February 6th, 2010
Really wanted to try out Hulu Desktop on my Mythbox, so I can get the Daily Show on the big screen in a convenient/legit fashion.
Knew 64-bit flash was still dicey on linux (Helloooo Adobe? 1998 called, they want their software back!) so did:
# yum localinstall huludesktop-i386.rpm
and it pulled in some 32-bit libs, I installed flash, and it should be groovy right? No. I run it and it says sorry you don’t have flash. I strace the thing and see it finding flash just fine but also see:
open("/lib/tls/i686/sse2/libXt.so.6", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
stat64("/lib/tls/i686/sse2", 0xfff02f3c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/lib/tls/i686/libXt.so.6", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
stat64("/lib/tls/i686", 0xfff02f3c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/lib/tls/sse2/libXt.so.6", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
stat64("/lib/tls/sse2", 0xfff02f3c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/lib/tls/libXt.so.6", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
Hmmmm ok so we’ll just …
# yum install libXt.i586
Yay it works. Booo Hulu for getting it wrong in a way less savvy users would never sort out. I’ll just enter a bug in their Bugzil…. oh never mind.
Grrrr nonfree software.
Posted in Linux | No Comments »
February 6th, 2010
The guys from Westwood Renewables came out yesterday to do the actual site assessment, and thought it would be a pretty standard install; the electrical panel is fairly full, might need to move some breakers, there is minimal shading that needs to be assessed, etc – but nothing looks like too big a deal. Nice timing, too – that evening I got an email from the state saying that the 2010 solar rebate applications would finally be available at Noon on Monday. Keeping fingers crossed that it’s still a good $/watt rebate… and wondering when Xcel will announce their rebates, too – can’t do this (financially) without those rebates! Hope I get the contract soon and can get the application in pronto.
Posted in Energy, Renewable | No Comments »
February 4th, 2010
I’d been looking for a WiFi thermostat that was affordable for a while; most seem to be vaporware or very expensive – but the CT30 from the Radio Thermostat Company of America looks like it may just fit the bill. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Conservation, Energy, Monitoring | 1 Comment »
February 1st, 2010
Electric Usage
Despite the bass-ackwards Microsoft Hohm presentation (Months left to right, years right to left?!) if you squint real hard you can see we are making a decent dent in our electricity usage. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Conservation, Energy, Monitoring | No Comments »
January 21st, 2010
Got a bathroom fan to handle moisture (finally!). Fan good. Dry air good. Running fan when moisture is gone, bad – sucks heat out of the house. Turns out those crafty Californians have a code which led to the development of an occupancy sensor that never turns anything on – it only turns things off after a set time of no motion. So waltz in, turn on fan, take shower, leave – fan turns off on its own 30 minutes later. Sweet. (Normal occupancy sensors would turn the fan on when you go in to brush your teeth, which would be downright silly). It’s an “IPP15″ from Leviton. Pair it with an ultra-efficient Panasonic fan and bask in your eco-righteousness.
Posted in Conservation, Energy | No Comments »
January 1st, 2010
My ISP got bought, moved, etc and suddenly my trusty old Cisco 678 DSL modem no longer sufficed. Grr. But oh well, Actiontec DSL modems aren’t that expensive, so I got a GT624R and things were groovy again. But the Cisco supported SNMP so that I could gather network stats for mrtg; the Actiontec does not. So I had to write my own script to get interface stats and output it in mrtg format, for anyone interested it’s below the jump.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Computers | No Comments »
December 22nd, 2009
There are a lot of solar rebates and incentives in Minnesota right now; I’m really hoping I can put some solar on my roof this year. Playing with Google Sketchup, it seems like I could cram quite a few of the smaller-sized Sanyo HIT panels on my roof, but it’s tight this way, not sure I have the dimensions measured accurately enough to know if it’d really fit this way… 
Posted in Energy, Renewable | No Comments »
December 17th, 2009
I was working on trying to make my Mythbox shut down when idle, and the first big(!) hurdle was getting X to come up properly, when the HDTV is off (and by off I mean off-off, not idle-off), with the nvidia driver. This was killing me; it kept rejecting the modes I gave it because it had no idea what was connected.
Finally I stumbled upon the fact that you can use their nvidia-settings tool to extract the edid data into a binary file, and then tell the X driver to use it in the Device section:
# So we don't need the monitor on to get panel info:
Option "CustomEDID" "DFP-0:/path/to/edid.bin"
# And tell the driver what is (or will be) connected
Option "ConnectedMonitor" "DFP-0"
Posted in Conservation, Energy, Linux | No Comments »
December 2nd, 2009
Kinda silly, when my energy-saving kick gets to this level of detail. But somehow I find it fascinating when a tiny niche product gets taken to a high level – take faucet aerators for example. Granted, not that much water flows through my bathroom sink, unless the kids are playing, but heck why not save a little, right? So I bought this Neoperl 1.5gpm aerator from the local hardware store for around $5. And it’s awesome. Who knew you could engineer such a simple thing so well, but they did it. Swapped out a 2.2gpm aerator for this 1.5gpm version, and it even passed the “my wife didn’t notice” test. I’ll have to try 1.0gpm and see how that fares.
If you don’t want to pay the hardware store markup for a couple of these, Amazon has them for a bit less, or go to the New Resources Group (NRG) site – they have several varieties for about $2 each, with reasonable shipping. I bought 10 for stocking stuffers. I’m sure my family will be so excited.
On edit: I got the 1.0gpm ones in my bathroom taps; they really are just fine – I’m not sure anyone noticed them, either – even though it was a drop from 2.2gpm to 1.0gpm!
Posted in Conservation, Energy | 4 Comments »
November 23rd, 2009
Dropped one tuner card from the mythbox, put the root on an SSD, and set the media drive to spin down… Kill A Watt now says it’s 51W when idle.
This still isn’t great; I’d never leave a 60W bulb burning 24/7 … so next stop is looking into making it shut down when idle, and wake up in time for the next recording. MythTV has this functionality built in, but not if the frontend is running; I guess I need to homebrew something for that.
The SSD helps it boot in 18s so turning it back on on demand isn’t so painful…
Posted in Energy, Linux | 2 Comments »
