Re: OT? Shipping issues?
Alex Hewitt wrote: Dan Jenkins wrote: Ben Scott wrote: On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 2:59 PM, Hewitt_Tech hewitt_t...@comcast.net wrote: Recently I've noticed that both major overnight package delivery companies have been damaging packages. Other than the Recently part, your experience matches mine. Shipping eats boxes, but this isn't news. My favorite was a story told to me at UNH, where a rather expensive new computer arrived with holes in the box and BB shot rolling around inside. Apparently, someone had used it for target practice. This was no more recently than 1996. To be honest we've had largely good luck in shipping, except for a few instances. My favorite story was when our regular man-in-brown sheepishly brought in what appeared to be an accordion made of metal - the sole surviving piece of the server that had fallen out of the back of his truck and was slammed by a tractor trailer into oncoming traffic where it was hit by a dump truck and knocked into a swamp where it sank. They did not dispute the claim. Nothing in the last twenty years has equaled that, so I consider the other incidents minor annoyances. -- Dan Jenkins, Rastech Inc. ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ And now for the rest of the story... Fedex has a policy where they need to inspect the package for damage. So they picked up the package from the recipient in Florida. They then inspected it but ignored my instructions to return it to the delivery point. They instead returned it to the authorized shipping point here in Manchester which is a Mailbox type operation. I didn't find this out until I called Fedex and they told me the package had been dropped off in Manchester yesterday. Here's where it starts to get good - Fedex tells me that I can't file a claim. They say the Mailbox place needs to do it. I stopped at the Mailbox place and when the nice lady (she really is nice) handed it to me I heard a clunk. I told her I needed to open it up and see what was making the noise. When I took the side panel off I see the 1 TB 3.5 inch hard drive laying in the bottom of the case! They had managed to rip the hard drive and it's retaining sleeve out of the case. The drive had it's Sata signal cable connector sheared off. The CMOS battery mount on the motherboard looked like a rear ended car and the battery was in different part of the case. The motherboard also has a number of crushed header connectors (USB). So on the way back to Manchester Fedex more or less totaled the system. To add insult to injury I'm now stuck waiting for the Mailbox place to make the claim... -Alex P.S. Although I haven't had a chance to test yet the only things that survived where 4 memory modules, the CPU chip and the fan/heat sink. ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ The corner mailbox place just called to let me know that Fedex won't honor my damage claim. They say wasn't packed properly. So much for using factory supplied cartons. Kind of an expensive way to find out that is the insurer and the shipper are the same entity, you're going to get hosed. Cost me $350 in parts plus $40 for the nasty shipping and doesn't include anything for all the wasted time. -Alex ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: OT? Shipping issues?
On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 10:29 AM, Alex Hewitt hewitt_t...@comcast.net wrote: The corner mailbox place just called to let me know that Fedex won't honor my damage claim. Do you ship a lot of stuff with FedEx? Can you total up a number for annual payments? If so, find out who the customer sales rep is in the area, contact them, and tell them all that money will be going to UPS in the future. In general, I find complaining through sales is sometimes effective for non-responsive companies. Of course, you might want to follow through on the proposed threat even if they do honor your claim. ... [If] the insurer and the shipper are the same entity, you're going to get hosed. Indeed. -- Ben ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: OT? Shipping issues?
In general, I find complaining through sales is sometimes effective for non-responsive companies. I knew of many, many issues of non-responsive companies that were solved quickly by contacting your sales representativeparticularly one that was commission based. Unfortunately this happens less and less as you have fewer sales representatives that are assigned to your account, and more and more sales droids that call on huge numbers of customers. The best salesman I ever had was one that knew very little about computers. He would just hand over the catalog and price list to me, then go and get whatever technical expertise I needed to make a decision about purchasing the product. Then, when I did have an issue he went and worked the problem. They eventually took him away from me, promoted him, and made him a manager to teach other sales people how to sell. (sigh) md ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: OT? Shipping issues?
