Quantum Furball - personal video recorderhttps://quantumfurball.net/2007-04-02T00:00:00-04:00Now in convenient blog form!My home-built personal video recorder nightmare 2: peace and quiet2007-04-02T00:00:00-04:002007-04-02T00:00:00-04:00Brendon L. Higginstag:quantumfurball.net,2007-04-02:/my-home-built-personal-video-recorder-nightmare-2-peace-and-quiet.html<p>After some <a class="reference external" href="https://quantumfurball.net/my-home-built-personal-video-recorder-nightmare.html">expensive failed experiments in building a dedicated MythBox out of a MiniITX form factor system</a>, I decided what I <em>really</em> wanted was a quiet machine that would do everything. That is, a machine I could just leave on all the time, downloading, serving, processing, recording... anything. The problem I had in attempting to do this with my regular desktop machine was that my machine was (a) situated only a couple of metres from my bed, and (b) loud. Loud enough to make sleeping anywhere near it uncomfortable.</p>
<p>With the new goal to fix the problem of noise, I bought a new case on my way back from visiting my parents over the Christmas break: an Antec P180. I also bought a new, quiet PSU: an Antec TruePower Trio 550W.</p>
<p>As I work during the day (starting a new year in the lab), all of the following happened over several consecutive nights. I had to spend a couple of nights disassembling everything from the old case and reassembling everything in the new case. It wasn't until some days later that I was finally able to check whether my machine had not only survived the trip home (which, honestly, was [...]</p><p>After some <a class="reference external" href="https://quantumfurball.net/my-home-built-personal-video-recorder-nightmare.html">expensive failed experiments in building a dedicated MythBox out of a MiniITX form factor system</a>, I decided what I <em>really</em> wanted was a quiet machine that would do everything. That is, a machine I could just leave on all the time, downloading, serving, processing, recording... anything. The problem I had in attempting to do this with my regular desktop machine was that my machine was (a) situated only a couple of metres from my bed, and (b) loud. Loud enough to make sleeping anywhere near it uncomfortable.</p>
<p>With the new goal to fix the problem of noise, I bought a new case on my way back from visiting my parents over the Christmas break: an Antec P180. I also bought a new, quiet PSU: an Antec TruePower Trio 550W.</p>
<p>As I work during the day (starting a new year in the lab), all of the following happened over several consecutive nights. I had to spend a couple of nights disassembling everything from the old case and reassembling everything in the new case. It wasn't until some days later that I was finally able to check whether my machine had not only survived the trip home (which, honestly, was not really anything to worry about), but also whether it all worked successfully inside the new case. As you can imagine, I was pretty confident it would.</p>
<p>Spoiler: Filesystem corruption.</p>
<p>At first it didn't boot completely, but stalled partway through. Strange, I thought, that it would stall like it did. I tried a few times. Sometimes I could get as far as the KDE desktop. Sometimes it wouldn't quite make the login screen. Sometimes it didn't even get as far as booting X.</p>
<p>It looked like a problem getting data from the hard drive. Every attempt, it spoke of ATA command timeouts, Buffer I/O errors, and ATA abnormal status <tt class="docutils literal">0xD0</tt>. Buggered if I know what that means, though. I kept rebooting and retrying and rereading, to try to figure out just what in the hell was going wrong.</p>
<p>At some point something totally screwed up and scattered a bunch of erroneous bits over the 250 GB hard drive—or at least the main partition of it. (The hard drive also hosted a small WinXP partition for gaming.) Then Linux became unbootable.</p>
<p>You know that feeling you get when you lean on a chair just that little bit too far and it starts to fall? Just before you frantically re-balance yourself? “Oh, hell...”</p>
<p>At this point I figured the best immediate course of action was to <strong>leave the bloody thing turned off</strong> until I could figure out the next step. I used the base system from <a class="reference external" href="https://quantumfurball.net/my-home-built-personal-video-recorder-nightmare.html">another project that didn't go so well</a>, plugged the 250 GB hard drive in, and did what I could with fsck to salvage and back-up everything onto a separate 400 GB hard drive (the one I had originally intended to store recorded TV on).</p>
