As one one of my first projects with my new Arduino I thought I would try to hook up a stepper motor. I had a few laying around from old computer hardware I had taken apart and now I finally have the resources to hook them up.

While cleaning up my computer room I ran across an old cell phone that had quit working. It got wet a few years ago on a camping trip when my tent leaked during a rain storm. I tried all the tricks like leaving it in the oven with just the pilot light to help dry it out, but even after a few weeks it still wouldn't work so I gave up on it. Well, just for fun, I stuck the battery in and it powered right up and said "insert sim card".

I've been watching the goings on at the several hacker spaces which are popping up around the world. Specifically NYC Resistor has a lot of interesting activities and the Cow Town Computer Congress is a new space that shows a lot of prommise. I was looking for something like that going on in my area but it seems there is none.

I switched back to Knoppmyth a couple months ago for my MythTV fix and I'm pretty happy with it except for a few minor glitches I'm still trying to work out. One of those glitches is that sometimes when the backend gets busy the video can become choppy and sometimes even effect the video as it's written to the disk.

I love using my MythTV for 3 main reasions:

1. Timshifting TV
2. Watching downloaded video
3. Watching video podcasts

This article is about the 3rd feature, watching video podcasts. I use a script called podget which is run every night by cron to download any new shows and delete shows older than the age I specify. It also creates a playlist for all the new shows it downloades so you don't have to figure out what's new and what you've already seen.

So, I recently went back to Knoppmyth because my mythdora box was acting up. Well, I got podget all set up again to download my video podcasts, but I couldn't get mythtv to play the playlists it generated. First, it wouldn't play them at all, then I figured out the new version of knoppmyth was using a mplayer-resume.pl script to start the videos which generates a file with a timestamp each time you watch a video so you can resume where you left off. Well, this didn't work well with playlists and I don't really need to resume anyway, so I changed it back to running mplayer directly.

I started using MythTV with Knoppmyth a few years ago. It had a feature where it would put a human readable filename in a folder that linked to the original file that was recorded from live TV by MythTV. I've since started using Mythdora and I did some searching and couldn't find anything like it that worked on Mythdora So I found a copy of the script and modified it to work with both Mythdora 4 and 5.

I share the /storage/videos folder through Samba so I directed the script to put the new links in the /storage/videos/tv folder. You could easily modify it to fit your needs.

I was listening to the latest Pauldotcom Security Weekly podcast and they were discussing their favorite hacker movies. They, as most people, dismissed Hackers as cheesy, lame, whatever and try to sweep it under the rug. I disagree with this and think it is a great hacker movie and would like to point out the reasons I think so. I have also included some quotes from the movie that exemplify my reasons.

So, Here are my top 10 reasons “Hackers” is a good hacker movie: