AboutBlank

This campaign has been a long time coming. Our last adventure had fallen apart due to a combination of annoyance, boredom, and scheduling conflicts. I agreed to DM a new campaign and was originally thinking of running Return to Castle Ravenloft, the 3.5 update to the classic AD&D module by Tracy and Laura Hickman. I eventually decided against it, the module is designed to be quite challenging and having a few inexperienced players (and one inexperienced DM) would lead to TPK after TPK. Plus the players were setting themselves up for some party infighting right from the get-go with some of their character choices.

So I decided to go with my true love, Dragonlance. Margaret Weis productions, before their license with WotC expired, produced a trilogy of adventures set in the most up-to-date era of Dragonlance known as the Age of Mortals trilogy. I tried running this before and stopped halfway through the first of the three. I decided to try again, now I have a better group and am slightly more experienced than I was before.

So there you have it, I'll try to update the journal after every session. We're planning on playing weekly but I'm sure we'll be skipping sessions here and there for various reasons.

Wow, it's been just over a year since I've touched this thing. The combination of giving up on the MythTV project, various life-changing events, and general lazyness (mostly lazyness) all contributed to the lack of posts. I figured that one day I'd come back once I have something to post about, and now I do. Last week I started DMing a new campaign, so I'm going to use this blog primarily as a campaign journal. Maybe once in a while I'll also post whatever else is on my mind.

Okay, lets try this again.

Lets start with the specs of my MythTv box

AMD Athlon 'Thunderbird' 1.2 Ghz (I did the pencil trick and upped the FSB to 133) 
765 MB PC133 SDR RAM
Abit KT7-A motherboard
Nvidia GeForce Ti 4200
Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150 MCE with Windows Media Center remote (silver) and ir receiver/blaster
Guillemot Fortissimo 4 channel sound card with S/PDIF output
120 GB HD with about 100 left for storage
Ubuntu 6.10 "Edgy Eft"

The specs may be a little low for a combined frontend/backend, but I have a hardware encoder (the PVR-150) and I won't be encoding in HD. Right now, without any video input connected it uses about 70% of my memory and none of the swap file, just to run the back and front ends simultaneously

Guides I've used

MythTV Edgy Backend Frontend
This is part of the Ubuntu community documentation and my main source for setup. It assumes you are installing a fresh copy of Ubuntu 6.10 on a blank drive (or a drive you don't care about being wiped) with no advanced partitioning and no dual booting.
So far this has been a great guide. Before I found this one I tried to use a guide from the MythTv site which wasn't nearly as good and didn't have the same instructions as the guide that was included with the MythTv software. There's only one thing I've been confused about with the Ubuntu guide. In the Setup Additional Hardware section is says not to install a graphics card driver until after you install and setup MythTv. Then in the Install MythTV section one of the first things it tells you to do immediately after installation is to finish installing the card driver it just told you not to install. And no where else in the guide does it say "stop now and install the driver if you didn't before." This may have been the cause of some of the display issues I was having before I started over, but I don't know for sure. Also the first time I went through it I had no problems but the second time I got the "access denied for user mythtv@localhost" error. I'm not sure what I did different but the solution in the guide worked.

MythTv Edgy Hardware
This is the hardware installation guide linked from the previous guide. It contains basic setup instructions for graphics cards and links to guides for tuners and remotes. The nvidia setup guide is a little confusing became it says to only do step 4 and beyond if you have installed xorg which is later in the guide, but it isn't. It didn't seem to matter anyway because xorg was already installed for me. Also the guide says nothing about dual monitor or TV out setup. More on that later.

Install IVTV Edgy
IVTV is the driver for Hauppauge capture cards. Pretty basic guide, but gets the job done. Make sure if you follow the main guide linked above you follow the text based environment instructions.

Install Lirc Edgy
Lirc is used for IR receiver/transmitters, so the remote and ir blaster. Some PVR-150s have on board support for ir blasters, which there seems to be some problems with. Mine came with an external USB receiver/blaster so I don't seem to have the same issue. I chose to install the mceusb2 module which seemed to work fine. Although I was having one problem with the modules loading I just noticed I followed the guide wrong, so I'm going to try again tonight. I also haven't setup the blaster yet, just the receiver and the remote, so I don't know how well the guide is on that point.
[Edit] No wonder I followed the guide wrong. They up and changed it on me after I went through it. Bastards.
[Edit x2] The error I was getting was

#####################################################
## I couldn't load the required kernel modules     ##
## You should install lirc-modules-source to build ##
## kernel support for your hardware.               ##
#####################################################
## If this message is not appropriate you may set  ##
## LOAD_MODULES=false in /etc/lirc/hardware.conf   ##
#####################################################

The Lirc documentation on the MythTv wiki says to do what the message suggests, 
which contradicts the Ubunbu documentation. For now I'm going to trust the MythTv 
docs because nothing else works.

