After several security vulnrabilites were highlighed in the previous release of SimplePHPBlog I had to disable functionality. Finally today I decided to upgrade to 0.5.1.

It's great to have the choice of 5 themes along with a really nice menu to navigate to old posts.

The upgrade was fairly plain sailing, and I just copied over the images, content and config folders to the new install.

I noticed a few errors popping up in /var/log/https/error.log:
[Thu Dec 20 12:17:15 2007] [error] [client 192.168.0.4] PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function utf8_encode() in /var/www/html/new/scripts/sb_formatting.php on line 32, referer: http://localhost:8000/new/index.php

After a bit of googling, this would appear to be a Mandriva related problem, the version of PHP 5 that came with my Mandriva 2007.1 install doesn't have support for the utf8_encode() function.

Usint URPMI I did the following as root:
urpmi php-xml

(I used this page to configure urpmi for my version of Mandriva)

Followed by a restart of Apache:
service httpd restart

All working fine now.

I just setup Google Reader for the first time and added a load of website which I read regularly.

It's an excellent tool for reading feeds from website, you can also share articles too. Here's my shared articles:
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/151 ... 9131968357

Along with a feed for the shared articles too:
http://www.google.com/reader/public/ato ... /broadcast

I just installed the latest Funambol Outlook Client version 6.0.14.



I was using version 3 and it kept crashing for some reason, the latest version is much improved. I using it with my ScheduleWorld.com account and everything is now synced as below:



When my new Nokia N95 arrived it took about 2 minutes (over my home wireless broadband) to sync all of the contacts and calendar. I made the mistake of additionally syncing my iPod - now that's just too many reminders!

I've been given a decent old laptop 850MHz 40Gig with 1/2 gig ram, but the DVD rom drive is missing.

I hope to follow these instuctions:
http://www.linux-sxs.org/internet_serving/pxeboot.html
... to get it to boot from the network card and install linux over http.

I had hoped to put OpenWRT on my Sky Netgear DG834GT router, but that model isn't supported by OpenWRT. This would have been idealy since it could have been the PXEServer.

I've been reading about the MythTV homebrew PVR project for a while. Basically you can turn a spare PC into a home media center - but because it's Linux you can get a plethora of plugins.

Over the past couple of months I've got together the PC:
1. nVIDIA GEForce FX5200 PCI graphics card with Tv out. Donated by Dave - cheers
2. Compaq Deskpro EN - PIII 1GHz, 250Gb HDD, 512Mb RAM. £20 from Tony - cheers.
3. GalaxyTV PCI Capture card - had this for ages.
4. Techno Trend DVB Digital Satellite PCI Card - £23 on ebay

I tried a couple of distros recently namely Mandriva and FedoraCore6 but for one reason or other I didn't like the approach - I wanted a dedicated PVR, not a desktop or server OS running as a PVR. I stumbled across MythDora 4.0 - basically Fedora Core 6 with MythTv and masses of home media drivers and tools.

First install didn't go so well because the X server didn't start (nVidia driver problem) and I misread the pop up which on the second install actually automatically fixed the problem itself - great.

MythDora does actually come with an nVidia tailored xorg.conf file located here:
/storage/misc/extras/xorg.conf.NVIDIA
... I used this almost unedited to replace my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.

I finished the setup on the monitor and then pluged the tv out and audio cables into the TV and it worked a treat. I stuck a DVD in the DVD drive as a test and it played full screen on my TV - perfect quality. I even ripped the DVD to disk.


Internet Radio test - MythTv comes with a great internet radio interface, I browsed though the guide and started listening to ChronixRadio.com


There's also MythWeb which will come into play once I've got a TV Guide setup, here's a Firefox screenshot:

... scheduling recordings from anywhere!

What's left to do?
1. Hook up the TV aerial and tune in
2. Hook up to the satellite dish and tune in
3. Set up the TV guide
4. I've also seen a couple of scripts on the web that will convert recordings into MP4's optimised for small screens - ideal for my iPod Video.