Archive for February, 2005

WP thought – why no default calendar?

Thursday, February 24th, 2005

I couldn’t believe that after seeing the Mac HTPC blog, with the nice calendar and everything, that default WP blogs don’t come with the calendar enabled by default.

I’m sure it’s only a two minute thing for most people, and sure enough, I soon navigated to the (path to blog)/wp-content/themes/default directory, and edited sidebar.php to stick a call to the get_calendar() function in there. And there you have it, a fully functional calendar.

I’m just surprised it’s not on, right ‘out of the box!’

Posted in Meta | No Comments »

Bike Commuting to Work

Thursday, February 24th, 2005

Apparently, May is national Bike to Work month. Something probably went around about that last year, but I didn’t do anything about it at the time. But Alisun and I had been talking about it for a while, and sometime in mid-June 2004, we tried it out. First, we rode our bikes halfway to work one weekend (5 miles there and back) to see how it was. Not bad at all. So we started doing it.

Since then, I’ve got about 2,500 miles under my belt, most of which are from the 20-mile daily round trip. I lost 26 pounds. And I figure I probably saved about $600 on gas, not having to put it in my car.

When it’s nice out, I average between 18-26 mph, depending on the wind. When it’s cold out, my average has dropped to between 14-19 mph. So it can take me anywhere between 30 mins and an hour to get to work, or from work.

I have been keeping a log, in Excel. Send me email if you’d like a copy, to start your own. I use a Cateye Cordless 7 cyclocomputer, which is wireless. I’d like a newer one with more functions, but I haven’t settled on one just yet.

I’m lucky because we have executive shower facilities here, and I have a place I can keep the bike indoors at both ends of the trip. My boss approved the purchase of a wardrobe cabinet, because the operations guy complained about the unsightly pile of dirty clothes I had on my floor. I keep a small hamper inside of it, a personal kit for showering, etc.

Once every week or so, I’ll bring my car and exchange my dress shirts for clean ones, then take the dirty ones to the cleaners, go do loads of laundry, etc. Or when I have large packages delivered to work, I may drive. But for the most part, I try and minimize the number of times I have to drive.

There is a really awesome cycling community in Chicago, which ranges from Chicago Bike Federation to Bikewinter.org to Critical Mass to Rat Patrol… only a few of the various groups I’ve had the pleasure to meet and hang out with. And we’re lucky to have the mayor’s support, apparently he’s into biking as well. I’m sure that goes a long way towards proper funding of programs, etc.

I have put quite a lot into my bike, which is a 2000 Jamis Aragon ‘cross’ bike with a 23″ steel frame. New seat, new front and back rims and tires, different cartridges, chains, bigger front cog with three separate gears and crank shafts, new deraileurs, etc. Plus winter cycling boots, eggbeater pedals, head and tail lights, the cyclocomputer, etc.

But I’d say that bike maintenance is still cheaper than car maintenance, and more enjoyable and hands-on. And it still is awesome to have my commute be my form of exercise! Much better than driving on Lake Shore, where I show up to work frustrated, then leave from a stressful day of work and just get more upset by the commute. Being on the bike lets me pour all of that excess energy into the pedals, and just relax.

Posted in Cycling | No Comments »

Exercise

Thursday, February 24th, 2005

I’m not a big fan of conventional or organized sports, for the most part.

Unicycling

As you can probably tell by the domain name of this site, this is something I have done a lot of.

I have a mountain uni, with a 26″ downhill nokian gazzaloddi tire that’s 3″ wide. Also handles on the front/back of the seat, which also has an air suspension bladder in it. It does okay. But I can only go about 8 mph on average. Got to try some uphill / downhill / cross country courses during a Unicon Nationals, when it was held in Toronto (summer 2001), and met Kris Holm, one of the stars of mUni.

I used to play unicycle basketball with a bunch of people over in Livonia, when I was in college. We’d meet in a church gym once a week and play for about two hours, then go to Sem and Teresa’s house and eat pizza and play video games until all hours.

Besides a mountain uni and a basketball uni, I also have a third uni (24″), which has spikey bear-trap pedals and a quick-release to adjust the height. I guess that’s my ‘street’ uni.

At one point about a year ago, I went to help Sem try and set the world’s record for tallest unicycle for the third time. He had already done this with heights of 42′ and 77′, but a guy in Vegas cheated (rode one held up by a crane!) and ‘broke’ the record at 100′. So Sem made one that was 115′ high, and rode it at the Pontiac Silverdome. They spent a ridiculous amount of money doing it, but whatever, they’re allowed.

