We got the first coat of paint on the walls on Sunday and the room immediately transformed, still no appropriate adjectives -- Jessica says that her choices for colors escape description. Of course now she wants a theme song, too. Something that speaks to her personality. The Pinky and the Brain …
Continue ReadingSince we moved into our house back in early 2003, we’ve slowly but surely been redecorating rooms and fixing the place up. We’ve had a few people live with us in that time, and each time, Jessica has always sacrificed her …
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Well, a few days ago Jessica started having problems with it. The box started locking up. Took a bit of effort to get it back online again (since its headless), three or four reboots before everything came back in. Not happy.
My first guess is that it is heat related. The only fan in the unit is the CPU fan. The inside of the case is quite warm. I haven’t put a thermometer into it yet, so I can’t say exactly how warm. It first locked up when she was using it “locally” with MPD playing. This does require a bit more CPU power than streaming which is what she has been doing mostly since I gave it to her. In fact, it GMediaServer had been streaming to the HomePod for just about 12 hours a day for the prior two weeks. Simple disk reads and sending packets over the network, very little CPU power. This all started happening on the 22nd or 23rd.
Continue ReadingIts been a busy few weeks since my last posting. I spent a couple Sundays working on the web interface and the streaming interface. It still needs quite a bit of work, but it is very usable now. I “released” it for Jessica to use about a week and a half ago.
Continue ReadingSo, I’ve been working on the MP3 player project quite a bit over the last few weeks. Christmas is a month away, so with the limited time I’ve got to work on it, I’d rather do that than post.
The remote control that comes with the Allwell box doesn’t work. Well, it does, but they tried to be clever and map it to the PS/2 mouse/keyboard port. It would probably work fine if their documentation matched and if they didn’t use the null character for the play button. Thats very difficult to match since many devices and programs use 0 to terminate arrays and strings and such.
Continue ReadingQuick update on the MP3 player project. I spent several hours yesterday looking at cases, embedded systems, and got really, really frustrated. The Home Theater PC (HTPC) is just now starting to catch on, but the manufacturers are charging way too much for a case. Granted, these are some really nice looking cases, but the prices they want for some MP3 of them took them right out of the running.
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