Building a Freevo

Freevo: so I’m planning to build myself a PVR, of the home-built, running Linux with mythTV or Freevo, mini-ITX variety.

So far I’m still at the hardware planning stages, but the price looks good – around $455 (plus shipping) for a working, thoroughly hackable, silent, set-top PVR system.

(Silence is a key aim here — last thing I want is something noisy taking over the room. But silence typically seems to cost the dollars, once you get into Shuttle gear and the like.)

If anyone wants to follow along, or provide some tips — I’m going to track progress (very slowly) on this wiki page. Like all wiki pages, it’s editable — although you’ll need to create an account to edit pages there (sorry, anti-spam measure).

BTW, lately, there’s been a lot of talk about using a Mac mini as a media center. So I took a quick look — but wow, it’s pricey! $499 + $329 for an EyeTV 200 tuner? Dude, that’s over 800 dollars, not include shipping or sales tax. Given whatever extras turn out to be appropriate, I wouldn’t be surprised if it hits double the mini-ITX’s price.

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RFID Security

Security: It looks like the security people are starting to take a look at RFID, and it’s not pretty.

I link-blogged this the other day — RFDump is a tool to display and modify data in RFID tags — including deployed ones, at least in some cases. (Think rewriting the price tags in a shop, scrambling the tracking numbers on a warehouse full of goods, or corrupting frequent-shopper data on a card.)

It looks like this was also discussed at USENIX Security ‘04 in an RSA presentation (those notes are swarming with typos, but the content’s there ;)

That talk has some interesting stuff — ‘blocker’ tags which spoof readers with gibberish data, or crash the collision-detection network protocol; while that’s being discussed as a security tool here, if the protocol is that hackable, and the hardware is available, I could see that having additional interesting effects in a supermarket. Of course, range is an issue — but that hasn’t stopped Bluetooth hacking, wardriving, etc.

If you ask me, it looks an awful lot like RFID is chock-full of security holes, and the features that make it so attractive (low power use, low cost, tiny size) will be the very features that militate against adding security. We could be in for interesting times here…

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Linux and MS: WinCE now customizable

Whoa: ‘This spring, Microsoft dropped the price of Windows CE and completely opened its embedded operating system to developers, allowing them for the first time to not only view and modify CE, but also sell products that incorporated the customized code.’

Really? So WinCE developers can modify and then rebuild and sell WinCE with code changes? That’s a big deal. It’s kind of unavoidable, though. That close to the metal is virtually impossible without source IMO.

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Irish DSL price halved

Eircom have halved the price of their DSL offering to 54 euros (including VAT). It still has a cap at 4Gb. Still, getting there. I wonder what the competition will do…

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(Untitled)

A great insight into marketing software at the “enterprise” level. This explains a lot, IMHO:

“price it high enough and the decision making process is taken out of the hands who know enough to make a sensible decision”.

Forwarded from Cam and Phil Suh’s cms-list.

Date: Tue, 08 May 2001 06:51:07 -0700
From: Julian Harris (spam-protected)
To: “Huston, Virgil H.” (spam-protected) (spam-protected)
Subject: RE: Why Vignette?

Exactly why Vignette’s strategy works — price it high enough and the decision making process is taken out of the hands who know enough to make a sensible decision.

Lowering the price would be a fatal move.

— “Huston, Virgil H.” (spam-protected) wrote:
> My experience says that corporate IT people are not
> baffled by BS.
> Problem is, they do not make the final decisions, at
> least in middle sized
> companies that I am familiar with. For example, I am
> basically a nongeek
> (maybe semigeek) and I run a company external
> website & ecommerce system. IT
> supports the backend and helps me out when I get in
> over my head (like
> trying to make changes to asp pages that appear to
> be intentionally written
> to be very difficult to decode - even the
> programmers have problems). We
> went with a fairly high priced (but not the highest)
> ecommerce vendor. The
> brass made the decisions and we implemented it along
> with vendor
> “consultants.” We provided input, which is sometimes
> taken and often
> ignored. The in-house costs (mainly labor, but also
> hardware) were still
> very high even with the consultants, which is
> typical. But, don’t blame the
> IT guys/gals. In my case, the IT folks and I are on
> the same sheet of music
> and we both understand how and why things should be
> run (at least we think
> we do). The powers that be, however, have us doing
> other things. They are
> the boss, right or wrong. As when I was in the Army
> years ago, we have an
> obligation to tell the brass what we think, but when
> the decision is made,
> we have to salute the flagpole and charge the hill,
> no matter how many
> machine gun nests are on it.
>
> Virgil
>
> > Are
> > corporate IT people really that baffled by BS? Or
> do they see something I
> > cannot? That’s what’s troubling me here.
> >
> >
>
> ————————–
> Subscribe: http://www.camworld.com/cms/
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> Post: (spam-protected)
>


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