Ben Scott wrote: On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 11:55 AM, Alex Hewitt hewitt_t...@comcast.net wrote: I'll probably just send the whole thing USPS. I don't know how the USPS insures but I do know that it's a separate item so maybe it will mean something. I rather doubt it will make a significant difference. I've had stuff destroyed by USPS, too, and that's really what you care about. Remember, your package is one of literally millions per day, being tossed around by people who often aren't paid well or treated well by management or their customers, and machinery which prolly isn't maintained well, if it was designed well in the first place. This is not a system conductive towards success. Engineer appropriately. Your best bet is simply to pack things *very* well. At a minimum, double box -- use two shipping cartons, in addition to whatever packaging the item itself comes in. Use thick cardboard for both shipping cartons. Make sure all spaces are filled with packing material, not just an air gap. Tape all seams of both cartons well. Cover it in large, dayglo Fragile stickers. If you're really worried, use a wooden crate for the outer container. I know Pak Mail (before they got bought by whoever) used to offer independent insurance if they packed it. Something like that would be your best bet if you want reliable insurance coverage. As always, *carefully read the fine print of the insurance agreement*. -- Ben ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ I concluded that breaking the system into small pieces and then double packing would be the way to go. The computer case will be directly shipped to Florida but the rest of the system will be assembled, disk built and then taken apart again. I'll put the motherboard/cpu/heat sink/memory into one shipment and the drive in a separate shipment. It appears that the chances of things arriving in usable condition is inversely proportional to the size and weight of the packages. -Alex ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: OT? Shipping issues?
On 03/24/2009 10:29 AM, Alex Hewitt wrote: The corner mailbox place just called to let me know that Fedex won't honor my damage claim. They say wasn't packed properly. So much for using factory supplied cartons. Kind of an expensive way to find out that is the insurer and the shipper are the same entity, you're going to get hosed. Cost me $350 in parts plus $40 for the nasty shipping and doesn't include anything for all the wasted time. I learned a while back that it is the shipper that is responsible for filing claims. We had a couple of cases where UPS failed to deliver some stuff to my wife (for her ebay store). Our regular driver told her that the substitute driver probably left it at the wrong address. My wife then started to file a claim, and was then told that the shipper must file the claim. She contacted the shipper who did file the claim, and refunded the money to my wife. If you can get the fedex documents, try to file a claim on the manufacturer. Certainly, FedEx would be responsible if they mishandled it, but if the item was shipped in improper packaging, then it is the shippers fault, not Fedex. -- Jerry Feldman g...@blu.org Boston Linux and Unix PGP key id: 537C5846 PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846 signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: OT? Shipping issues?
Since we are talking about packing, when I was in Viet Nam one of my buddies would get packages packed in pop corn. Since he got a lot of glass containers (such as booze), I don't remember a single broken bottle as it would have been a tragedy of major proportions as most of the guys liked to drink themselves shitfaced when they returned back to base after a day of combat assaults. -- Jerry Feldman g...@blu.org Boston Linux and Unix PGP key id: 537C5846 PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846 signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: OT? Shipping issues?
Jerry Feldman wrote: On 03/24/2009 10:29 AM, Alex Hewitt wrote: The corner mailbox place just called to let me know that Fedex won't honor my damage claim. They say wasn't packed properly. So much for using factory supplied cartons. Kind of an expensive way to find out that is the insurer and the shipper are the same entity, you're going to get hosed. Cost me $350 in parts plus $40 for the nasty shipping and doesn't include anything for all the wasted time. I learned a while back that it is the shipper that is responsible for filing claims. We had a couple of cases where UPS failed to deliver some stuff to my wife (for her ebay store). Our regular driver told her that the substitute driver probably left it at the wrong address. My wife then started to file a claim, and was then told that the shipper must file the claim. She contacted the shipper who did file the claim, and refunded the money to my wife. If you can get the fedex documents, try to file a claim on the manufacturer. Certainly, FedEx would be responsible if they mishandled it, but if the item was shipped in improper packaging, then it is the shippers fault, not Fedex. ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ Yup. Fedex took the claim but then said that the shipper (in this case the Mailbox place on the corner) needed to file the claim. The shipping carton was the one provided by Antec. The box was a heavy corrugated carton with foam inserts to cushion the computer case. The damage was more or less a crushing with the case buckled along the vertical axis. It would take quite a bit of force to buckle a rolled steel case but they managed to do it. The internal damage as noted previously was turning a hard drive into a missile. Again the hard drive was ripped out of the caddy that contained it. The caddy used a spring mechanism to hold the drive into the drive bay. You need to squeeze the steel strips on either side of the drive to pull it free from the drive bay. If you tried to do this by pulling on it you would have a tough go. -Alex P.S. The destruction of the system was a two step process. Some damage as it made it's way to Florida and then heavy damage on the way back stopping somewhere for inspection. The Mailbox person used to work for one of the big shippers and said that once a package has a Damaged label placed on it you can expect much rougher handling because the logic is It's already damaged so what the hell. I would have been ahead of the game if I had not filed a claim and the system would be in use right now because it booted and ran when it got to the customer. ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: CMS
2009/3/24 Drew Van Zandt drew.vanza...@gmail.com: Using Joomla currently; it seems to work well. Some plugins were required to make it do what we wanted, though. In particular the built-in file upload tool is crap, and there are form submission and tabbed-page plugins that are quite handy. Nontechnical folks can add, technical sorts can still access HTML to make tweaks if they feel the need. (It doesn't tie your hands too much.) --DTVZ Modulo the specific plugins, that's an excellent description of Drupal as well. -- Roger ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: CMS
Lori Hitchcock wrote: Working with a company developing a website in a LAMP environment and starting to look at CMS. Hearing good and bad about both Joomla and Drupal. The needs to be very simple for non-techs to add content. Does anyone have any advice or experience with either of these? Does any one have a positive experience with another CMS? Hi Lori: We've used both Drupal and Plone recently. Some thoughts: - both reasonably complete CMS systems. - Plone has a tough learning curve -- but can be pretty easy for the non-techs once it is set up. - Drupal has less of a learning curve -- and also relatively easy to use once set up. - Drupal seems to hit the wall with complex environments a bit earlier than Plone does (e.g., Plone more complex but also more capable.) - Plone doesn't get security update alerts every week. - Plone community has a greater focus on web standards than Drupal community (core products not bad, Drupal add-ons are all over the map). - Drupal has a much larger collection of half-done, partially implemented, done some time soon now plug-ins. - Plone tends to have fewer plug-ins (and 1-3 of any particular selection, like blogging), but they tend to be maintained (there are, of course, always exceptions to this). - Drupal will deploy just about anywhere you can get PHP and MySQL. - Plone requires more specialized hosting (though places like Webfaction.com provide excellent service). - Plone built on Zope which is probably the most complex environment in the Python community. - Fairly active Plone community here in the northeast. - Drupal built on PHP and you can find PHP programmers just about everywhere. One big difference between the two is ecommerce. Drupal has a nice Ubercart system which is fairly flexible (long as you don't need multi-language checkouts). Plone community working on their first eCommerce plug in which is doing well, but nowhere near as functional as something like Drupal. If you need a heave e-commerce component, then a pure Plone solution is probably out of the picture for the moment. Above are all my personal opinions to date. I don't consider myself an expert by any stretch in either of these. Your mileage may, as always, vary. --Ray ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: CMS
Lori Hitchcock wrote: Working with a company developing a website in a LAMP environment and starting to look at CMS. Hearing good and bad about both Joomla and Drupal. The needs to be very simple for non-techs to add content. Does anyone have any advice or experience with either of these? Does any one have a positive experience with another CMS? ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ Lori, you really need to first understand what you require the CMS to actually do before making a selection. Joomla and Drupal both tend to be fairly hefty in terms of capability. You may not actually need all of that though. For clients with simpler needs I often will use Word Press because it provides the essentials of a CMS, is simple to use for non-technical people, and provides a good level of granularity with regard to content control mechanisms so that different sections of the site can be assigned to different people and the accounts can be prevented from editing other user's sections of the site. Here are some of the key things I'd look for: Do you have one person editing content or many? Do you need content editing access controls? Do you need e-commerce capability? Do you need a blog? Do you have existing content that you'll convert? Do you handle lots of images? Do you need to handle video or audio? Do you want site visitors to be able to interact with the site? Such as commenting, responses, help requests, etc. Do you need the site to integrate with other internal systems? What types of systems? Hope this helps! Dan ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Fwd: New local Linux Kernel Contract...
