One of the big things that always annoyed me about HiFi equipment was that the connections
to the HiFi setup were so inaccessible. After building
the extension to the house in 1999, the old entrance hall
(behind the arch in the photo below) became effectively useless space, so when we remodelled
our lounge room in May 2001, I decided to turn it into a walk-in cupboard for tapes and CDs,
along with rear access to the HiFi equipment. Here's what it looked like just after
completion, during the transfer:
Round the arch you can see the joiner's tools. The wooden frame behind the arch is part of
the new arrangement to be installed there.
We had laid out the shelves for the HiFi cupboard to be enough for the foreseeable future.
Two things I didn't foresee were:
In 2002, ABC Classic FM, our national radio
station, changed the announcer for
the breakfast programme, to which I
used to listen just about every day. The old announcer, Guy Noble, was really good, as
was his predecessor Christopher Lawrence. The new one, by the name of Clive Robertson, is
a rude, bumbling idiot, and as a result I stopped listening to the programme.
I discovered
a
cheap source of CDs on eBay, and ended up buying
several hundred of them.
As a result, the original calculation was way off, and we had to call Russell Burfield back
to put in additional shelves. Here's what it looked like on 29 June 2003:
The computer on top of the cabinet on the right was sat-gw.lemis.com, a machine for
receiving Internet data via satellite. With the advent of ADSL, it has since been
retired.
The advent of digital television
Starting in September 2004, I began to try to set up computer-based video recording. Here's
the mess it had caused by 11 March 2007:
To the right of the monitor are two machines. The lower one is
ceeveear.lemis.com, which I currently use to record DVB-T programmes. It has a DVICO
FusionHDTV tuner and runs KnoppMyth
Linux.
On top of ceeveear is cvr2.lemis.com, which one day should replace (well,
become) ceeveear. Like ceeveear, it has a DVICO FusionHDTV tuner and runs KnoppMyth Linux.
Under the monitor is tv2.lemis.com, a FreeBSD test box. I sometimes use it to record analogue
TV, but mainly it's for testing the Hauppauge PVR-250 driver (cxm).
On top of the cabinet at the right is teevee.lemis.com, a FreeBSD box which I
use to play back recordings and DVDs.
