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Eve's new toys August 28, 2008

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Since I’m going to be away for fathers day, I was given an early present. It’s a new battery for Eve (my MacBook Pro). The old battery was so dead it got maybe 15 minutes. Now I’m back to over 3 hours of battery life. Nice.

I’ve also been playing with my phones. A Nokia E90 (from work) that’s got 3G connectivity and my trusty Treo 650 that only does EDGE. I’ve now got both phones setup to do BT DUN so I can get on the internet when I’m out and about. Not that I’m likely to ever actually do that but hey, it never hurts to be prepared.

Menu Meters CPU name August 6, 2008

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A long time ago I ran a CPU load meter app called Spy. It ran in the menu bar and had a funky way of displaying current and long-term load. Alas, it was not an open source app and the original author disappeared off the face of the earth. I kept a copy of the app around for others to download until it broke with the 10.4 upgrade.

So I finally had to look for something to replace it. Unsanity’s Cee Pee You was ok but only did current load, not long-term load. In fact, that’s something I found with just about every CPU load app that ran in the menu bar. Then I found Menu Meters.

Something that’s bugged me for ages with Menu Meters is it’s inability to recognise the CPU in my MacBook Pro. It says that I’ve got 2 Intel 80486 CPUs running at 2.00 GHz. To be fair though, it does this because Mac OS X tells it that I’ve got that particular CPU. It seems that Apple never bothered to update the Gestalt functions after the switch to Intel CPUs and they never bothered to update the NeXT CPU info functions to support chips newer than the Pentium 4. I did manage to find a suitable string via sysctl. Since Menu Meters is open source, I could go ahead and fix this annoyance myself.

The patch I created is here (watch out! I’m not very experienced with Cocoa so there could be bugs in that).

On my machine the end result looks like this.

Not quite the “Intel Core Duo @ 2.00GHz” that I’d like to see but I wasn’t about to implement a model to marketing string conversion map. I know that T2500 means Core Duo so it’s fine for me.

Hmm… It seems Spy came back though I have to wonder if a new version is ever going to be released. I think I’ll take a look at the code. Maybe I can graft the circular display that Spy used onto Menu Meters…

Update 6 August 2008

So it seems the Spy author was busy, at least for a while. I can build and run the version in CVS and it seems to be doing what it’s supposed to do. It looks a tad different and it has the same “80486″ bug that Menu Meters has but I’ve already figured out how to fix that :)

Isaac is a bad boy August 4, 2008

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Isaac has been avoiding sleeps at kindy for a while now. When he comes home after a day without sleep he’s completely tired and exhausted and tends to be very fragile.

Today, he screamed at Bree all the way home. She put his nappy on (in case he fell asleep), put him on his bed and left him for a few minutes. When she came back there was wee on his bed but his nappy was dry (and suspiciously re-positioned). Upon questioning he admitted to taking his nappy off and weeing on his bed.

We always knew Isaac would be a stubborn one. I never thought that we’d have something like this to deal with.

MythTV FAIL August 4, 2008

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So, once again my MythTV box is sitting in the garage. I got in some testing and found that all channels were ok (but not by much) when a single tuner was plugged directly into the wall point. MythTV showed under 30% signal while my current PVR shows almost full signal. Then again, my current PVR gets occasional glitches in video and audio and that doesn’t seem likely with such high signal. I think it might be lying.

The splitter I’ve got is crap. Here in Australia we have SBS on the UHF signal band and the rest of the channels are on the VHF signal band. The splitter has 1 inputs, one for TV (UFH) and one for FM Radio (VFH). I guess it’s got filters and happens to be filtering out the VHF TV channels because everything except for SBS comes out at 0 when run through the splitter.

HD reception wasn’t good. It’s purely a signal thing though. I guess the errors aren’t enough to stop an SD channel but are enough to interfere with HD reception.

All up, I’m pretty sure a powered splitter is something I’m going to have to get. Either that or a more expensive masthead amp. It would be great if I could get some measuring tools but those things are expensive. Getting an antenna guy in will cost $75 and there’s no guarantee that’ll fix the problem (if for example it’s just because my tuners aren’t good enough at pulling out a signal).

One more thing I might try is a good unpowered splitter. That’s under $10, compared with at least $100 for a good powered splitter and more for a masthead amp.

I’ve done as much reading as I can and the aerial itself and the cabling are supposed to be really important but our aerial isn’t that old (installed 4 years ago, during the Olympics) and it was setup specifically for digital TV. All of the extra distribution wiring was removed leaving just one new cable from the aerial to the TV. In other words, there’s probably not much more that can be done there (without upgrading to some massive aerial).