December 28, 2007

Making your PS3 (Slightly) Less Useless

First off, let's be clear - there is no reason for a sane person to own a PS3 today*. There are no games good enough to justify the expense, and Sony's decision not to include a 10¢ IR receiver means that you can't easily integrate the PS3 into your home theater set up as a Blu-Ray Player, since your can't use your existing universal remote with it.

While there is nothing to be done about the lack of games, other than waiting, there is something that can be done about the lack of home theater integration. Once again, it's Nyko to the rescue, this time with their Blu-Wave IR remote for the PS3. For $19.99 you get a 10¢ IR reciever and an IR remote that you can add to the growing pile of remotes you keep in the closet. If you are using a Logitech Harmony remote you can automatically set up the Harmony to work with the Nyko Blu-Wave - just select it in the setup utility instead of the PS3 (which can't be controlled by the Harmony anyway). You will also need to change the default mapping for the device and for any activities you set up to map the PS3 "X" button to the Harmony's "OK" button. Once that is done plug in the IR receiver and your PS3 suddenly works as well as your PS2 used to. If you don't have a Harmony remote, you can use the Blu-Wave remote to teach whatever universal remote you use the Blu-Wave commands. Really though, you should go out and buy a Harmony, since even the cheapest Harmony is a hundred times better than any other remote you are using.

The only thing that the IR remote cannot do is turn the PS3 on and off, which is a little irritating, but if you leave your machine on all the time working for Folding@Home anyway it's not really much of a problem.

I think that I am getting gadget crush on Nyko. Their stuff is cheap, well made and it works.

* Do not attempt to convince me that Resistance or anything else on the PS3 is so awesome that I must play it. I've looked at everything that is out for the PS3 right now and there is really nothing that interests me. I bought one now just because I had the money to pick up a used 60gb with full backwards compatibility to replace my PS2 and get blu-ray thrown in. There are PS3 games I am looking forward to - LittleBigPlanet, Singstar PS3 and...and...um...looking out six months from now that's really it.

Posted by edgore at 10:34 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 22, 2007

(Not Quite) Bone Rattling Sound

I recently picked up an interesting gadget - a pair of Vonia EZ-4200P Bone Conduction Headphones. These look like a set of over-the-ear headphones, except that instead of being completely covered by a foam pad, the center of each headphone is a hard plastic pad. Instead of wearing them over your ears, you actually place them a bit forward so that the plastic pads are resting above your cheekbones. The sound is then transmitted through the bone into your head, rather than blasting directly into your eardrum. Supposedly this will give you good sound, while at the same time reducing the possibility of hearing loss.

Since I am rapidly becoming deaf as a post and I listen to music quite a bit during the day to block out the noises of my fellow cube dwellers while I focus on the tedious minutia that is the life blood of the auditing work that I do, trying these things out seemed like a pretty good idea.

There is very little information about bone conduction music headphones. Nothing really about where to buy them in the US, and no reviews to speak of. Even more discouraging, the only product line I was able to find any information about was Vonia, which is manufactured by Thanko, a company better known for a wide variety of USB powered devices covering the full range from seat warmers and warming slippers to a USB hub shaped like a gold bar. My confidence was not inspired..

However, theirs was the only product that I could find for sale in English. Unfortunately only their lowest end product was available, but I figured if it worked at all it was probably worth $90.

After using the headphones for several days I have mixed feelings about them. The headphones definitely have their problems - The sound quality is not perfect; it's a little distorted and "bathroom-echo-y" and it looses a lot of the low end. The headphones themselves press pretty tightly against your face, which becomes a little uncomfortable after a while.

That said they show a lot of promise. The sound is not awful, by any means, and I can certainly tell the difference at the end of a day from not having my eardrums battered all day. Also, because they don't cover your ears you actually are more aware of what is going on around you - if say, someone comes into your cubicle - while still over powering just about all environmental sounds and distractions.

