Media PC: Tuners

You are probably thinking of buying or building a media PC. With the advent of Vista, I foresee a rapid increase in the use of media PCs in the living room. That's if anyone buys Vista of course.

If you have digital TV broadcasts in your area, then get a DVB-T tuner. Forget about analog - the price difference make it a no brainer, and analog will be switched off pretty soon. Hopefully. So all that frequency space can be freed up and used for something better.

How many tuners? Well there are 7 free-to-air channels where I am, with content on about five of them that I would watch. Still, for that many channels, I'd say two is the minimum, and three would be good.

Now you may be thinking - well hold on, I managed perfectly well with a single VCR, why would I suddenly need to be recording 3 shows concurrently? How often would that happen?

The thing about switching to digital recording is that your whole approach to TV will change. If you have regular shows that you would watch, you'll find that you will watch almost all of them "time-shifted". The first thing you do when you get your MPC set up is to go through the programme guide and tell it to record all your favorite shows. You are likely to get a overlap here. And you may be thinking, well I can just watch one show live, and record the other...

The thing is that once you get used to having all your shows recorded whenever they are on, you will become more flexible about when and how you watch them. You'll no longer be timetabling your life around what is on (you do this right?) - everything gets recorded, and you watch when you can, or when you want. So the show that you used to watch while the other show was being VCRd on the other channel becomes a hassle, and you'll want both of them to be recorded. Not least of all so you can pause the show and come back with that cup of coffee. Besides, recorded shows means no more adbreaks - that you need to pay attention to - you can break whenever you want, not when the network wants to sell you something.

Overrun is also an important thing. In this country, they take great pride in considering a TV schedule a 'guide' - a kind of "nice to have", but not really that important. So even channels with no live content still do not trouble themselves with shows starting when they are advertised. So you need to plan for overrun. And if you have a show back to back with another on a different channel, you need two tuners to cater for one show overrunning the start time of another.

Dvico do a fusion card that has two DVB-T tuners built in. This is a good starting point. Don't get one. Or you'll want to get another. And when this whole media PC thing works for you, you'll want to put the kit into a nice low profile case. These support microATX size motherboards, which often only have one PCI slot, and one PCI-X. Most tuner cards are still PCI, so a dual tuner card is a good idea.

Final Conflict

Remember Earth: Final Conflict? Maybe not, because I was the only one who watched it.

But they had these communicators with roll out screens... so lookee here:

http://www.polymervision.com/News-Center/Press-Releases/TelecomItaliaandPolymerVisionannouncetheCE.html

Ruby Scraping

You've always got to pick the right tool for the right job, and many would say that Ruby is the right tool for most jobs. It is pretty good, thats for sure.

But with hpricot, it is a no brainer when it comes to web scraping. hpricot is a library for extracting contents from web pages to do with what you will. Chief amongst the features you'll want for such a library are simple and fast ways to parse the tree of the site you are scraping, and hpricot has them in abundance. I haven't found anything simpler.

And then just now I find out about the firebug extension for firefox. One of the tricky things with scraping is manually figuring out the path through the tree you need to traverse to get to the bit of the page you are looking for. This blog shows how much simpler it is with firebug...

Ruby Screen-Scraper in 60 Seconds

Canon Scanner Toolbox

My new Canon scanner, the LiDE 500F, comes with a utility that listens for the scanner buttons being pressed, and can kick off various activities in response. The defaults are to Copy (scan and print), Email (scan and start your email compose with the scanned file attached), Scan to PDF and Scan and open in an application of your choice.

They are all variations on a theme - scan the file and pass the result to another process. The application is called Canoscan Toolbox, and I got version 4.9.

For email, it comes with Outlook and Outlook Express as options, or just save and manually attach. Or you can define your own email client. However, the dialog for picking your email client is just a explorer "pick file" dialog, so you cannot enter any command line options to tell the client what to expect.

