For ages I've had a tv-tuner card in my PC, which was kind of fun for watch­ing TV in a small win­dow and take some screen­shots. But cap­tur­ing was CPU in­ten­sive and took a lot of disk­space. Then I up­grad­ed to a 3.0GHz P4 with a 500GB disk and pos­si­bil­i­ties were there, but in the fresh de­bian in­stall I kind of lost the tuner abil­i­ty. Took a cou­ple of months to find out that was main­ly be­cause of a bug in the ac­celler­a­tion mode of the In­tel Xwin­dow dri­ver, and the whole bt848 lin­ux stuff was OK. Hacked away at some mplay­er tv play­ing and cap­tur­ing to make it pos­si­ble to cron cap­tur­ing of tv shows but that got a bit messy. I tried Free­vo but that didn't work, tv­time has su­pe­riour im­age qual­i­ty, and fi­nal­ly I in­stalled MythTV. It's a bit of a has­sle to get it all set up but then it just did some­thing I hadn't even dared to ask it to do: I can watch TV sit­ting on my couch! Ok, that sounds not very spec­tac­u­lar (just like when I back­up my oggs to DDS3 and re­alised I had mu­sic on tape), so let me ex­plain: The tv-card is in a lin­ux serv­er in an­oth­er room and I'm sit­ting on the couch with my iBook on my lap. With the MythTV back­end run­ning on the lin­ux serv­er and the MythTV client on OS X on the iBook I can stream full-screen TV con­tent over WiFi from the serv­er to my iBook, so I can watch TV wire­less­ly with­in the range of my wire­less lan. Which is pret­ty cool.

For my mu­sic col­lec­tion I al­ready had some­thing like that go­ing, mt­daap. DAAP is the pro­to­col iTunes uses to share a li­brary on the net­work, so with my col­lec­tion of oggs on the lin­ux serv­er I can play then through iTunes on my iBook. But since that was about the only thing I used my iBook for when I was work­ing on my lin­ux work­sta­tion it would be nicer to have a na­tive lin­ux daap client, even if syn­er­gy serv­er and client make my mouse and key­board go to both desk­tops. Amarok didn't do it, but Ban­shee is the bomb! It had a mi­nor but fa­tal bug be­cause the in­staller didn't cre­ate the Au­dioScrob­bler plu­g­in di­rec­to­ry aut­tomat­i­cal­ly, but now I lis­ten to my ogg col­lec­tion through a daap pro­to­col. That keeps the stats of the tracks in the daap serv­er up to date, and I also have a last.fm pro­file that gets up­dat­ed when lis­ten­ing through Ban­shee.