This weekend saw some serious exercise on the Myth box. Because of a fairly major snowstorm, we spent a fair amount of time indoors, trying not to get on top of each other and stave off cabin fever. The Myth box came in very handy as (at least in Ben’s case), it was the instrument of recall to his Super Bomberman days. This game, ancient though it is (the SNES version we’re running is 12+ years old), is still outstanding.
What really made it tasty was we got 3 joysticks + the keyboard working on the box. Two of the sticks are the Thrustmaster gamepads I mentioned earlier, one was a Logitech Rumblepad I had frankly forgotten I owned. These all come up on the USB bus under linux as /dev/js0 through /dev/js2 respectively. More on this shortly.
The game ran perfectly via the ZSNES emulator managed from the Myth front end. With 3 adults and 1 7 year old playing, it was quite the bit of fun.
But of course, there has to be at least one hassle. The USB hookup I’m using has a tendency to reset for no reason. We’re not sure if this is the hub, or the cabling, or the connectors, or what. The issue is, when it resets, the joysticks tend to be renumbered. If I’m running /dev/js0 and /dev/js1 gamepads, and the hub resets (from just moving around on the couch or the like), BING, those joysticks are now /dev/js2 and /dev/js3. Nice that it resets and reloads, not so nice in that now the main joystick I use for selecting games and controlling the Myth box is unavailable. I could use some input (so to speak) on this problem. Linux geeks may have suggestions on how to better control the dynamic device assignment in the USB system. Its workable when you have unique devices (Camera goes to /dev/camera, etc etc), but when you have multiples of the -same- device (say, 4 gamepads), I’m not sure if it’s possible.
The other good toy added recently was a wireless keyboard and mouse courtesy of woot.com. This has helped a lot as it’ll allow us to push the box back under the shelving by the TV (the keyboard cable was VERY annoying to deal with). Next will be a USB extension cable to bring the joysticks nearer the players.
All in all, I continue to be fascinated with this machine and all it represents.
Author: Dave Shevett
A wandering geek. Toys, shiny things, pursuits and distractions.
porchsnow
Why yes, we did get a lot of snow, why do you ask? This was a remarkable storm. I had to drive for several hours in it, and there was lightning, thunder, and almost zero visibility. At 3pm in the afternoon. At around 6pm, it just… stopped. The front moved through like a knife, and we had a beautiful sunset under rapidly clearing skies. Remarkable.
I’ve driven some in some horrible weather, but this was one of the heaviest snowfalls we’ve ever had. In broad daylight it was treacherous. I can’t imagine what this might have been like at night.
The forecast was for 6-10 inches. I think we ended up with about 14″ here in Natick.
For other pictures of the sunset, click on through to my flickr account, but also check out some of the pictures Diana posted (she’s about 15 miles north of me)
A good shirt for Kansans
Barb pointed me to this image available on T-shirts from Prickwear.com. This site appears to be even more directly and unabashedly offensive than Tshirthell.com, which I have to admit has some pretty funny stuff on it.
Anyway, this is available on a tshirt I wonder if I could get Cafepress to make a bumpersticker, something that will assure me of being beaten in Kansas.
Deluded Blues gig this Friday
This friday (12/9/2005), my band, Deluded Blues will be playing at the Cottage Street Pub (Map ) in Franklin, MA between 9pm and midnight-ish. Folks are welcome to come in, grab a table and listen in and/or say hi. It’s a very informal setup, and the pub itself is not what you would call a high society venue, so be prepared. I do guarantee the music will be good and plentiful!
Hope to see some folks there!
Seti@Home backlogged
Just as we were getting ready to kick those silly corporate folks out of the top slots in the seti stats, the seti@home project reports that things have backlogged in the mechanism for handing out new work and collecting completed work. This means many of the compute machines in our team have been idle a lot for the last 24 hours.
I don’t feel too bad, because that means that all the OTHER folks doign Seti@Home work are also idled, so our standings shouldn’t drop off. I have been having fun looking at how we’re holding up in the BOINCstats.com ‘world wide statistics’ system. When we started out a month ago, we were at the bottom of the heap. Since then we’ve climbed through over 2/3rds of all the teams, and now stand somewhere around position 9000. We’ve completed more work than almost 80% of all the teams in the project, and our current ‘work unit per day’ count is high enough that I think we’ll move into the top 1000 within a week or two.
This live banner comes from the BOINCstats site, and represents the current status of our team. Click on it to go to our team statistics as compiled by BOINCstats: 
If you haven’t joined the team yet, and have a machine that is idle any length of time (say, a desktop machine that stays on when you go to work, or a work machine that stays on when you go home), please join our team!.
