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Day 12 – 2013

Day 12 – 2013

On the same theme as yesterday.  A couple of shot of the progress in restoring the bathroom ceiling!

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Day 11 – 2013

Day 11 – 2013

The things that happen when you use the wrong paint.  Well we ended up with paint flaking off the bathroom ceiling and no have done something about it.  Hours later and a sore back and arm – flaking paint removed and UPVA and water mix applied.

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Day 10 – 2013

Day 10 – 2013

Resurrecting a WD MyBook Live

So I managed to kill the Guvnors NAS box and have now resurrected it. How to repair it (with a backup before hand) because we really don’t want to loose his data.

Step 1: We need to remove the hard drive from is enclosure:
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Day 9 – 2013

Day 9 – 2013

Sorted out typos and made some tweaks to the GraigAid Flyer and Poster.  These are now with VistaPrint and the final products should be here in a couple of weeks!

Also made some changes to the Electricity Graphs, lines colours and fills etc…

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Day 8 – 2013

Day 8 – 2013

Today has been a day of tinkering with media boxes and Live TV.

I have been using a raspberry pi and a g-box midnight as media boxes at home and running mythtv on an ubuntu box for a while now, however I have been having a lot of trouble with the cmyth client on both boxes.  Firstly it is incredibly slow loading up the EPG (Electronic Program Guide) and switching channels, on top of that the audio sync gets worse the longer you watch something.

So how to fix these irritations?

Step one. Stop the myth mythtv server on the ubuntu box and install tvheadend instead.

Step two. Configure the tvheadend server, scan the steams and set up the channels etc. (hmmm need to edit the udev rules to give the right permissions the the satellite tuner!)

Step three. Check to see if the channels work locally.

Step four. Disable the cmyth client on both media boxes.

Step five. Enable the tvheadend client and configure it to connect to the ubuntu box.

Step six. Watch TV channels on the media boxes.

So far so good on the midnight box, however there are problems on the pi.  All I get is a blackscreen when selecting a channel to watch.

Time to hit the interwebs….

After lots of searching we discover something for step seven…

Step seven. Enable timeshift on the tvheadend server.

Step eight. Retest on the pi, and voila a picture and sound, still one problem (well know about) the aspect ratio of the SD channels is out.

Step nine. Simple workaround – not the best I know – however change the video properties to zoom 16:9 and it looks fine.  The downside is that this may affect movie playback.

Step ten. Similar sort of problem on the midnight box to sort out, same fix as above however the aspect ratio is fine – the picture just does not fill the screen.

 

So now I have much more snappy TV viewing with so far as I can see none of the AV sync issues I was having before.  It’s still not perfect, but as the whole system on the midnight box is only in beta, and there are known problems on the pi I’m much happier!

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Day 7 – 2013

Day 7 – 2013

OK, taking a step back from the excercise tracking code, and doing something a bit simpler to get used to the flot stuff.  I have created an electricity usage/generation graph.

http://brain.demonpenguin.co.uk/electricity-graphs for the results.  Obviously it will look better with more data in it! (I know the picture for Day 7 has data after the fact – but it needed data in it to show up properly!)

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Day 6 – 2013

Day 6 – 2013

Vectorising a logo for a freind.  Playing around with various fonts as well as a hand drawn one.

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Day 5 – 2013

Day 5 – 2013

Some garden work – creating a ditch to prevent the shed from having water running through it when its raining!

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Day 4 – 2013

Day 4 – 2013

Again nothing to show really.  Looking at creating a wordpress theme from scratch using bootstrap, and trying to evisage what I have to do to get what I want.

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Day 3 – 2013

Day 3 – 2013

Nothing to show for this really.  I have been working on an excercise tracking app to graph progress of weekly training sessions.

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Day 2 – 2013

Day 2 – 2013

And for those of you who notices all the deliberate mistakes on yesterdays, here is the poster version – with the correct info!

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Day 1 – 2013

Day 1 – 2013

A New Year, and therefore a new set of 100 (hopefully) creative things.  To start off with a new flyer for GraigAid 2013

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