Good & Bad Ideas

Posted by stephen on Monday, 10th October, 2005 @ 10:35

Things continue to progress nicely with my little PC-cum-STB. When I realised that the version of VDR Debian ships with is 1.2 and not 1.3 I downloaded the older version of the pvr350 plugin, compiled it successfully, started VDR and wondered how the hell I was going to configure it.

But something rather good happened. I noticed my TV (plugged into the output of the PVR card) had some text on it! It wanted me to assign keys for the various interface functions (menu, up, down, select, etc). So I thought I'd push my luck and grabbed hold of the Hauppauge remote and press the up arrow, as requested.

Woo hoo! It asked me to press down, and then menu, and a whole host of other buttons. It just worked! Well, it just worked meaning VDR did with my hardware, after hours of poking, compiling, and setting up said hardware.

I installed lots of cool VDR plugins; games, the weather, teletext (doesn't work in the UK), signal information, etc. And I learned my newly plumbed in roof aerial is only marginally better than my tiny portable one, and only if the booster is plugged in. Hmm, am I bothered enough to fix it? Or is the fun over with now it works and I'll just keep using TiVo? Probably the latter.

At least it spurred me on to finally get around to swapping around my living room, the sofa and the TV are now on opposite sides for anyone who knows what my living room looks like. It works well, even if it does feel a little odd, having had it the other way for over 2 years now.

All that's left is to swap around the G5 and the sub, as I don't think they're on the right sides at the moment, then off to Argos to purchase a couple of bookshelves, one for each side, as the room is looking a little empty around the TV at the moment and it'd mean my DVDs finally had somewhere to go other than floor piles.

So lots of good ideas, on to the bad... I was playing with the site yesterday and installed a couple of new Zope/Plone products, CMFContentPanels and CMFSin. The intention with both was to get RSS feeds into the site pages. As you might guess from my bosses blog now being included on the right, I got it sorted. Eventually.

Here's a couple of tips though... never unintentionally delete the Python install that's running your Zope instance. It'll keep running, until you want to stop and restart it to register a new product. Then you'll get a really odd error message that says nothing about Python not being available.

And finally, never remove CMFSin after installing it on your site, just because it doesn't support ATOM feeds. When you do remove it, your site will be completely, 100% broken and you'll have to reinstall through the ZMI.

Lessons learned.