<p>The fsck managed to recover many files but, unfortunately, it had no idea what those files were, what they should have been called, or where they should have been located in the filesystem hierarchy. In total I was left with a couple of hundred files all neatly numbered and tucked under /lost+found, including files that used to constitute /sbin/init.</p>
<p>As you might imagine, I was not my usual cheery self at work for the next few days.</p>
<p>Now, it occurred to me as I was performing this salvaging process that if the hard drive itself had a fault then more than likely it would be popping up some kinds of new errors. But it was working, despite the corruption, without issues. The only difference with the hard drive here was that I had limited it to SATA 150 so that the dopey VIA SATA controller in this system would detect it at all. But I wouldn't have thought that that in itself would be enough to solve the problem.</p>
<p>It crossed my mind that it might be my Linux install doing something funky, but I ruled that out quickly. I don't remember upgrading anything in the intervening time, and the error messages looked to me to be very hardware-fault-esque.</p>
<p>As I could see it, the only thing left to blame was the motherboard, an ASUS A8N-SLI. So I blamed it. As far as I could tell, it was a hardware fault on the motherboard. Somehow something had stuffed up as it was either travelling or being moved from one case to another. Perhaps I shorted something accidentally? I try to be careful about these things, grounding myself, etc., but one can only do so much.</p>
<p>Having convinced myself the SATA controller on the motherboard was broken, I tracked down the warranty details. The board was just over a year old but, luckily, ASUS had a 3 year warranty on all their motherboards when I bought it. It was still a bit awkward, though, since I had originally bought it along with a bunch of other stuff for my own and my dad's machines, and he was the one with the receipt. I called him to get him to send a copy to me, but that would take a few days.</p>
<p>Added to this awkwardness was the fact that the shop that we bought this stuff from didn't operate in the same place anymore. Now they were further away. I called up their head office to chat to them about this, and they told me to just bring it to them. Okay, I thought, that's not too bad; it's somewhat of a drive, but I can still make that trip.</p>
<p>After a few more days (heading into the second week of this madness, now) I had received the receipt in the mail and was on my way to the shop to submit it for warranty. The guy there was friendly and took the board (and box and as many accessories that came with it as I could spare) without a hint of a problem.</p>
<p>Five days later I got a call on my mobile, in the middle of the day, from the manager of this shop telling me that there was nothing wrong with the motherboard. He added that Linux doesn't support SATA.</p>
<p>Now, let's just pause to consider this for a moment. This was entering its third week, while I had been without my usual capable system for over two weeks. I had filesystem corruption that I had managed to partially salvage using another motherboard. I had been using SATA and Linux together happily for <strong>over a year already</strong>. And now you're telling me that the motherboard's fine and Linux and SATA don't work together? ... Are you high?</p>
<p>I told him, in no uncertain terms, that what he had just told me was so much bovine waste. “I've been using SATA in Linux for a year already without problems!” He deflected, saying that he was just the manager and was only relaying what he had been told by the tech.</p>
<p>“Oh, and by the way,” he informed me, “we won't support a warranty on this anyway since you got it from a place that isn't part of our franchise anymore. You'll have to go take it to them.”</p>
<p>Nevermind that I had phoned in <strong>four days before</strong> to check exactly this. I pretty clearly said where I had originally bought it from (while they were still trading under the name of this store) and explicitly asked if it was okay. I was told it would be fine. I asked if the store there was still open. I was told it wasn't anymore, and it didn't matter anyway because warranty claims go to these guys, anyway. If there actually <em>was</em> going to be a problem, why the hell did this moron tell me that there <em>wouldn't</em> be? Why was I told to bring it to these “Linux doesn't support SATA natively” numbskulls, in a location out of my way, when they were in no position to warrant it?</p>