Overall it's enough to make me want to keep using them at work and to look forward to seeing future iterations of the technology. I would definitely consider paying a few hundred dollars for a really good set of bone conducting headphones based on this experiment, though I would like to be able to actually try them before buying.

(I should also mention that according to the instructions you can wear the headphones over your ears, if you want to. I tried it and it does improve the range and quality of the sound, but it also defeats my goal of sparing my ear drums (though it's probably still better than shoving in ear buds)).

(I also wonder whether or not these things sound heavy on the high end because the bone conduction is overcoming the fact that I have lost a lot of hearing at the higher range over the years...)

Posted by edgore at 12:43 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

September 27, 2007

Why I (Heart) Logitech

About 16 months ago I decided that I was tired of having dozens of remotes to control my extremely robust (overly complicated) AV center. After doing a little research, I came to the conclusion that the Logitech Harmony 880 remote was the ideal solution. It's a universal remote with a programmable color screen. You hook it up to your computer, tell it what equipment you have, how they are connected and what you would like o to with them and it automatically programs the remote so you can, for example, press a button (virtually) labeled "Play Xbox" and the remote will send out all the commands to all the components that are needed to make that happen. It remember the state of you equipment too, so if while in "Play Xbox" mode I press "Watch TV" it knows the TV and the receiver are already on, so it doesn't mess with their power, it just switches the inputs, and turns off the Xbox.

This has worked brilliantly. Flawlessly, with a wide variety of hardware.

Until about 6 months ago.

One of the neat things about the remote is that it comes with a built-in, rechargeable battery and a charging cradle. Pop the remote into the cradle, and you never need to worry about changing the batteries.

So, when the charging cradle began to act flaky, it was a bit of a problem. It started out with just needing to jiggle the remote to get it to sit right, this it required putting a book on the remote to get it to make proper contact. Finally it just stopped charging.

I called Logitech and after a short time they determined that my cradle was probably defective and they offered to replace i for free, which was VERY nice, since I am 6 months out of warranty. Then again, after doing some reading on the internet it appears that this is a pretty common problem that they admit to, so I was not too surprised.

No, what surprised me was that today I got an email from Logitech apologizing that the cradle had been on backorder for two weeks (they told me that it would be back ordered on the phone, so no surprise) and that instead of making me wait, they are just going to send me an complete replacement, brand new cradle and a brand new remote. A BRAND NEW REMOTE. To someone that is out of warranty.

So, if you ever need a super expensive remote to tame you AV center, I would have to say I can really recommend the Logitech Harmony remotes. That's it, just felt like sharing.

Posted by edgore at 3:04 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

February 13, 2007

Awesome Vista Feature #347

If you have a folder window open, you can't delete the folder. Example, I have an empty folder on my desktop called, let's say, "New Folder".

"What", I ask, "is in this folder? I do not recall, so I shall open it and see."

Opening the folder I discover that it is, in fact, empty.

"This empty folder clutters my desktop, which is not desirable", I say to myself as I drop the offending folder into the trash. Immediately, Vista springs to my aid, warning me that I am deleting a folder, despite my having long ago turned off the "Display delete confirmation dialog" check box. I cannot seem to find the "Display 'you are trying to drop an empty folder into the trash" dialog' check box.

"Fine!" I say, clicking the "Ok" button.

Vista helpfully tells me that I need permission to perform this action.

"I am logged on as an Administrator", I remind Vista, clicking the "Try Again" button.

"You need permission to perform this action", counters Vista.

"But, I am logged on as an Administrator!", I plead, clicking the "Try Again" button.

"Administrator? What is this 'Administrator' you speak of?" asks Vista. "You seem to be under the impression that I work for you, meatbag"

This happens three times before it occurs to me to try something monumentally stupid. I close the open window displaying the non-existent contents of "New Folder", and drag the folder into the trash again. Without a complaint, Vista drops it into the trash and allows me to empty it. No problems, no complaints; just a like a real file management shell, say Norton Navigator from 1989.

