My poor baby Kia
I took my car in yesterday to the dealer for some general maintenance and to see if they could ferret out a really alarming rattle / ticking noise I had been experiencing. I got woken up at 8:30 this morning by the service manager telling me that it is in fact a knocking coming from the bottom end of the engine. So they have given me back the car and ordered the short block from Kia which will hopefully appear next week. It will then take two days to replace the engine, and hopefully return my otherwise brilliantly reliable car to me. I have to say that Dorschel (the dealer I purchased the car from and have been having it serviced by) has been fantastic and easy to work with. I really am delighted that I bought the car from them.
Happy Holidays, from the Electric Company
Well it looks like 2007 is rapidly drawing to a close, and despite the fact that it has been another unseasonably mild winter so far with the exception of the one winter storm it feels like the holiday season. I spent last night at Mom’s house and snapped a bunch of pictures, including the one above of the tree one of the house. The little Lumix did amazingly well and I got to play with it a bit in full manual mode. The shot of the house was a 25 second exposure with a f-stop of 8.0. I think it came out really rather nicely, since I was looking to get a nice glow effect off the lights.
I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and has a great New Year, 2008 can’t be too bad, it’s time to elect ourselves a new president so let’s hope that we actually end up with someone who cares about the people of this country and indeed the people of the world.
PS3 Firmware 2.10 and Mediatomb
PS3 Firmware update 2.10 brought VC-1 and DivX playback (finally) to the PS3 natively. Now I have been playing back my 400GiB DivX/XviD/h264 collection via transcoding for quite some time now using the development branch of mediatomb. Now when I setup mediatomb it autodetected .avi as the mime-type of video/x-msvideo, the PS3 doesn’t recognize that mime-type. That was fine since I was on the fly transcoding it to MPEG2, but the PS3 wants video/avi. So I changed the config.xml file to include a new mapping and I removed the transcoder mapping for the video/avi and video/x-msvideo mime-types:
<mappings>
<extension-mimetype ignore-unknown="no">
<map from="avi" to="video/avi"/>
...
</extension>
</mappings>
Then I deleted the shared folders from the db and rescanned, since I use inotify the mime-type mappings in the db won’t automatically update unless the kernel tells mediatomb the file changed.
So far, I have gotten native VC-1 and DivX playback working on files up to 720p.
Hooray Sony, just hooray. Now if we can have messaging and music playback working in game it would be everything I could hope for in a system. It is a fantastically powerful system and I am ever gladder that I replaced the XBMC box with it.
The dust, the dust, always covered in the dust.
You look so tired and unhappy
Bring down the government
They don’t, they don’t speak for us
I’ll take a quiet life
A handshake of carbon monoxide
I’m trying to move the last bits of things onto my colocated server, and it’s not easy let me tell you. All the years I’ve spent doing this for a living has made me want to have cock-all to do with computers at home.
Of course losing my cellphone sometime after dinner tonight hasn’t put me in the best move either… stupid piece of crap belt-clip…
Anyway, I’m trying to be as gentle as I can be, but I imagine some things might be cocked up a bit until I have it all sorted, DNS is probably dodgy and I hope the redirects all work.
If anything is broken, feel free to drop me a line, mernisse at ub three rgeek dot net, or via comment, as those get e-mailed to me.
( as a side, m4a files can go jump off a bridge. My poor RIO Karma will play ogg, mp3, wma, flac and wav but not m4a, and transcoding them is more than I care to deal with right now… so I’ve got Radiohead playing on the PS3…. oh well, could be worse I guess )