Over the weekend, I set up my eee to operate as a second front-end for MythTV. This will allow me to watch TV in my bedroom on my eee, which is hooked up to a 19" display. The eee is a bit slow doing some things, frustratingly slow on occasion, but overall, it works fine. It's certainly usable.

Many ISP's these days block outbound SMTP (port 25) from their networks. However, they generally don't block higher ports that are used for encrypted SMTP (port 587). I came across this document that outlines how to set up postfix so you can relay through Gmail's SMTP.

It seems to work pretty well, but you manually have to add the cert's for Gmail's SSL sertificate. On Ubuntu, do the following:

apt-get install ca-certificates

Some guys at work were using Jinzora to manage their music collections at home. I tried it out, but found that it was really really buggy and it really didn't like how I have my web server set up at home (Special port + NAT + SSL). Another co-worker found Subsonic, which does basically the same thing, but in a much better way. The biggest downside to Subsonic is that it's java-based, but, that's not that big of a deal.

One of the things I learned about in my RHCE training was the autofs capabilities in Linux. I'd never used them before, and found they're pretty neat.

Consider the following:

-{ conrad@conrad-laptop }---{ 07:30 PM }-
-[ ~ ]-> df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3             32993140   3939496  27377664  13% /
varrun                 1037908       128   1037780   1% /var/run
varlock                1037908         0   1037908   0% /var/lock
udev                   1037908        84   1037824   1% /dev

I've had a MythTV setup for about a year and a half now. I originally installed MythTV on Ubuntu 6.10, and had a fair amount of difficulty getting it set up to work properly. I am happy to say that Ubuntu has improved, and more importantly, the Mythbuntu project has created some nice tools for integrating the two creating a nice Linux distribution.

Well. Not now, anyways.

I used to use the myth2ipod script to transcode video from my MythTV setup to a podcast. Over the weekend I upgraded to MythTV 0.21 (which allows me to do transcodes from the web), which ended up making me upgrade to Ubuntu 7.10 mostly due to my own issues. I found that myth2ipod didn't work properly any more, partially because nuvexport apparently doesn't like my version of ffmpeg.