...must put up with management that still wants Word .doc format documents... ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
a Joomla! view from LUGOR territory in Western NY [WAS Re: CMS ]
Hi Ray... [and Lori and et al in GNHLUG ] _*Regarding CMS's:*_ I've been thinking about and experimenting with /Joomla!/ for my personal legacy site www.helmers.com http://www.helmers.com/ since last summer thanks to our former *_/BYTE/_* editorial colleague Mark Dahmke (co-owner of the ISP firm /Information Analytics, Inc./ in Lincoln Nebraska.) Mark followed up his suggestion of /Joomla!/ with my access to his /Joomla!/ beta site on which I started to experiment. After diddling around to see what /Joomla! /could do for the rest of 2008, I finally got serious about creating my new site at the end of December. While not obvious to me when Mark suggested /Joomla!/ to me last July, WWW research and then experimenting with a beta version of my now on line /Joomla! /site has shown this CMS to provide a great way to create an editorial oriented site ala a personal magazine. I am back in the meme of self-publishing that led to my _*/BYTE/*_ magazine at the start of the last quarter of the last century. With /Joomla!/, I use HTML output directories of articles created offline with /Open Office Writer/, uploaded to my site with /FileZilla/'s FTP, and then -- here is a /non-naive user/ part -- link each article's one .html file in the site's directory tree to its menu item by hand wiring that article's one /.html/ file name/address on the site to the corresponding /Joomla!/ menu item. That's the one relatively minor /naive user/ gotcha about /Joomla!/ as I use the system. The results far outweigh learning that one rote trick to use /Joomla!/ as presently implemented in the 1.5.9 version. The neatest thing from the point of view of my site's WWW visitors is the advantage of using their browsers when reading my articles. My internal /OOWriter/ bookmarks in the source document automatically become active hyperlinks once the HTML output reaches the WWW site. For good examples of my bookmark hyperlink technique presently posted, see my articles The Importance of (Emergency Backup) Power http://www.helmers.com/images/stories/CH_Main_M/Imp_E_B_Pwr/Importance_of_%28Emergency_Backup%29_Power.html or Compressor Time Box http://www.helmers.com/images/stories/Projects/C_T_B/Compressor_Timer_Box.html Both these articles use this technique for lists of sections and lists of images and occasional random internal links in text. /OOWriter/ external links to valid WWW addresses from an article automatically become active valid hyperlinks when the article is posted. (While not written and posted on my site yet, this is key to re-creating my article on a list of favorite WWW sites.) Use of a true WWW browser to read an otherwise static non-web article presentation is the major innovation that I have created. Unlike reading an article from /OOWriter /or even from a .pdf Adobe Acrobat form, the browser has a back button whose scope goes homogeneously from the on-line posted article all the way back to originating place on the WWW site! The article thus integrated with the whole WWW! My offline editorial method was not obvious when I first started looking at /Joomla!/ last summer. By January I had perfected the technique so that it works smoothly, though it is definitely not automatic and may be above the mythical /naive user/'s abilities. My /Joomla!/ beta site became the real www.helmers.com http://www.helmers.com/ on March 7 when I changed DNS pointers in close e-mail cooperation with Mark. For a while, my site will keep evolving as I add queued and new materials not yet posted. I still have un-answered questions about certain aspects of /Joomla!/ but at least I have base from which to ask questions... Then there is always the unknown of moving beyond the default site template :-) Live long and prosper Carl Helmers c...@helmers.com www.helmers.com http://www.helmers.com/ 585 . 624 . 9841 Raymond Cote wrote: Lori Hitchcock wrote: Working with a company developing a website in a LAMP environment and starting to look at CMS. Hearing good and bad about both Joomla and Drupal. The needs to be very simple for non-techs to add content. Does anyone have any advice or experience with either of these? Does any one have a positive experience with another CMS? Hi Lori: We've used both Drupal and Plone recently. Some thoughts: - both reasonably complete CMS systems. - Plone has a tough learning curve -- but can be pretty easy for the non-techs once it is set up. - Drupal has less of a learning curve -- and also relatively easy to use once set up. - Drupal seems to hit the wall with complex environments a bit earlier than Plone does (e.g., Plone more complex but also more capable.) - Plone doesn't get security update alerts every week. - Plone community has a greater focus on web standards than Drupal community (core products not bad, Drupal add-ons
Re: Very important information!
