The Culture: T minus two days

John has been blogging about his upcoming trip to China. Even though it is a business trip, I bet he will have a great time. Read more about China and 'sleeve fish' at The Culture: T minus two days.

What to do in the Summer?

After a lot of conversation, introspection, inspection, etc. we as a family have decided on something. We want to enjoy our summer. And that is going to include some vacationing.

I know that sounds almost ridiculous, especially since our kids are so young, but the point is that we are ready to branch out and get adventurous. We have been to the Carribbean, been to Florida, and have even bumped around closer to home a bit. But we have not travelled in one of these:



Now I know it may sound strange, but camping is not actually off-limits for me. Sure, I get harrassed by bugs on all of these trips. And I don't get enough sleep. And I am usually more tired when we get back from a camping trip than when we left.

But it may be a different experience for us now that we have 3 small children, who are very interested in exploring the world. And, while we have tented with them, and hoteled with them, we have not "trailored" with them (shout out to Melissa).

So, here we go. We started looking at tent trailers like this:



Basically a box on wheels, with a hard top and bottom, and tent material around the outside. Inexpensive and light. Unfortunately, no bathroom or shower. Really just a place to sleep, or keep out of the rain. And of course, tent material on the outside.

So, we took a look at Hybrids, also called Expandables, that look like this:



(Trailer may not be exactly as shown, Happy Family not included.)

And this time, while there is a full bathroom in some of these, and real beds (for really short people), there is still that tent material around the bunks. In fact, they fold up for travel, and fold out for camping. So, we are still not where we want to be.

Then we found this:



Wow. Rock Star trailer. It is a 2007 Starcraft StarStream 19RB. I think we might have a winner. Loaded out, and looks good too.

To satisfy our primary requirement, I think we can take the StarStream here:



And we can take it to sporting events, too. I hope the kids learn to like tailgating.

Tell us what you think.

Free Personal Video Recorder (PVR)

Unless you have been under a rock lately, you know what a PVR is. For those whose eyes are just adjusting to the sunlight, a PVR is similar to a VCR, except it uses a PC, is digital, and can do a lot more.

There are a number of software options to do this:

1) Microsoft Windows Media Center PC. You have to buy a specialized PC, all the setup work is done for you, and you are bound to Microsoft for fixes and updates.

2) Tivo. Not available in Canada, and requires a monthly subscription.

3) Myth TV. Free. Linux-based. Open Source. The subject of this post.

There are a few downfalls to MythTV, not the least of which is the fact that it is very difficult to install, especially if you have not used Linux before. So, let me go on record as saying, if you have ever wanted to learn Linux, THIS is the best excuse to.

And you are going to want to visit these sites:

Myth TV. Main site.
Myth TV Wiki. Official hints and docs. VERY HELPFUL.
KnoppMyth site..

What is KnoppMyth? Well, if you want to spend a lot of time customizing and building your system by hand, you can go the traditional route and install an implementation of Linux, then install MythTV. Or, you can use the precompiled installation called KnoppMyth, which is a pre-installed MythTV built into Knoppix.

I have tried both ways, and the KnoppMyth way is by far the fastest method to get up and running. You can watch a video of the installation by Kevin Rose and the folks at Revision3 here.

What do you get with Myth?

* Basic 'live-tv' functionality. Pause/Fast Forward/Rewind "live" TV.

* Support for multiple tuner cards and multiple simultaneous recordings.

* Distributed architecture allowing multiple recording machines and multiple playback machines on the same network, completely transparent to the user.

* Compresses video in software using rtjpeg (from Nuppelvideo) or mpeg4 (from libavcodec). Full support for Hardware MPEG-2 encoder cards (Hauppauge PVR-250 / PVR-350). Preliminary support for DVB cards and the new pcHDTV tuner card.

* Support for the (very nice looking) hardware MPEG-2 decoder and TV out present on the Hauppauge PVR-350.

* Completely automatic commercial detection/skipping

* Grabs program information using xmltv.

* A fully themeable menu to tie it all together.

Some screens:

EPG

Photo Gallery


Video Player


Weather


Also, because it is themeable, if you don't like the layout of these screens, you can create your own. If you get stuck installing this, and believe me, you will, just try Googling Mythtv and your problem. There is a lot of independant work being done and it is spread across a number of different forums on the 'Net. Good Luck!

New Mac Blog

Finally started my long awaited Mac Blog: Mac Mania

Everyone should play hockey

Another disappointing loss in Hamilton, this time a 6-0 shutout. Not as bad as the previous week (we all lost count after about 7 or 8 goals).

I play on 2 teams, an oldtimers team in Hamilton and an oldtimers team in Oakville, both organized through Russell Hockey. While it is not contact hockey, it can be very competitive. The rules are very similar to shinny rules, with some minor exceptions. For example, there is a fixed length for each shift and the teams change lines on a timer instead of making substitutions during play.