These days, I don’t have a lot of people to uni with. And it takes me too long to get to/from work. I’ve actually commuted *to* work one day, and home the next (got rides for the other directions) when my bike was in the shop. But that was like 2 hours each way.

Snowboarding

My first experience with this sport was at age 13. My mom got me a lesson at Mt. Brighton (Brighton, MI — a former trash dump) and I promptly broke my wrist near the end of the lesson. Didn’t inhale enough of the gas when they took me to the hospital to set the bone, and screamed like a girl. I got out a few times after that, but not very often.

In college, while with the Michigan Snowboard Club, I got to go on a lot of spring break trips, including: Jackson Hole, Wyoming; Big Sky, Montana; Killington, Vermont (officers trips); and of course, Blue Mtn., in Collingwood, Ontario. This was a fairly close place, and we’d go up over MLK weekend and stay at the Auberge, a top-quality youth hostel. The proprietor’s son and his girlfriend lived in a tiny shack in back of the place and sold ‘puffs’ to our club members. Fun times.

My last year in the club, I was the president. My trip was to four resorts, Snowbird / Solitude / Brighton / Alta (for the skiers among us) in Salt Lake City, Utah. Outside of that I’ve been to Mt. Hood, Oregon when I went out there to visit my relatives.

But now, I live in Chicago. Even flatter than Michigan, where I’m from. On occasion, I get to go to remote places and pay exorbitant amounts to slide down other people’s hills. Most recently, Alisun and I went up to Whistler / Blackcomb with my friend Chris and some people he knew from college.

Hang Gliding

When I moved to Chicago in November 2001, there were no jobs anywhere, as 9/11 had just happened. I had some money saved from my unemployment, since the startup I’d worked for had just ‘gone virtual.’ The girl I was dating at the time gave me a pretty cool Christmas present, a gift certificate good for my first three lessons at a nearby field. That’s where I met my instructor, Arlen Birkett, and got the bug. After those first three lessons, I went whole hog and got the full package.

After about twelve lessons, I was ready to solo. I had a beautiful, and easy, flight. After trying to wrestle the bulky tandem glider, it was a real pleasure to fly this thing. I enjoyed the sunset from 2,000 feet, then coasted in for a nice rolling landing (on my belly, of course) and logged my first solo flight in my logbook.

Since then I think I’ve flown about 10-12 solo flights. I’ve also picked up my own pod style harness, variometer with wind speed sensor, etc. And I have started making mods to my car, to prepare it to be able to transport a glider… slowly but surely. I didn’t get to fly last summer at all, which was kind of a bummer. I hope to get out there again this spring and summer, though.

Rock Climbing

I first got into this in college, in maybe 1997. Started by driving an hour to Pontiac, with some friends, to the Planet Rock gym. In lieu of taking the intro course (expensive), I already had practiced by rapelling from the attic of my house. Taught what I knew to a friend, then we went and passed the test at the gym. We flailed around on some walls that were way too hard for us, but watched other people and picked up advice from them.

A few months of this, and I heard that the owner was looking to build another gym in the Ann Arbor area. This was excellent news. I offered to help, and in exchange, got a free one-year membership. That made things a bit easier. I also participated in an outdoor climbing thing where we met up at the North Campus Rec Building (NCRB) and then drove over to Grand Ledge, which is by MSU and has a bunch of sandstone cliffs, the highest of which is probably 40′. It was fun, but I didn’t like the guy running it, and they insisted that we use the BUS method of belaying. Say what you want, but once you do something one way for a few years, you definitely will feel less secure about it when forced to do it another way, especially when it’s your climbing partner who is at risk.

Once I moved, I had a hard time finding a good gym. After Planet Rock Ann Arbor, I was a bit spoiled… eventually I learned about a place called Vertical Endeavors, which operates out of Lifetime Fitness in Warrenville, IL. It’s at least an hour outside of the city, and on toll roads, but definitely a good place to go climbing. I ran into an old college buddy from the snowboard club, and we used to go on weekends.

One of Alisun’s friends, Jim, and some of his friends invited us to go up to Devil’s Lake, Wisconsin. That was a pretty fun trip, a good time. Unfortunately, the pictures are gone. Oh well, just have to go again. :)

Sports which didn’t quite make the cut

Running

I tried coming home after work, changing into running clothes, and going about 3 miles round trip. At which point, I was totally sweaty and having trouble breathing. Lots of snot issues, I wonder if I have some kind of mild runner’s asthma. And I always felt like I was going way slow. This lasted maybe a few weeks, but I wasn’t a big fan.