Paul Lussier p.luss...@comcast.net wrote: I just came across this very important fact: The modern rack unit used in computing, i.e. the U in 1U, is by pure coincidence exactly equal to the vershok, an obsolete Russian measurement of length. Just thought y'all should know ;) Let's see: $ units 2411 units, 71 prefixes, 33 nonlinear units You have: 1 vershok Unknown unit 'vershok' I'm shocked. A unit of length it doesn't know about?? - Jim Van Zandt ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Very important information!
The modern rack unit used in computing, i.e. the U in 1U, is by pure coincidence exactly equal to the vershok, an obsolete Russian measurement of length. 1U or RU for Rack Unit, but Russia is .ru Coincidence? You decide. I'm shocked. A unit of length it doesn't know about?? Patches Welcome! -- Bill n1...@arrl.net bill.n1...@gmail.com ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Building / Buying a MythTV box
On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 12:22 PM, Greg Rundlett (freephile) g...@freephile.com wrote: I was thinking of getting the Dell Studio Hybrid ... or the System76 Koala Mini ... Be warned that a lot of those itty bitty boxes don't have the graphics horsepower to decode high-def on the fly and throw it up on to the screen. Or so I'm told. ... Hauppauge WinTV HVR 1800 ... Support for that particular card seems to be very new. I''d look for people reporting in-depth hands-on experience with it before buying it. (Yes, I saw that you already bought it. :) ) I've got an HD-5500 from pcHDTV (http://www.pchdtv.com/) PCI card that I never got around to using. These were designed for Linux (Windows drivers provided but not supported, IIRC), and are reported to work very well. I'd be willing to sell it at this point. Mail me off-list if so. I'm re-thinking using my existing PC for the backend b/c it's only a 1.2GHz Athlon with 768MB of RAM with similarly old motherboard and only USB 1 My understanding is that the storage backend doesn't need a lot of CPU or RAM -- just hard disk, and maybe gig Ethernet if you want multiple high-def streams at once. If the storage backend is also doing capture, you're still okay as long as the capture device has a supported hardware encoder. -- Ben ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Fwd: New local Linux Kernel Contract...
On Tue, 2009-03-24 at 17:55 -0400, James R. Van Zandt wrote: ...must put up with management that still wants Word .doc format documents... Try OpenOffice.org... it actually works really really well now (contrary to the notorious history of the 2.x series). In fact, I've found it to be the savior for those numerous people who are forced by others to have to read OOXML documents (.docx) but already shelled out for Office 2003. OpenOffice.org will open these. -- Coleman Kane ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: CMS
Lori Hitchcock wrote: Working with a company developing a website in a LAMP environment and starting to look at CMS. Hearing good and bad about both Joomla and Drupal. The needs to be very simple for non-techs to add content. Does anyone have any advice or experience with either of these? Does any one have a positive experience with another CMS? Lori: Both Joomla and Drupal are fairly capable content management systems, and with great power comes, no, no that, comes a bit of overhead. Both have made a good effort at user-friendliness, but they're still non-trivial. As others have already answered, there are plugins and add-ons to simplify some of those tasks, and both products have active communities for peer support. For sophisticated sites, it's not unreasonable to bring in a consultant or train someone in-house as the adminstrator. What exactly is the company using the CMS for? If they really want a support forum or a multi-user blog or an issue tracking system, I'll bet many members of the forum will have suggestions. If they're locking for a document-management system, there might be other alternatives that are better tuned for that, again, depending on the exact situation. If they'd like to learn more about Drupal and are local, there's the first ever meetup of the NH Drupal Group next month at the Concord Monitor April 13th (http://groups.drupal.org/node/20441). Note the both the Monitor and New Hampshire Public Radio have pretty extensive Drupal sites. There are several Drupal practitioners among GNHLUG members, and we've seen presentations of Drupal at a couple meetings. Joomla! has also been presented several times to various GNHLUG groups, most notably by Barry North of Compass Design and JoomlaShack (http://www.compassdesigns.net/ and http://www.joomlashack.com/) who's based in Vermont and offers Joomla! training locally. -- Ted Roche Ted Roche Associates, LLC http://www.tedroche.com ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Building / Buying a MythTV box
