So I finally got a video card that handled decent TV-out (nVidia FX5200) and fitted in the motherboard of my old Pentium 4 desktop. I installed the Ubuntu Breezy preview, compiled MythTV packages (the ones in Breezy are uninstallable) and got MythTV running. It was a little bit fiddly, but I got there in the end. The machine is still early days, so it is still in its noisy, bulky case and doesn't yet have a digital tuner, both of these will have to be fixed. It was also being the stand for my new desktop, which means I will have to find a new home for that. Ideally both machines will be able to run in cupboards. I will probably make the MythTV box the router too, so that I still only need two machines turned on. That said, my current router is damned stable.

I don't have any sort of wireless keyboards or mice and I got sick of standing up to use the attached keyboard, nor have I gotten to the stage where I purchase a remote. I started looking for a software solution to what is in essence a hardware problem. x2x would have worked, but not been what I wanted at all in this scenario, so instead I thought about keystroke injection with XTest. Using xte I was able to write to a stdin over ssh to my MythTV box and eventually ended up with this script. This is seriously about as low tech as it comes, uses Python and PyGTK as well as xte to talk to the X server. I am talking to xte over SSH to get around Xauthority issues, but if you have the authority you could run it on your machine with the appropriate command.

The UI is highly usable and intuative:

send keystrokes over the internet
There are still some bugs, like don't change workspace on your laptop using the Metacity shortcut with this window focused. All keyboard input on the Myth box stops working until you change virtual terminals to and fro. I suspect this is related to Metacity on the Myth box (which I apparently needed to run else I didn't get keyboard focus on mplayer and xine windows that MythTV opened).

For anyone else doing this, I have other boring config bits and pieces, as well as i386 MythTV packages, available if someone wants them. One other trick I picked up is using autofs to manage your CD-ROM drive. While the automounter usually drives me batty, it is useful here as you can symlink your CD-ROM drive into your directory for MythVideo to be able to browse media you have on CD and have it automagically unmounted for you.

Also, the Goom visualisation seems broken. No idea why yet.

Wallace and Gromit
Susie, Matt, Alex, Liz, Stephanie and I went to see Wallace and Gromit at the cinema tonight. Pretty damned hilarious, however the short involving the penguins from Madagascar before it seemed a bit... contrived. It was like watching motion picture fan fiction. Dinner beforehand at Retro Betty's, which wasn't really that retro and kept playing a lot of house music. Alex renamed it Metro Betty's. I hadn't eaten there before, the food was good; albeit a little pricey, I thought.

They have posters for The-Movie-in-which-we-appear-to-have-turned-River-into-a-sex-kitten-assassin Serenity up. Didn't see a trailer though.