PVR

Since I've got digital cable, I've been thinking I need to put together a PC-based video recorder. Subscription-based ones like TiVo just mean another monthly bill, and since I don't watch all that much TV to begin with (the wife does sporadically), it's not worth it. So far I haven't been able to find any Japanese DVR-like devices, so I may have to roll my own.

Hot Deals Club had a blurb about a device called HDHomeRun, which is a networked DVR. The downside is that it requires coax inputs, and with my setup, I'm not sure if it'll work. Furthermore, SiliconDust's website doesn't have any specs or other information that would help me decide whether to buy it, so I'm going to pass.

DVICO, on the other hand, has a product, the Fusion HDTV5 RT Gold, that caught my eye. It at least has an S-Video input, so I could hook up my cable box to it. At $150, it's not too spendy, either. The problem is, it doesn't support Linux. I guess I have to keep looking.

Hide & Go Poop

Joel sent me this one. Crazy vid on YouTube.

PC 'Scope

Following on to the mixer thing, I was wondering how hard it'd be to make some oscilloscope-like hardware that plugs into a PC. Wikipedia has an article on test probes that's enlightening.

Maxim also has an article on designing a low-jitter clock, which can be used to drive high-speed ADCs. 1 GHz should be achievable. Using a USB interface would be too slow to do real-time processing, but by capturing into memory on a trigger and transferring the data, the PC could handle high-speed captures. Real-time could use less bandwidth to approximate the signal to the limit of USB 2.0.

Audio Mixer Circuit

I was looking at building a simple mixer circuit to mux two PCs' 5.1 audio sources to 5.1 speakers. My current KVM switch only has two minijacks, so it can't handle 5.1.

Googling "simple audio mixer circuit" turned up a page of links to mixer projects. Some ones I liked:

Simple Mixer
FET Audio Mixer
Six-Channel Mixer and Amp

Water Guns & The Glock FAQ

Noel sent me a link to a Wired News article about underwater weapons. Interesting, but of limited depth.

The more interesting thing was mention of The Glock FAQ, which has a lot of details about Glock pistols.

Lotus Notes on OS X

If I were really intent on getting away from Windows: There's a version of Lotus Notes for OS X, as well as the AT&T Global Network Dialer necessary to tunnel to the company network. Hmm.

Fading Photos

More on archival of photos. All the more reason to archive important images to film!

lhaca

Just in case I forget where to get a decompressor for LHA/LZH, here one is. The URL is amusing, "buttya" looks like "butt yeah!" Wonder if it's supposed to be "butcher" or something.