Ryan Kanno: The diary of an Enginerd in Hawaii

This blog is for all my Hawaii television addicts.

Since I rarely have time to watch live television, my Oceanic Time Warner DVR is constantly filled to max capacity. This means I’m always battling my inner demons on what shows I have to erase… Rock of Love, A Shot at Love, Flavor of Love… you know, all the good stuff. To solve my problem, I’ve finally decided to invest the $150 to upgrade my DVR and increase its total number of recording hours.

Luckily for you, I’ll walk you through the steps to upgrade your own DVR!

As a standard disclaimer, if you attempt to upgrade your own DVR and f-it up, I can’t and won’t fix it. So… if technology scares you, please parents, do not try this unless supervised by your technology-oriented youngster. If you don’t understand what SATA, external enclosures, or hard drives mean, do not, and I repeat do not try this at home!

The setup

Before you can upgrade your DVR, you’ll need to make sure that you have the Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300HD. Just match what your DVR looks like to the one in the picture. It’s not that hard. This is what mine looks like: the front and the back. I do know for a fact that Oceanic has a few versions of their cable boxes out in the wild. I’m pretty sure you can upgrade (some of) the other models as well, but I’ve personally only upgraded the 8300HD. So if you want to be ballsy and upgrade a different cable box, feel totally free – just be warned that this guide won’t apply to you. I’m not even sure if you can still turn in your old cable box because of the demand for HDTV in Hawaii, but calling up Oceanic can’t hurt.

Aside from owning an 8300HD, you’ll need three additional components to make this upgrade work. I’ve included links to where I purchased the following items. Fear not, I don’t make any commissions on these links so feel free to buy these products from anywhere you see fit.

• 1 external SATA enclosure (I used a KingWin from Fry’s for 30 bucks.)
• 1 SATA/IDE harddrive (I used a Maxtor 500 GB for about a 100.)
• 1 SATA to eSATA cable (I used a 6 ft cable from Monoprice.com for 5 bucks.)

Here are a few pictures of the aforementioned items.

The results

First, make sure your 8300HD is turned off. Place the hard drive into the external enclosure. Next, after connecting the external SATA enclosure to the 8300HD (with the SATA to eSATA cable), power the external hard drive before turning the DVR box back on. Note, it’s extremely important that the external SATA enclosure be turned on prior to the cable box being powered on. Once booted, the 8300HD should recognize a new, external data source and prompt you to format the new drive. The following message should appear:

Once formatted, you should see a success message:

Voila! DVR Upgraded!

The benes

There are numerous benefits to increasing your DVR’s total recording time.

• No more having to rush home because you forgot the DVR is full.
• No more making those life-altering decisions about what movies to delete.
• Being able to store almost a year’s worth of reality crap is fun!

Of course, there’s the almost 4X increase in the DVR’s recording time as you can see by the following before and after pictures. Not bad!

The cons

There’s no such thing as a free pass in life… so here are a few of the cons.

• As I wrote earlier, the external hard drive needs to be powered on before your cable box. This means one of two things. Either you always turn the external drive on first or leave it on permanently. Since I know I could never remember to do the former, I’ve decided to leave the device on permanently – meaning a slightly larger electricity bill. As someone trying to get off the grid, that makes me sad.
• You can’t rip the recorded video off the external hard drive. Unfortunately, the data is encrypted. Unless you’re a cryptographic expert, worked on the 8300HD, or have a few Beowulf clusters, deal with it. You won’t be able to share your recordings.
• $150 bucks is a lot to spend on easing one’s mind, but I think it’s money well spent considering the prices here and here.

Some linkage

Of course I couldn’t have upgraded my DVR without the Internet. Here’s a link to the forums and guides I read to assist me along the way. Check them out, some of them are quite interesting.

• Scientific Atlanta 8300HD User Guide
• AVSForum’s SA 8300 HD Tips & Tricks — SARA thread
• Scientific Atlanta 8300HD SARA eSATA Database

Finally, check out my flickr set if you need to see any more pictures!

Enjoy!

Popularity: 37% [?]