Update: Fixed some broken HTML. Sorry bout that.
Hedonistic Uber Widgety
I must admit, when we bought our new Saturn relay, I was particularly astonished by the vast number of geeky widgety thingies it can do. DVD player, heated seats, FM radio with data feed, powered side doors, 110v outlet in the back, etc etc etc. One thing I thought was over the top was the remote starter. You do a particular little series of buttonpushes on the keyfob, and the engine starts.
Now, in the middle of summer, this didn’t seem like that big a deal. But buddy, lemme tell you how, as it’s now getting colder, giving that extra 3-4 minutes of warmup time before you even get in the car is mighty tasty. We’ve figured out you can start the van from the kitchen in the house, so we look out the window, do the keyfob buttonpushing, and the lights go blinkety-blinkety-blinkety-steady. One running van. By the time we walk out there, it may not be -warm-, but at least it’s not simply recycling the already frigid outside air.
Other things have squirmed their way into the “Okay, I could get used to this” category. For instance the little display whoozie on the dash has a bazillion settings in it, including a compass, outside temperature, 2 trip odometers, a ‘current’ and ‘average’ mileage display (watch that puppy go to single digits going up hills!), and other handy bits like how many miles are left on your current tank of gas.
It’s a fun vehicle for what is essentially a minivan. The All Wheel Drive has already come in handy with our obscenely steep driveway. We’ll see how the rest of the winter goes.
MythTV Update – Of joysticks, remotes, and keyboards.
I’ve been struggling with the concept of a ‘controller’ for the whole project. It’s easy to think of the Myth box is just like another audio/video component – something that sits in the rack, and you switch / control it via a remote to do, well, audio/video stuff. Watch TV, listen to music, record things.
But really, the machine is an entertainment center. A conglomeration of all that is ‘fun’ on a modern computer. It plays music from a library I configure and update. It is infinately expandable with low-cost off the shelf hardware. It plays games. It integrates with television and cable. It runs Linux. In it’s spare time, it processes Seti@Home data (NB: Not a function of MythTV :).
So given the system’s sort of multifaceted position in the ‘home entertainment’ circle, what’s really the best way to interract with it? It’s not a ‘computer’ in the sense that you’d sit in front of it and type all the time, so a traditional keyboard isn’t really appropriate. On the other hand, there are times when you do need to interract with the system in more detail… searching for music, updating configurations, even websurfing… where a keyboard is really needed. But for the most part, just something that does up/down/left/right, go, and cancel is sufficient.
I also use my Myth box for gaming via XMame and snes9x, two outstanding ‘classic’ emulators (I know of several folks who have a dozen or more emulators configured into their system(s)). This necessitates having a joystick or two connected up pretty much full time. At the moment I’m using a pair of ‘Thrustmaster‘ gamepads (CompUSA, $9 each) hooked up via USB. They work like a champ, and we can play multiplayer games without a problem (aside from jostling the USB hub, which tends to force the USB bus to reset, which may renumber the joystick devices when it re-inits a second or so later – oops, /dev/js0 and /dev/js1 are no longer your joysticks. They’re not /dev/js2 and /dev/js3. Eee!). My problem has been that the various emulators require interaction with MythTV to start or select games, currently handled by my keyboard, then we jump back to the joystick to play the game.
MythTV has already addressed this problem. The MythTV distribution comes with a joystick configuration file called “joystickmenurc.example”. Copying this file into ~mythtv/.mythtv/ (or wherever your root is for your myth user) and restarting the myth front end enables joystick navigation in the Myth menu system. After setting this up last night, I can tell you it changes the whole tv viewing experience. There’s something about controlling your television via a game controller that just tickles me. I can pause viewing (which starts Myth spooling up the current show into the ring buffer), skip forward or back, change channels, as well as navigate the myth menus. I’d like to add some other button triggers to the joystick definition file, but for now, this is a major win.
I think in the end, for my particular setup, I’ll end up with a wireless ‘gamepad’ controller with a bit more functionality than the Thrustmaster simple gamepads. That will fill the need for a ‘remote’ for controlling the tv, a game controller for playing games, and remove some of the need for a wireless keyboard.
Google Pedometer – Another cool Google Maps hack
Yesterday while out here in Pittsburgh, my friend Barbara and I took a nice long walk around the park and streets around CMU, (pictures are here on Flickr). We were out for about 2 1/2 hours, walking through Schenley Park and parts of the campus. Naturally after we got back, I was curious how far we had actually walked.