Now, I realize that Vista probably has it's panties in a bunch because there is some stupid hidden file (like desktop.ini, or something) inside the folder I want to delete that it has open when the window is open, but you know what?

I don't care. It should work as if it was designed in the later part of the twentieth century.

Posted by edgore at 10:48 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

January 31, 2007

The Inevitable Windows Vista Post

For the last 3 months or so I have really needed to backup everything on my hard disk, wipe the whole thing, and reinstall everythign from the ground up. However, since Vista was coming out sooner of later, I held off on doing it figuring that I would simply kill two birds with one stone. Well, that time has come and those birds are dead.

Yesterday I picked up the Vista Home Premium Upgrade edition, which give you almost, but not all the features available in VIsta. Basically you don't get file/disk encryption, file journaling (the ability to fall back to an older version of a file if you screw something up) and Texas Holdem; baiscally stuff that's not worth the extra hundred bucks for the Ultimate version.

Installation went pretty smooth, and actually took less time than installing XP used to. The downside is that apparetnly, because I have the upgrade version, if I ever have a problem that causes me to wipe and reinstall, I will have to first install XP, then install Vista over that. This is, needless to say, irritating and stupid.

Now that it's installed though, what is it like? Is it a giant leap forward as Microsoft has stated? Is it the single most significant advance in computing in the history of man?

Not so much.

Here then are the thins I like and the things I hate about Windows Vista. If there is anything here that I am off-base about a setting that I am missing or soemthng that will fix what I hate, please let me know so I can fix it.

Things I like:
Um...thinking. There must be something...Nope, not really. There is nothing, as near as I can tell, that is that great about WIndows Vista. Building in media center is okay, but reall would not have mattered to me at all if they had not crippled support for Divx on the Xbox 360 to begin with. So, nothing that I like about it.

Things I don't like:
I use FireFox and Thunderbird and it actually seems like Vista tends to ignore my preference for Firefox (set as the default browser) and fire up Explorer all the time. XP managed this just fine.

I don't own a Mac for a good reason.Several years ago Apple went nuts and forgot all the interface design lessons they had ever learned and replaced their "get the job done and stay out of your way" interface with a colorful, flashy stupid thing that interferes with your ability to judge color, concentrate for more that two minutes and takes up half the screen space with pointless design elements. Windows has now caught up. There is no reason on earth for color-gradient window frames and transparent title bars. Mac users will no doubt disagree. They are, however, retarded. I say this a someone who gave up on the Mac around OS 9 as too gaudy.

The code signing stuff is pretty irrititatng as well. I use several programs regularly that are not code-signed (winRAR, for example) and everytime I use them I need to grant them permission to run. EVERY TIME. Not once and it remembers; Every. Freaking. Time. I know that I could turn off the user account controls and it would stop doing this, but I would also lose the advantages of having it warn me in cases where I DO want to the opportunity to decide whether or not to permit unsigned code to run. They really need something in-between all or nothing protection.

Those are the things that are bugging me today. I may post more later. The quick rundown though is, as expected, there is no reason to upgrade to Vista today, or any time in the near future. All of the main feature are available elsewhere, typically as a free download for XP (IE 7, XP Powertoys, etc).

Posted by edgore at 9:03 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 10, 2006

New and Improved DEET for Robots

I've just put up a new version of Bad Robot! that includes an IP white list and a user agent black list pre-populated with known evil robots. Listen carefully and you can hear the metallic tintinnabulation of robots around the world quaking in fear!

Posted by edgore at 2:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 5, 2006

Foolish Human

I have re-activated the link for Bad Robot! It turns out that Bad Robot! was right, I had performed a bad robot like behavior from that IP address while doing some of the research that led up to writing Bad Robot!. So, it does work correctly, and I need to implement a white list feature.

Posted by edgore at 1:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 29, 2006

The Robots Win This Round

I've temporariily taken down the links to Bad Robot! - it looks like whatever I am using to identify bad behavior for MT-trackbacks has a flaw in it, since it is coming back with my work IP address as a probably Bad Robot. My home address did not get flagged though, which seems wierd since I hardly to anything from home. I'll pour over logs tonight and figure out what it's doing...

