Reed turned two months old today! We celebrated with his first hike in the woods, which he mostly slept through in his Ergo carrier. Part of me can’t believe he is already this old while another part feels like I’ve known him forever. The past month has been a whirlwind of visitors, but we have the house to ourselves for the rest of the summer. While it’s nice to have company and help, it’s also be nice when it’s just the three of us. My parents were so crazy about Reed that they’re renting a house nearby for three weeks to spend more time with him.

Reed has been growing like a weed. Two weeks ago, we learned that he was in the 75th percentile for height

Adam circa 1971

– which is impressive when you have two shorties for parents. He’s grown 4 inches since he was born
so is 23 and 1/4 inches now. While he eats like crazy, he’s still a pretty lean guy. I’m sure he’ll fill out
soon, though I was never particularly chubby as a baby. I’ve recently seen pics of Adam at this age and he is a chubby version of Reed; it’s really uncanny!

Tummy time or snack time?

Reed’s accomplished so many things this month. Four weeks ago he cracked his first smile and since then he’s been smiling all the time when he’s in a social mood. He’s been cooing a lot and we’re much more clued in to what his various vocalizations mean. He’s started playing with toys — batting at and clutching toys that dangle over him. He’s a whiz at tummy time and has a very strong neck. On Sunday morning he managed to roll himself from his belly onto his back!!! It was a big weekend of firsts since Saturday he also was able to consistently get his thumb in his mouth. He’s still not quite as crazy about it as the pacifier, but he seems to use it more and more each day. He’d been getting it into his mouth on and off for 2 weeks, but he was never able to consistently repeat the feat until now. Good work Reed!!!

I started back at work last week. I’m only working two days per week until mid-August (when Reed is 4 months old) and Adam will be watching him on days that I’m away. It’s difficult to be away from him, but at
least for now he’s with Adam who is so great with him. They have so much fun together and Adam is a really supportive, hands-on dad (and husband). The idea of sending him to daycare really freaks me out, but there really isn’t another good choice for our family.

Lots more to update, but my buddy here seems to want to play, so play we shall.

Unfortunately, they only ran the lines into a couple of rooms.   Not even the living room had a jack.

With the baby coming, Meredith insisted on better access to TV around the house (she’s got to do something while nursing, after all!)

This left me with a terrible choice:  try to retrofit coax drops all over the house (painful, labor intensive) or find a way to transmit the signals wirelessly (possibly expensive,  probably complicated).

We already had a pretty fast 5Ghz 802.11n network in the house and I had a bunch of obsolete hardware rotting in the closet, so the wireless decision seemed obvious.

I’m writing this guide because I hope someone finds it useful, and so three years from now when some piece of the system croaks I have notes to look back on…

MythTV: The DIY Solution

MythTV is an open source software project, so named because it is designed to turn off-the-shelf commodity hardware into the “Mythical” media convergence device.

In practice, it turns your PC into a Tivo-like device that can also play games, stream music, get weather reports, etc….

It is unlike Tivo in a couple of  important ways:

• No mandatory subscription fees.  However, to get good schedule data is it is important to subscribe to a service like Schedules Direct ($20 annually.)  You can use that one account with all the MythTV boxes in your house, so the more units you add, the greater the cost savings vs. Tivo.
• Client-Server architecture.  With Tivo, you play back recordings on the same box that does the recording.  With MythTV, those roles can be split into two different machines:
  1. A server (aka “back-end”) which takes a cable TV input from the wall and records programs to its hard drive.
  2.  A client (aka “front-end”)  hooked up to a TV, which receives recorded and live programs from the server over the computer network either wired or wirelessly.

  One server can serve many clients.  As you can surmise from the description, the clients don’t need access to a cable jack.  So you can place them anywhere around the house.  As long as they can communicate over the network with the server, they’ll be able to receive programming. In fact, you can even use your PC or Mac as a client.

Sadly, one way that MythTV is really not like Tivo is the ease of setup.  Tivo is truly plug-and-play.  You can have one unboxed and running in under 10 minutes.

MythTV makes you work for it.   You need to pick the right hardware & software, then configure it properly. You even need to program the remotes so that they work reasonably well with the clients.

Thus:
If you hate tinkering with hardware, don’t try MythTV.
If you get upset editing xorg.conf by hand, don’t try MythTV.
If you didn’t understand that last sentence, don’t try MythTV.
Seriously, you will thank me later.

