gift cards, and its turned out to be quite a bit of fun. Since neither of us are very good at darts, the wall around it is getting its share of little holes. To discourage this, Becky came up with the great idea of initialing all of the holes so we know how made what/how many holes. Adds a whole new dimension to the game...

Turns out the trick is to save some calories for wine and chocolate. 16 days and I'm down 20 pounds. I have a nagging suspicion the next 20 pounds won't go so quickly, but we'll see.

We got a Nintendo Wii from the Target store in North Aurora, IL. Got it hooked up and tried our Wii Sports, which comes with the unit, and its a blast! The Will controller, if you haven't seen it, works by actually waving it around like you are playing tennis, or swinging a baseball bat, or bowling. Its actually pretty accurate!

Turns out making fun games is indeed much more effective than having the latest graphics processor in a game console. So we will be putting our XBox 360 system up for sale soon to get some more games.

I have the Harmony Remote H659. I got it for free. Even at that price, I feel cheated. I can't imagine what people who paid over $100 for the thing feel.

The idea, in case you aren't familiar with it, is a universal remote that you can connect to your computer via USB and download new codes for whatever devices you have in your audio/video system. The good idea, is that the sync app is a web application, so people will always the up to date signal definitions and latest software.

The problem is the update software simply doesn't work. At least not with any version of Firefox or even IE released in the last two years. Even when you do manage to find the right combination of buggy browser releases and reinstalling the other pointless software bits, the interface is very slow and clumsy.

Many of the remote codes seem to have an initial 100-300 ms delay, which is quite annoying for doing things like the Tivo 30 second skip. It is in theory a learning remote, but even when relearning it often injects an initial delay.

There is no "expert mode" where people who went past 9th grade can simply set up lists of macros they want assigned to a particular remote.

There should really be a local access program. I tried to update my remote today and the web site is broken, as it often is, denying my saved password is correct, and I can't update my remote. There is really no excuse for having a piece of hardware inexorably tied to such a poorly executed, and on top of that, unreliable, website.

Zero stars for this turd.

Sounds like the Wii might actually have some fun games, unlike the XBOX 360. Seems most of the 360 games are Doom rehashes. While that was still fun back in 95, these days its just lame. The whole FPS thing jumped the shark with Quake III as far as I'm concerned.

Project Gotham was also rather disappointing. They took out the biggest thing I liked about the original: having cars you might actually be able to afford...

The inability to view pictures/play music from non-windows servers is also very irritating. The Wii definitely got that one right by having a real web browser.

Not sure about the Wii controller though... I've seen such things attempted over the years, and they usually disappoint. Sounds like the Wii's controller actually works as advertised, so I'm intrigued. If it actually worked accurately it could be very cool.

But its still a lot of money, and there will probably be a new round of consoles out before KJ is old enough to play video games, so we'll see how it goes...

The convenience of getting to all my email via the web just can't be beat. Also, gmail allows the use of pop3, so I can still archive all my email at home with fetchmail, and most impressively, the read/unread/deleted status of the pop view of the account doesn't seem to effect the status of the account via the web. This was a real stickler when trying to get a similar setup working with yahoo a few years ago.

I thought about giving yahoo a try, but I've been on the new web mail beta for a while now, and all the "web 2.0" eye candy just makes it far too slow to actually use. Gmail seems to have good balance in that department.

Since having a baby means getting a camcorder and producing DVD's, all the post production needed meant 100Mb/s just wasn't going to cut it anymore. Luckily, the local CompUSA location was going out of business, so I picked up a linksys, (or was it netgear?) 5 port 1Gb/s switch.

I then got two el-cheapo gigabit cards for the main file server here and the main video editing workstation. Initially had some issues, but after cleaning up some messy wiring, including getting the phone off the ethernet cable to the computer room and replacing old cat-3 cables, both systems auto-negotiated 1000Full duplex connections.

Now the limiting factor is the external USB IDE hard drive I use for backing up the server. Its apparently limited to about 5MB/s...

The filter in question to fix the page is '*centerstagechicago.com/*'. Not sure what exactly the ad is trying to do, but it sure is annoying. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to read the SunTimes without any ads until they get it fixed. Hope somebody there reads this...

This is my first blog entry done with Quills. So far, so good.