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Well, I jumped in head first on several of the projects I had listed last night. I’ve made great progress today accomplishing and learning a lot. I got my iPhone to talk to my Amarok VM and am able to stream podcasts and music off of the iPhone wirelessly and play them out my stereo. There is still a good amount of work and planning to move this project along. I realized that I need to come up with a way to launch an application based on location, seeing as the Wifi in the iPhone is off unless it’s available and checking for mail. One solution is to leave Wifi on all the time using Insomnia, but this drains my battery WAY too fast. So, some kind of location based turning on and off of Insomnia would be perfect.

I installed my PVR-150 card in my Atom box today in an attempt to see if I could use it as a Secondary Backend and Frontend. I ran into problems getting to tuner to be accessible though for playing TV under MythFrontend. I believe it to be a version issue and am creating a new MasterBackend VM to test the theory. If this works out I should be able to record TV shows on my Atom box while leaving the heavy lifting to my server such as transcoding and commercial flagging.

I installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu Server on my old laptop to start on trying to write the software for my Digital Picture frame . I also came up with a software concept for the touch screen when I get that far. I should be able to pull pictures from Flickr or some other online source, as well as using local or saved content. I would also like to be able to see the currently playing song in my Amarok VM on the screen with Song Name, Album and Artist along side the Cover Art. Adding a weather widget in the corner would be nice. I really like how the concept is coming together, but I’m having trouble deciding the best way to start as well as what language to use. I’m leaning towards Python, but my lack of knoweldge in the language is holding me back. We’ll see what happens, might just have to dive in and try it out.

On a rather grim note, I’m having trouble with USB devices in my Windows 2008 Server. Every time I plug in a device I get a malfunction error. I’m thinking it might be related to a USB network program I was experimenting with. Hopefully removing and rebooting should fix the issue, as of right now I can’t attach my Bluetooth dongle to my VM that controls the lights in my room. More to come soon.