Barb sat down with with the Gmap Pedometer and cranked out this course, which shows pretty closely the route we walked. Total distance? 4.35 miles. It seemed like longer, but as many have noted, Pittsburgh is hardly flat. We did a lot of up and down traipsing.
The Pedometer site is fantastic, though. I can see using this for planning out bike trips, hikes, measuring distances, anything you can point at a map and say “I walked from HERE to THERE!”.
Just for chuckles, since we tend to take sitewalks on our property in Berlin, I measured how long a walk from the road to the top of the property and back was. Answer: 1.25 miles. A nice walk in the woods 🙂
Yay Google toys!
Because it’s a quiet sunday…
Like this is going to come as a surprise to anyone.
You Cannot Pass
I so want this roadsign leading up to mosaic. It just fits. 8)
Not all is horror in US travel
This weekend I’m travelling out to Pittsburgh to visit a friend for a few days. I normally enjoy travel a lot, though admittedly finding seats for a 6’6″ 260lb super-geek can be a challenge. I’ve learned a few tricks to iron over the rough spots. On the trip out I got to put a few of them into play.
First of all, don’t fly out of the major airports. Boston’s Logan Airport is a MAJOR airport, and small to boot. It’s always crowded, and the folks there are harried. Parking is extremely expensive (yes, I know there’s things like Logan Express, that has it’s own challenges). This weekend I’m flying out of RI’s “TF Green” airport. It’s about an hour south of me (5 miles south of Providence), and is mighty nice all around. Large, comfortable, not insanely crowded, and parking is $10/day.
Second trick is one appropriate for ‘largish’ folks. And I win in one respect because I’m large in a way that can’t be sneered at for overeating or something. You don’t get unusually tall by eating too many twinkies. I usually show up and check in at the automatic checkin whoozie early (an hour and a half early). This gives option 1 for changing my seat assignement to a bulkhead or exit row seat (most checkin kiosks allow you to choose your seat if any are available). If I don’t get a seat that’s good for me there, I try to show up at the gate before the staff arrives. When they first get there, quietly and politely go up and say hi, and ask if there are any bulkhead or exit row seats. I tend to be as friendly and open as possible here – Yes, I’m one of the biomass moving through the system, but recognize me as human, and then note that I’m a good head and a half taller than most people on the planet, and MAYBE you could see my reasoning for wanting a seat that won’t drive my kneecaps into the drink tray.
Generally, once the gate person recognizes my humanness and actual needs, they take the ‘extra effort’ to see what’s available. Here’s a hint. Almost all scheduled flights ‘block out’ 1-2 seats toward the front (bulkhead seats) specifically for crew or ‘unusual’ needs. They stay blocked until the flight fills up. I’ve been on 3 flights now that have had the gate operator say “They’re all blocked out” “Owait, one of these is blocked by the crew, but doesn’t have a passenger in it. I’ll give you that one.” Pleasant flights all.
But that’s not what I came here to tell you about. Another unusual thing happened while at the Providence airport. I had checked my bag (yes, I don’t mind checking bags. Carting 80lbs of luggage onto a small plane is not my idea of fun, even though it ‘technically’ fits in the bins. Myself, my backpack, and my jacket are enough, thankyouvermuch). At any rate, I had checkd my bag, it went through the X-ray thingamajig, and I was on my way over to the security check, when I had a total V-8 moment. I still had my Leatherman hanging on my belt, par usual. Despite stirrings about the TSA relaxing their idiotic requirements on carry-on items, the policy about ‘no pocket knives’ was still in effect. I had this same problem on a trip back from Florida, and ended up mailing my leatherman back to me (at a cost of $18 or so).
I went back to the TSA security guys (who were very friendly when I was there before) and asked if my bag was ‘gone gone gone’ having gone through the little chute already. “Yup, what’s wrong?” they asked. I explained my problem, and the fellow scratched his chin a moment, and he said “Well, just get a small box, we’ll put the knife in that, and just check that as checked in luggage.” “Hey! That’s a great idea! Do you have one? ” “No, but I bet the fellow behind the counter over there does.”
So off I go to the other counter where in fact, they have a small (small = 2x the size of a shoebox – a tad overkill, but hey, this is NOT costing me anything). I take a spare shirt out of my backpack, roll the leatherman in it to keep it fro mrattling around, pack it into the box, and sign it in as checked luggage. Fwoosh! Off it goes!
