The Blasphemous Bicycler

So, I decided to construct my very own homebrew PVR. I finally got all of the hardware (was waiting for the case…), and I put it together tonight.

I’m installing the operating system (Fedora Core 4) right now. It seems to be taking forever to format a 270GB partition with JFS.

This is the first PC I’ve built from scratch in about 3 years. I’m glad I haven’t forgotten how to do it. It’s also my very first ever AMD system. I’m using a Semperon chip. I think the Semperon should have enough horsepower, because my capture card (PVR-350) has on-board mpeg encoding/decoding. We’ll see.

Update:

Calamity!
The on-board sound isn’t working with Fedora. Neither is my wireless card… It looks like some kernel recompilation is in order.

It’s pouring evil 70° rain outside, so I’m stuck in the house. I started playing around with Topo and I found something interesting.

You may remember my post about my nice ride down the Cumberland Valley Rail Trail.

Well, I was looking at the map to see what happens to that rail road grade after the CVRT ends. It seems to turn into a proper road, which runs the whole way into Carlisle. The map shows the name of this road as “Unimproved Local Road.” I wonder what that means?!

Maybe it’s a dirt road? That would be cool as hell. I’m gonna try to get out this weekend and check it out. The map shows it as 14.21 miles long.

After this mysterious road meanders through downtown Carlisle, it turns back into a trail, then unceremoniously ends after 2.18 miles.

Something isn’t quite right about this:

It’s 5:30AM and it’s the end of November.

Update:

Rode home in shorts and a t-shirt! Holy smokes!

I went for a ride down to City Island today. I’ve been experimenting with some new software and wanted some pictures to test with it. The software is called Hugin, which is a gui frontend for Panorama Tools.The upshot is that it lets you take several pictures with a cheap digicam and combine them for a panorama effect.

Before you go clicking on any of these pictures, be aware that they are fairly large files.

This is a regular picture. No digital trickery here. It’s just my bicycle with Santa Claus. For Christmas, my bicycle would like a new rear wheel, a new rear derailleur, a new chain, and a much lighter operator.

This is a 2-image composite. It’s some sprawl under contruction.

This is a 3-image composite of the Market St. Bridge. I took it from City Island.

Overall, it was about a 25 mile ride, which is the longest I’ve done on the Diamondback since roadifying it. It was in the upper 20’s, and I got cold. I seem to be troubled by the cold more this year than last. I must be getting old.

I’m getting tired of using my domain name as a blog title. I’m trying some new ideas.

Let me know what you think of “The Blasphemous Bicycler”

If you have any suggestions, leave a comment.