Garstang Booths.

Having a coffee in the Booths cafe after doing some shopping. Free WiFi with your drink and 50p off each drink for every £10 you spend. Not too shabby.
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Dent Family History.

My Gradnfather Alan E (left) with his brother William H.

Over the past few months I've been working on finding out as much as possible about my family history. I've been mainly concentrating on my fathers side. I've had a good start with it as my aunt had done a lot of work on this many years ago.
Most of my work revolved around using the Ancestry.com website. This has proved very useful and has allowed me to fill in many gaps and even find relatives that my father did not know about in the USA.
Last night I received two unconnected emails from Dent relatives in the USA. I'd not made contact with these people before and I was very surprised when I found out that neither of them knew the other had written to me!

Things I've discovered so far include:-

• My family originates from Burnley in Lancashire where they were stonemasons and later brick-makers.
• My great grandfather moved to Lancaster area to manage a brickworks near to Caton.
• My grandfather was a carpenter for Waring & Gillows, he was in the Royal Engineers and I have been able to find all his military papers.
• My grandfather worked for just over a year in Buenos Aires, South America on the woodwork in the prestigious Plaza Hotel. This was 1913 to 1914.
• My grandfather came back from Buenos Aires and within 6 months he was in the Royal Engineers until the end of the war when he returned to Waring & Gillow.
• Lots more...

I'm currently waiting for the will of my great, great, great grandfather to arrive, he died in 1835.

Router/Firewall upgrade - or - Xbox peace at last!

Last night I switched my Soekeris net4801 router from m0n0wall to pfSense. I'd been running m0n0wall for several years and it had served me well. However recently I upgraded it to 1.3 and noticed that I had trouble getting NAT to work correctly for my 2 Son's XBOX 360. As the days past this had been causing more and more 'fun' with the eldest.

Before I upgraded their nat type would display as moderate and this would work fine for most things. After I upgraded to 1.3 the nat setting on their xbox dropped to strict. I tried several nat rules and short of putting their xbox's in the DMZ, and re-wiring their rooms, I was stumped.

I read up on alternatives that I could load on to my embedded Soekris box and it seemed pfSense, a fork from m0n0wall, looked a good candidate. It supported UPnP, which would allow the correct opening and closing of ports to forward traffic to their xboxes.

I downloaded the latest non-beta version and wrote it to the compact flash card in the router, not before having taken a backup of the latest m0n0wall config! I had to dig out my null modem cable and connect in to the router via serial interface to do the first configuration but after that it can all be looked after by a web interface or ssh.

All went well, I was even able to import my last m0n0wall config, after making some changes, to have it setup pretty much as I previously had. Only now I had the option to turn on UPnP and even configure it so that it would only affect certain hosts.
Ahhhh peace at last....

[here is a link to the network bunny site that has some more details on the xbox nat issue]

Sun.

went to the field near our house with Morgan and Cameron today.
A very nice and sunny day it was too. Almost February 2010.

Dads MythTV box.

About a year ago I built my dad a MythTV system out of an old PC. This is a dual tuner system, combined frontend/backend with a 200gb disk in I think. It's running MythTV 0.21 and he has been using it without much problem for the past 12 months or so.

Recently our TV system in the UK begun switchover from analogue UHF signal to digital UHF. This required several re-tunes of our TV's and of course I needed to visit to re-tune his mythtv box. I think the whole switch over process required 3 retunes before everything was straight.
Somewhere along the line it seems that one of the tuners was not tuned or tuning in right. The result is that he is now missing recordings and does not have the ability to record more than one program at a time. This causes him to miss recordings of Emmerdale and Coronation Street, shock, horror!

Not long after I set the system up for him I configured his router for remote VNC access and ssh access to his mythtv pc, so I could connect remotely for maintenance and updates. He is 82 and so I can't really expect him to  find his way around the bash shell at his age can I?

All was fine until his router decided to go belly up. He called Plusnet and another one was sent, only this time it was a crappy single port Thompson 516 or something similar. I attempted to configure the firewall and port forwarding but I don't think I ever got it working. Tonight I managed to talk him through enabling remote access to the router so I could connect in and try and set the forwarding up.

Talk about watching paint dry! Each time I tried to navigate to another page took over 30 seconds! I did as much as I could and then I was kicked out! I think there is a 20 min idle timer in place on the remote access but I've no idea why it threw me out. Anyway I didn't have the patience to talk him back through enabling the remote access so I will pay him a visit and do what I should have done in the first place.

Missing audio on H264 videos & Mythtv.

Recently I did a reinstall of my Mythtv frontend. Everything seemed ok apart from the lack of audio on
H.264 video clips which are taken with our Creative Vado HD camera.
This was working before the install so I'm not sure what I changed.
Anyway I posted a query on the mythtv-users list and a kind person called David Linville replied they had a similar problem which was fixed my changing the audio output device from ALSA:hdmi to something else.

After I had enabled all the ALSA devices in 'alsamixer', see first screenshot, I managed to get the audio working again! I took a quick photo of the settings for future reference and just in case it helps anybody else.
I'm using an Acer Revo 3610 for the frontend with Mythbuntu 9.10.

Rather annoying Google calendar bug.

Recently I noticed that the location field, or the 'Where' field as Google call it in their calendar was
not being synchronised back to my G1 Android device. This had worked flawlessly for many months.

I thought it was perhaps a bug in my android operating system on my phone but the same thing was happening on my wifes HTC Hero.
I did some searching on this and could not find anyone else with the same problem. I'd came to the conclusion it was not an Android bug I decided to post about my problem on the Google Calender support forums.

If you are having the same problem I would urge you to report it at the above forums. Until google acknowledge the problem it is unlikely to get fixed.

[Update January 2010. Rather oddly this problem seems to have fixed itself. Several people have also commented that it has begun working for them. Obviously Google did some magic to fix this. Would have been nice if they had followed up with a quick note to say it was working]