MythTv Setup
This guide is also part of the Ubuntu community docs. I haven't delved too deep into it yet because I haven't completely setup my hardware. This is where you enter your zap2it user name and password (which you should have if you followed the first guide) and tell MythTv what hardware to and inputs to use. I'm sure I'll talk more about this guide later.

Nvidia Linux Guide
I finally found this guide after looking in Ubuntu documentation, MythTv documentation, and several other how-to guides for setting up TV-out. While I finally got it working the output looks pretty bad before I wiped the drive and started over. I haven't reached this point yet in my new install so I don't know if I'm still having the same problems. At least I have the right guide this time.

I was going to use this post to continue talking about what I've already done as a part of my MythTv project, but the MySQL database server decided to crap out and throw errors at me. I tried for a few hours to get it fixed and decided to hell with it. Now I'm starting over from scratch, complete with a drive reformat. Maybe tomorrow I'll do ThrackTv part 2.1.

A couple of weeks ago during a disastrous D&D session I uttered the phrase :
"Not all mushrooms don't have feet"
We came across a room with a purple mushroom guarding the exit. Not being up to speed on my Monster Manual I didn't know the specifics of a purple mushroom. My confusion was compounded by the fact that the DM chose to represent the mushroom with miniature that indeed had feet.

Mushroom Mushroom!

I asked if the mushroom had feet so I'd know if I shot it with an arrow if it would chase me, The DM said no and looked at me like I was an idiot. The I said the phrase above. It was laughed down as not only being silly (which it is) but also wrong (which it is not) The reason given was that the phrase contains a double negative, thereby making the true meaning of the phrase "All mushrooms have feet" which is incorrect.

Let's look at this deeper. A double negative is when a sentence or phrase contains two negative elements. These can then 'cancel' each other out creating a single positive. For example in the phrase "I'm not not licking frogs" the two 'not's can be removed leaving "I'm licking frogs" which is the meaning of the phrase. This process is much like how in multiplication/division statements can be simplified, canceling out even numbers of negatives. Therefore -x * -y = x *y. 

You would probably read the last example as "negative x times negative y equals x times y" although I would not. Why? Because it was pounded into me by my freshman year algebra teacher to never say "negative variable," always say "opposite of variable" because you don't know whether or not the number the variable represents is already negative. While a crazy thing to yell at your students about, it makes a kind of sense, in a real literalist math nerd kind of way.

In any event nagatives and opposites are more or less the same thing, in that light let's go back a step. The opposite of licking frogs is not licking frogs. Lets call that -LickingFrogs. The opposite of that would be -(-LickingFrogs) or not not LickingFrogs. These opposites cancel and leave LickingFrogs. Now, back to the original phrase. Lets look at the second negative; "don't have feet" The opposite of that is clearly "have feet" Now lets look at the first 'negative.' That's where is gets tricky.

The phrase "not all mushrooms" supposedly becomes the phrase "all mushrooms" when the nagative is canceled. That would make "not all mushrooms" the opposite of "all mushrooms" Think about that for a second. What would you say the opposite of "all" is? Is it "not all," or is it "none." Lets look at the statment with the second 'not' removed and with two different 'mushroom' statements'

"Not all mushrooms have feet."
"No mushrooms have feet."

Those statments clearly have different meanings. In the second phrase "no mushrooms" is the opposite of "all mushrooms."  The phrase "not all mushrooms" is not the opposite of any other statement and therefore is not negative. Therefore the full phrase "Not all mushrooms don't have feet" is itself not a double negative and can not be 'simplified' by removing 'not's. Although the phrase may be linguisticly clumsy, it is indeed gramaticly sound and means exactly what I meant it to.

I setup this Vox page with the intention of doing something with it, might as well start off chronicling my experiences setting up and using MythTv.
What is MythTV? For those who don’t know.
Free, open-source digital video recorder software for Linux. Basicly, with the right hardware you can turn your computer into a TiVo like DVR.
Pros: Cheap, if you have an old computer lying around. So far all I've bought is a video capture/encoder card, which ran about $90. If all goes acording to plan then that's all I need. Also there are no recuring costs or subscription fees, at least at this time. Program guides for MythTV are provided through Zap2It which just requires you to take a survey every few months.
Cons: Setup can be a bitch. You can get Linux distributions that have MythTV preinstalled to help you out, but for me installation was the easy part. It's hardware configuration that I'm struggling through at the moment. If you don't have a spare computer lying around or you aren't comfortable setting up your own machine for whatever reason but still don't want to pay monthly fees there are places where you can buy a fully setup MythTV box, hardware and all, for a bit of a premium.