My geek-fu is weak today.

Posted by edgore at 12:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 27, 2006

Defend Yourself!

As you know, it's not a matter of if the Robot Uprising will come, it a matter of when.

I know - I have been under constant robotic assualt for years, and I am finally starting to get sick of it.

If you have a weblog you know that there are teeming millions of webbots taht go around and try to put fake comments and track backs into weblogs. This leads to all of the nonsense comments that you sometimes see about viagra and online poker. Now, most of the junk comments and trackbacks get caught by the filtering software built into modern blogging software, so they don't actually show up on webpages. However the bots and the people who run them are too stupid to give up, so these visits to post this junk still shows up in my logs, and screws with my stats. I am also forced to moderate a bunch of the comments and trackbacks, which is irritating.

No more.

Today a new day begins as I rise up against the automated hordes. Okay, as I make the first step towards rising up. If you are on an apache webserver...and using a windows or Mac OSX desktop...and the only problem you have is tons of junk trackbacks...and you are tired of seeing them in your logs. Within those parameters I have the weapon that you can use to fight back.

Oh, also, you have to not mind blocking huge swaths of IP addresses.

I give you...Bad Robot! *stunned silence*

Bad robot is an application that analyzes your (apache) webserver logs and looks for signs that point to a Bad Robot, then spits out a report onscreen that you can review. You can then choose on an IP address by IP address basis whether ofr not to block that address from ever seeing your website again.

At the moment the only thing that bad robot really does is looks for anything that tries to post a track back to a movable type weblog. In the entire life of my weblog I have only had 2 external trackbacks, so for this initial version I am comfortable assuming that anyone trying to post a trackback is probably a Bad Robot. You might actually be a popular kid who get's trackbacks. In that case you will need to excercise some caution when blocking track back posters, so as not to block real people. Bad Robot! gives you some sorting options that can be helpful.

The neat thing is that now that I have put together the basic engine for examining logs it's really, really easy for me to add more rules to the program. Soon Bad Robot! will be able to distinguish between things are certainly bad robots, and things that might be people - and tell you! It will also be able to automatically figure out if a robot is obeying your robots.txt file. The goal here is to create a single tool that will handle misbehaving spiders, spam-bots, email harvesters, etc. in one fell swoop, then block them permanently.

Download the latest release and use them as you see fit. Tell me what you like about it, tell me what you hate about it, tell me what else you want it to analyze for, and tell me your stories of how you have struck out against the robot uprising.

I'm especially interested in hearing from mac users - the Mac version has never been tested in any way, since I don't have a Mac, so I am putting all my faith into the development environment's automated Mac version spitting out abilities. Can you people even open ZIP files?

I'll post new versions as make changes. Various Linux flavors may appear if there is any interest at all.

At this point you need to have the log file to analyze available locally, un-gzipped, and the output is a text file of the banned IPs that you have to manually add to the .htacess file on your webserver. So, it's still not for the faint of heart - messing with .htaccess can screw up your websever, so don't play with it if you don't know what it is.

You can still play with Bad Robot! though - at this point it can't possibly do anything bad. In the next version, where I plan to add auto-fetching of logs through FTP and automated updates to your .htaccess file (also via FTP) that could be dangerous. Really really dangerous. I will also create cute icons and stuff.

I wonder if JJ Abrams will sue me over the name...I hope so.

Posted by edgore at 4:14 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 15, 2005

Adventures in Television Part 5

Ah...I am weak. After having buiilding my own PVR as my big project for the last year, I have given myself over to the darkside. I signed up for Adelphia cable, including their Moxie-based DVR/setop box. There are a ton of things I don't like about it (like the tiny hard disk - 7 hours of HD content fills it up!?!?) but it's easy, and it reduces the complexity, something I have been trying to make myself do lately. Instead of a computer, two external digitizers, two satellite boxes, and a stereo reciever I now just have the one box. It has also removed something like 16 cables from behind the television. Yes, the hard disk is tiny, yes the interface is occasionally irritating, nop, I cannot use it to play music and downloaded video from the internet, yes, it's not very geek-macho, but it's simple. I'm trying to learn to like simple.

