Perpetual Motion Fuel

About a month ago Dave and I "finished" our MythTV box. There are still a few issues to work out, but they haven’t been major enough to warrant our time. The IR remote still isn’t working, but my old Apple USB keyboard is small and seems to be well suited for the box. The only annoyance is the driver for our PVR250 card seems to crash either the frontend or backend whenever the 4GB ring buffer is filled.

Beyond that, we’re very impressed with it. One of my favorite shows is Fifth Gear, which has a very random and sporadic airing schedule. No problem for Myth. I simply tell it to record a single episode each day. If it already has a given episode recorded, it lets me know as much in the upcoming schedule, and doesn’t record the show unless explicitly told to do so. What is so great about this, is I don’t have to care at all about when it’s on. Every once in a while when I look at our recorded programs, I get a treat, and a new episode of Fifth Gear that I didn’t even know about is waiting for me to watch it, with commercials already flagged, just waiting to be skipped.

The box is annoying convenient for many things though. All of my movies on my external 200 GB FireWire drive, and all of my music on my tower, are network mounted via NFS. Got an urge to watch something random? It’s probably accessible on it already.

The reason I’m writing about Myth now, is that last night (for no good reason) I started playing with MythGame. This is not good. When I first looked at MythGame I didn’t realize it came with games already installed: Tux Races, which I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about, and Frozen Bubbles (a.k.a. Bust-A-Move, or Snood for those who don’t know). This is like crack for some reason. After a little playing we got StepMania installed, configured, loaded with Songs and Characters, and accessible via the MythGame interface. This is not good. The box is becoming too powerful, and I don’t know how well we can stand up against it.