motivated.

Unlike alot of people that ran right out and upgraded to Leopard on the first day it was available as a general release, I waited. I wanted to upgrade. And I was looking forward to it. But having experienced an upgrade that broke applications in sometimes unexpected ways before, I thought it wise to sit and wait this one out.

Why Upgrade Now
Now that the first major patch release is out (OS X 10.5.1) and after having read numerous reports about the new features, OS improvements to stability and the user experience, and the recent bug fixes, I upgraded. The upgrade went smoothly, but it wasn’t without quirks.

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I did something stupid last night. I tried to make a modification to the partition table of a drive while it was in use. For obvious reasons, this was not what I had intended and I corrupted the partition table and lost all my data on that drive — temporarily. Then, I fixed it with parted.

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With all the hype surrounding appleTV I’ve started to rethink the whole PVR vs. TV-media client tradeoff. I have a server at home, a bulky black box with 2×250GB hard disks that I use for storage and backups. I’ve recently considered turning it into a PVR or a TV-serving media server, but the lack of good HD options has stopped me from doing so. I have an HDTV, and I pay for HD cable. Naturally, I want an end-to-end HD solution. I could purchase and install a tuner in the server (which runs Ubuntu, by the way), such as the pcHDTV550 that’s guaranteed to run on linux — but it only takes analog inputs (coaxial and s-video) and only decodes ATSC, which is already exported via firewire by the cable tuner. When I thought about it, I noted that all I really want to do was capture the video stream.

After a little research, I found that any Firewire-equipped Mac can be made into an HD-PVR for unencrypted content at the expense of an appropriate firewire cable. Apple even provides the necessary capture software that you need, provided that you know where to look.

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