I used to run while in high school, on the cross country team. Never got out of JV during the two seasons I ran, but I did manage to learn something about myself: I have flat feet, which require orthotics. At least that got some recruiters off my case during high school.

Ultimate Frisbee

I only tried this one out for one short summer season; a girl I was dating signed us up for the league and we gave it a go. There was a LOT of sprinting involved. It tired me out. I had a really awesome time, and I learned a lot of new ways to throw frisbees. I also made us a pretty cool shirt for our team. But I don’t think I could play this sport at a competitive level, it’s pretty grueling. I have a lot of respect for people who can, though.

Posted in Sports | 2 Comments »

OTA HD – Antenna time

Thursday, February 24th, 2005

The TV is pretty sweet so far. I first tried plugging the comcast feed into it, to see what I’d get, but their selection of clear QAM (unencrypted) channels was horrible. I think I got like two local network affiliates and that new ‘ME 23′ that only shows old stuff like Honeymooners, Lucy show, etc. Plus a bunch of those stupid music-only channels. So I decided to try an Over the Air (OTA) HD antenna instead.

I’m fairly pleased with the $40 ‘Silver Sensor’ antenna I got from Sears; I quik-clamped it to Alisun’s balcony and ran the wire in through the AC unit’s gasket. However, signal strength is typically only around 60% and that’s just barely passable; on certain channels, we’re regularly getting MPEG artifacts or dropped audio, which sucks. But we get a LOT of channels, including:

2.1 (CBS)
5.1 (NBC), 5.2 (NBC WeatherPlus)
7.1 (ABC), 7.2 (ABC News channel), 7.3 (Live 24/7 doppler radar)
9.1 (WGN, surround), 9.2 (WGN, Stereo)
20.1 (WYCC PBS)
26.1 (WCIU, “The U”?)
32.1 (FOX)
50.1 (UPN)

…plus a few telemundo / univision type channels as well. I have learned a lot from the AVS Forums, especially the one dedicated to OTA HD in Chicago.

Alisun told me that at a recent condo association meeting, nobody seemed to have a problem with the idea of putting up an antenna. So I’ve ordered a Terk TV36, which is in the ‘Red’ antenna category at antennaweb.org, medium directional. It is 103.25″ L x 111″ W x 25.5″ tall. I think I’m pretty ready to get it set up. I have a drill/pliers/screwdrivers, etc, zip ties, some quad shielded coax, electrical tape, two way walkies, etc.

I have heavy gauge wire for grounding, and hopefully there’ll be some exposed metal pipe up there. If not, I’ll put a stake in at ground level and run the wire all the way down the building. Meaning, I’ll need to either rappell down each floor to secure the wires, or get the people in the two units above (and maybe the one below) to let me come visit their balconies for a few mins. :) But rappelling is more fun. I have at least one, probably two, rock climbing harnesses on hand, and hopefully what’s needed to anchor those properly. I’m thinking, if I can’t find something suitable up there on the roof, a runner from the stair rail, out the hatch.

I still need to find a compass, if getting the bearing exactly correct is an issue, but my hope is that I can just line-of-sight it to the Hancock (there’s a decent gap between buildings where you can see it from the roof.) I cannot see the Sears Tower because either the building next door, or one further along, blocks it out. Still, this should pull in those stations at the same level or higher.

I wondered if anyone from the building would object, but I can’t see why. The roof has already been sealed by the builders. And I’m happy to install a splitter and amp to share the signal from the antenna, provided someone wanted to chip in. I’ll be getting the antenna on Friday evening from Tweeter, and knowing me, I’ll probably want to install it right away, or sometime over the weekend. We’re having a kickoff party for Amazing Race’s new season next Tuesday, which is the impetus for moving ahead so quickly on this. One of the guys in her building has a DirecTV dish. He seems excited to learn more about HDTV stuff, he might give me a hand if I need it.

Meaning that tonight, I’ll probably have to get up on the roof and take some measurements, so I know exactly how much quad-shielded cable I need…

Posted in Home A/V | No Comments »

Sonica Theater. Thumbs down

Thursday, February 24th, 2005

My first experiences with the M-Audio Sonica Theater last night were not the best ever. Admittedly, the first time I tried hooking it up, it was in 7.1 mode. It needed to be in Digital mode; you change this in a special app called, appropriately enough, “M-Audio Sonica Theater.” But even after changing this, the DTS passthrough did not appear to be working. 5.1 output did not seem to work. All I got on the stereo was ’44.1 PCM’ and occasionally a sub + L + R, instead of surround information.

