On 26 Apr 2010, at 14:25, Mark Knecht wrote:
... I have a machine that's a MythTV backend server. It sits quietly in our living room doing it's job, but it only does that roughly 4 hours per day so for 20 hours it wastes electricity. To make more use of the hardware my wife and son use it at times to browse the web. They are used to shutting off other computers and they sometimes make mistakes and shut this machine off so we lose recordings.
In the case of your particular Myth box, it might be worth looking at sleep / hibernate / BIOS wake functionality, to save 20 hours' electricity per day.
I haven't looked at this in detail, but I think that Myth can write a wake up time to the BIOS, say of 5 minutes before the next scheduled recording. Thus even if you wife does switch the computer off, it will switch itself on again so that you don't miss your show.
Stroller.
