You probably have heard about Hubble telescope, which searches for the black holes in the universe. There is one more Hubble which searches for the black holes too. It is the project of University of Washington and it searches for the internet black holes. It explores IP network prefixes in real time and whether they are reachable by the path which is about them advertised in BGP. If the path is advertised, but the destination network is not reachable by it, the packets end in a virtual “black hole”. Good news is there is no such black hole in our local “star system” in Czech republic. Check your self whether the situation still remains the same on the Hubble project page.

Because my generally bad experience with DVB-T (I have bought two different pieces of hardware at different time, but had no luck to get it working), I upgraded my analog TV card to 3Dvision PV-951TF.

Use following options in your /etc/modprobe.conf to set it up properly (autodetection does not work):

options bttv card=42 tuner=28 radio=1
options tvaudio tda9874a=1 tda9874a_STD=6 tda9874a_AMSEL=1 tda9874a_SIF=2

If you need infrared remote, play with i2c_udelay setting of bttv. I read somewhere 16 should be enough. 128 was definitely too much and 8 seems to be too less. As I won’t use infrared remote, I don’t care.

You probably haven’t noticed … the era of Internet based on currently used IP protocol is coming to the end. There are only roughly 14% of network blocks free at IANA pool. There will be no free blocks left at the end of 2010 if their consumption will stay the same as currently, which is pretty likely scenario as there are no new technologies like NAT, name based virtual hosting or other in sight to slow down this process.

We will have to adopt new IP protocol known as IPv6 (the current is IPv4). There are very few IPv6 enabled and prepared ISP out there currently, so it is hard to get your connectivity, but anyway … ask your local ISP. I will do the same for moucha.cc. Meanwhile see IPv4 exhaustion online.