<p>So after that phone call I was too furious to do anything involving interactions with other people. I spent half an hour in the lab, by myself, quietly working on something completely unrelated to try to calm down a bit. Even then I was still fuming. I told my supervisor what had happened and that I was going to take a bit of time out to pick up the motherboard. (He'd never seen me so mad. A day or two later, he told me that I was almost shaking with anger and frustration, and he was being deliberately careful to not say anything that might possibly aggravate me further.)</p>
<p>One 90 minute round trip to the shop and back, later...</p>
<p>They didn't charge me anything, though I knew they could have tried. I'm not sure if they forgot about it or just decided it better to not piss me off any further and rather ignore it.</p>
<p>So the machine was back home. Again I tried my hand at diagnosing the cause. This time I noticed that WinXP didn't seem to have so much of a problem with it as Linux seemed to. Occasionally it wouldn't boot all the way, but usually it seemed okay. It's possible that my testing in Windows wasn't thorough enough, though—certainly it wasn't as thorough as with Linux.</p>
<p>I also noticed that limiting the drive to SATA 150, even while on the ASUS motherboard, seemed to help. Leaving it at SATA 150, it was, for the most part, running fine. Tired of fighting this crap, I began reinstalling Debian, and I was prepared to leave it at SATA 150 rather than 300. But, just in case there was some idea that I had missed, I put the issues to the folks on the <a class="reference external" href="http://www.humbug.org.au">Humbug</a> (my local Unix/Linux user group at the time) mailing list.</p>
<p>I got a few suggestions, but they seemed to converge towards it being a good idea to investigate the power supply. Apparently many weird effects have been in the past attributed to power supplies, and I wasn't aware of that. And not just dodgy supplies, too; someone even mentioned a situation where a PSU, tested to be working fine, was somehow incompatible with the particular case it was intended to be housed in. (For some bizarre, unknown reason, it just didn't work right while in that case.)</p>
<p>So, with that in mind, I tried substituting out the new power supply to see what happened using the old one I had. I couldn't imagine what could be causing errors like these by the PSU, but I gave it a go anyway.</p>
<p>It worked. No problems. No errors. Booting and working just fine. Something about the spanking new mid-range power supply was causing problems that the old bog-standard PSU did not.</p>
<p>I did note that there was something different about this setup as compared to using the old power supply. The old supply had no dedicated SATA plugs, whereas the new one does, and so to use the old PSU I had to use Molex to SATA power adaptor cables. On the new supply, however, I had just plugged the SATA power straight to the dedicated SATA supply lines.</p>
<p>So, for one more time, I tried using the new power supply, but with the Molex–SATA adaptors instead of the dedicated SATA power. It worked. I was running at SATA 300 and without the ATA errors.</p>
<p>Some thorough testing confirmed it. Yep. That was it. That was the problem. The PSU's SATA power cables and the hard drives weren't playing nice. Finally!</p>
<p>Of course, now I wanted to know what the problem with the SATA supply was. I poked around the outputs of the SATA supply cables with a multimeter to see what I could see, and what I could see was nothing out of the ordinary. Everything was within spec. Maybe with a current draw it'd be clearer what was amiss. But as it stood, I couldn't work it out any further.</p>
<p>Now it's taken me at least a few weeks to finally restore my machine to about where it was before this all happened. I was able to salvage most of my personal files from the original install that got corrupted, and what wasn't still there I had either a backup of, or it wasn't important enough to worry about. Since this happened, I've put VDR back on this machine, running as my digital TV receiver and PVR device, 24 hours a day. Like I had hoped to do.</p>
<p>I think there are a few morals to be learnt from this story. Some of these everyone should already know, but it's worth repeating:</p>
<ol class="arabic simple">
<li>You can't trust support staff to know a whole lot about Linux. (Doesn't support SATA! Right.)</li>
<li>You can't trust sales staff to know a whole lot about their own company. (Sure, bring it in! Even though you bought it at some other place which still exists but isn't part of our brand anymore.)</li>
