I've been itching to build a new machine for a while now.  At first, I thought about building a new server box...one that I could use to virtualize the various old machines I have running as servers currently.  I still have to decide if it's best to build or buy for that one, so in the meantime, I'm going to dive into the world of PVR.

On the advice of some friends, I've decided thta for the software, I'm going to go the easy route and use one of the pre-built distributions - probably Mythdora...that just leaves the 'hard' part - the hardware:

Processor 

I've decided to go with AMD from the start, mostly for cost / performance but also because they seem to use less power and generate less heat...important considerations for a (hopefully) quiet set-top box.

After doing some searching/obsessing, I've decided on the  AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+ Brisbane 2.1GHz Socket AM2 Processor. At first I was going to go with the Sempron line, but decided that since I'm going through all this, I want to make sure it will handle the load when we decide to move to HDTV in the next year or two.  The 4000+ should be more than enough power and at a great price these days.

Motherboard

Hands down, I spent the most amount of time deciding on a motherboard.  For everyone that loved motherboard X, there were 2 people who hated it.  Too much information can sometimes be a bad thing. Anyway, my requirements were not too demanding. Basically, I needed something with the AM2 socket, a good on board graphics chipset, a microATX form factor with digital and analog outputs.  The AIT NF-M2 board would have been perfect if only it had an anolog video out besides VGA.  Right now, we plan on hooking it up to an older Sony Wega that has no digital input but we want the ability to hook it up digitally when we upgrade.  What I was looking for was an S-Video line so I settled for the BIOSTAR TForce TF7050-M2 AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 7050PV HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard. The only gripes I have about it is that it doesn't have on board firewire (since I would like to use this box to import by DV files from our camcorder as well) and the digital audio is on board, but there are no connections on the rear out of the box. You will have to build or buy a connector for it.  Ah well.

Capture Card

This was easy - I decided on the MythTV'ers card of choice - Hauppauge WINTV-PVR-150 PCI Interface Tuner Card. I choose the model with the remote control as well as the IR-Blaster since I will need to control my cable box with it.

Case

There are almost as many cases for a HTPC as there are people with HTPCs.  What I was going for here was something that would both fit in physically to my media cabinet as well as fit in aesthetically.  Noise was a concern, but since my media cabinet has a solid front door, it doesn't need to be totally quiet.  I decided on the nMEDIAPC HTPC 200B.  This takes a microATX board and a standard ATX power supply.  Got fairly good reviews and the folks at silentpcreview.com seem to think it's fairly quiet as well.  It has a plethora of connections on the front of the box that can be wired into the motherboard too.

Power Supply Unit

The PSU for this box needs to be fairly quiet, so once again I went on the advice of the folks at silentpcreview.com and decided on a lower powered SeaSonic unit, the SeaSonic S12 SS-330GB ATX12V, 80Plus, Active PFC, RoHS, PCI-E, 330W Power Supply.

 Hard Drive

The motherboard will support 1 IDE bus and 4 SATA drives.  My idea was to run one large SATA drive (or a RAID array) for the data/media files and a smaller driver for the actual OS.  I have tons of drives laying around here so I'll use one of those for the OS drive and I'll pick up a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3250410AS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive.  The Barracuda drives are highly recommended and from what I've read seem to run a bit cooler and quiter than others. Plus, on newegg.com there is currently a budle with the drive an processor.

Memory

Nothing really special here.  I've seen recommendations that say 512MB is plenty of RAM for a MythBox (especially if your only encoding one source at a time) but I'm playing it safe and putting 1GB in the box with Kingston ValueRAM 1GB (2 x 512MB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit I wanted Crucial RAM, but newegg was out and I hate to wait.  I still have 2 free slots in case I need to add more RAM as well.

I think that about covers it.  For now, I'm going to use a keyboard / mouse I have laying around until I have it set up.  Then, depending on how much I need to use the keyboard once it's running, I might spring for a wireleess mouse/keyboard combo unit or something.

Anyone with any input on this topic, I'd love to hear from you! 

Like most people, I've become very frustrated at the amount of spam that has found it's way into my inbox. For about a year now, I've been using a greylisting technique, along with various MTA tweaks to limit the amount of spam that makes it through. You can read more about this on my (still rough) VPS migration page. This has been very effective overall, but lately I've been seeing a huge increase in the number of spam emails that make it through. I decided it was time to do some content filtering.

I considered trying SpamAssasain since it seemed to be so popular, but was concerned with resource usage, as my mail server is on a virtual private server that is shared by others, and in addition to not having any swap space on our VPS accounts, I wanted to be a good VPS neighbor.

After reviewing some options, I decided to use the Dspam package. I'm not going to get into comparing effectiveness of various spam detection techniques, as that is available in many other places. What I will say is that the statistical method used by Dspam is far less resource intensive than SpamAssasain's method. While I was at it, I decided to add automatic virus scanning to the mix as well using the ClamAV package running as a daemon.

In a nutshell, I now have email coming into Postfix, which performs it's own checks (including greylisting), then hands the email off to Dspam for delivery. Dspam then does it's own checks (including running the email through ClamAV) then hands the mail off to Procmail for actual delivery.

User's can train dspam by forwarding incorrectly tagged mail to either a spam@ or ham@ address.  It's only been running for a few days now, so I don't have much data to report on....but I'll post up some data when it's available.

 I put a HOWTO up on my wiki to describe everything I did to set this up since I do not want to have to dig through all that documentation again.  Hopefully, it will help someone else!  Check it out on the DspamNotes page on the wiki.

While I hesitate to call something like this actual news - just call it a slow news night - I recently purchased a new smart phone.  I got tired of always having to say things like - "I'll have to check my schedule when I get home" and "Once I get back to my computer to check my email, I'll  take a look at that..." etc...  So I knew that some sort of PDA was needed. 

I've been wanting a Palm PDA for a while now, but never really got around to getting one or justifying one to myself.  I also didn't like the idea of having to carry around both a PDA and a phone, so...the Treo seemed like the perfect combination.  I was just out of contract with my current cell service, so I thought I'd switch to a new phone, new plan etc...  That whole process will be the subject of another article someday...

I've been contributing code to the Horde Project for a number of years now, and support for 'syncing' has recently gotten a boost.  As I keep all my contacts and calendar info on a Horde server, I was anxious to see if the Treo would sync properly. 

Thankfully, with new smartphone in hand, a new install of the Synthesis SyncML client on the Treo and a fresh backup of the entire Horde database I was ready to try.

 Well, it was pretty much a non-event.  Things 'Just Worked' the first time out....well, that's not exactly true, but totally erasing all my contacts during a sync was MY fault, not the software...but that's what the backup was for...

 Anyway, I can now access my calendar, contacts and email all from anywhere and everywhere (actually, in this case anywhere and everywhere would be defined as 'within the service area').  I can add events to my calender, sync them with the Horde server, and my Wife can see that I just made a new dentist appointment for Friday before she even talks to me. 

 Of course, the coolest part of it is that I can connect it to my laptop and use it as a modem...in fact that's how I'm writing this article right now.  The connection is not 'cable-fast', but it reminds me of the days when I had my IDSL connection....oh, yea, and whenever I'm bored, I can see how long it will take me to loose against it playing chess...