We’re trying to clear out the freezer before getting more food tomorrow. Thus today’s lunch has a “freezer” theme – frozen pizza, frozen vegetables, frozen dessert…
In the back of the freezer was strange aluminum tub containing a rectangular cake. The label says “Pound Cake”, yet it’s only 10.75 ounces. I’m confused.
Maybe it’ll be good with some recently thawed strawberries.
Over the weekend we went to Namron Protectorate again. Yup, it’s that time of year again! Last year’s description still mostly applies, so go back and read it now.
Waiting a few minutes for you to finish reading…
Okay, on with the story. This year we set up a booth to sell soap and belly-dancer coin scarves. I haven’t counted all the cash yet, but I think sales were a little better what I had expected. That’s not bad, really, considering how I forgot to bring a few of our more popular scents.
What’s exciting is that my soap has been developing a fan base, and people are starting to make requests for specific scents. Bars of my soap are starting to turn up in prize baskets for some of the group’s competitions. I really should try to finish the online ordering system so they won’t have to wait for the next nearby SCA event.
Packing the car took longer than expected, so we got there late Friday night. There too little light to choose a booth site, so we just set up our sleeping tent and went to bed. Sleeping wasn’t easy — it was cold. I should have brought more blankets.
Around 3:30 I got up for a bathroom break and discovered that the warm feast hall had turned into a party zone. People were milling about, chatting, and playing board games. I had to be up early, though, so I said goodnight and went back into the chill.
Saturday had perfect weather. After closing shop for the night, I sat through Evening Court. Usually I don’t bother, because Court tends to be painfully tedious.
I thought it might be different this time. The Baron and Baroness were stepping down the next day, and there were some final awards to be given out in their names. It was indeed an emotionally moving thing to see, but I was still bored. Especially after my mug ran dry. But that’s Court for ya.
Speaking of which, I didn’t have time to finish any exciting new homebrew projects before the event this year. So I just threw something together. Here’s the recipe:
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- Hot Stuff -
1 liter of the cheapest available vodka
1 pound of Red Hots cinnamon candy
1 cup of sugar
3/4 liter of water
Simmer the candy and sugar in water until they dissolve. Skim the wax from the surface. Allow to cool until it’s just warm, and then combine it with the vodka in a bottle. Allow it to age for a few days.
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Okay, so the drink was meant as a silly homebrewer’s joke. But it tasted good!
The sky opened and loosed a torrent of rain around 2AM. It never stopped raining. Luckily our sleeping tent only leaked a little, and the merchant tent was unaffected. But we had to break camp on Sunday in the cold rain. That was no fun at all. The rain also meant that we couldn’t open for business on Sunday as planned. Packing up early caused us to miss the baronial transition court as well.
But we got home okay. The mood was much better after lunch and hot showers. The 600-1600 period is a fun time to play, but it’s always nice to come back home to the 21st century.
The Tivo is calling out for program listings again!
After rummaging around in a box of electronic parts, I finally found the cable used to program my old Pronto remote control. Apparently this cable is very similar to the Tivo type. That makes sense electrically; when making any serial connection, at a miminum there will be 3 wires — TX, RX, and some kind of reference voltage or ground. It works between the Tivo and an external modem with the addition of a gender changer and a null-modem adapter.
I also started an experiment with KnoppMyth, a free linux CD that simplifies installing MythTV. I tried to install it on a spare hard drive in Dana’s PC, using my old bt848-based video capture card as a TV tuner. I had trouble making it work with my nice zippy Serial ATA disk, so after a while I set it aside in favor of my older Parallel ATA backup drive.
Finally it was installed. Not quite easy enough for non-engineers, but much better than I had expected… Then I realized that I had told the installer to use eth0 instead of eth1 for its main network connection. It can’t get programming information from Zap2it without internet access. I’m currently stuck figuring out how to change it back to the other network interface. So if you’re building your own MythTV box, be sure to get a system board with only one ethernet port!
Assuming relatively “standard” hardware, though, KnoppMyth works pretty well. I’ll have to play with it more later.
A few weeks ago an electrical storm came through and fried some of our computer stuff. Never mind that there were surge protectors and and uninterruptable power supply… Some jolts can get through almost anything.
Since then I’ve been fixing the damage. Our spare ATX power supply turned out to be completely interchangeable with the dead one in Dana’s PC — and it has a higher power rating. That was the easy part.
The storm disabled the ethernet jacks in our wireless base station. After trying to get it to work again with no luck, I had to get an old NAT box out of storage and use the Airport Express as a wireless bridge. This worked until our new base station arrived. It’s a Buffalo WHR-G54S, which I chose because it’s one of the cheapest base stations that can be reprogrammed to run DD-WRT instead of its native firmware.
The new base station is working well so far. DD-WRT is easy to manage. It supports WDS in a way that’s compatible with the Airport Express, which finally allows us to use the little white box as a remote wireless bridge. This means that any future home theater equipment with ethernet ports can join our house network.
That’s important. The lightning storm also knocked out the modem in our Tivo.
The way the modem was damaged wasn’t apparent until it tried to call out a few days later. I happened to pick up the phone at the same time. Of course I heard modem noise, so I hung up again. Normally in this situation the Tivo automatically ends the call and hangs up.
It tried! But due to the damaged modem, it never actually hung up. It just sat silently off the hook for several days. Not only were calls for program listings impossible, but we thought something was wrong with our phone line. Repair crews had been doing something to the utility pole out back, so it was possible that they had accidentally disconnected us.
After figuring out what was really wrong and unplugging the modem from the phone jack, I started working on an alternate plan. First I made a crude prototype of a serial cable. This took a while; Tivo serial ports look suspiciously like stereo headphone jacks. Finally I was able to make it talk to a terminal program on a PC laptop.
Next I tried to make it call out on an external serial modem. Despite having a working modem (I tested it again with a PC) and following instructions found online, I couldn’t get it to call out. Adding and removing null modem adapters didn’t help.
The current plan is to set up a PPP server on the laptop, which is already on our network. Then the Tivo can connect to it over the serial cable to get online and download program data. I’m still working on that.
Eventually, though, we’ll probably have to add ethernet to the Tivo. Two different Series 1 ethernet cards are available; one is ethernet only and the other includes a memory cache to speed up internal database operations. I’m not sure which one we’ll end up getting. While digging around in the Tivo I might upgrade its hard drive.
Hey, it’s way out of warranty anyway, and it has a lifetime service subscription. A new Tivo would set us back at least $300 just for a 3 year subscription. The cable company’s DVR has a similar cost. If it’s going to cost that much, we might as well save up and build a dedicated computer based on open source software and free tv listing services.
But that’s another story. For now we’ll do what we can with the Tivo.