That said, the project has come a long way.  There are now several MythTV re-spins based off  major linux distributions, like MythDora and Mythbuntu.  These greatly ease the process of getting a functioning system with a high “WAF”  together in a reasonable amount of time.

Step 0: Pick a Distribution

I chose to use Mythbuntu 8.10 on our clients and server.  This is the latest version of Ubuntu with the latest avaialble version of MythTV layered on top of it. I picked it mainly because of my familiarity with Ubuntu, the large database of supported hardware, and the helpful community around Ubuntu. (The community is critical — if you run into a problem, they are the only ones who will provide useful advice.)

Step 1: Get a SchedulesDirect Account

You’ll need to subscribe to SchedulesDirect in order to download your cable system’s TV schedule each day.  They offer a free trial for 7 days, then if you like it they ask that you subscribe for $20/year.

As an aside, SchedulesDirect is a not-for-profit organization.   They perform a valuable service, transforming the TV schedules from cable companies around the world into an easy-to-swallow XML feed that MythTV and other open soruce projects can download.

They’ve been 100% accurate with our cable schedules up until now, I highly recommend supporting them if you’re into DIY TV projects like MythTV.

Step 2: Get the server running

Fortunately for me, we had a cable drop in the room that I use as my gym.  I could throw an ugly server in there and Meredith wouldn’t notice or care.

Digging through my junk closet, i found such a case.   It had a 2006-vintage Celeron D motherboard, which is more than fast enough for the jobs that the server has to perform.  In the MythTV world the back-end, with the help of a TV Capture Card, handles the recording and storage of the programs and listens for requests from clients to serve up content.

I also had a 1TB hard drive lying around, so threw that into the case.  1TB is good for 500-700 hours of standard-definition TV recordings.

The hardware that actually does the “heavy lifting” of encoding the signals from the cable into something that a computer can play back is called a video capture card (aka TV-Tuner card), and it was the one piece of hardware I didn’t have lying around.

The best place to find such a card is eBay.  And the classic capture card for MythTV is the Hauppauge PVR-350, which is what I used.

This card is considered a good choice for a number of reasons, most importantly because its Linux drivers work well, and because it has two coax inputs.  You can split your cable signal and stick two cables into the card — this lets you record two streams at once, or watch one stream of live TV while recording another.  Very handy, especially if you have more than one client in the house.  A decent capture card compatibility list can be found here. (But do yourself a favor — stick with the supported Hauppauge boards.)

One great feature of MythTV is that it can support multiple capture cards in the same machine.  So, if I anted up for another PVR-350 and stuffed it in this server, the machine could record 4 streams at once!

MythTV also has the concept of a ‘master-slave’ server relationship.  You can setup additional servers (called ’slaves’).  The master server tells the slaves what programs to record when.  This sort of expandability is a huge bonus, particularly if you are adding clients all over the house.  Or if you and your spouse can never agree on what to record.

Once you’ve got your (hopefully compatible) hardware put together, installing the server software is usually straightforward.

Mythbuntu installs like plain, old Ubuntu but at the end of the setup also installs the MythTV software & helps you configure it.  The configuration options are beyond the scope of this blog post.  The MythTV wiki has a wealth of information about how to set it up.

Step 3: Build the client machines

Client machines typically take a little more thought to build, since they sit next to or under the TV.  This means they cannot be excessively ugly, large or loud (WAF rears its ugly head once more…)

Additionally, the motherboard that you use in the client needs a way to send a signal out to a television.   You can achieve this in one of three ways:

• a TV-Out built into the motherboard
• a TV-Out built into an add-on AGP or PCI video card
• a signal converter, which can change a VGA signal to composite or S-Video.

My junk closet/treasure trove happened to hold a couple of VIA EPIA-M10000 motherboards from 2003.

The VIA EPIA M-Series are considered classic motherboards for a Myth front-end because they are:

• Cheap (check out eBay)
• Use very little power
• Can frequently be run fanless, so they are silent
• Have a built-in MPEG2 decoder chip, which offloads the video decoding from the wimpy CPUs that these boards are usually saddled with.
• Have composite and S-Video TV outs.
• Are well supported in Linux

Alternatively, i’ve heard of people using mobos like the  Intel D201GLY2 or the newer Atom-based D945GCLF Little Falls, two more low-power consumers.

All these motherboards are tiny (Micro-ITX sized)  so you can use extremely small, somewhat less ugly cases which resemble cable boxes.

