The ancient 1st gen Mini has just been reallocated to media center duty, once again, this time in the basement, where it will drive an even-more ancient video projector, one I dumpstered many years ago.

XBMC finally arrived for PPC systems sometime in the past couple of years. While it is far from as polished a product as Boxee, it was able to browse to and add nearly all my LAN media sources. The exception being the recently-added eyetv, which sends and shares happily to the iPads but not via UPnP/DNLA.

It looks as though I need to pop for a bigger screen than the 64″ model we scored at a salvage place for five bucks, as well as a ceiling mount for the projector. I am still mulling options for audio. The Mini will never be able to install Lion, with its broad support of AirPlay options, but might be able to support an Airfoil-based audio redirect. The question, then, is “Can Airfoil support multi-channel surround?”

AirPlay appears to and Airfoil claims to support all AirPlay enabled devices, so one would think the answer is yes. I need to test this somehow.

Further equipment gathering is needed as well; I have a pre HDMI 5.1 receiver currently in use only as a stereo output device, and I do not have an additional set of surround speakers. Therefore an additional stereo-only receiver and some set of speakers is suggested. Out if curiosity I looked for wireless surround systems but that appears to remain a pipe dream.

Given the recycled nature of this project, I think Craigslist would be the place to go for the speakers and receiver.

UPDATE: scored a nice compact 5-way Samsung set. No sub, but I’m sure that will, er, surface in time.

In rooting through my antiquarian cables and such, I realized that with the exception of books, I have more tools and electrical stuff (extension cords, what not) than my family did when I was a kid.

Waxy has some analysis and handwringing up about OAuth and third-party apps accessing Google account info, specifically Gmail.

I took a look, and yeah, I don’t trust you motherfuckers very much. Tripit and Yahoo are the only non-Google services I have granted OAuth inbox access to. I obviously need to nuke Yahoo, but Tripit is essential.

I suppose the answer is to stand up a dedicated travel-oriented gmail address with forwarding. The problem generated there would be two unique uid/pw instances.

Hm. Anyway, yeah. Nerds who use crypto use gmail and grant OAuth access just like normal people. You know who uses crypto and doesn’t do that? Corporations and governments, and not all of them, even.

Interesting thread on writer’s software at Mefi.

I am amazed to discover that I lack an early digital video cable, the M1 variety. Monoprice is there for me, natch.

Not sure why, but as I was posting this I remembered that my parents were supposed to send me the family pachinko machine, like, two years ago. Outrage, or a good excuse for a cross country road trip?

Much of my dream space last night was occupied by a dream about bagels, wherein I made several dozen and then inexplicably bought six, hot from the oven, for twenty dollars, grumbling about the price. I am not sure if I bought them from myself or what.

I was the bagel maker at a coffee shop in my youth and once entirely forgot I knew how to make them. On a whim I invited a friend over and once the ingredients were assembled, muscle memory took over and it was as if I had been possessed. I watched my body move efficiently and swiftly through the steps of the process, agape and not knowing how it knew what to do.

About the time the bagels were going into and out of the boiling water, my on-hand lack of a large steel mixing bowl to boil the water in (the 20-inch diameter of the water surface meant you could get eight or so in at a time) FINALLY triggered a clear, conscious memory of mixing, kneading, turning, twisting, and baking.

How it is that one can totally forget something that one loves remains a complete mystery.

I don’t think I will bake some today – twenty bucks is an outrage – but I might roll out on a bagel quest later on. Seattle is in general sorely lacking in east coast deli food but there are indeed a few decent bagel sources. Thank god.

As briefly noted earlier, I have been working through using Amazon EC2 instances as an on-demand proxy. I am making progress, and can reliably launch and ssh into a given instance.

The problem is that so far I can’t figure out how to share that ssh connection with applications or the operating system. There are plenty of tutorials that cover setting up the OS or an app (usually a web browser) to use an sash session as a proxy; my problem appears to be that once I have ssh up, the session is not being shared outside the establishing application.

This could be a consequence of some firewalling I am unaware of or it could be something more fundamental (application walls or something) which the easy-to-find pre-Lion and pre-Win7 tutorials don’t have to address.

Anyway. Learning.