I don't know what I am going to do with the hardware - I'm thinking that I will build Ash a computer of her own to have when/if she gets a place of her own.

Posted by edgore at 2:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 30, 2005

Music Server

The music server upstairs lasted for a little over three years, whcih is not too bad, really. Something (CPU. MB, Power Supply) died and took out everything else along with it. The price to replace the components was not too bad, though it is irritating that I had to buy new RAM for it, simply because nothing supports the gig of RAM that was in there. I suppose I can have Sharon let Rick know that I have it, since am pretty sure it will work with his machine.

It took a couple of days to everything sorted out with it (getting it to recognize all drives, etc), which was a nice, distracting little project. Now I need to seek out additional distractions. Not sure what the next project is going to be, but it needs to be engrossing and lengthy...probably something involving getting the house ready to go.

Posted by edgore at 10:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 14, 2005

Adventures in Television (Part 4)

It's funny how easy it is to overlook any one of the 15,000 things that you can update on your computer at any given moment.

On the PVR computer I have within the last two weeks gone to Windows update for patches, upgraded to a point release of BeyondTV (the releases specifically state that the update does nothing that would affect any of the problems I am having), updated the machines BIOS, and even performed hardware upgrades to try to get this damn harddisk thrashing/TV viewing lockup thing to stop.

Then along came Will reminding me that my motherboard drivers might not be up to date.

Actually, I have no idea if they were out of date or not - Gigabyte's site doesn't make it easy to figure when the driver version they have were relased, and it's almost impossible to figure out which specific driver version maps to the driver releases on the site.

But I downloaded everything they had and updates what ws on the machine.

I haven't had much of a chance to use it under real conditions yet, but I did just sit downstairs changing channels, watching recorded shows then suddenly switching to Live TV (So the computer would not be expecting it) and so far, no problems.

So, until it starts crashing again, thank you Will.

Of course, once it starts crashing again, now I will consider it your fault.

Posted by edgore at 7:17 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 13, 2005

Adventures in Television (Part The Third)

As I mentioned in my first post about my homemade PVR, I've been having problems with occasional hard disk thrashing and lockups. Over the weekend I decided to try and fix that.

First thing I did was drop in an 80 GB ATA drive to hold the operating system and the swap drive. That means it's got three drives now: 80gb ATA for the OS & swap, 120GB SATA for the live TV buffers, and 250gb SATA for recorded shows.

The install went just fine, got everything copied over and changed the boot order of the drives to make the new 80gb the boot drive (If you can get a copy of it Maxtor's software that ships with their drives is awesome - it allows you to copy from drive to drive, including all the bootable-ness stuff completely automatically, it's WAY earier than using Ghost or whatever and it was free with the drive).

I changed all the settings for Beyond TV so it's buffering and recording whare I want and start trying to make the machine lock up.

No problem. It takes about 5 mintues to do it, and now it seems like the problem is worse - the viewing interface just locks up completely, instead of for a minute or two.

Being the technologist that I am, I assume that I need to throw more hardware at the problem. Memory! I only have 512megs (approx. 51 times the size of the hard disk on my first IBM PC). Obviously it needs more RAM.

So, I doubled it to 1gb (8,192 times the amount of memory in my original Apple IIe computer).

Still having exactly the same problem.

The upside is that it only appears to affect the viewing application - I can ctrl-al-del out it it and shut it down, but the backgroungd processes that record shows continues to work just fine, so I am not losing anything, but has made viewing live TV extremely dicey.

I think I am going to look at how Windows IRQ sharing is set up and see if there is anything there that might be a problem. If that doesn't do it then I have suppose I have the option of looking at differennt software...I still haven't tried out SageTV...

