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.

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.

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.

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

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....

• 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

Replacement #1: The Skeptics Guide to the Universe

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.

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.

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...

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.