September 2007 Archives

I'm not sure any of can say that we feel warm and fuzzy inside when we see our paychecks and see how much has been taken out in taxes every pay period. In fact, if I stop and think about it makes me sick to think of how much of my money slimeball politicians are spending. I don't want to pay for a bridge to nowhere. I don't want to subsidize illegal immigration. I don't want to pay for all this crap that they are signing me up for.

Recently I received a bonus of about $1300.00. Of that bonus I received just about $750! That's insane, nearly 42% or $550 of a bonus lost to taxes. I don't know about you but I think I know how to spend my money better than congress does and I'm tired of giving them so much. That's why I support the fair tax. It's an alternative tax system that is revenue neutral (meaning that no current programs will have to be cut) but promotes simplicty, and transparency over the current tax code. It also promises many economic benefits and the great hope that congress might be forced to lower taxes as a result of greater transparency. Now that's something I can get behind and would actually spend my money on to promote, so I signed up to support them financially... I really want to get the word out about this, you can read more on the website at http://www.fairtax.org/ and I have included the official short description below.

Here's the official description:

The FairTax plan is a comprehensive proposal that replaces all federal income and payroll based taxes with an integrated approach including a progressive national retail sales tax, a prebate to ensure no American pays federal taxes on spending up to the poverty level, dollar-for-dollar federal revenue replacement, and, through companion legislation, the repeal of the 16th Amendment. This nonpartisan legislation (HR 25/S 1025) abolishes all federal personal and corporate income taxes, gift, estate, capital gains, alternative minimum, Social Security, Medicare, and self-employment taxes and replaces them with one simple, visible, federal retail sales tax -- administered primarily by existing state sales tax authorities. The IRS is disbanded and defunded. The FairTax taxes us only on what we choose to spend on new goods or services, not on what we earn. The FairTax is a fair, efficient, transparent, and intelligent solution to the frustration and inequity of our current tax system.

I feel like I've been exposed to ownership a fair bit by owning my own home and car. I know the benefits and draw backs of it all. What drives me crazy is when sales people equate owning to always being better than renting... yes, renting will never build you any equity; but depending on how much it will cost to purchase the item you wish to rent vs the costs of renting there are many instances when renting can be better than owning.

A friend of mine won a trip to San Diego, all he had to do was go to a timeshare presentation and he got a free trip for him and 1 guest. We went to the timeshare presentation tonight and I must admit they do a good job of selling it. They make it sound like you are going to be saving all this money and get to stay at all these really cool resorts (they always corrected me when I called them hotels). It's a very high pressure type of deal, you have to decide on the spot, no time to think about the offer that they are making you. It has to be because if you ever went and ran the numbers you would never go for the deal.

The presentation was by a company called Windmark which appears to be pretty much an outlet for Wyndham to sell their resorts to. They own 62 properties around the country and a few foreign locations and give you the option to buy additional days at discounted prices. They also have an "out of network" plan where you pay a base fee and give up some of your nights at "in network" hotels to stay at other hotels that are not owned by Windmark. It basically boils down to a room that sleeps 2 (1 bed) is available for about 14 days at a cost of $30,000.00 up front (they offer financing over 10 years at 14.4%) and $75.00/mo in maintenance fees. The number of nights you have available depends on where you want to go and when but this seems to be the average. During the sales pitch they are continually pressuring you that for smart money the only way to go is through their time shares. They were doing a good job selling it too because I kept finding myself thinking, "maybe I would like to do something like this." I continually had to tell myself anyone who wants you to make a decision immediately and is using the types of sales tactics that they were is hiding something. So I resisted the temptation and turned down their one-time offer.

When I got home, out of curiosity I decided to run the numbers and see if it was a better deal. So I took the $408/month for 10 years plus the $75.00/month maintenance fee and invested the money at a hypothetical interest rate of 10.4% (the market average over the last 75 years). I then subtracted out 14 nights of hotel costs at a rate of $200.00 a night. I increased both the hotel rental and maintenance fees annually by 3% to keep up with inflation. Basically if after 45 years (when I turn 70) the value in the account is 0 dollars either decision would have been equally financially advantageous, if the account has money in it the time share was a bad deal, if it has negative dollars in the account then the time share was a good deal.... what do you think the final value of the account was after 45 years of vacations? If you said positive in the extreme you would have been right, by not going with the time share option and investing the money instead you would have accumulated 1.6 MILLION dollars in addition to paying for 14 days of hotels every year for the last 45 years. That's a lot of money to be throwing away.

