Self-sacrifice or self-preservation?
Posted by mcummings
Last week, a tragedy befell the mcummings household. Ever since my buddy John lent me a tv tuner card a few years ago, I've been running mythtv in some fashion. Sure, it started out as a toy on my desktop, but over time it grew to be a beast in its own right. In fact, when we bought our current tv because our last one began humming, smoking, and giving the black screen of death, I purposely sought out a TV that had multiple hookup options, to include a PC cable from a VGA card. So for over a year now, myth has sat on a box in our living room, hooked up to the TV and grabbing its feeds over wifi, serving both movies, music, and recorded shows to me and my family. Our youngest daughter in particular is glued to it, because its the only way to guarantee she can watch some Yo Gabba Gabba when the mood strikes her (like, daily between the hours of waking and sleeping). And daddy-o has a bit of a tie to it, since its how I grab all those shows that come on when I need to be doing other things, like sleep.
But last week I found myself in a position to make a really tough call. On Tuesday, the mybox had begun to have an odd problem - mplayer stopped working. No sound, no video, but if you paused it you'd get whatever frame it was in playback. I chalked it up to some unforseen change on the *buntu side, switched over to xine, all seemed to be good again. The next morning I get a call from my wife. Its worse. Much, much worse. Nothing is up, the tv just gives a black screen. I have her hard reset the PC while I'm on the phone, thinking its just locked up for some reason (it happens occasionally), but although the pretty LED'd fans light up, nothing ever comes up. I assure I'll take care of it when I get home and go on my merry way.
As fate would have it, I worked late that night, not an odd occurrence in the last month or so, but vexing since I had actually forgotten what I was walking into when I strolled into the house just before the girls needed to head to bed. I start to head towards the myth box when our youngest (one and a half year old, YGG fanatic) leads me by the hand to the tv, points at it, then does this grunting shrug thing as if to say "It's broken, daddy. Fix." In the background, our middle daughter is commenting that its ok, Daddy will fix it, Daddy can fix anything.
Talk about some peer pressure.
I try and reboot the box again and feel my stomach drop as I get no post message, no beeps to try and decipher which connection on the mother board has failed. Nothing. Some of the peripheries seemed to be getting power, but none of the drives spin up, nothing gets sent back to tv, and where the heck are the freaking bios messages/beeps that I'm supposed to pull a decoder ring out to decipher?? In short, the box was dead.
I knew my options even as I herded the kids upstairs to brush teeth and tuck in for the night. I could decree the myth box to be dead, and in a few weeks, or months more likely, we could scrape together the excess cash to replace it with something decent enough to serve as both a back and front end mythbox, or I could do the unthinkable and rebuild it. Mind you, all the while I have three girls around me telling me how it wouldn't come up, and how much the youngest missed her YGG, and how they can't wait for it to be fixed because they can't watch movies (we have no dvd player down there on account of the myth box serving so many functions so beautifully).
So around 9:00, with my beautiful wife on the couch flipping channels and making sure I at least got to hear part of Ghost Hunters and Destination Truth, I set in. Because as I saw it, there really was no other choice here. I backed up the most important parts of my home directory, shut down my desktop, and started chopping. I yanked ram, hard drives, and the nice DVD burner/player from the old mythbox, popped open my desktop, and began rearranging things. I knew in my favor was that the (myth)buntu install on the myth box was fairly generic, so so long as I didn't drastically change architectures it should boot. I crammed my two ATA and two SATA drives into the chasis, doubled the ram, and replaced the dvd drive, and said so long to having a desktop at home.
This isn't intended as a woe is me post, but I do miss having a desktop to rely on. But not as much as I'd expected, to be honest. Over recent months, it really had only served three purposes in life: email, stamp collection records, and browsing feeds. The re-christened myth box came up without too much trouble (an initramfs rebuild here, a udev tweak there, and a re-configuring of the nvidia card there), the amount of disk space nearly doubled, the ram is up to 3 gigs now, and tv is again being recorded and replayed in my house.
And my girls are all smiles again. At least until one of the sisters does something to the other. But if you email me and it isn't work related (crackenberry), don't expect a speedy response in the near future. What I still haven't figured out, though, is encapsulated in the title of this post - was it self-sacrifice to give up my desktop? Or self-preservation to keep Yo Gabba Gabba and my shows available on disk?