Posted by edgore at 1:25 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 8, 2005

Adventures in Televison (Part Two)

Immediately after I hooked the computer up to my Panasonic CRT Projection TV, I realized something. I needed a newer, better TV. The television stuff looked fine, but anything involving the computer side of things was just about unusable.

After some looking around I decided to get the Toshiba 52HM84 52” rear projection DLP. It had good picture quality, a pretty good selection of inputs, and most importantly, it looked like something from the bridge of Star Trek.

I got it home, hooked everything up and turned it on – everything worked perfectly. Obviously there was some tweaking needed to get the picture just right and all, but overall, pretty good.

Two days later, it would not turn on. Press the power button; hear the fan spin up half a dozen times…nothing. Nothing except for a malignant little red light that was blinking at ½ second intervals. So I unplugged the power waited ten minutes, plugged it back in, and turned it on with no problem. Obviously it was just some weird hiccup.

Two days later it would not turn on at all, unplugging and re-plugging made no difference. It was completely dead.

So I returned it to Best Buy, not problem at all, within thirty days etc. That one did exactly the same thing after a week. Now I know there is something weird going on.

I returned the second TV, but this time, figuring that I must have some strange power quality problem, I bought an uninterruptible power supply with line conditioning and brownout protection, so the power going to the TV would be perfect. After all, I have never seen any posts about anything like this on AVSForum, or anywhere else, and the service guy said he had never seen the problem before. It had to the power.

Two weeks later that one died as well. The service guy replaced the entire light engine (which is about 80% of the value of the set). Again it stopped turning on reliably after about a week.

So we left it on. 24/7. Staying on had never been a problem, and the lamp was covered by the extended warranty. It worked fine for a couple of months while a final return and replacement with another brand was worked out with Best Buy.

I’m glad to say that I got my new LG 52SX4D 52” DLP set in on Monday. Best Buy even let me return the Toshiba TV stand, which was custom fitted to the Toshiba set. The picture on the LG is not as good out of the box as the Toshiba was, but on the upside I haven’t seen any of the “rainbow effect” that I saw constantly on the Toshiba.

So far the LG has been turned off and come back on 8 times and counting.

Posted by edgore at 2:29 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 7, 2005

Adventures in Televison (Part One)

As those of you that know me know, I have been a ReplayTV user since the first model came out. I upgraded to the networked model when that came out, and generally I have been pretty happy with it. Until this last winter when, suddenly, I started to run into recording conflicts - two shows on at the same time that I wanted to record. ReplayTV has also been removing useful features like commercial skip and internet sharing from their boxes. All of this lead me to start looking at PC based solutions for recording television. This is the story of my journey to recording satisfaction.

Afte looking around at the software that was out there I soon dismissed the idea of MythTV or any of the other Linux based solutions. It looks like they are way better tan anything else out there, but I am too lazy to get into the whole Linux thing. I used a Linux box back in the late 90's as a household server and internet gateway - I just don't have the time (or frankly, attention span) to go through that again.

So, having decided it was going to be a Windows solution I did the minimum amount of reseach possible and settled on SnapStream's Beyond TV product - it supports multiple tuners, has the minimum feature set I need, a good user community, and most importantly, it looked like the interface was something that entire family could live with.

For hardware I decided to go for something that would have a little life left in it before becoming obsolete - I went for an Nvidia chipset motherboard and an AMD 64 3000+. For the graphics card I chose an Nvidia 6200 (I can't be bothered to remember which manufacturer) mainly because of the HDTV support. For the video digitizers I have two Hauppauge USB2 PVRs, each one hooked up to a DirecTV receiver. The receivers are controlled using Serial to Lowspeed data port, which makes channel changing foolproof. Input to the digitizers is through svideo. Initially I had a single 250GB harddisk, allowing around 100 hours of high quality recordings, though I later added a 120GB drive to put the OS and live TV bufers onto. The machine also has 512mb of RAM.