Fellow small-scale retail entrepeneur Steerforth holds forth on “Brand Wheels,” an infographic abomination I have thus far thankfully missed out on.

His judgement is law.

Totally digging Mitchum in “The Big Steal,” 1949, which appears to have been shot on location in Veracruz and elsewhere.

Huzzah! A comical-book themed story by the estimable Michael Chabon in the new ish of the New Yorker, “Citizen Conn.”

“Though he was at the time unknown to me even by reputation, I soon learned that my own husband had been among the millions of American boys in the nineteen-sixties whose minds were blown by Feather’s art work in comic books such as The New Frontiersmen and Mister Arcane.”

Sounds like he’s doing a Ditko take, mashed up with some other folks. Yes, that first fictionalized title is a Watchmen shoutout; in Moore’s comic, the title is a right-wing scandal sheet trusted by Rorshach with his memoirs. Ditko is legendary for his ground-breaking work for Marvel (on Spiderman and Doctor Strange), and for his eccentric legend as a big fan of Ayn Rand.

I haven’t read more than the first couple sentences, but the clever layering of Moore’s fictional right-wing publication into a Ditkoesque career seems amusing and appropriate. Among other things, Watchmen was a fictionalization of comics history, and that is a thing that Chabon has delighted in giving us for years now.

UPDATE: The story is more a take on the Stan Lee – Jack Kirby – Ditko thing, with Kirby and Ditko compressed into the single character of Mort Feather.
WITH a full-on cameo by none other than Seattle’s own Comics Journal, an issue of which is described as featuring a Gary Groth endless interview with the story’s Lee-alike, the “Citizen Conn” of the tale’s title.

The New Yorker has a discussion with Chabon on the piece up.

He sez Lee-Kirby, so I guess my Ditko stuff up top is off base.

Many incremental successes today.

A troubleshooting session with a software vendor went smoothly enough, and now orders are flowing, more or less, directly into Quickbooks. This will inevitably dramatically increase accounting issues but it also transforms my inventory monitoring and reordering into something to which I can apply Quickbooks analytical tools. Which, well, they are what they are.

I taught myself how to strip, crimp, and verify cat-11 telephone cable. I also installed and verified a couple of additional phone jacks.

I reviewed my annual haystack of tax reporting forms and it looks like I am only missing a couple, which means I am probably a week away from filing.
I am clearly noticing my heart rate improving while running. I still need to check with the docs about my sacroiliac stuff.

I began working through some products in Amazon AWS, specifically EC2 server setup and usage. Some fiddly bits defeated me, as I was using downtime on the tech support call and it has been years since I had to use PuTTY for ssh and the like.

This past week, I started working on getting Viv set up to use her iPad as an A/V playback device, installing an ElGato TV receiver on the media Mini and then banging on antenna reception. I managed to rewire the existing forty year old roof aerial and currently we are missing only the Kitsap-located tower signal that carries channel 13 and the signals from Tacoma that carry KBCT. This is kind of aggravating because I like KBCT’s programming more than KCTS’.

We do receive it in the guest room, which makes no sense: the five dollar antenna there gets it but the six foot aluminum kite on the roof does not. Electromagnetic waves: how do they work?

Anyway the upshot of all this extreme retro nerdery is that our iPads and iPhones are now portable televisions. The EyeTV app only supports one viewer at a time, though, so you can steal the broadcast away from other users on the LAN, which has delighted our inner brats no end.

Some time in the past couple weeks I also moved all of our object-based playback media into a more useable setup, so we can easily get to the vinyl and CDs and cassettes. The stuff still needs to be organized, especially the CDs, but at least it is no longer hidden from sight. I’m sort of contemplating some roofline shelving for the discs, but am not totally sold on the idea.

Running still going as previously noted. Looks like I am settling into about a mile and a half a day, plus a mile walked with the pooch. Still puzzled about what people mean when they describe exercise as something that makes them feel good. An interesting aspect of watching the time of the run and my heart rate is how similar the time needed and apparent personal physical effects are to my father’s longtime exercise regime.

I have a hard time imagining I will get into the same kind of shape he was when he was my age, though. That guy would bust his ass every morning for twenty minutes, and so far I would not describe what I am doing as ass busting.

It is sort of motivating me to work on the room the treadmill’s in, though. Next thing: music.