And I use Thunderbird, and if you want to start a compose window with an attachment, you need:

thunderbird.exe -compose attachment="c:\the directory\the file"

- which cannot be done. So we have to resort to a little registry hacking. Remember kids, the registry is a scary place and you destroy your computer if you meddle unwittingly.

First go through the pointless dialog box to tell canoscan where thunderbird is, and set it as the email client.

Thunderbird will appear as the selected option in the dialog bog. Now dig out your registry editor and go here:

HKEY_USERS\[clsid]\Software\Canon\CanoScan Toolbox\4.9\Data\EmailApp

Now your clsid will be different from mine, so it may be simpler to search for "canoscan". It should be the first entry that comes up.

You will find that it contains an entry for each email destination you have defined, numbered starting from zero. Find the Thunderbird one, looking something like this:

D:\Program Files\Internet\thunderbird\thunderbird.exe

So you want to alter this entry so that it passes the correct parameters to Thunderbird. Canoscan will add the file name to the end, and luckily, thinks to enclose it in quotes.

"D:\Program Files\Internet\thunderbird\thunderbird.exe" -compose attachment=

If you want to put a default subject line in, go ahead but make sure it is prior to the attachment parameter:

"D:\Program Files\Internet\thunderbird\thunderbird.exe" -compose subject="This is the default subject",attachment=

I guess they will fix this eventually.

Firefox: In page "Bookmark" tip

When scrolling through a long web page, you sometimes need to refer back to an earlier part of the page. This would entail scrolling back up and visually searching for the reference.

Firefox allows you to enable "cursor key navigation", or "allow selection using the keyboard" in FF 2.0 and 1.5 respectively. Essentially this just means that you have a normal text cursor that you can use in text to cursor around and select text using normal keyboard selection keystrokes (like shift-cursordown will highlight a line).

However, you can also use this as a sort of bookmarking facility. Click the mouse on the text where you want to refer back to, and a blinking cursor will appear.

Now scroll down to read the remainder of the document. If you need to get back to the point where you left the cursor, just hit left or right arrow. All this does is move the cursor you left behind left or right, but ff will also jump back to that position to show you it moving!

Not Quite so Pedestrian

This is the first, and potentially last, in a series about the ways of Australia. This is so that visitors to this interesting country can be prepared...

In some places in Australia there are a different kind of pedestrian crossing. These are crossings where pedestrians give way to vehicles. That's right. You stand at the side of the pedestrian crossing and wait there until there are no cars, and then you can cross.

Now the first thing you might wonder is, "well how is that different to any other stretch of road? What makes it a pedestrian crossing?".

Well first of all the road is raised slightly. This is primarily to catch out newcomers, hence this post. The crossing are signposted of course, with the rules stating you should wait, but most people already know how a crossing works.

So they will stand at the side and expect the cars to slow and let them cross. The great thing about this system is that the cars do slow, but because there is a raised patch of road. This suggests to the unwary that the car intends to stop, and so they step out. And get run down.

It is even better when you are a driver new to a town where these crossings are. Because you will already know that pedestrians get right of way on a pedestrian crossing - hence the name. So you will approach, see people are getting ready to cross, and slow down to stop.

Of course, those people standing there will now believe that you are simply lying in wait. That your intention is to encourage them to cross so that you get pile into them. So you end up with a kind of Mexican stand off until someone gives in.

It is inspirational.

Windows Symbolic Links

Just found out about "junctions" which is NTFS speak for linux style symbolic links.

There is always a battle with Windows with getting stuff installed where you want it.

Documents and Settings, and Program Files, default to the system partition. This is exactly where they shouldn't be. The system should be on the system partition, and the rest of your stuff should be elsewhere, partitioned off sensibly.

And where is the "advanced" button in Windows to specify where you want the default locations? Doesn't exist. The best you can do is modify the setup.inf on the cd - which means burning it of course. I must do this at some point, but several installs later I cannot be bothered fixing something that should not be broken.

So after each install it is a case of moving stuff and hacking the registry to make it all work. And does it all work? No. Moving Documents and Setting is *hard*. My last install I caved. 2004 was my last rant about it. So right now it is sitting on the system partition.

