MythTV and backups

I’ve been exploring a couple projects lately:

• Build a MythTV machine. To this end, I’ve picked up a Hauppauge WinTV PVR-350, pcHDTV HD-3000, Radio Shack VHF, UHF and HDTV Indoor TV Antenna, and a 200G Maxtor disk. I’ve put the HDTV card and disk in what used to be my XP desktop machine. It’ll let me play with MythTV and get all the tuner stuff working so I can see if it’s worth trying to build a PVR for my living room. Most of the gear can be moved over to a new case for that. When I make some more progress I’ll write a longer summary of my experience so far…. I’m trying to get the HDTV card to work first since it looks like a longer shot than the PVR-350. So far I can capture HDTV video but not yet under MythTV and I can’t display live TV or use any tuner app I’ve tried. It may be the aged GeForce 2 I had laying about to put in this machine will be insufficient.
• Improved backups. I concluded I couldn’t bring myself to have my desktop machine trust my Linux server to get files off it for backups. So I bought a Linksys NSLU2 and a Maxtor OneTouch 300G USB 2.0/1394 disk. My initial plan was to just set it up as intended so I can get backups running. I’m tempted to instead set it up with alternate firmware. I will almost certainly at least set up the power-down on the OneTouch.