I put on the scene from Shaolin Soccer where Stephen Chow gets a bottle whipped at his head. The first time I saw the movie, I actually turned around to see “what the heck is that noise?!” and missed seeing him get hit by it, because you hear the bottle whipping through the air. Alisun was cracking up, both at the scene (the restaraunt’s patrons are really not digging the musical revue that Brother #5 and Iron Head are putting on, to put it lightly) and at me for missing it because of the surround sound.

The surround channels were all screwed up, and there was a buzzing noise and a lot of crackling. I figured that this couldn’t be a good thing, and kept messing with stuff. Plugged, unplugges, rebooted, etc. At one point I got it to play a version of an Alvin & The Chipmunks song (slowed down, so you could hear the guys’ actual voices… creepy) and I was relieved at that. Something finally worked.

Eventually after much noodling, I realized that I had to force the receiver into Movie mode, eg Cinema displays. Then I started getting some surround. Or maybe it was after all of the plugging and replugging… apparently these guys didn’t spend another buck on the unit to store any firmware updates in flash, so they run a daemon on your computer instead, started in /Library/StartupItems. Every time you unplug and replug the unit, it forgets the update. So the daemon is required to bring it up to speed. (Did I ever tell you about Sammy Jankis?) The app that you use to control the interface doesn’t remember all of your preferences, either.

I still couldn’t get Apple’s DVD Player app to say anything other than ‘built in sound output’ as the method for sound output. Have not solved that one yet. While Googling around for possible solutions, I found a LOT of really bad comments about this device, and the poor quality of tech support. I’m inclined to agree. My email to support took days to answer, and their response didn’t offer much help. Wish I’d seen these before buying it.

I asked people on Freenode’s #macdev channel, and rudy mentioned that he had like 12 machines and a Sonica, plus a bunch of other M-Audio stuff, and no problems with any of them. I mentioned that some people had their problems only after updating to 10.3.8, had he tried this yet? Nope, he may try that this weekend to see if it affects his setup(s). He wrote Detour, which I haven’t played with yet, but looks pretty darn cool.

Ended up ordering the Edirol UA-1X, which looks basically the same to me for what I’m interested in, except it’s a TOSlink instead of coax. Had to get one of those mini plug end adapters, but I figured I could also use that for the Airport Express with Airtunes if I wanted to at some point.

Note: it’s dangerous to order electronics from Amazon. You always end up ordering a bunch of DVDs and other stuff you’ve been wanting. (Well, okay, I end up doing that. YMMV.)

Hopefully, second time will be the charm. If not, maybe Apple’s next version of the mini will have an mini optical digital out. I SO wish they would have either made this standard, or as a BTO option. (Yeah yeah, I know that minis aren’t intended to be HTPCs, they’re here to help grab market share, blah blah.)

Posted in Home A/V | No Comments »

Things Icy, and Dicey

Thursday, February 24th, 2005

There was a joke someone submitted to Reader’s Digest a long time ago about an English guy who’s giving a presentation at an ice rink, and he keeps asking the facilities person if it’s Icy or Dicey there. Well, of course the guy has no idea what the guy is asking — it’s an ice rink, for heaven’s sake, he expects it might be quite Dicey out there on the ice. Until he finally understands that the guy, in his British accent, is actually wanting to know whether the electric current is AC (ahh-see) or DC (DaySee?) This of course has very little bearing on the extreme stupidity I’m about to relate, but I think of it from time to time. Welcome to my nebulous blogosphere, or something.

Few weeks ago I’m riding my bike to work, as usual. Except the conditions have been really hot and cold, lots of snowmelt, re-freezing, more snowfall, etc. This led to a condition where a lot of water froze everywhere, then new snow fell on it. Black ice that you could hardly see.

I should have known it was going to be one of those days, when I slipped FOUR times. Once, I’d only just left the alley and was about to head down the sidewalk towards the bike path. Shoomp, down I go. I have clipless SPD cleats and Lake MXZ 300 boots, so it’s not very easy to recover from an ice slide when clipped in. For me, anyway. Some crazy homeless guy starts telling me about how I should sue the flower shop I fell in front of. Yeah, okay, thanks, dude. I go on.

I’m taking things pretty tentatively, I get to Wilson and there’s the slighest of curves shortly before the intersection, and I go down pretty hard. I slide all the way across the width of the path, maybe 10 feet or so. I know at this point that I’m going to have some nasty bruises. A guy all the way across the park over by the lake gives me this kind of a wave, I give him the thumbs-up sign to say I’m okay. People are cool, sometimes.