Installing the front-end is similar to the back-end, just stick the Mythbuntu disk in and answer a series of questions, including information about the back-end that you’re going to connect to.

The installer will set up the hardware automatically and this is why it is important to choose your hardware carefully — if your distribution is baffled by the hardware it detects, you are going to be in a world of pain and spending many sleepless nights trolling the MythTV support forums.

Just as an aside, here’s my xorg.conf file for my EPIA M10K, using the composite TV-out (hope it helps someone):

# xorg.conf (X.Org X Window System server configuration file)
#
# This file was generated by dexconf, the Debian X Configuration tool, using
# values from the debconf database.
#
# Edit this file with caution, and see the xorg.conf manual page.
# (Type “man xorg.conf” at the shell prompt.)
#
# This file is automatically updated on xserver-xorg package upgrades *only*
# if it has not been modified since the last upgrade of the xserver-xorg
# package.
#
# If you have edited this file but would like it to be automatically updated
# again, run the following command:
# sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Generic Keyboard”
Driver “kbd”
Option “XkbRules” “xorg”
Option “XkbModel” “pc105″
Option “XkbLayout” “us”
EndSection
Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Configured Mouse”
Driver “mouse”
Option “CorePointer”
EndSection

Section “Device”
Identifier “openchrome”
Option “TVType” “NTSC”
Option “TVOutput”
Option “EnableAGPDMA”
Option “ActiveDevice” “TV”

EndSection

Section “Monitor”
Identifier “Configured Monitor”
EndSection

Section “Screen”
Identifier “Default Screen”
Monitor “Configured Monitor”
Device “Configured Video Device”
EndSection

Section “ServerLayout”
Identifier “Default Layout”
Screen “Default Screen”
EndSection

If you want to change the channel from the couch, you’ll also need a remote and an IR receiver that plugs into a USB port.  Lots of people like the StreamZap. One of the cool things about MythTV is that it not only supports a ton of different remotes, but you can also program remotes that it doesn’t know about out-of-the-box.

We had an extra Tivo remote lying around (also available on eBay, $10-15), and I was able to find links to someone who got it configured properly.   This was a critical piece of the puzzle, because the more I can get the MythTV to behave like the Tivo, the happier Meredith is.  And a happy Meredith is a critical goal for this project.

Step 4: Record Some Shows!
After the construction ordeal is over, the final step is to actually start using the thing.

You can watch Live TV with it, or set up programs to record. You can set up your recording schedule using the TV and remote (a la Tivo), but it is cumbersome and annoying. The *better* way to do it is to access MythTV’s web server.

Easier to program than Tivo.

When you set up your back-end Mythbuntu should have given you the option to install MythWeb. It is a very simple way to see the upcoming schedule of shows and pick which you want to record.

Another neat way to progam the MythTV system is through an iPhone. There’s an app for that.

Step 5: Watch TV, Already!

That was a lot of work, but in the end you’ve built a system that has many advantages over other PVRs:

• It can  be easily expanded to every room in your house (without multiple subscription fees, a la Tivo)
• You don’t need to be near a cable jack
• Centralized storage means every client can access all the shows on the common back end
• The ability to stream music and other media, as well as games,  to the front-ends around the house

If you are intrigued by MythTV but all the setup talk has you spooked, you can also buy pre-built MythTV boxes on eBay.

Good luck and happy loafing!

Don't let this happen to you

I’d been painstakingly renovating the entire house getting ready for baby.  One of the last rooms to finish was the guest bathroom, which was really dumpy.

New wallpaper, cabinet hardware, and a coat of paint made a major difference. Or rather it would have.

As I was victoriously applying the very last bit of paint to the cabinets, i heard a faint “drip… drip… drip…”

I looked up & saw the ceiling bowing downward. Not good.  My plumber immediately ran over and stuck an awl into the ceiling.  A comical torrent of water came flooding out of the ceiling all over him, the floor, and my new wallpaper.

All I could do was laugh.

Can’t wait to see how much this is going to cost us…

Actually, it is probably true.  I’ve got dozens of lame excuses, but the reality is I’m just not as expressive as Meredith.  

With a new baby on the way, I think Meredith was hoping it would cause a surge of emotion that would clear my writers block and compel me to write my deepest thoughts in this most public of spaces.

So far, no dice.  I’m really excited about being a dad, but I haven’t felt a great need to talk about it online (maybe that’s a guy thing? or just an Adam thing?)   Besides, there’s no way I could say it as well as Meredith!  Just look at the size and depth of her posts! Incredible.

