Digital Rants

So glad I did not search everywhere for the super JB Hifi special Harmony 1000i, because I now own a Harmony One, thanks to my special some one .

Above is how it looks like in the original packaging. (Disclaimer: Fake unboxing 'cause I had already removed the remote from the packaging prior to have a play with it. )

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At the moment I am using MinGW and MSYS to port some linux applications over to Windows.

The default MSYS shell appears to be sh and I prefer bash. Here's how I changed the batch file to load bash instead of sh (simple really). Locate the following text:

-sl 2500 -fg %FGCOLOR% -bg %BGCOLOR% -sr -fn Courier-12 -tn msys -geometry 80x25 -e /bin/sh --login -

and change it to

-sl 2500 -fg %FGCOLOR% -bg %BGCOLOR% -sr -fn Courier-12 -tn msys -geometry 80x25 -e /bin/bash --login -

and

start %WD%sh --login -

to

start %WD%bash --login -


Notice for the rxvt part there's a 80x25? If you want a bigger window, change that number.

Note that I'm using MSYS-1.0.11.exe.

Link: http://www.jbhifionline.com.au/dvd/dvd-genres/action-adventure/watchmen-blu-ray/438555

Found this in the forum. If true, this will mean we in Australia are getting the Director's Cut!

So it's true there's no BD-Live, i.e. not be able to chat with the directory. But if this information proved to be real, I'd be getting this instead of renting it. DTS HD MA, 3+hrs of content.. drool, only if it's real...

Time will tell, a few more days to go.

Update: 30 July 2009: Click here.

The Thecus N7700 is factory installed with 1GB of DDR2 667 RAM. I have updated it to 2GB, all you have to do is remove the back panel. Here's how:

1. Unscrew the back panel, be careful when doing this as the 2 exhaust fans has leads to the motherboard. Remove the fan leads from the motherboard. (You may want to swap the fans)
2. Somewhere near the drive cage there should be two thumb screws. Remove that.
3. Slowly slide out the SATA backplate and the motherboard.
4. Remove the SATA back plate
5. Slide out the mother board furthur until you can reach the 2 DIMM slots (Be careful of the power supply wires)
6. Replace memory (make sure they are securely connected) and have enough clearance from the drive cage.
7. Reverse steps to assemble
8. Boot up and see if everything still works
9. Needs firmware 2.1.09. The older firmware only sees about 64Kb extra than stock

The process is really straight forward, but do at your own risk.

As far as I can tell, there's no real world performance boost. But at least the OS has a huge cache now.

Just as I am about to send this.. Hailstones were raining in!!!

See the van in the middle of the picture? The lawn both sides are covered in hail.. It was green, and now it's white! Man the sight of the hailstones pouring down is amazing. I hope my car is all right.

What a day to be out there right now... Must hurt a lot for those walking out there...

Did not check my car yet. Hope it's ok...

It's been raining on and off like crazy in Perth for the past few days now.. And it will be the same for the next few I think.

The pond is filled up to the brink.. nice!

So after some experimentation I got smooth playback working again in MythTV. It turns out the timing could be a problem.

MythTV has two mechanisms for timing, one is via usleep, and other other via OpenGL. In theory when I use usleep and sync to VBlank, it should work. But I get tearing (The blitter option is not available for my card somewhow, and I never understand what that feature is).

The second method is OpenGL but I have no idea how it does it behind the scenes..

Anyway, funny thing which I just found out. If I check on sync with OpenGL in the settings menu, MythTV will use usleep. And if I uncheck that option, it will use OpenGL. Kind of counter intuitive, but now my timing is done via OpenGL now and the video appears alot smoother (and no apparent tearing can be seen from my usual sitting distance).

However.... I'm not sure it's using VDPAU anymore.. Because the logs did not mention anything about VDPAU. Will double check that again when I get back I guess. I guess at the end of the day I'd be ok if that doesn't work, because right now the video playback is a lot better now (if not perfect) than before.

Always had a problem with VirtualBox. SMP will crash my VM. So I updated to v3.0.2 hoping it will solve the issue. And I think it has, so fingers crossed there.

With that out of the way, I changed my scaling_governor for all my CPUs from "Performance to "ondemand". The idea is that the CPU will run at a low er clock speed when idle and up to full frequency under load.

And you know what? It worked, it finally worked! I can never get this to work in VMWare Server (VMWare VMs always run at the lowest clockspeed). Not so with VirtualBox 3.0.2! The CPUs clocks goes up and down and it seems to work.

Kudos again to Sun for such a wonderful software. VirtualBox is everything I wanted, and more.