On Tuesday 24 March 2009 20:48:59 Ben Scott wrote: On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 12:22 PM, Greg Rundlett (freephile) g...@freephile.com wrote: I was thinking of getting the Dell Studio Hybrid ... or the System76 Koala Mini ... Be warned that a lot of those itty bitty boxes don't have the graphics horsepower to decode high-def on the fly and throw it up on to the screen. Or so I'm told. The Dell Studio Hybrid does (I have one, watching HDTV on it now). Don't know about the other. ... Hauppauge WinTV HVR 1800 ... Support for that particular card seems to be very new. I''d look for people reporting in-depth hands-on experience with it before buying it. (Yes, I saw that you already bought it. :) ) I have an HVR-1800 also, it works just fine (tested w/2.6.27 and 2.6.29). My understanding is that the storage backend doesn't need a lot of CPU or RAM -- just hard disk, and maybe gig Ethernet if you want multiple high-def streams at once. Yup. Although its nice to have some cpu for commercial flagging and transcoding. If the storage backend is also doing capture, you're still okay as long as the capture device has a supported hardware encoder. Remember: for (non-encrypted) hdtv and digital standard-def stuff, no hardware encoder needed, you're just dumping the mpeg2 transport stream (or individual program stream if you have pid filtering enabled) to disk. -- Jarod Wilson ja...@wilsonet.com ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Building / Buying a MythTV box
On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 9:41 PM, Jarod Wilson ja...@wilsonet.com wrote: On Tuesday 24 March 2009 20:48:59 Ben Scott wrote: On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 12:22 PM, Greg Rundlett (freephile) g...@freephile.com wrote: I was thinking of getting the Dell Studio Hybrid ... or the System76 Koala Mini ... Be warned that a lot of those itty bitty boxes don't have the graphics horsepower to decode high-def on the fly and throw it up on to the screen. Or so I'm told. The Dell Studio Hybrid does (I have one, watching HDTV on it now). Don't know about the other. Because Jarod said earlier that he had the Dell Studio Hybrid, I started looking more closely at it. I also remembered seeing adverts in Linux Journal for LogicSupply, and found that they have some nice hardware -- certainly a very open and Linux-friendly company to do business with. So, with that I setup a comparison of the options http://freephile.com/wiki/index.php/MythTV Also, I'm right now adding in third (and fourth?) option(s) for a DIY build from Newegg Since I may not initially purchase an HDTV, it's making the HDHomeRun look even more attractive as a tuner device because that way I can even watch video on my wife's Window's laptop which happens to be in the kitchen. p.s. I'll certainly add my wiki content over at mythtv.org when I'm done. ~ greg ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Building / Buying a MythTV box
On Tuesday 24 March 2009 22:58:48 Greg Rundlett (freephile) wrote: On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 9:41 PM, Jarod Wilson ja...@wilsonet.com wrote: On Tuesday 24 March 2009 20:48:59 Ben Scott wrote: On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 12:22 PM, Greg Rundlett (freephile) g...@freephile.com wrote: I was thinking of getting the Dell Studio Hybrid ... or the System76 Koala Mini ... Be warned that a lot of those itty bitty boxes don't have the graphics horsepower to decode high-def on the fly and throw it up on to the screen. Or so I'm told. The Dell Studio Hybrid does (I have one, watching HDTV on it now). Don't know about the other. Because Jarod said earlier that he had the Dell Studio Hybrid, I started looking more closely at it. I also remembered seeing adverts in Linux Journal for LogicSupply, and found that they have some nice hardware -- certainly a very open and Linux-friendly company to do business with. So, with that I setup a comparison of the options http://freephile.com/wiki/index.php/MythTV Nb: your cost for the Dell Studio Hybrid is a bit high. Well, at least if you're willing to look at the Dell outlet store for one. The one I have cost me $409 delivered -- MA tax included. :) Mine is a Core 2 Duo @ 2.16GHz, 2GB RAM, 160GB HD, 802.11n Broadcom wifi card, CD/DVD burner, wireless keyboard and mouse included. -- Jarod Wilson ja...@wilsonet.com ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
