I made a quick&dirty hack to connect to my entertainment center management daemon. It will let you send a message which will scroll across the front of my cable box. It'll also display the first 16 characters on my TV screen (if the TV is on). Click here to send a message It's actually not really a cable box anymore. I removed the face plate from the cable box and wired up the LED display to a ICM7218A which is plugged into the parallel port of my Linux computer. No other...

Right now in my entertainment center I've got a Sony Vega TV, Yamaha RXV-1000 receiver, GoVideo VCR, TiVo, Slink-e, and an HP Vectra VL400 computer with KnoppMyth installed. The receiver and the VCR both have serial ports and are hooked into the Linux computer, along with the Slink-e. The TiVo has an ethernet card in it, but currently does not run the web server since it tends to cause the TiVo to lock up and reboot. I wrote a daemon about 5 years ago to manage my entertainment center...

Ok, this is just a rant more than anything. I've been using VNC for years, and I just don't understand why over anything less than a 100baseT link it's so unusable. And even over 100baseT it's marginal. I connect via any client to a remote X11 VNC server, and bring up a terminal and start typing, and it LAGS by minutes! Why is it so hard to send the 10x10 pixel block of the last character I typed? What the heck is it sending back and forth during that entire time before it does...

Played a bit with the power management today. Couldn't really it get it to do much that'll be useful. I turned on the ACPI in the kernel and turned off APM and rebuilt/rebooted. My power button stopped doing an immediate shutdown and I could cat a file and see everytime I pushed it, which was neat. When I tried to put the computer into S3 it went to sleep, but didn't quite want to wake up. Had problems with both the video and the USB keyboard/mouse. I also had no luck at all finding...

After much tinkering I finally got advmame to fire up Donkey Kong! It was a problem with the framebuffer driver. Sort of. :-) The site that the driver originally came from used an old style of separating the boot args. It said that you separate args with a : and the values with an =. Well, under the 2.6.11 kernel it's args with a , and values with a : This is what I'm using for a boot arg: video=i810fb:xres:1024,bpp:16,hsync1:30,hsync2:65,vsync1:50,vsync2:100,accel,mtrr Unfortunately it...