20 Sep 2000 (updated 20 Sep 2000 at 06:25 UTC)
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I created a suggested printers page on LinuxPrinting.org.
It's gotten
about 400
visitors in two days; obviously this was way overdue.
Thanks go to
Robert for helping identify the best inkjets in the low and
mid range
categories.
Lpdomatic
should now handle ASCII jobs as well as Postscript, barring
any
embarassing silly bugs.
Cupsomatic
should now handle options in all the usual CUPS and PPD
ways, be they
defaults in the PPD file, embedded in the job, or specified
as CUPS
job attributes. Various other minor bugixes happened as
well.
I really must find a free software job. Many seemingly good
nonfree prospects keep saying things like "we mostly use
Word" and "we do Windows work, but are branching out into
Linux". Urgh.
How to build a tivo
I've thought through how to construct a device with
tivo-like
functionality
in my house, all for only four times what a tivo costs,
albeit with
better functionality, flexibility, and freedom. The end
goal is a TV
in the bedroom operated in normal remote-control style, that
can watch
live TV or anything from an assortment of automagically
prerecorded
stuff. There should be no computers etc in the
bedroom;
they're all in the basement or machine room, accesed via
Ethernet or
serial.
The key is that the second such TV I add to the system must
then operate jointly with the first, so that it's one
recording backend with two TVs seamlessly sharing data. The
real fun comes in distributing backends across the net so
that my freinds and family can share shows. But I
digress...
The parts: a DC10-style MJPEG video card ($150?), a 30+ gig
disk
($200?), my ratty old cyrix-based computer, a video overlay
box ($100, run via rs232; it
gives you esentially a 20x10ish text screen overlaid on the
video, for
control display), an Irman consumer IR input dongle ($30),
an
analagous consumer IR output dongle ($100! anyone got a
cheaper
source?), my existing cable box, my VCR (to demodulate the
cable box's channel 3), and
an RF
modulator ($50-150).
The plan: cable-to-cablebox-to-VCR-to-DC10. Then
DC10-to-overlay-to-RFmod-to-housecable. The computer itself
is
essentially headless. Control of all TV watching happens
via IR input
over cat5 to the computer in the basement; a w3m or similar
web
browserish interface displays on the overlay terminal to
select the
recorded show or live pass-through channel to watch, and
whatever it
is gets sent on channel 3 to that TV. The computer selects
shows to
record based on TV guide info parsed from
yahoo, and
records them by setting the channel on the cable box via IR
out and writing mjpeg to
disk.
It has the disadvantage of constructing mjpeg files, which
aren't
nearly as well-compressed as modern mpeg; my understanding
is that
mjpegs are essentially jpeg-encoded frames in sequence.
Without the
deltas, the compression is not ideal, although the hardware
is much
easier to build. This all stems from the DC10 card; I
wasn't able to
find a full-hardware mpeg implementation with linux
drivers. If one
exists, do tell...
Audio is also a bit uncertain. Apparently one often does
the audio
separately with a sound card and software encoding. I
don't see how
sync gets maintained, so a video editing-style card with
integrated
audio support would be the best deal.