Okay, to heck with the path. I get onto inner Lake Shore at this point, and take it all the way to the bridge underpass at Ohio, which has a nasty hairpin turn halfway down the ramp. That was the third wipeout, it was very snowy, etc.

Somehow I managed to get all the way past the Yacht club (notorious ice melt which freezes right when you go around the curve there) and to the peninsula where I work, when I decided it’d be smart to take the sidewalk, despite my earlier experience with one at the start of my journey. WHAM! Down I go for a fourth time, right in front of a mom and her little kid. So I try making a joke out of it, all exaggerated, “Wow! Be careful, you guys!” Big grin, etc. so hopefully her daughter wouldn’t be freaked out. And mom explained that they’d had a slip and fall earlier, etc.

So I’d like to think that it was this fourth fall, the icing as it were (if you pardon my pun), where Fate just stepped back and went, “Okay, dummy, three strikes already, you’re toast.”

I get in to work and open my bag. First thing I realize is that one whole corner on the laptop is bent. Lower and upper casing, LCD, everything. And the craziest thing is, it all still works perfectly, with the exception of the backlight. Meaning you can look at the screen at a very severe angle, and see things appearing on it like normal, they’re just not backlit. And when I removed the framing from the DVI connection (very carefully, with a Dremel tool), that worked just fine as well. So, not at all worth a Tier 4 repair ($1300) on an at-the-time, $1800 laptop. Had fun telling my boss about that one, but figured I’d just as soon get it out of the way.

A day or so later I was hit with a bigger, and much worse realization. I’d taken my external 250 GB firewire drive in to work with me what day. And it had some minor cracking on the case in the rear corner. Well, when it began to spin off, it was oscillating. And the head made that ‘click’ noise when it tried to engage. Yeowch. Of course, I probably let it ‘try’ far too long, and I tried more than once, hoping that by some arcane magic, things would right themselves. No such.

I got on the phone with Allison from DriveSavers. She explained that their Economy rate for recovery attempts was anywhere from $500-$2700, but not to worry, she’d only seen one $2400 and a few $2100′s. Plus, I said the person from Apple (who I’d asked about the laptop repair) had mentioned them. Wow, that was good for an immediate 10% discount. Neat. Then I explained to her (and truthfully) that the most important thing on the drive, to me, was to recover a few gigs worth of photos, from the summer camp I volunteer at, which is for kids with cancer. So apparently there was a 20% discount for that, instead of the 10%. Alright, I bit the budget bullet and began working out the numbers, how many paychecks and how much I could spare, etc.

Packaged up the drive as per their instructions (3″+ of padding on every side!), sent it off to them, and ordered a new 250 GB enclosure to be sent directly to DriveSavers (if they recovered anything, they’d need a way to store it), and waited a week (Economy rate means 5-7 business days.) Got a call, and the guy was nice about it, but said he was unable to get anything from the drive at all, the heads had probably crashed and wiped out the data. It was completely toast. I thanked him for trying, and they were really cool. They even waved the $200 ‘attempt fee’, and even the shipping costs. People are pretty cool, sometimes.

For the most part, I lost my entire music collection, but I had the bulk of it on my 30 GB iPod. Plus a bunch of those crazy eBaums type movies that you can download. And a bunch of Sifl n’ Olly episodes as MPEGs, but I had those on a data DVD. The hardest was the photos, both from camp and the personal ones. And wedding photos from our friends’ wedding, but fortunately we’d at least printed those out for them. This was before I had Gallery online, etc.

I was still pretty bummed about the whole thing, but at least I learned a huge lesson from this. Not long after that I ordered the MacTruck case from Radtech, which I like a lot. It looks like a secret agent’s briefcase. I feel like I should handcuff it to my wrist, that’d be pretty entertaining. Maybe I’ll try and hack something up… heh.

Anyway, it still is hard to think about, but hopefully this will dissuade someone else from doing the same thing, I guess. Now, I’m so paranoid about the whole thing, that I plan to have at LEAST one external drive of the same capacity to back up every laptop and desktop we have (soon to be three.) Plus, if we get any additional external drives (eg actually for external storage,) then there has to be a SECOND, identical drive, to back THAT up. Sounds expensive? Yes, but balance that against a $2700 bill… or not getting your data back at all. (Priceless. For everything else, there’s… yeah yeah.)