I thanked the TSA fellow profusely, and asked if there was a good word I could put in somewhere. He rattled off something fairly boilerplate, in a tongue in cheek phrasing, that anything given to him or offered could be considered a bribe, but he did say “After you go through security, there’s a TSA booth just after it. Just tell them something nice.” “Okay!”
So I did. After going through security, I stopped by the TSA booth. They were obviously expecting another abusive annoyed passenger, but I relayed my story, and commented how helpful the fellow had been, and how he had saved me a lot of hassle regarding the item. They were all sort of lost as to what to do, but thanked me for not yelling at them 🙂
The TSA folks in the airports are not hte ones making these ridiculous policy decisions. They’re just doing the job they were hired to do. Yelling at them is not going to help, and they get a lot of it anyway. Having a pleasant experience there was a nice change, for them, and for me.
Frappr Planet-Geek Mappage
Okay, this is too fun. Do you read Planet-Geek? Are you a friend or someone connected up with me in some nefarious way? Drop a marker on the map over on Frappr.com. It only takes a second, and there’s no signup process.
MythTV Project update – Yay real screens!
Well, this weekend saw a bunch of advances on the project. The biggest was figuring out, much to my chagrine, that my Toshiba television did in fact have an S-Video input on it. Doh! I patched that puppy in tout de suite, and got an immediate full color image up on the screen. Hooray!
With that cable patch, we were pretty much set. Movies, live tv, dvd’s, music, etc – all were working properly. We even stopped having the lockup problem on MythMusic when going to full screen visualization.
We’re not 100% there yet. XMame is acting unusually twitchy when it comes to screen resolution. Some resolutions work okay on the external monitor, some do not. I can tweak the xmamerc and get SOME of the games working, but others will stop functioning all together and bomb out on startup.
I think I’m getting closer and closer to the time where I’ll need to do a Myth build from scratch on the box, building the code from source (rather than use Knoppmyth). There’s too many problems with the Knoppmyth distribution that I cannot repair without an upgrade (like broken MythGame sorting, MythWeb upgrades, etc).
But for now, I have a stable, useable box.
MythTV Project update – Bad card, Good games!
I had chalked this weekend to put in some work on the MythTV Project. As of mid-day Saturday, it’s been a mixed bag of results.
I received my replacement MX4000 AGP card from Newegg right as scheduled, and proceeded to install it into my system. The problem happened when I tried to remove the old card which had gotten pretty badly wedged into the slot. I believe I ended up cracking the slot (an AGP card is a ‘double-depth’ card, which means it goes pretty far into the motherboard). I installed the new MX4000 card, and apparently didn’t quite get it in place properly, because after 5 minutes of use, I was getting noise on the screen and corrupted video. No amount of swapping, reseating, fiddling, or whatever has solved the problem, so I’m RMAing the card back to Newegg, and trying a new one. Alas, I’ve had to go back to my old nVidia card in the meantime.
On the good side, I did some more work with MythGame the plugin for MythTV that acts as a front end to XMame, a wonderful arcade emulator. After populating the machine with the ROMS I had (all legally, natch), it took some noodling to get MythGame and XMame to configure properly. I’ve narrowed down a lot of the problems to the fact that the KnoppMyth folks rolled a ‘mid-development’ version of Myth out with their last ISO image, so many things are only half completed. I won’t be able to use the new ROM SQL database stuff yet, but ‘big browsing’ (using just filenames) -is- working.
I also picked up a pair of Thrustmaster (yes, thats really the name) USB joysticks from CompUSA ($9 each. Cmon), and Debian Linux picked them up automatically. I had to tell XMame to use the joystick (putting ‘joytype 1’ in /etc/xmame/xmamerc), as well as some other minor tunings (always run fullscreen, here’s where the rom dir is, etc etc), but after that it’s been working great. I have to decide whether the handheld controllers would be best, or if something like an X-Gaming controller is needed. However, in the time it’s taken to write this article, my friend and my wife and my son are now gathered around said system playing Gauntlet II on the handheld controllers. That may have answered my question for me.
Minor update – Something is amiss in my USB setup. The joysticks have a tendency to disappear off the bus and not reinitialize. A hard reboot seems to fix it, but not exactly an optimal situation. Stay tuned.
“Wizard is about to die!”. Ahhh.
Create your own lighting controller
So a few days ago I posted a link to a fellow who had programmed all his christmas lights in time with a Trans Siberian Orchestra track. I sort of mused, being the geeky fellow that I am, how this could be done in a reasonable budget.
Hackaday to the rescue! They pointed me at this wonderful site that gives full detailed howtos on building controllers to drive your own lights display.
Not that I need another project right now.