But now I find that auto-updates don't work. And this is because I have moved Program Files, along with the contents, and fixed the registry so it knows. And yet Windows Update insists that it cannot do what it has to because it has moved. Why? WHY?

So what if there was something like symbolic links for Windows? Then you can move stuff wherever you like and just link it, and windows will think everything is where it is "supposed" to be.

Well, of course, there is. Called "junctions". There is a utility over at sysinternals to allow you to create them, and it works a treat.

I consider this a compromise rather than a solution.

Optical Illusion as Web Design Technique

Look at this website. It is an Australian company that sells and ERP product. Whatever.

But look at the way the graphic above the main menu makes the menu itself look as though it is thicker at one end rather than the other.

I imagine this was entirely unintentional by the company web designers, and the end result looks a bit disconcerting.

However, it did lead me to wonder if there might be some room for using optical illusions to create subtle design elements on a web page.

I'll add it to my list of millions of things to consider...

Firefox Proxy - Yahoo.com

I have firefox configured to use my proxy server. I do this using Foxyproxy.

I have just discovered that if my proxy server is out of commisssion, Firefox attempts to make a connection to yahoo.com on port 65535.

Now why would this be?

Technocrati

Technorati Profile

Jalapeno

Most food can be thought of as a jalapeno delivery system. However, there are some food types that are not suited to being a vehicle for jalapeno consumption.

It is quite likely that these foodstuffs are not good for you.

Compiz XGL

This took a bit of getting going, but it works now. This is on Ubuntu on a laptop with an ATI X600 onboard.

The error I was getting referred to "Support for non power of two textures missing"

This suggests that the driver I am using cannot handle anything other than square textures, and googling showed that I should be using the fglrx driver rather than the standard ati driver.

Thats great, but I was already using the fglrx driver, so something else must be afoot. I tried a bunch of things, even AIXGL, but couldn't get passed this error - which was coming from compiz.

So I gave up and went back to X vanilla. But back in X I found that ordinary GL apps were running slow - max 5 fps.

That is when I discovered that dri - direct rendering - wasn't being loaded. So no 3D acceleration. And it was simple enough, the composite option was enabled in xorg.conf:

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection

Composite cannot coexist with dri - and once disabled, GL apps sped up. glxgears went from 100 fps (which I actually thought wasn't a problem - that is a high frame rate in the scheme of things) to 1400 fps.

So I fired up XGL again, and bam, my windows are now wobbling around my cubic desktop just like they should.

I hope someone else lands here and this helps....

Wired? Forget it.

Okay, it is a little bit disappointing - the progress that we are seeing today with technology. For example, there are no flying cars; manned space travel is... not exactly progressing. We don't have foldaway screens, we don't have a decent method of inputing data into handheld device. Batteries are rubbish; mobile data seems to be as good now as wide data was two decades ago. In some areas it is as good now as it has ever been - absent.

So it would be great if the technologists would pull their finger out and get some these things working. Working like all the technologies we currently take the granted. However, I would almost prefer that every single person currently working on a technology project would stop. And they wouldall get together and solve the one problem that plagues technology today.

Wires. One of the main problems in overcoming the wires problem is the fact that batteries don't work very well. It makes Bluetooth as a wireless solution - well - crap. However, I am not necesserily saying that the solution to the problem of wiress necessarily has to be wireless - it could be more intelligent wires. Wires that whatever you do, can't tangle up with themselves and other wires. Memory metal may be.

Just some solution where I can put my headphones on, take them off and put them in my pocket. And when I take them back out of my pocket, it doesn't take several hours to untangle before I can use them again.

We've achieved many things, as a species, but we have had wires for many decades and been untangling them and tripping over them for all of that time. And it needs to end.

Save the Sharks - for now

New Scientist reports that the Cronulla Fisheries Centre in New South Wales has a new plan to save the endangered Grey Nurse Shark.

Grey Nurse Sharks start with around 40 embryos per pregnancy. However the embryos have a tendency to eat each other in the womb, meaning that only a couple make it to term.