<li>Using the most appropriate plugs you're given doesn't guarantee that it'll work.</li>
<li>Power supplies can cause some very strange behaviours.</li>
</ol>
<div class="section" id="update-2007-09-01">
<h2>Update 2007-09-01</h2>
<p>I really am a sucker for punishment. Last weekend I got talked into believing that upgrading was a good idea... way too easily. You see, the small 40 mm fans in my system (one on the motherboard over the northbridge, and one in my video card) were making noise. Not loud noise, really, but loud enough to annoy me as I tried to sleep. Particularly the northbridge fan. I thought it would be cool if I had a motherboard without any fans. I knew such existed, but I was wary of doing anything about it, given my previous experience with installing computer parts.</p>
<p>Aside from that, I was considering my options for getting a new, bigger monitor, and upgrading my memory. But it appeared that the DDR RAM that I was after had become disproportionately expensive as everyone moved to DDR2 RAM. Someone suggested that it'd be plenty cheap to just buy new parts to support DDR2, and for some reason I was feeling risky. I took the prompt and picked out for myself some parts: a fanless motherboard that supports DDR2 RAM (Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe), 2 GiB of DDR2-800 RAM (Kingston), a CPU (since, of course, the standard pins had changed since last time I bought a motherboard—I swear, they might as-well just go back to soldering the CPU straight in... anyway: Athlon X2 4400+), a fanless video card (Gigabyte 8600GT), and a monitor (Benq 20" widescreen, which was, perhaps not so surprisingly, the most expensive part).</p>
<p>After pulling out the old parts and putting in the new, things seemed to be going well. I ran it a little, used it to watch some TV, left it on overnight, and it survived okay. Things <em>seemed</em> to be going well. I shut the machine down in the morning since I hadn't gotten the network working for a silly reason (the interface I was trying to use as “eth1” was actually being called “eth3” by udev) and it would've been pointless to leave it running with no way to act as a server, and no TV shows worth recording. That evening I booted the machine up, did some web browsing, and then things started failing with segfaults, crashing, and a buildup of instability. Oh hell.</p>
<p>Without going into much detail (these posts already have far too much of that), I narrowed this problem down to use of the Cool'n'Quiet function of the CPU. After more desperate searching and probing, eventually I figured out that, even though the RAM was passing memtest86+ testing, the voltage setting for the RAM in the BIOS was defaulting to a value lower than what the RAM was actually designed for. It was being undervolted, and was made very unhappy when the CPU changed speed. So... no wonder there were segfaults.</p>
<p>Things seemed to be going well, again, once I pushed the voltage up to the correct level in the BIOS. Everything was running quieter than before the upgrade, and using less power, too. Happiness!</p>
<p>If I weren't such a masochist, one day I might learn to stop doing things like this to myself...</p>
</div>
My home-built personal video recorder nightmare2007-01-28T00:00:00-05:002007-01-28T00:00:00-05:00Brendon L. Higginstag:quantumfurball.net,2007-01-28:/my-home-built-personal-video-recorder-nightmare.html<p>It started with an impulse purchase. I was browsing Harvey Norman for one reason or another (I was probably in there to buy some overpriced printer ink) when I stumbled across the TV tuner card aisle. I had been digital-TV-curious for a while—this at a time when digital-TV was still fairly recent—and I was in a buying mood, so I bought a single-tuner DviCo PCI HDTV card. It took a bit of effort to get the software right, and I had to also get myself a long TV aerial cable, but it wasn't too long until I got working TV on my computer.</p>
<p>It was at this point that strange and wonderful ideas began to form in my head. Words like “MythBox” and “PVR” and “TiVo” coalesced, loitered around menacingly, and formed gangs that beat up other words like “easy”, “sensible” and “cheap”.</p>
<p>I considered for a moment what I already had to work with. I had an nVidia video card with, supposedly, video out function. I say “supposedly” because, at the time that I tried it, nVidia's Linux drivers were a bit thin on this particular front. TV out would kinda-sorta work, I think, but probably wouldn't [...]</p><p>It started with an impulse purchase. I was browsing Harvey Norman for one reason or another (I was probably in there to buy some overpriced printer ink) when I stumbled across the TV tuner card aisle. I had been digital-TV-curious for a while—this at a time when digital-TV was still fairly recent—and I was in a buying mood, so I bought a single-tuner DviCo PCI HDTV card. It took a bit of effort to get the software right, and I had to also get myself a long TV aerial cable, but it wasn't too long until I got working TV on my computer.</p>
