Hello all,
My name is Nick and I live in north Australia.

I just wanted to let you guys, especially Jaromil, know how much I appreciate the dynebolic livecd!

I am unsure about disclosing too much personal info but as I have nothing to hide I am happy to share my experience with the distro.
As I see it dynebolic celebrates the sharing of information and so here is my little story and I hope that I do not offend anyone by telling it here.
I once briefly studied computer engineering at university but did not complete my degree mainly due to other distractions ;-)
This has given me a fairly broad though unspecific knowledge of computer systems and programming but it has allowed me to in my spare time play with cool projects. While these are in no way professional or fancy I at satisfied that I can apply my mind and create cool things out of old computers mainly mainly for the benefit of my two beautiful young daughters.
The first project that I completed was mainly due to my daughters love of DVD-video movies. I would (usually) buy a couple of kids movies for them to watch at home but due to their young ages and unintentionally rough treatment the discs would soon become scratched and unplayable. As I am in no way a rich person this meant that we could only own a dvd movie for a while then it had to be rebought when it became unplayable. This seemed somewhat unfair to me as the girls did not mean to damage but could only enjoy being able to play their own property for a limited time. Then while late night net surfing in my workplace I stumbled across transcode, an amazing piece of software thet seemed from it's description to be able to make backup copies of movies that they already owned. At the time my internet access was quite limited so that I could only suft at work. I was given an old pentium pro 233Mhz box by a friend so I attempted to first install redhat linux on it from a cd. I then bought a second hand 32X cd-rw burner and a 2X DVD-rom drive. Then through many late night trips to my workplace to download all the dependancies for transcode and then I had manually transport these files to my home and then install on the old box. I must have made 20 trips before it was able to install. Then after more surfing I found some info about creating video cds and svcds. After days more surfing and tinkering I burned a video cd from a dvd video and placed it in my daughters dvd player and amazingly it played through. This was really a great buzz because the old box was too old/slow to actually play the orgignal dvds and I could not even tell if things had worked untill I placed the finished copy into a home consumer dvd playerI felt euphoric that I had used only the command line and other peoples freely given knowledge and software to create something really cool. My children loved it too!
Years later I started looking at livecds and they seemed also to be really cool. I started searching to see if there was a livecd that contained transcode with all dependancies intact and to my utter amazement there it was, dynebolic. And furthermore it conatained a bunch of other cool software for video and audio editing. As soon as I tried it I was hooked!. Then I realized that there was a way to extend the cd by using dyne modules and soon my daughters were loving the games in the games.dyne module. I wanted to create modules for myself but felt quite inmtimidated by the process as internet access at home was still very limited. I emailed the mailing list asking for advice and lo and behold I was answered by Jaromil himself who told me what I needed to know and emcouraged me to hack away.
Then my house was broken in to by some unknown persons while the family was out. They helped themselves to money, equipment etc. This was quite a shock and left me feeling uncomfortable at home and wishing that I had a least known what the intruders had looked like. So after a while I started doing some more research and then I started making some dyne modules. I created a festival lite speech synthesis module and a motion module. Then I laboured over some simple bash scripts and installed it all on another friends gift computer, a pII 300Mhz with a video capture card, camera and dvd burner. This became our home security system. It used a very simple simple keyboard operated speech synthesized menu that allowed it to record events in front of the camera and later burn video footage onto dvd-r disc. I know that probably this was not the original intent of dynebolic. If anyone would like these modules or any of the scripts please let me know. They are very basic and even perhaps silly but they served a purpose for me and if my home gets broken in to again I will at least be able to give the police a dvd of the offenders and it has allowed me and my daughters to feel a little more relaxed in our home again. Again it was because of the free sharing of information that I was able to do this and I wanted to let everybody in the dyne community know how gratefull I am.
My latest project has been in creating a mythtv media centre pc on a pIII mainly to record my childrens favouite free to air television programs and to try and filter out most of the commercially oriented crap that is broadcast. This has left me with a question? Would a mythtv module be a good idea for dynebolic? Would anyone like to help me to create one? If not then could someone explain why it would not be?
I realize that this is a long rambling story but the point is this. Why shouldnt we have freedom over what we want to watch from broadcast tv?Is that the kind of thing that dynebolic stands for? Wouldn't a combination of the video and audio editing features of dynebolic and mythtv be cool?
Apologies if I have offended anyone with this. If anyone wants a copy of the modules that I made please let me know.
Best wishes from Australia
Nick

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