CFC are building a series of artificial uterus' so that each embryo can be removed from the mother and brought to term. "No eating your brothers and sisters now!"

Ok.. this sounds like a good plan on the face of it - except for a couple of things. An artificial uterus? Pregnancies are hard to pull off even using the original equipment, so it will be interesting to see how successful an artificial womb is.

But aside from that, nature rarely does things without reason. Not mindful reason of course, but billions years of trial and error reason. Forty embryos are fertilised each with the capability of coming to term, so what is the evolutionary benefit of wasting this energy in a cannabalistic feeding frenzy?

Nutrition? Why convert energy into an embryonic shark only to then use it as a food source? Efficiencies are lost in this process.

Many animals "stress test" embryos for suitability before allowing them coming to term. Even in humans as many as one in three embryos don't make it. It would seem that the most likely explanation what is happening is that the world that these sharks will be entering is a harsh one, particularly when they are young, and this process helps weed out all but the strongest of the pups to be - those with that have the greatest edge.

So while interfering with this process may increase the quantity of sharks born, surely the quality will be diminished.

These sharks are near extinct, so while the idea of bringing as many into the world as possible would seem a good strategy, the consequences of releasing so many sharks that would not normally be brought into the world could have longer term detrimental effects - the gene pool quality is reduced and this would surely have an impact on the long term survivability of the species.

It's getting hot in here

The Register reports that CO2 levels are at their highest ever in nearly a million years:

Ice cores reveal historic heights of CO2

Deep ice cores from Antarctica reveal there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today than at any time in the last 800,000 years.

The data comes from analysis of tiny air bubbles buried 3.2km down in the Antarctic ice sheets. These provide a record of the ancient atmosphere and give insight into how climate was affected by CO2 levels in the past.

I am sure there will be those that come out and say this could still be a natural cycle and human activity isn't the cause of the "hockey stick" hike in all things warm.

But my question is this: "So what?"

Take away the causative and the problem still remains. If it does turn out that humans are not the cause of the changes in our environment that are inevitably leading to climate catastrophe, does that mean that we should sit by and do nothing and let it all happen?

It has been a while since humans have accepted what nature has to offer, and not to meddle, so this would be a refreshing change. But what would be the outcome? C02 rises, and the temperature increases. Greenland melts. The sea rises - perhaps by 6.5 meters. Historically, severe climate change always occurs in response to high CO2 levels.

And billions of people lose the means to survive.

Clearly something would need to be done to avoid this no matter what the cause is. And the first thing to do to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is to stop dumping more of it in there - ie cut emissions, and to stop removing the planets capability to sink the carbon that is there. By not chopping down the plantlife that achieves this.

Get on with it.

Please Start Again

I can't help it; I want her to start smoking again.

On TV in this neck of the woods is a advertising campaign for a smoking preventative. A lozenge or gum or patch or knitting needles or something.

It is presenting in the form of a video blog of a woman's successful battle against cigarette cravings. And somehow they are the most irritating they could possibly be. Of course she is happy about cigarettes not getting the best of her. And her kids are supportive. And the story about visiting her two pack a day mother with all its mental imagery is heart warming. In the most opposite sense of the phrase.

So I want her to start smoking again. So the ads will go away. So she will stop her 2am musings on the plight she is overcoming.

But K had an extra insightful insight... There is another way to stop her - and that is if everyone stops smoking. If everyone stops smoking, then there would no need for nicotine supplements, and then no need for these ads.

For a moment I wondered if this was the intent of the ad. But it isn't being run by an anti-smoking company, it is a company that makes products for smokers to help them stop. Except of course, these companies wouldn't want people to actually stop smoking, because their market would evaporate like so much smoke in the wind.

So I can only conclude that this ad is serving two simultaneous goals. To raise awareness of their product line, and also to annoy reformed smokers to the point that they take up smoking in desperation after seeing the advert, and hence need their products again.