<p>It was at this point that strange and wonderful ideas began to form in my head. Words like “MythBox” and “PVR” and “TiVo” coalesced, loitered around menacingly, and formed gangs that beat up other words like “easy”, “sensible” and “cheap”.</p>
<p>I considered for a moment what I already had to work with. I had an nVidia video card with, supposedly, video out function. I say “supposedly” because, at the time that I tried it, nVidia's Linux drivers were a bit thin on this particular front. TV out would kinda-sorta work, I think, but probably wouldn't be capable of handling anything tricky like hanging an alternate display off it.</p>
<p>What I also had, though, was an old DVD decoder card: a Sigma Designs Hollywood Plus (H+). This had been working well under Linux for several years using the <a class="reference external" href="http://dxr3.sourceforge.net">dxr3 drivers</a>. Knowing that the TV signal is actually an MPEG2 stream much like a DVD stream, I figured there must be a way to connect it, the DVB card, and my TV under MythTV.</p>
<p>There wasn't, though. Not with MythTV. MythTV assumes you have a true framebuffer to work, and the dxr3 driver doesn't implement a true framebuffer. But I did find an alternative to MythTV that <em>could</em> do what I wanted: <a class="reference external" href="http://www.tvdr.de/">VDR</a>.</p>
<p>VDR is perhaps not the prettiest, most feature rich, or easiest to use PVR software available. Don't get me wrong, it's very good, but at the time it was not as intuitive and ubiquitous as MythTV. It does have one major advantage, though—it supports the H+ card well, via the <a class="reference external" href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/dxr3plugin/">dxr3 plugin</a>.</p>
<p>After finally figuring out how to actually do cool things in VDR, I was really impressed with what I could then do: record, timeshift, pause live programs, get program info, etc. All with vastly improved picture quality, to boot, compared to my old analog signal. (There was probably an improvement in audio quality too, but the speakers in my TV are extremely ordinary anyway, so that advantage was somewhat moot.) It was a big step up from what I was able to do previously, which was precisely none of those things, and typically with a fuzzy picture.</p>
<p>It didn't take long before I got completely used to using VDR as my PVR, but there were still a few things about my particular setup that were bugging me. My computer lived in my bedroom, and the TV lived in an adjacent room. I needed to have fat, long cables running across a doorway to get signal from the aerial to my computer, and then picture and sound from my computer to the TV. (For some reason the best place in the house for reception by my indoor aerial was literally on top of the television. Who would've guessed?)</p>
<p>The second thing that was bugging me was having to boot-up and shutdown my computer every day just to put something on the idiot box. This was getting annoying. The alternative, of course (short of having the machine wake itself up, which it seemed unable to do by that point), was to leave my machine running overnight, all the time. This would have the advantage beyond just not having to turn it on in the morning, but also that it would be able to record things that interest me even after I'd have gone to sleep.</p>
<p>The problem with that idea, though, was that my computer sounded like a lawnmower. An old rickety case housing some 80 mm fans and the whole setup never considered for quietness, sitting a couple of meters across from my bed, made for an uncomfortably noisy environment that I would have had to try to sleep in.</p>
<p>Then I had a thought (uh oh) which seemed like a fun idea (oh no). “Why not build a quiet, efficient little machine, a kind of MythBox, exclusively to run MythTV-type software and handle all my TV needs?”</p>
<p>I should've just had a lie down and forgotten about it. But instead of doing the sensible thing, I spent a couple of weeks of my holidays feverishly searching the web for information about what I could do to achieve said box. I discovered the <a class="reference external" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniITX">MiniITX</a> form factor and was intrigued. Looking around to see what I could practicably get my hands on and what would do the tasks I was proposing, I took copious notes, comparisons, and details.</p>
