Posts for category ‘Computers and the net’

This blog is done.

As in toast.

Deceased.

See www.twitter.com/ianknox for anything personal I might otherwise put up here.

Well I know I haven’t been on here for a while and this seems like a somewhat insane way to return, but so be it.

I bought a Popcorn Hour A-110 media streaming device to go with my new TV and I thought I’d write up my initial impressions of the unit. I wish it was all roses but sadly it’s not.

Here’s my wish list for a set top box and how well it worked with the PCH:

• Video playback from an internal HD for many video formats
  Check!
  The PCH played back nearly everything I threw at it (although I haven’t installed a HD yet I was able to use a USB stick). The one glaring exception to this is it flat out doesn’t do Adobe’s FLV format. The decoder chip (A Sigma SMP8635) doesn’t support FLV natively and the processor in the PCH isn’t nearly powerful enough to decode the FLV on it’s own. It’s possible that there will be a firmware upgrade for the Sigma chip that will allow this, but highly unlikely.

• Streaming support over the interwebs
  Semi-check!
  The PCH has support for a number of streaming media providers (You Tube, Veoh*, Apple Movie Trailers, and a bunch more) but it does not support the two most important ones for me, namely Hulu and Netflix. I had originally thought that these were supported but it turns out the Playon software you can buy that will allow this requires that it runs on your desktop as a streaming server. The whole idea behind this project was to eliminate the need for my desktop to handle my media so this was a disappointment. There is hope however that Netflix may be supported in future firmware releases given that the hardware is capable (the the ROKU Netflix streaming box uses the same decoder chip). As of right now there is no remedy for those that want to watch Hulu other than an outright HTPC.

• Serve as a HD PVR/DVR
  Fail!
  I knew going in that there was no support for this. While there is basic functionality for watching TV with a HDHomerun tuner there’s no time-shifting, recording, or scheduling in place yet. There is a distinct possibility that this will be available at some point since the TIVX series of media streamer boxes do PVR and use the same Sigma chip; I’m fairly sure this is somewhat low on the PCH list of priorities though.

• Not piss me off
  Fail!
  I had immediate issues with the unit that made the process frustrating.
  • The Network Browser was unable to access my SMB shares on my windows desktop. I spent a good 1/2 an hour trying different things but ultimately gave in and installed myiHome, PCH’s super-basic UPNP server. I’m sure I could get it to work with some more screwing around but this falls in the this-should-just-work category.
  • It’s menus are not very pretty and not very intuitive. Luckily for the PCH you can completely customize them… but again more time spent screwing around (and in this case writing code) to get a decent result.
  • They provide really poor documentation and support. The PCH operates on software created by Syabas called Networked Media Tank (NMT) The NMT web page is primarily a forum that’s very hard to search and contains a huge amount of incorrect or incomplete information. On top of that it’s very hard to search. There is also a wiki but it is very weak on content.
  • The remote control provides a serious problem that is most likely the deal breaker for me. It has a conflict with my TV. Whenever you press the left navigation arrow my TV switches input to the OTA antenna and return key increases the volume on the set. I do have an off-brand TV so this is probably not going to be an issue for most folks, but this is more or less unacceptable for me since I can’t operate with the set switching sources all the time.

So most likely I’ll be returning/craigs-listing this unit**. I could live with nearly all of it’s shortcomings for the simple fact that it does what it’s supposed to –play media– really darn well, but the problem with the remote control is simply too much to deal with. I’m not sure about the next step, perhaps a Tivx box.

Vee-shall-see.

Bleh, so darn close!

* Veoh support is very spotty and (of course) it doesn’t work with data from affiliate sites like Hulu.
** after further research looks like craigslist– the ebayer I bought it from doesn’t take returns.

I just signed up for a lifetime subscription to LibraryThing.  It’s a very nifty online book cataloging site that keeps a nice record of all of the books you own and with the purchase of a $13 CueCat bar code scanner you can just scan the bar code to import books into your database (no typing!).

If you’d like to see the books I have on my bookshelf just check out my LibraryThing public listing.  Of course I just signed up a few hours ago so it’s just got what I could remember I have off of the top of my head, I’ll be busting out the CueCat soon!.

I also embedded a little searching widget in the sidebar of my blog so you can search my library from here.  At some point when I have time for projects I’d like to build a simple loaning application that would allow me to track who I’ve loaned my books to so I can get them back– I imagine it would be fairly straightforward coding wise.

P.S.  If the person who I lent His Dark Materials to is reading this, please bring it back when you’re done.

So my good buddy Rob has hooked me up with some hosting– hooray for ianknox.net/ianknox.com no longer being hosted on my desktop at home. There’s still a few old entries I need to copy over to the new instance but on the whole it’s doing what it should.

Thanks rob, you are the man!

I realize I’ve been a bit remiss in updating lately but I’m not going to be making apologies for it– Life has been just too full of stuff to spend much time re-hashing it here. However I do realize that there are friends of mine that really don’t get to know what’s going on with me unless I write it down here so this is the short version of my summer.

Theatre work:

• I split with the Tantalus Theatre Group. I think their work is awesome and very important, but it just wasn’t where I wanted my acting career to go right now.
• I’ve been taking acting classes in the Meisner program at Act One Studios. It’s been great, it feels really awesome to get back into a classroom and be able to work without the pressures of eventually turning what you’re doing into a production.
• I’ve been doing a lot more auditions– sadly it’s a slow time of year for that but still, I’m getting out there.