Zencore Takedown II

An interesting sequence of events - and the moral of the story (always best up front) is: If you use a DNS host, do not use one of the domains they host for you for the email address you register with.

I use 123-reg.co.uk, who are based in the UK. I am in Australia. My website is hosted in Florida I think. So cogent in Florida got their routing mixed up and the IP address my sites are on went dark. Cogent apparently were going to take their time fixing the problem, so my web hosts gave the servers a new address.

So all I need to do is repoint my dns at the new address and viola. So I go to log into 123-reg, and hmmm... what is the password?

No problem, I forget every time, and all that needs to happen is I go through the lost password routine and they reset it and email it to me. I probably had the old one in an old email somewhere, but it was on another machine.

I realised my blunder as I clicked submit. Because now they have changed the password from something I had recorded somewhere, to a new random password and they have emailed it to my domain. The one that is broken.

Damn. Ok, so now I have to leave them a support call. The half a quid a minute phone line is out, as it cannot be called internationally. So I use the webform.

Days pass. Nothing happens.

Damn... try the fax number! Nope. Nothing happens.

Email has been down for several days now. So time to get creative. First I try skyping the 0900 number - perhaps skype can break out to pstn locally, so it isn't an international call. But no - barred.

So 123reg is a part of pipex, so I call one of the other pipex companies. Lots of hold music later, I get a guy who cannot help, but gives me the number for "123reg" that can be dialled internationally.

Of course it isn't really, it is another pipex company that still isn't 123reg. Their tech people tell me the only support provided to international customers is via email. I explain that I have already sent an email and got no response, so actually, there isn't any email support to speak of. And then I point out I sent a fax too.

He repeatedly tells me there is nothing he can do - even though when asked said he had a number for 123reg, but couldn't give it to me.

He said try customer support. Fine. Whatever.

With customer support things got better. The woman tried to divert me a couple of times, but I stood my ground, and finally she capitulated and put an email together to 123reg. She took all my details, and I had the new password minutes later.

I am finding it amusing in hindsight that the best way to get responsive support from 123-reg is to actually phone a different company entirely.

Screen Screen

Continuing my enthusism for screen, the terminal multiplexer (on most linux dists), I found the


following post in response to another post about the wonders of screen.

Basically, some tips for using screen within screen - which comes in handy when you want to kick something off but still have a terminal session attached to it - and you already have a screen session in play.

The deal is that the "outermost" screen hears the Ctrl-a sequence and responds to it.. so detaching from inside the second screen sessions detaches the first (you'll understand when you start using it)...

For anyone that dislikes C-a as the command key (e.g. emacss or bash users) one of the two following keys may be convenient. Put one of these lines in a file called ~/.screenrc:

#to use C-] as the command key
escape ^]\
or

#to use C-\ as the command key
escape ^\\
it’s useful to use different escape sequences on different machines so that ssh’ing from one to the other and running screen within screen doesn’t cause an aneurism.

another useful customization is to show the current screens at the bottom of the page:

hardstatus alwayslastline ” ] H]{= Bw} %w %=”

notice that that has a ] as the first character; this helps me remember which escape key I’m using at the moment. On a machine with C-\ as the escape key, it should be:

hardstatus alwayslastline ” \ H]{= Bw} %w %=”

Blacklander at Dilbert.blog

Scott Adam's blog is good reading at any time. But this post wasn't even by him. Scott recently caused a new wave of commenting in response to his recent post and follow-up where he considers the effort required to fear all the things that we are required to these days.

Some serious discussion came out of this, along with the usual Bush-banging and Bush-loving nonsense. But out of it all came a comment that Scott thought so well of that he promoted to a post.

Blacklander offers incisive thoughts about the reality of the "us" and "them" rhetoric we hear every day, from the perspective of "them".

Cliffskis Mumblings...: Kudos Video Trailer

Oooh, excellent, Cliffski has posted a google video of his latest masterpiece, and it is looking good:

Cliffskis Mumblings...: Kudos Video Trailer

Check out other Positech titles here: Positech Games