I'm off to France and the U.K.

I have been sent by work to France and the U.K. and will be away for 6 weeks.

The Mountain Goat's Triumphant Return

Last night, Melissa, Courtenay and myself went to see The Mountain Goats at the Rosemount Hotel in North Perth. We've seen John Darnielle live before, but not with his bass player, and not since he became quite popular.

Last time, John wasn't even the headline act, and as a result, there weren't as many fans there. It had a very intimate feel to it. He played material from most of his back catalog, including my favourite, "All Hail West Texas"

This time, the venue was much larger and there were a lot more people there. John got a lot more loving from the audience, and he reflected it with a high intensity, high energy (for John) performance. He mostly played songs from his latest album, The Sunset Tree, but still managed to finish off with "The best ever death metal band in denton" which was very good. John's bass player was very good too. His playing was very minimalistic, but placed just perfectly to fatten out the sound coming from this duo. In a departure from two piece convention, he didn't play purely rhythm either, quite often playing melody lines of his own. At one point, he launched into a brief bass solo, the only one I have ever heard that didn't come from the slap bass school of bass playing.

Is this the coolest ute ever?

I saw this ute parked out on the street near my house today.

I like it! I wonder what its fuel efficiency is?

My first HTPC

I've been trying to put together a HTPC for quite a long time now, up until now with little success.

Recently, some of my workmates have started working on HTPCs of their own, which has spurred me on to try again. For a change, I succeeded, mostly through the really good MythTV distribution KnoppMyth. It takes out all of the hard work in configuring linux to work properly as a set top box, especially for obscure hardware like the VIA EPIA-M mother boards

So, I now have a working set up to record Digital TV programs.... Yay!

Here are some pictures











The hardware list:

• An old DVD-Player case (Thanks Peter!)
• Via EPIA-Me6000 Motherboard
• 60W DC-DC power supply
• 256 Mb DDR400 RAM (Thanks Mike!)
• 300Gb Segate Barracuda 7200.8 Hard Drive
• ATI RF Remote
• Logitech Di-Novo bluetooth keyboard/mouse
• Netgear WG311 802.11g PCI Card
• Hauppage Nova-T DVB tuner card

Things that are still wrong, or I need to fix:

• The Hard Drive runs too hot, and you can hear it click when it seeks. I think I will replace it with a notebook drive
• The Tuner card is too slow.
• I think the power supply is a little too weak, as sometimes it struggles to boot up. I think changing the hard drive will help a lot
• The EPIA-M boards, even with their hardware decoder, can not decode HD (1080i) signals properly. I am considering building another machine using a Pentium-M solution
• No DVD Drive, but that is just a matter of buying one and sticking it in