Digital Everywhere

On macosxhints.com there is a great hint on what the title says. I have my iTunes music library on my server and I sometimes forget to mount the library before launching iTunes. If you sometimes do the same, then take a look at the hint.

As mentioned on the page describing my setup, I use iPhoto on my PowerBook to organize my digital photos.
Naturally I want to have a backup of the photos. DVD’s don’t work for me - I forget to burn them, and those that I burn, are still in the house, so if the whole thing should burn, they would be useless.
So I decided to use flickr for backup. That also allows me to share the photos with friends and family.
To make it possible these two tools are absolutely necessary:

Without Keyword Assistant, adding keywords/tags in iPhoto would be a nightmare, but with it, it is really fast to do. And once you have added tags to your photos, you will enjoy them much more.
FlickrExport makes it a snap to upload a bunch of photos to flickr and naturally all the keywords/tags from iPhoto transfer nicely to flickr.

I have my Epia Mini-ITX ME6000 inside a nice black aluminum case. It is a SilverStone LaScala LC06.

Originally it was a little too noicy. The harddisk was making too much noice. Basically it was the vibrations transmitting to the case causing the noice. The harddisk was hard mounted under the motherboard, so I put the harddisk on top of the DVD drive instead, as you can see here:

Unfortunately that made the harddisk much too hot (55+ degrees), since there was no longer a direct metal-to-metal connection. So I needed some cooling. I already had an 80mm case fan above the heatsink for the CPU, sucking air out of the case, but this was not sufficient.
So I decided to use the same case fan to blow air onto the harddisk. To make it work, I had to cut a big piece out of the back panel and place the fan on the outside of the case. The result can be seen here:

And it works! The harddisk is now only 32 degrees.

I have a MythTV box which I am very happy with. I like the fact that I can get a quick overview of all the movies for the coming week.
I guess, that if you get the TV listing in the US and possibly also in other contries, then you get star ratings in MythTV. At least there is an option in the GUI to only show movies with a certain rating. But in Denmark where I live the TV listings, which come from TV2, do not contain star ratings. But the script tv_imdb which is part of XMLTV will add Internet Movie Database ratings to an XMLTV file.
So I created a simple script to do just that.

Before you can use the script, you need to setup tv_imdb. That can be done by calling:
tv_imdb --imdbdir <dir> --prepStage all --download
Be aware that this takes quite some time and uses a lot of memory, bandwidth and disk space.

Unfortunately the tv_imdb script messes with the categories, which means that MythTV will no longer recognise movies. To avoid this I have modified the tv_imdb script slightly.
Look for “my $imdb=new XMLTV::IMDB” and you should find something similar to what you see below.

my $imdb=new XMLTV::IMDB('imdbDir' => $opt_imdbDir,
'verbose' => !$opt_quiet,
'cacheLookups' => 1,
'cacheLookupSize' => 1000);

Now change it into this:

my $imdb=new XMLTV::IMDB('imdbDir' => $opt_imdbDir,
'verbose' => !$opt_quiet,
'cacheLookups' => 1,
'replaceCategories' => 0,
'updateCategories' => 0,
'cacheLookupSize' => 1000);

This will preserve the categories as they are.

And finally, here is my script:

#!/bin/bash
LOG_PATH=/var/log/mythtv/mythupdateepg.log