Safeguarding Family Internet – Overview
(Haven’t posted in a long time–sorry for that. Been busy. Having twins unexpectedly (as if there were any other way) will do that to a guy.) Home Networks My wife and I home school our children using excellent videos from Abeka, and it works out very well. They can travel with me when the opportunity arises, work from the dentist’s waiting room, or whatever. Except for the problem of how to let the kids get to the Internet safely. Well, there’s all kinds of thoughts out there on the subject. Everything from “Don’t” (absolutist) to the school of thought that says “They’re Going to See It Anyway” (defeatist). Then there are the people who say, “My kids would never do anything like...
Use Google SketchUp for 3D Drawings
I’ve never claimed to be an architect, but I love great tools that work well. Â One such tool belonging to that category is Google SketchUp. Â In the past, I’ve fiddled with 3D software before. Â I think that Blender is awesome…but it also has a steep learning curve. Â Almost a learning cliff. It honestly is just to much for my needs. Â Case in point, I wanted a quick floorplan diagram to post to the Studio Central forum for comments on my new home studio. Â Blender just isn’t the choice for that. Â Now, if I wanted to make a cool 3D animated cartoon over the next few years, that’s a different matter… [amazon-product]0470277394[/amazon-product] The image above was completed in about two hours total time....
Smart Home Media Project: Adding a Shortcut to XBMC
Well, it has been a while, so I thought I better at least complete this thought regarding XBMC. Â Overall, it is one of the slickest open source projects I’ve encountered. Â Well run, well designed, and very active. Â However, there are some downsides. Â Let me break this down as well as I can from my perspective: XBMC – The Good: Super fast and responsive Easy (ish) to setup Cheap hardware Active community Fantastic codec compatibility It just works XBMC – The Bad: Myth LiveTV Frontend ineffective Myth Schedules hard to read Adding shortcuts Remember, this is from my perspective. Â XBMC is completely secondary to my MythTV needs–I am just not using it as a standalone. Right now there is no way to make the Xbox my only settop...
MythTV Frontend Article Published on Linux.com
Here is a link to my article on Linux.com. It is my first effort, and while it turned out pretty well, I think I’ll do some things different next time. And there will be a next time. http://www.linux.com/feature/144179 Give it a read and let me know what you think!
Smart Home Media Project – Xebian
It’s been a little too long since my last post–apologies. Here’s what I’ve found out since: The pre-built Xebian/Myth distro seems to have trouble finding my backend server. Which is strange, as they are both on the same 100MB network segment. It complains about no UPnP sources. Apparently no one can watch live TV on the XBMCMythTV script…I am giving up. This will apparently be folded into the next major release of XBMC–the script developers are working directly with the XBMC team. The 1.3 release of PFSense will include support for OpenDNS via their DNS-O-Matic site. This has nothing to do with XBMC…just thought it was cool. All firewalls should be doing this! My PFSense firewall might be...
MySQL Authentication Woes – MythTVDB and XBMC
Well, this little issue hit me with a brief feeling of deja-vu. It is the exact same trouble that I faced trying to get Nessus security scanner frontend to write data to a MySQL database. I don’t know when exactly it changed, but new versions of MySQL writes passwords in a hashed table (and perhaps a new location, too) so that older apps trying to connect simply cannot read (or find) the password to authenticate the transaction. In other words, the biggest issue I was having with the XBMCMythTV script was this authentication issue. And that was only after finding the sneaky place that Mythbuntu recorded the actual password in the first place! The setup never asked me to assign one–it just popped a random password on the MySQL mythtv...
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