What has impressed me though is the sheer amount of preparation that it takes to get a house ready for a baby.  Seriously, I had no idea.  I was born in an era where cars didn’t have shoulder-belts and “car seat” meant “milk crate”.  Sticking a knife into an outlet was considered a learning experience… like a pre-school science class or something.

But 2009 is different.  After a quick look around it was obvious that our house was child-unfriendly to the max.  It contained (among other things):  

• Unsecured, heavy,  tippy furniture 
• Highly charged and unstably-placed computer equipment strewn all over the house.
• Weights that were barely adult-friendly, let alone baby-friendly.
• A 13-year old car that blew so much smoke it probably shaved a decade off my life,  and airbags that may or may work.
• No bedroom suitable for a baby.  

So, despite being very comfortable with our deathtrap of a house, this past couple of months I set out to be the best dad possible & make real changes.  

The Nursery
The space formerly known as Adam’s Office.  Needed to clean, paint, add new window treatments (and all the furniture.)  Turned out OK, only took a couple of days to do

Nursery: Before! Blech!

Nursery: After! What a difference some paint & carpet makes.

Adam’s Office

Since my office became the baby’s room, I decided to repurpose part of the downstairs as my new office.

Had to build a wall downstairs to enclose the office

The resulting space needed some help.. it was dingy.

More scrubbing, moving, and painting! And they say pregnancy is easy for a man! (BTW, the color is Behr Restful 400F-4, in case anyone got here from a search engine trying to figure out what it looks like on a real wall.)

 

 

Next step:  Fix up the Bookshelves of Death. That’s for another post.   Man, does my back hurt…

We didn’t do a lot with our house for the first few years that we lived here (click here for pics of what it looked like when we moved in). I got my book deal within 2 months of moving to Vermont, so my mind was singularly focused on writing for a good long while. By the time that was finished, we were unsure if we were really going to stay here. I learned a lot in my first professional librarian position, and one of the things that I learned was that the sort of job I was doing wasn’t really for me. I was good at it and there were elements that I liked about it, but I found myself getting a little bored. I was really interested in doing more teaching and wanted a management position, so I started looking for jobs in that fit my interests. So, since we didn’t feel too committed to the house, we only did the things that absolutely had to get done: replacing the tartan plaid carpet that covered the entire downstairs of the house, completely re-doing the landscaping, painting the exterior of the house, and fixing up what was a sad little guest room (and is now cute and cozy and something we don’t have to be embarrassed of).

When I was offered my promotion at work to Head of Instructional Initiatives, we decided that we were going to stay in this house a while. We’d already talked about having kids and were waiting to start trying until I got a new job. Well, we had no more excuses to wait for any of it (baby or house fix-er-up-ing). I don’t want to be one of those people who moves their whole family every couple of years to rise up the career ladder, and we so love Vermont, so we committed in our heads to staying here — not forever, but for a good long while. And very shortly after that, we found that we were expecting our little munchkin. That was when we finally got the energy and motivation to start fixing up the house.

Here’s what we’ve done so far this Fall:

• Got rid of the ugly green carpet that covered the upstairs and replaced it with nice, normal beige carpet. This alone made us feel like we were living in a new house.
• Got new window treatments for a lot of the rooms to replace the inconvenient and dirty plantation shutters that were there before (before and after)
• Replaced some of the uglier light fixtures (before and after & before and after) with ones I’d been eying for years from Pottery Barn.
• Replaced the scary, swaying ceiling fan in the kitchen (that I was sure would kill one or both of us one day) and had ceiling fans installed in our bedroom and the nursery (which has made it feel much less dry and stuffy in our bedroom so far this winter).
• Painted the baby’s nursery (click here for pics).
• Moved Adam’s office downstairs.

Downstairs living room when we first moved in

Adam’s office is definitely the project I’m most excited about. Ever since we moved in, we’ve been at a loss to figure out what to do with the “living room” downstairs (there’s one upstairs as well that we actually do use). It’s this weird L-shaped room with a fireplace and the shape really makes no sense for entertaining or  anything else as far as we can see. There’s no good place to put a couch or a TV, so we’ve just sort of done nothing with the space for the past 3 1/2 years. When we got pregnant, we knew that Adam’s office (right next to our bedroom) was going to have to become the nursery. So we moved Adam down to the L shaped room in the little alcove part (it’s about the same size as our guest room). It actually works really nicely as an office, and we

New wall to separate living room from office - in progress. No more wood paneling!!!