I've been using this setup since January 05, and over all I have been pretty happy with ti. It can record two shows at the same time, while watching a recorded show, it's easy to dump stuff onto DVD (something that never worked too well with stuff pulled off the ReplayTV) and it's very easy to dump mpeg or other media from other sources (cough - bittorrent) onto the PVR and play it within the BeyondTV interface.

Quality is pretty good - it looks a little better than the ReplayTV would say (though there has been a lot of tweaking). I'm using the Nvidia PureVideo decoder, which really does seem to make a difference in the display quality on a hi-def TV. The main problem that I continue to run into is that I get harddisk thrashing on occasion when switching from recorded shows to live TV and soemtimes when switching channels in live TV - thi will basically lock the machine up for a little over a minute.

This is the next thing that I plan to try tackling - just not sure if the best approach is adding more ram (up to a gig) or adding another harddisk to separate the OS (and pagefile) and the Live TV buffers. I'll probably end up doing both.

After that the big thing is going to be waiting for High Def support to come from Snapstream. Having seen some high def stuff (cough - bittorrent) it makes a huge difference, plus the idea of being able to record the HDTV stream directly from the set top boxes Firewire port without recompression is pretty attractive. More posts coming as things progress...

Posted by edgore at 1:14 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

September 24, 2004

Data Center

So, earlier today, just as an idle exercise, I added up all of the read/write random access storage in the house, and it's scary. My house has over a terabyte of disk space in it. Of course I am counting everything - all of the computers, the Replay TVs, the hard disk MP3 players, etc. But still - over a terabyte. Whoever would have thought that a home would have a terabyte of storage.

The scary thing is that, really, it's not that much. I mean, since I plan on getting rid of my CD changers and just ripping all my CDs using a lossless codec, I'm going to fill up a quarter of the space right there.

I'm betting right now that within a year, I'll have two terabytes of storage in the house - and that it still won't seem like enough.

Posted by edgore at 2:43 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

January 6, 2004

VERY Disappointed

So..apple announced their new "mini-Ipods" today, proving, once again that Apple has no clue when it comes to product segmentation. When I was an Apple fan back in the 80s and early 90s, I was still always irritated by their inability to create reasonable segmentation in their product line, and the new iPods just continue this trend.

For 249 dollars you can get a 4GB iPod, while by spending another $50 you can get a device with almost 4 TIMES the storage. Are these people idiots? Anyone who would be willing to spend $249 on an iPod has already justified spending $299 on an iPod. This new device has absolutely nowhere to go.

If it was $149 it would kill of every other low-end player and drive traffic to iTunes.

Is it any wonder they have .00000000005 market share?

Posted by edgore at 10:13 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 4, 2003

Amazon at it again

This is ridiculous. Amazon now has a patent on threaded discussions about products. Huh!?! And the patent was file in 1999 at least 3 years too late, if not more. This is stupid. This is worse than the 1-click patent. Hasn't anyone ever heard of prior art?

Posted by edgore at 12:52 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 1, 2003

DVD-Making Software Really Sucks

Lately, I've been using my ReplayTV to record "We Are The Eighties" on VH1 Classics. Then I use DVArchive to pull the video off, edit down to just the good ones, and burn a DVD of them.

At least, that's the theory.

In reality, the software for editing the MPEG files is completely unreliable. It supposed to be frame accurate, but it seems that over the length of a one hour show, the timecode drifts enough that the edited video clips will typically either cut off short, or have a bit of another video or commercial at the end.

Then, once everything is edited together and built into a DVD, more than half the time the software will claim everything went fine, but the DVD will be unreadable.

All I want to do is be able to preserve the occasional rare video that shows up on VH1 classics for posterity. Is that so much to ask? Anybody have any good experiences wtih DVD making to share?

(Did you even know they HAD a video for Bauhaus's version of "Ziggy Stardust"???)

Posted by edgore at 1:09 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack