Midnight Cheese

This weekend I’m going to attempt to build my own DTV/UHF antenna to be mounted in my attic, hopefully in time to watch the big game, over the air, on Sunday.

Ernie turned me on to these instructions from Make.

Update: The antenna worked! Here are the results.

I’ve been using just a pair of rabbit-ears the last few weeks which actually work well with the digital TV signals. No adjustments needed between channels, although I am probably only 20 miles away from the majority of the towers in town.

Once the antenna is done we’ll see if we can’t pick up a little signal from some place further like Bowling Green.

My custom built desktop has had problems off and on the last 6 months. Most commonly, when turning the machine on, it powers everything up but never gets to POST.

I’ve replaced or borrowed all my hardware trying to figure out the bad piece: 3 motherboards, 2 PSUs, 2 graphics cards, 3 CPUs, 2 hard drives, 2 optical drives, 2 CPU fans, countless RAM sticks, even set the machine up outside of the case and still get the same result.

Sometimes the machine powers up and works great. This usually occurs after replacing a piece of hardware. Fan, drive, PSU, etc. But eventually it goes back to the blank start.

With this latest iteration of components, I believe I’ve narrowed the problem down to the motherboard. When powering the machine on (with minimal components: graphics card, RAM, CPU & CPU fan) the machine spins up for a few seconds then shuts itself down. Then it turns itself back on again and off again and so on and so on until I hit the PSU switch.

When I unplug the small power cable used to power the CPU, the machine turns on and stays on, but never POSTs. I’ve tried two other CPUs with the CPU power cable test and get the same results. I know my CPUs are good because they came from working systems.

So this leads me to the motherboard. The problem is, I’ve replaced the motherboard before, only to have the same problems happen again down the line.

I’m thinking about selling everything and starting fresh.

I’m officially posting my latest project, Kitty Litter Cam! I grew tired of the webcam pointing out the window capturing the occasional car going by, so I’ve moved it into the laundry room and pointed it at the litter boxes. With 4 cats in the house I figure the chances of catching some action was pretty good.

There’s some fun stuff going on. The live feed is broadcast through Ustream while a second camera detects motion and uploads the video clips to the server. The motion detection software will also send out a Twitter message whenever motion is detected.

I’ll post technical details later. In the meantime, enjoy the cats and their litter time!

This past week I officially cancelled XM in favor of using Pandora in my car through my iPhone.

I mentioned before my displeasure with with the XM/Sirius merger, mainly XM wiping out their music channels and replacing them with Sirius stations.

Pandora works exceptionally well in place of an XM radio as long as you’re only after music. (Which I am.) The Pandora pros include full color album art, complete artist and song titles, the ability to skip songs, and most importantly, the ability to customize your stations by voting songs up or down.

The signal reception is a non-issue. I can drive the 30 miles to work and back without ever encountering a break in the stream. This is true over 3G and Edge.

Cons are few. Sound quality is not as good as XM, although XM was pretty well compressed to begin with. Pandora really isn’t far off from FM quality and should only get better in the future as bandwidth increases.

Best of all, the money saved from XM can go to offset the monthly AT&T/Apple money pit.

With all the talk of the housing market, I decided to take a quick inventory of the homes on our block. Of the 81 homes on the south end of our street there are 8 empty homes in some form of foreclosure, abandonment or sale. That equals about 10% of the homes on our street without occupants. Most of the homes have been empty for several months or more.