MediaPortal Screen Tearing

Lately I’ve been having an issue where MediaPortal playback is choppy and suffers from screen tearing.  It turns out this happens when the Windows 7 Aero theme gets turned off.  I’m not sure why it’s getting turned off sometimes, but at any rate you can force it on through the guide here;

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Bus Pirate & AVRDUDE Revisited

It’s been a while.  I’ve revisited the AVRDUDE patches I made to the Bus Pirate to make sure everything actually works with the version 5.11 AVRDUDE that comes with the Arduino 1.0 IDE.  I’ll also be gradually updating all my GoogleCode stuff to make sure that it works with the Arduino 1.0 IDE.

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Damn you, SElinux!

SElinux is a major security feature in CentOS (and Red Hat).  By default it’s in Enforcing mode, which means it enforces all sorts of security restrictions on what processes are allowed to do.  On my Microserver, I’ve intentionally been running in Enforcing mode so that I can get used to dealing with it, as well as for increased security.

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Media Center Comparisons

I’ve either tested or used for an extended period of time several different media center products for the PC, so I thought I’d write some opinions I have about each one of them.  Take this with a grain of salt, since everyone’s requirements and aesthetic tastes are different.

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