<p>I had originally foreseen a fanless (and thus extremely quiet) system, with huge hard drive capacity, about the physical size of a DVD player, that would sit on top of my TV, run MythTV 24 hours a day, and record TV, play DVDs, and generally be my super-duper custom-built media centre.</p>
<img alt="The box in question." class="left" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/pvr/box_skin.jpeg" />
<p>What I actually ended up with was a little bit of a compromise from this ideal—disappointingly I was unable to work out a fanless configuration. The final plan involved a twice 40 mm-fanned (and thus, not so quiet) case—a Morex Procase 2677—and 40 mm-fanned (again, not so quiet) motherboard—a VIA EPIA SP-13000. But, on the plus side, the motherboard had MPEG2 hardware acceleration and TV out, and I was getting a huge 400 GB Sumsung hard drive for storage of recordings and things. I was also getting 512 MiB of 30 mm-tall RAM—importantly, my copious reading revealed that this particular case literally can not fit any RAM that's taller than 30 mm, so I made sure to check the RAM manufacturer's (PQI's) website for specifications before I ordered anything. Some parts I got from AusPCMarket, others from Eyo. The parts all totalled more than AU$800, but my newly approved <a class="reference external" href="http://www.innovation.gov.au/Research/ResearchBlockGrants/Pages/AustralianPostgraduateAwards.aspx">Australian Postgraduate Award</a> meant I could afford it. (I'm rich, ha ha! ...Not really.)</p>
<img alt="The guts of the box." class="right" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/pvr/box_guts.jpeg" />
<p>The parts arrived sometime in the following week. On the night they arrived, I took them all out and started assembling everything. It didn't take long before I ran into my first problem: The RAM was too tall. A single millimetre too tall. I measured it. Somebody (PQI) lied to me. I was not happy at all.</p>
<p>For now, it just meant that I wouldn't be able to put the DVD drive in its proper place, so I plugged the RAM in anyway. That let me get to the stage of booting something for the first time, and, with Debian install CD in the drive... nothing but motherboard beeps. After some farting around with various things, I eventually worked out that the RAM itself, quite aside from being too big to fit properly, was also <abbr title="dead on arrival">DOA</abbr>.</p>
<p>It occurred to me (after the obvious disappointment and mild rage), “Perhaps I could get Eyo to change it to a RAM stick only 30 mm tall while they replace this bad stick—kill two birds with one stone.” This assumed, of course, that the guys at the other end would actually listen to what I was asking (or even believe me) and actually wanted a satisfied customer, not merely a paid-up one. Ultimately I had assumed incorrectly.</p>
<img alt="The clearance between 30 mm RAM and the DVD drive." class="left" src="https://quantumfurball.net/images/pvr/mem_clear.jpeg" />
<p>In the meantime, I stole a stick of RAM from my desktop machine which just happened to actually be 30 mm tall. It also happened to be matched to a second stick in a dual-channel configuration, so I wasn't keen on this being a permanent solution, but it was enough for the moment.</p>
<p>Over the next while, I installed Debian and MythTV and played around a bit with all that. After much tweaking and farting around I got to the stage of actually being able to watch TV through it. Only, the reception wasn't all that good. Or, more accurately, it was pretty bad—enough to fall right over the <a class="reference external" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_cliff">digital cliff</a>.</p>
<p>I don't recall exactly how I worked it out—I probably put the TV card back into my desktop machine a tried some things there—but I eventually discovered that, somehow, the DC power block for the Morex case was causing so much electromagnetic interference that my indoor aerial was not enough to get a sufficiently strong signal above that noise for the tuner card to lock onto. I could only get, at best, one channel at a time, so long as I oriented the aerial just perfectly, and that required me reorient the aerial whenever I wanted to change channels. Some channels weren't able to be picked up at all.</p>
<p>In the end, the only time my MythBox would have a clean enough signal to be able to do what it was originally built for was when the whole thing was switched off... at the wall... Brilliant.</p>
