Now my server is finally back online (apparently although hosted in Germany somewhere, the support staff are in flood-ridden Australia) so I thought I’d update the blog.

I’ve rebuilt my desktop machine now I’ve got the HDTV card. I finally fitted the 64Gb Kingston SSD boot drive, installed Fedora 14 and put the 1Tb SpinPoint F3 hard disk back in to supplement the rapidly-filling 1Tb F1.

I noticed how much of a difference the SSD makes when rebuilding the Nessus plugin cache – on a HDD it takes literally minutes, on the SSD its almost instant!

I’m using Kaffeine to record and play via the HDTV card. The TV guide is not great, but you can manually add programs in to record or just hit the record button to record now (and pause live TV etc.)

I can’t be bothered to go the whole MythTV route as I only use it to watch TV in a window whilst I’m doing something, or to record a show when something else is on the Sky box downstairs. Xine, VLC, TVTime and MPlayer are supposed to support DVB-S too, but I can’t get them to work.

The electricians came on Friday and decided (without even looking!) that it wouldn’t be possible to run the CAT6 down the cavity alongside the satellite cables, so as the BT Business Hub has shite wireless, I’m going to have to look into HomePlug AV or Powerline HD which runs IP over the mains electrical wiring at 200Mbps or even gigabit speeds (more like 100-300Mbps apparently on the same ring main). Shame I bought those CAT6 faceplates and 65m of UTP cable now!

I’ve got Fedora 14 on the replacement Asus EeePC 1001P netbook now, its a little slow – although strangely since enabling Compiz, the desktop renders faster (not slower as you’d expect!) but its handy for web surfing or SSH. Battery life seems to be pretty good, nowhere near the advertised 11 hours I wouldn’t think though, even the Jupiter controlling the SHE power management.

The Acer Aspire Revo 3610-M nettop is being used to play the video’s downstairs through the TV, that’s the machine I wanted to connect to the desktop upstairs using CAT6. Its wireless is OK for surfing but way too slow for video – and its 802.11N chip doesn’t even work with the Fedora 14 on there, so its Windows7 playing via a 16Gb USB stick at the moment!

I noticed that to play a Full-HD file I had to use Windows Media Player as it uses the ION DirectX acceleration (like VDPAU as used in MPlayer on Linux) as the Atom CPU didn’t have the grunt without GPU acceleration when using VLC/MPC.

The new Lenovo ThinkPad T410 from work is pretty nifty too – its a desktop replacement one, so massive and no battery life, but its running all the latest Microsoft crap that we need for work – Windows7, Office2010 etc; and the VPN uses a SmartCard, which works quite nicely actually, much better than the Novell dialer crap with XP.

Update: I recompiled JtR with the newer MSCash2 v1.1 patch, downloads here.