Tech Bits and Pieces

first post

The first post...hmmm...a difficult one. Anyway, in short, I plan to use this blog to post bits and pieces of tech stuff that I stumble across and find interesting or useful.

The iPod is seeing a lot more use lately since I discovered a few interesting tech podcasts. The longer drive into work each day, now that we have moved out west, makes the drive home pretty tedious with only local radio to tune in to. The podcasts help make the trip fly by. I'm also hoping to start doing some more riding again soon, so it'll also get a lot more use then too, not to mention when I'm in the States next month.

I've been playing around a heap with Fedora Core 4 Linux, both at home and at work. I was fortunate enough to arrange some Red Hat training through the office and so far I've done two of Red Hat's courses. Prior to this training, my experience had been self taught, mostly by trial and error with support and hand-holding from Google and IRC (#linuxhelp and #fedora on Freenode have been invaluable). At the end of the second course I sat the gruelling 3 hours RH202 prac exam, and passed, so I'm now officially a Red Hat Certitifed Technician. I hope to do some further training and go for RHCE next year (Red Hat Certitified Engineer)...

At work, we're looking at using Fedora Core for a file server, for DHCP and to serve up some web stuff. We've already begun trialling it as a Windows alternative for some of our users desktops as well. LTSP (the Linux Terminal Server Project - check out #ltsp on Freenode too) also offers a lot of promise by extending the life of equipment that would ordinarily be facing retirement and disposal if being used in the Windows world. These bits of "junk" make for excellent "dumb" terminals hanging off a fairly modest LTSP server. Once the server is configured, extending the network by adding extra terminals is a synch..

At home, MythTV holds a lot of appeal and I've been playing with that on and off.. Since buying the plasma tv, VHS looks absolutely dreadful so we are looking at better quality ways of recording TV. Obvious choice would be a DVD recorder, but simply adding a decent digital TV tuner card to a PC running some flavour of Linux and MythTV can give a more fully featured system for a lot less money. Fortunately, Jarod Wilson has produced a great guide on how to get everything up and running on Fedora Core, recently updated for FC4 - Myth(TV)ology . I am still having a few hiccups getting Myth setup to use my Fusion Plus HDTV DVB card properly but I don't think I'm too far off. Once I have a properly working system, I'll look at purpose building something that won't look too out of place in a home theatre system...or maybe using a Mac Mini as a possible front end?

Call for Help on the How-To channel (in Australia on channel 118 on Foxtel) has been interesting to watch. The shows hosts have some interesting blogs too (links on the show's site).

A few of the podcasts I've started listening to...

• Diggnation
• This Week in Tech (TWIT - hosted by Leo Laporte from Call for Help)
• HDTV and Home Theatre Podcast
• Engadget

All feeds are free and available in the iTunes store.

More soon...

posted by John C @ 7:33 PM