have a contractor who is right now putting in a wall and pocket door to create a real extra room.  Now, that downstairs living room is nice and rectangular and finally makes some sense. And Adam is loving his new office, which I must admit is a lot cozier and better laid-out than when it was in the bigger room upstairs. (click here for more pics of the office in progress)

The nursery is really starting to shape up too! Adam did an amazing painting job and the baby’s furniture has started to arrive. The only major piece of furniture that hasn’t arrived yet is the crib, so I’d say that for being about 15 weeks away from D-Day, we’re in very good shape. I didn’t want to be in the position of working on the room and rearranging furniture at 8 or 9 months pregnant, so I’m glad we got a jump on it.

Newly-painted nursery with some furniture.

For the first time, I really feel at home in our house. It feels like it’s “ours.” And while we still have some projects left to do — like buying a new stove and wallpapering the bathrooms — I finally like the house and feel like it reflects our taste a lot more than that of a 70-something-year-old woman.

R.I.P., Productivity Pr0n

Friends, I’m done with “productivity” as a personal fetish or hobby. There are countless sites that are all too happy to vend stroke material for your joyless addiction to puns about procrastination and systems for generating more taxonomically satisfying meta-work. But, presently, you won’t find so much of that here.

Except inasmuch as it can help move aside barriers to finishing the projects that you claim matter to you, “productivity” is often a sprawling ghetto of well-marketed nonsense for people who really just need a ritalin and a hug. So, for myself, random tips and lists that aren’t anchored to solving a real-world problem for a smart but flawed adult with a mind are dead to me. Pour a forty on ‘em.

…

This is now a site for people who want to finish things that they care about — but who still occasionally need help, inspiration, and the courage to push all the bullshit off their work table. This is about clearing that space every day, and then using it to do cool stuff that makes you proud.

AMEN! I think the whole productiving pr0n thing can be taken way too far and I’ve seen a lot of people who’ve fallen into that trap. You may very well need some sort of system to organize your life, but when you’re devoting more time to creating and honing the organizational system than to the actual things you need to do each day, you’ve got a problem.

Believe me, I understand. I used to make all of these grand plans for getting into better shape. I’d read all about different exercise plans, write down exactly what I was going to do each day and what my reward system was going to be. Unfortunately, I spent a lot more time creating this system than I ever did exercising. I sometimes wonder if planning (to that extent) is the enemy of stick-to-itiveness. I find that that the less I plan, the more likely I am to stick to what I’m doing. I think the plan itself becomes so grand that the first time it doesn’t work out the way I want it to, I tend to be so disappointed that I give up on the whole endeavor. For me, at least, it’s better to have a small goal and just take it one day at a time. Sometimes it’s better to focus on the trees rather than the forest.

I love all of those cool productivity tools as much as anyone. I’ve bought my share of software and paper doodads that haven’t made me any more organized than I was before. But I think that productivity fetish can really get out of hand where it becomes more important (or satisfying) than actually accomplishing the things you’re creating the system for. This realization has saved me a lot of money over the past few years.

I skimmed through the Getting Things Done book and found a lot to like in there. But, for me, a detailed system really isn’t a good fit. Right now, for my own productivity, I use Remember the Milk. It’s incredibly simple and gets the job done for me. I use it as a dumping ground for things I need to remember to do or things I just want to remember. For example, if I am listening to Pandora and want to remember the name of a band I just heard, I’ll put it into Pandora under my music tab. I have different lists for all different things, like committees I’m on, writing, speaking, library instruction, the class I teach, household projects, projects at work, and more. With pregnancy brain fully in effect at this point, it’s nice just to have a place to write things down before they disappear. I don’t know that it makes me more “organized” but it keeps me from forgetting stuff and that was my only barrier to actually accomplishing things.

I’m not knocking anyone who has an organizational system that works for them. Good for you! But I think some people get so into planning and organizing and playing with different organizational systems and tools that it becomes a barrier to productivity. I really like what Merlin wrote on his “How to use 43 Folders” page.

Why am I here right now instead of making something cool on my own? What’s the barrier to me starting that right now?

And that’s what we should look at. What is it that’s keeping us from doing something? Is it because we lack a fully-functional organizational system, or is it something much more specific that is holding you back? Focus on fixing what is broken and on pushing yourself to get a little more done each day on the things you need to do. Because you could spend weeks in the 43 Folders or Lifehacker archives and in the end, be no closer to accomplishing anything.