Now that my MBA class is finally done for the summer, I can focus on more important things… like upgrading my Python installation on Dreamhost for my Django application. Seeing as how Dreamhost is still behind the Python times, with Python 2.4 hidden in Dreamhost obscurity, I figured I’d blog about updating your Dreamhost Python installation (and subsequent MySQLdb libraries) to Python 2.5.

The very first thing I did was search Google. You know, I really don’t know how people lived pre-Googs. In any case, I found this blog posting describing exactly what I wanted to do. Thanks Ben! Since I’m not a big fan of running one large batch script people create in their blogs, I’ll break it down for the non-*nix fans out there.

Before I begin, I’m assuming that you already have Django running on Dreamhost. If you’re having a “wtf” moment, make sure to stop by Jeff’s blog and read “Setting up Django on Dreamhost“. (This is how I set mine up). To follow my short tutorial, you’ll need shell access to your Dreamhost account.

After ssh’ing into your Dreamhost account, you should be in your home directory (/home/username). According to the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, the /opt dir “is reserved for the installation of add-on application software packages.” With that said, issue the following commands:

$ mkdir opt
$ mkdir downloads
$ cd downloads
$ wget http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.5.1/Python-2.5.1.tgz
$ tar xvzf Python-2.5.1.tgz

First, create a directory named opt. Next, create a directory named downloads for all your files. Change into the downloads directory, then download the latest Python from http://www.python.org. Finally, unzip and untar the package into the download directory. Everything will extract into a directory named Python-2.5.1.

$ cd Python-2.5.1
$ ./configure --prefix=$HOME/opt/ --enable-unicode=ucs4
$ make
$ make install

Change into the Python-2.5.1 directory and type in the following configure command. Basically, configure prepares your installation for compilation. The –prefix flag will install machine-independent data files in subdirectories of the specified directory. The default is to install in /usr/local, but it’s overwritten with the opt directory created earlier. Finally, run make and make install which will install your custom Python installation.

$ cd ..
$ rm -rf Python-2.5.1

Finally, delete the Python-2.5.1 directory. Before you can use this Python installation, you have to add the /opt/bin directory to your path. To do this, add /opt/bin to your .bash_profile file in your home directory. To do so, you’ll have to add the following to your .bash_profile.

export PATH=$HOME/opt/bin/:$PATH

Basically, this allows you to type ‘python’ in your shell and reach the custom Python 2.5.1 installation instead of the Dreamhost one. To make sure that our Python installation is working, type the following in your home directory (cd ~):

$ source .bash_profile
$ python --version

After the last command, you should see the following: Python 2.5.1. If that displays, your upgrade was successful! After upgrading your Python installation, you’re not done yet. Since Dreamhost uses an old MySQL-Python installation, we’ll upgrade that as well. Type the following in your home directory:

$ cd downloads
$ wget http://internap.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/mysql-python/MySQL-python-1.2.2.tar.gz
$ tar xvzf MySQL-python-1.2.2.tar.gz
$ cd MySQL-python-1.2.2
$ python setup.py install

First, change into the downloads directory and issue the wget command to download the latest MySQL-Python files from Sourceforge. Once you’ve received the files, unzip and untar the package. All the files will extract into a directory called MySQL-python-1.2.2. Change into this directory and install the files by typing python setup.py install. If you followed the custom Python installation, the files should build and extract into the ~/opt/lib/python2.5/site-packages/ directory as an egg file.

You now have a custom Python installation and a MySQL-Python upgrade!

Voila!

Update: Just so you don’t get caught up in the same mistake that I made, to be sure that your Django fcgi installation is using your custom Python installation, make sure the dispatch.fcgi file reads as such:

#!/home/USERNAME_GOES_HERE/opt/bin/python
import sys

sys.path += ['WHATEVER_PATHS_YOU_NEED']

from fcgi import WSGIServer
from django.core.handlers.wsgi import WSGIHandler
import os

os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = 'wegoeat.settings'
WSGIServer(WSGIHandler()).run()

Popularity: 38% [?]