The long and short of it is that in no way is owning a timeshare at those rates better than renting a hotel room. It doesn't matter that you own it forever, what do you think that your kids would rather be inheriting a timeshare, or 1.6 million dollars of cold, hard cash?

I wish I would have had those numbers available to show the sales guy. I wonder what he would have said?

If you use MythTV you probably are aware by now that Zap2It labs has stopped providing free listing data as of 2007-09-01. There is an alternative though--schedulesdirect; a for fee service that is a drop in replacement for Zap2It labs ... except it costs $5.00/mo and you have to upgrade MythTV to 0.20.2

I was running MythTV 0.20 on FC4, it worked pretty well, excepting the occasional crash. I was planning on just upgrading to the new version of MythTV and leaving the OS at the current version. That is, that was the plan until I found out that atrpms.net no longer maintains packages for FC4. So I decided if I was going to have to compile source might as well update everything.

That's when the adventure began. It turns out that things have changed a lot since FC4; especially with the IVTV driver (the driver that is used for the PVR-350 capture card I use). The driver has been integrated into the kernel as of 2.6.22. This is a good thing as it means the drivers have become much more stable but the documentation is still pretty lousy. Here's the outline of what I've had to do to get my box back and running... hopefully it will save you sometime:

So what exactly didn't work when I upgraded:

• The video capture card was not automagically detected like I thought it should.


• Lots of problems getting MythTV to use the PVR-350 framebuffer for display... this required some code changes


• LiRC does not start properly (this is not a new problem... I also ran into on FC4 also)

How I fixed it all

I usually follow Jarod Wilson's "Fedora Mythtvology" guide when installing mythtv. The current version as of September 2007 is for Fedora 6. For the most part this will work fine for Fedora 7 as well. There's just a few quircks you have to be aware of due to the 2.6.22 kernel and ivtv.

IVTV was integrated into the kernel as of 2.6.22 (so is ALSA, so you can skip the sound portion of the tutorial). When you get to the ivtv step do the following:

yum -y install ivtv ivtv-kmdl-$KVER ivtv-firmware

Next add the following 3 lines to /etc/modprobe.conf

alias char-major-81 videodev
alias char-major-81-0 ivtv
install ivtv /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install ivtv; /sbin/modprobe ivtv-fb

That should do it on the ivtv, on your next reboot the /dev/video0 device should be working.

Next, you will need to install the X-Driver. Since Fedora 7 uses X11 release 7 you will need a new x driver available here.

Next install the xorg-server modules with:

yum -y install xorg-server

Now compile, like so:

cd ivtvdev directory
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
make install

Next edit the xorg.conf file in /etc/X11 like jarod describes, just change the driver name from ivtvdev to ivtv.
Now when you reboot X should load up on the framebuffer.

Now that you should be able to get video and load X on the framebuffer let's fix mythtv so it can show video on the framebuffer (in my experiance this looks much better than just using a video card). You have to patch the sources to include the controls for the new ivtv-fb commands as documented in 3486.

Your options include simply building trunk which depending on the day, you never know exactly what you are going to get. Or you could back port the patch for 0.20.2. Fortunately I have already done that for you. You can download the SRPM here. This is basically a patched version of MythTV-0.20.2-165 from atrpms.net

You should be up and running by now after one more reboot. Just setup mythtv to use the PVR-350 output device and your set.

NOTE: If lircd does not start up properly on boot you might need to modify the /etc/init.d/lircd script to try and reload the lirc_i2c module if it failed: Include this after the "start() {" line

if [ `/sbin/lsmod | grep lirc` != ""]; then
echo -n $"Reloading lirc_i2c: "
/sbin/modprobe lirc_i2c
RETVAL=$?
echo
fi