Computing!

I've been down to just my laptop and a single ancient box since moving to Hawaii, due to the careful packing skills of my movers.  I finally bought a replacement, and have been having that old-school feeling of trying to get disparate parts working together.  Unfortunately, I fly out to Baltimore for a week on Wednesday, so I'm making this list partially as a to-do list for when I return.

Current status:

• HDMI display works to my television.  Unfortunately, the TV refuses to believe there is a computer attached, and so refuses to allow access to the overscan disabling functions.  What this means is that there's a fairly large border that the computer thinks is visible, but isn't.
• Surprisingly enough, HDMI sound worked with mplayer with only minimal tweaking.  This is a good sign.
• Wireless now works fine, allowing this computer to function as my wireless router.  I've enabled WPA, since I don't feel like doing MAC address filtering and running kittenwar net.  I am having some throughput issues, where the network stalls every ten seconds or so.  I suspect interference from neighbors, but that's a bit tricky to diagnose.
• mythtv sees the database, and looks like it should be functional with an evening of tweaking, once I get that overscan issue fixed.
• The IR remote I got apparently works randomly with mplayer.  I suspect it's a config issue.  I'm hoping that I can simply use the receiver, and train my universal remote to send the key codes.  
• My external USB drives live too high on the shelf to plug into the new computer.  I can probably solve this by just buying a few 2m cables.
• I don't have a video capture card yet, so it won't be a DVR quite yet, but that's the next project, once I get the rest of the system up and running.