As I am sure you already know, the most popular sport in Canada is hockey. Even more important, the most important television show other than the news, is Hockey Night in Canada. The reasons for hockey's prominence in Canadian culture are many, but let's just say for purposes of brevity that it is an activity that gets thousands of Canadians exercising during the cold winter months.

More about the league I play in is here.

Baby and Mommy are doing fine

Baby and Mommy are doing fine
Originally uploaded by LangFamily.

One of the rare public appearances for the dynamic duo.

The holidays have been a bit of a blur, and now we are back on track. Baby Grace has had a bit of a difficult time at here first Christmas, as she caught a cold from her brothers and has been struggling to keep it together through all of the visits and excitement.

A Star is Born!

DSCF0013.JPG
Originally uploaded by LangFamily.

Unidentified karaoke singer steals show.

The 80's are not dead, as evidenced by the impromptu performance of an unidetified karaoke singer, who decided to regale a mixed audience of Christmas partiers with his own personal lounge-lizard rendition of "Wild Boys" (Duran Duran), and other assorted holiday favourites. Sources suggest that several agencies have attempted to contact the singer, but he is holding out until he has assessed the job market for hockey players and superheroes.

Military History Wiki update

A brief update on Military History Wiki is available here.

Military History Wiki was a project that I started a couple of years back to provide an online repository for articles and information related to Military History. I had a lot of help from a number of friends, and especially from my brother-in-law John, who also shares the excitement. The site used software available under free license from Mediawiki, and was set up to run in a similar fashion to Wikipedia. I personally funded the hosting costs for the site, and also donated a significant amount of personal time to site promotion and updating.

After a while, several astute authors and historians noticed that there were many articles of relevance already posted on Wikipedia, and they started to cross-post or copy the Wikipedia articles to the MHW site. While this managed to expand the number of articles rather quickly, it also diluted the amount of original material. This is not necessarily a bad thing - in fact, MHW was picked up at Armchair General Magazine, and several other online sites including Military Spot, and Society for Military History.

Over the past year the contributors at Wikipedia have finally gotten their act together, and you can read about what has transpired as well as any new Military History Wiki information, here.

P really likes his sister

P really likes his sister
Originally uploaded by LangFamily.

P finally gets a chance to hold his baby sister. This is a very important moment for the little guy, as he has not been allowed to hold G until this point. He really enjoys her after this, and has even taken to getting his own baby doll so that he can mimic his parents as they care for her.

He loves to talk about how "cute" she is, and how soft her hair and skin is. He is very gentle, and tries to make sure that he is there to help out if he thinks there is something he can do to help.

My conversion to the world of Apple

If you had met me a few years back, you would never have believed that I would even consider an Apple product.

Well, finally, I have made the plunge. And I am here to tell you that the water is actually quite warm, and not as scary as you might think. And the more that I work and play in the world of Apple products, the more I realize how significant this decision has become.

A little background: until a little over a year ago, I had several MS Windows machines and a couple of Linux boxes. My work laptop was an IBM Thinkpad - which was actually a fantastic machine in it's own right. I firmly believed, along with the Windows masses, that if it was not happening in the PC world, it was not immediately relevant. And this generally made sense. The latest "in" software was usually written for Windows, the latest games were written for Windows first, and the files that I exchanged with my colleagues and customers at work were authored in Microsoft Office for Windows.

Unfortunately, it also meant that the majority of hacker and virus activity also happens in the Windows world. And this was fine for me for a while, until one fateful day when I picked up a virus on our main PC that just refused to go away. As I scrambled to try to rescue a number of important files, including family pictures and personal records (unsuccessfully, I might add), I stumbled across some of the claims made by Mac users and how happy they were with their simple to use and as yet uninfected Mac OS X systems.



I am not new to the world of Macintosh. Those who have known me for a while will remember back when I worked for Xerox Canada. Back then I believe it was Mac OS 7. Macs were used extensively in the graphics industry, as they were the primary tool for graphics designers. Much of the software used in the graphics industry used to be available only for Apple machines, so if you worked in the industry you usually had a lot of exposure to Apple products. This was back in the age of Extensions and Control Panels, when Mac users occassionally suffered with technical issues like hard drive drivers and Extension conflicts that would cause random crashes when you least expected it. And multitasking in Mac OS was absolutely terrible. In many instances outside of the graphics arts industry, Macs were treated more as toys than as real computers.

Fortunately for all of us, Steve Jobs and Mac OS X changed all of that. And for me, the discovery of Mac OS X Tiger was the end of MS Windows on both my home and work machines. I sold our home PCs, or relegated them to the basement as fileservers (see FreeNAS). And at work, I managed to get my laptop changed to an iBook.

I haven't looked back since. All of the applications that I used to have on my Windows PC were either available on my Mac, or have even better equivalents. I am now using devices and software that was designed to be easy to use, instead of requiring a significant amount of time and effort for me to learn how the developer wanted me to work.

And I have not lost a single document yet. Knock on wood!