Rhymes with Toaster

Music: Code Monkey by Jonathan Coulton

One year ago today, I was playing around with Automator in OSX and decided to create a script that would automatically upload my latest picture in ichat to flickr. Every time I change my chat icon in iChat I upload it, (mostly) daily. It has gotten to the point where it's taking over my photostream and I'm just ready to quit, or at least slow way down.

So what better way to celebrate the one year anniversary of my first ichat2flickr picture than a nice 90 second slideshow of all 187 pictures. You'll see at the 0:47 mark where I upgraded to Leopard and the ichat pictures changed to 640x480 instead of 256x256.

I used iPhoto to create a slideshow of all the pictures, then exported a quicktime movie into Quicktime Pro to squish it all down to 90 seconds.

This also means that I won't be posting all these goofy pics as often, so my contacts won't see my face plastered in their photostream quite as incessantly as in recent months.

I just installed an HTDV Wonder tuner card into my ubuntu MythTV box. So while I watch a bit of a very pretty PBS program, I wanted to throw a couple of notes here to remember what the heck I just did.

My myth box is running ubuntu fiesty fawn. I debated whether or not to update to the latest version, gutsy gibbon, before I installed the card, but it had taken a while to get the Video-out working just right and I didn't want to rock the boat too much. Then I found the following page, which helped tremendously:

[http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/ATI_HDTV_Wonder]

Luckily, it had instructions for Fiesty Fawn, so I decided to go for it.

I shutdown, opened the card and physically installed the card in my last free PCI slot. I followed the directions at the link above for manually setting up a perl script to grab the firmware for the card (I had to sudo most of the commands to get them to work, though). The firmware worked correctly and the drivers loaded on the first try. So the card was recognized and loaded by the operating system, that left configuring mythtv to actually tune something in on the card, which is where I ran into problems.

I followed the directions for setting up the card in mythtv, but I couldn't tune any channels. There are two inputs on the HDTV Wonder: "DTV" and "CATV". I wasn't sure which one to plug in my analog cable connection. I believe the directions were for using an antenna, not for tuning non-encrypted HD channels on the Cable connection. After a lot of trial and error, I found a setting that actually tuned in some channels. I saved the settings, went into myth, and I can now watch FOX HD, NBC HD, ABC HD, CBS HD, and PBS HD for NO ADDITIONAL CHARGE on my comcast "basic cable" subscription, not to mention some other local digital channels.

Here's the changes from the above instructions I had to find to tune HD channels on my basic analog cable, plugging into the "DTV" port on the card:


4. Input Connections
New Input
Select "DVB : 0"
Display Name: ATI-HDTV
Video Source: CABLE-HDTV
DVB Options:
Unencrypted channels only - checked!
Radio Channels - checked!
Use Dish Long-term EIT Data - unchecked
Scan for Channels
Scan Type: Full Scan
Frequencey Table: Cable
ATSC Modulation: Cable (QAM-64)
Channel Separator: (5.1) Period
Existing Channel Treatment: Minimal Updates
Next <--- The scanning process will take a long time!
Verify the output, checking for "Locked" channels.
Exit mythtvsetup with the Esc key


The hard part was the channel scan.

Now I just need to get the guide data set!

Found via [http://www.tuaw.com/2007/08/20/keeping-time-with-aurora-and-polarclock/|TUAW]:

I just found this cool new screen saver called [http://blog.pixelbreaker.com/polarclock/|PolarClock]. It's a cool visualization of the current time. It's available for Mac and Windows, so go get it.

PolarClock 3.0 is now available as a screen saver for Mac and Windows, and also as a dashboard widget for OSX Tiger.

This release is a total rebuild from scratch using Flash CS3, Flex Builder and ActionScript 3.0. There has been a staggering amount of feedback over the past few months, all of which was very useful. There are more things to add, but there are only so many hours in the day!

I've had a few thoughts recently that don't merit a full blog post, but I still want to share. Perhaps a [http://tumblr.com|tumblelog] might be better for me to share quick ideas and thoughts. Anyhoo, here's a few ideas that have popped into my head recently:

• What the heck is [http://www.demko.com/AARP070630.htm|that thing on Kevin Costner's face]?
• There's always that moment when you realize, "oh yeah, I did have asparagus at dinner." Those of you who eat asparagus know what I mean. Gets me every time.
• Thank goodness for air conditioning at work.
• My kid is turning into a total pokemanic, but at least it's better than captain underpants quotes all the time. Heck, I'm starting to like playing pokemon myself.

My last post detailed an automator action that would upload a copy of your ichat buddy icon everytime you changed it with a built in camera. Unfortunately, it had to use the mail program to send the picture to flickr by email.

But what should I find on [http://www.tuaw.com/|TUAW] this week but the [http://turtlehead.co.uk/macintosh-toys/osx-automator-flickr-upload-action/|OSX Automator Flickr Upload Action] by James Pitts! So here's an updated version of the script. This will allow for easier uploads and more reliable data.