<p>It probably would have been enough if I had an outdoor aerial. But I didn't, and for various reasons, I wasn't about to install one. All this was taking place, of course, while I was exchanging emails with the folks at Eyo, where I bought the RAM from, trying to nicely ask them to help me find a stick of RAM really-truly 30 mm tall, and not taller. Pretty much the only response I got through that whole exchange was “Tell us which one you want, and we'll exchange it, for a 15% restocking fee.” Even when I replied specifically saying that I just want one that's 30 mm tall: “Tell us which one you want, and...” Genius.</p>
<p>I was trying to make it clear what I wanted to do: return a stick of RAM that was dead on arrival and <em>at the same time</em> exchange the RAM for something more appropriate, which they would be kind to suggest. I didn't see why I should pay the full restocking fee since, to replace the dead RAM (for which that restocking fee doesn't apply), they'd surely have to go through almost the same motions, anyway.</p>
<p>It was nearing the end of December at this point, and their website claimed they would be leaving on holidays for a few weeks over Christmas. I sent yet another email with the same request, reworded yet again to try to make the point clearer, and when I didn't hear back within a few days I assumed they had left for the holidays and would deal with me again when they all got back in the new year. Over the holidays I looked at what I might be able to do to alleviate the problem with the interference, but that exercise didn't produce anything useful. (Turns out aluminium foil doesn't make such a good electromagnetic shield, though I should've guessed.) It was about at this time when I realised this project was doomed.</p>
<p>It was the new year now, and the guys at Eyo still hadn't gotten back to my last email. Fed up, I emailed them requesting an RMA to return the dead RAM and that, as per their own policy available on their website, they refund it rather than replace it. I got the RMA without hassle and posted the RAM back.</p>
<p>About a week and a half later I got a phone call to my mobile from a guy at Eyo. They were <em>still</em> confused about my situation and what I wanted to do. The call was to let me know that my replacement RAM was ready to be shipped. Yes, they wanted to send me a replacement stick of RAM. (Are these guys illiterate?)</p>
<p>I argued with him for several minutes about not wanting a replacement. He wanted to charge me the full restocking fee. Restocking is not applicable to dead items. He argued that I was late with notifying them. I had notified them within a couple of days of the RAM arriving here—it was their fault that it had taken so long to go ahead and do something about since they made no effort to help me choose a replacement or alternative, and the ball only got started rolling once I inevitably just gave up dealing with their crap. He wanted to at least charge me <em>something</em>, since RAM prices had shifted by this point.</p>
<p>I was sick of arguing and conceded to some small amount being taken off the refund amount. I forget how much, but it was less than the total 15% restocking fee. The amount was credited to my card shortly after. I won't be purchasing anything from Eyo again.</p>
<p>As for my MythBox, for a while its remains occupied space in my spare room. I couldn't use the box because it made too much electromagnetic interference, so it was entirely useless to me at that point.</p>
<p>After some time and some calming down, I thought some more about it and realised that the biggest problem I had with the old system in my loud machine was really the fact that my machine is loud. The other problems were minor—the cables can be taped to the floor for minimal fuss, and everything else pretty much just works.</p>
<p>“So why not,” I thought, “instead of a separate, quiet machine, I replace the loudest component of my machine, the PSU, and get a new quiet case to use? That way, I could leave my machine running 24 hours a day and still be able to sleep. And there's the bonus that this way, once I eventually upgrade from dial-up to broadband, I'll be able to use my machine as a little always-on server, too!”</p>
<p>You would think I would've learned to steer well clear of those kinds of thoughts by now, but you'd be wrong. It foreshadows a whole new set of bizarre problems that drove me mad for another month. Read about them in my follow-up post: <a class="reference external" href="https://quantumfurball.net/my-home-built-personal-video-recorder-nightmare-2-peace-and-quiet.html">My Homebuilt Personal Video Recorder Nightmare 2: Peace And Quiet</a>.</p>