Personal stuff:

• I finished my second Chicago Marathon. The weather was so hot (90+ degrees, fucking global warming) that they actually canceled the marathon 1/2 way through so I was forced to walk the last 8-10 miles. I’m not sure I’m interested in doing a third one after that experience, but we’ll see.
• I completed by new bike project which involved a lot of work but it’s finally finished. A Fukaya Japanese track bike with nearly full Suntour Superbe Pro components. It’s freaking sweet, pity it’s too nice to ride in the crappy weather we’ve been having lately, but hey that’s why I have three bikes.
• I’m single again. It always sucks when a relationship ends and I miss her a lot some days, but I think ultimately it’s for the best. *sigh*
• I opened an IRA account for retirement. Christ I feel like such an adult.
• I’ll be back in NC visiting the family Dec 19-23. This means I’ll actually be hanging out by my self on X-mas day, which will feel weird I’m sure, but it was the only way I could see my brother whom I haven’t set eyes on in two years.

Geek stuff:

• I moved this blog to my home computer when I left Tantalus (I had been piggy-backing with their hosting account). Some time soon I’ll go buy my own cheap-o hosting but for now I’ll have to live with it as is. The bastards at RCN block port 80 so this is being served on 81, hence the odd looking URL above– But hey at least it works.
• I’m really in love with the EEEPC from ASUS. If I had a spare 400 bucks floating around I’d be all over it. Who knows, maybe for my birthday. Maybe by then the 8g model with a 7 inch screen and the same size case will be out.
• I just ordered a new phone. My trusty old Sony Ericsson T637 is dying the rapid death of battery failure so I decided to go with a Blackberry Pearl (in red) with an unlimited data plan. I will be on teh internets AT ALL TIMES! (yes I’m a geek, deal with it)
• I’ve pretty much completely phased out Windows on my desktop computers in favor of Ubuntu. It’s still not perfect, but as linux on the desktop goes, it’s the best I’ve used so far.

Well that’s all the news that leaps to mind right away– I’ll update this post later if I realize that I forgot something.

Pardon the temporary move, my hosting with Tantalus us no more since I’ve left the company and for now this blog will have to live on my desktop at home. Sadly RCN won’t let me run anything on port 80, hence the wonky looking URL above.

Some time soon I plan to move to my own hosting account elsewhere, but for now this will have to do the trick.

Sitting on my desk is a Garmin Forerunner 301. It is a wrist mounted GPS/heart rate monitor that will accurately track all of my biking and running distances, speeds, locations, and heart rates and it will do so by just turning it on and telling it whether I’m biking or running. This is extremely cool.

I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m in gadget love.

The only question remaining? Why the heck aren’t I out using it?

I just found a Linksys NSLU2 at a local thrift shop yesterday for $5.00.  I can’t wait until I have time to tinker because, as you can see from the wikipedia page, it supports all kinds of fun linux bits.  My local music storage partition has filled up recently and this seems like a perfect chance to buy a nice big USB2 drive and offload all of that storage.  I’m seeing DAAP, SSH, Web, Music playing, and maybe streaming radio in my future, depending on processor abilities.  Really after spending some time browsing the NSLU2-Linux wiki the possibilities are pretty endless.
Gogo Embedded Linux! (gawd I am such a geek)

After some thought I decided on this:

Matt is right.
While I do relish the idea of telling people off for being examples of why I hate MySpace, the greater political good is a far more lofty goal. Who knows if it will do any good, but if it gets one extra vote somewhere then it’s worth every bit of bandwidth it takes.

It all began with this post to my blog about a year ago. I doctored up a picture about Samuel L. Jackson’s movie Snakes On a Plane, made a funny comment, and moved on.

Cut to a few days ago. I was checking the web stats for my blog (which I haven’t been particularly good at updating over the summer months) and I noticed a had some very odd sites linking to mine– people I don’t know about on topics I don’t care about. After a little digging it turns out the reason is that they are direct linking/in-line linking my Snakes On a Plane picture. Now in case you don’t know what it means here’s the brief version. There were using pictures hosted by my web server for their websites– more from wikipedia
This pissed me off pretty well. If you’re going to take someone else’s artwork (and yes I use the term VERY loosely) and post it on your site at LEAST have the decency to

A: host it yourself and

B: ask permission first.

So I replaced the image with this:

This made me a feel a bit happier and it was taking up a LOT less bandwidth since the new one is much smaller than the original.

Cut to this afternoon. I was taking a closer look at the past few months web statistics and discovered the extent the linkage had gone, and how much it was still going.

Holy Crap! Over 7 GBs of data in August! 800,000 people viewed it! I never suspected that it was so widely linked. After doing some more digging it seems it’s still in very wide circulation, the numbers are decreasing but we’re still talking hundreds of thousands of people looking at this image I control over the next few months. The number one culprit?

MySpace.

Now I really hate MySpace. It’s an unattractive, annoying, pit of Internet stupidness. Yes I DO have a profile there but only for the purpose of keeping up with a few friends who are otherwise difficult to reach/keep up with.

So here’s the dilemma– I have the ability to replace that image again with whatever I want. It can be crass, ugly, gross, insulting, or whatever I want it to be! I can even advertise a good cause or my own website. My revenge on MySpace for being a eyesore on the face of the Internet is at hand!

What should I do? If anyone has brilliant idea’s please leave them here as a comment– but for right now I’m going to ponder the possibilities and giggle happily.