Posted in Cycling, Tech | No Comments »

Things which weigh heavily

Thursday, February 24th, 2005

re: the Flat. Alisun had a patch kit, and we found the culprit. Big shark-tooth of glass in my rear tire, that went through both the outer and inner portion of the tire. Two patches later… seemd okay. Reseated everything.

Stopped by the bike shop and got a patch kit, levers and new tube to keep in my bag, just in case. Also kicked myself for not having had my phone charged, have to get better about that.

Sean at the bike shop showed me the Michelin Cyclocross Jet tire, but they sell it there for like $50. I think they’re about $40 online, with shipping…

* * *

I have been biking to/from work with this chain around my waist. I’ve used it to lock up my bike, and that is much easier to do than the U-Lock was. But it’s fairly heavy and takes some getting used to. I didn’t know quite how much that… and my computer + case weighed together, plus clothes.

I got on the scale twice, before and after getting ‘suited up’ to ride. I weighed roughly 40 pounds more, between the 8 pound chain, the computer and case, etc. I think it’s a necessary evil, considering what I managed to do without the case. But still… I’m thinking of it like ‘cross training’.

* * *

I was riding in yesterday morning, just starting out, when this guy passes me on the path. I had just turned onto the path proper when he went by, so once I got up to speed, I drafted him for a little while. It was clear that I wanted to go faster, so at an opportune time, I passed him.

Right now, the area between Fullerton and North is torn up for the installation of a new water main. The path is narrower, but not (yet) impassable. Regardless, they still put up huge barricades and orange plastic fencing, which people promptly moved or tore down. For a few days, I tried their detour, which involves: Crossing the Fullerton northbound off-ramp and southbound on-ramp (BAD/DANGEROUS), taking the crappy path along the Lincoln Park zoo (I normally just take the parking lot road instead), detouring way around the open stretch of park to go to the North underpass (goes North/South, under North, heh), then down the sidwalk to the other North underpass (goes East/West, under Lake Shore). Well, that’s all crap.

Apparently this guy didn’t take the detour, so I ended up behind him again. Which gave me a goal again, to catch up to and pass him. :)

I caught up right as the light was changing at Grand, which is the westbound street coming away from Navy Pier, and said, “Well, guess that detour isn’t necessary yet, huh?” And then realized he was the guy who was nice enough not only to stop the other night, when my dumb self didn’t have a tire fix, a ride, or a phone for four miles… who not only helped me look for a phone, but also went ahead to look and doubled back to let me know. And he said, “Wow, you really blew by!” totally paying me this compliment. To which I blathered something about cross-training, this heavy bag and chain, yadda. Which could only have made him feel worse, and almost immediately after was his stop. So I felt like a total jerk.

What I should have said was, “I wouldn’t have gone so fast if you hadn’t passed me right at the start, you gave me a good goal!” Must keep this in mind, cycling karma.

* * *

I rode the detour area today after Alisun told me took it yesterday, having seen others do it, etc. (Would YOU jump off a bridge if… yeah yeah.) So one whole lane of the path is torn up and packed back down. Big deal. I scared some lady jogging because she made a huge and unnecessary detour around a couple of rocks which were jutting out into the (already half-width) path. I rode over the rocks, on her right, because there was the most room there. And she kind of jumped because she heard the rocks crunching, and on her right, went “sheesh!” And I’m like “Sorry!” But give me a break. If you yell, “On your right,” or ring a bell at someone or whatever, half the time it has the exact opposite effect that you were desiring, because a lot of the time, people don’t think fast enough to jump in the correct direction, or they just stop and look, or go the wrong way. And you slam on your brakes, and it’s worse than just passing them like you wanted to in the first place. That, or they’re going right down the middle of the path. On rollerblades even. With a dog on a long leash. And headphones. Don’t get me started. :)

Posted in Cycling | No Comments »

iPod Rants

Thursday, February 24th, 2005

Okay, so Apple posted an iPod firmware update on their website the other day. I read the description and I got excited about it because it appeared to finally allow you to have a ‘shuffle’ setting in the main menu. Hooray! Downloaded, ran, updated, etc. on my 3G 30 GB.

(Then I posted some version of what you see below as a comment to a post on the Apple Blog.)

re: shuffle. Not quite what I’d hoped for. I really think that this is less of a feature and more of an afterthought. Hear me out:

I always have Shuffle turned on in the Settings menu. Only once in a rare while do I want to turn it off, usually to listen to a whole album or something. If I want to do that, I need to go into the Settings menu and hit ’shuffle’ past ‘Albums’ (which always seems to take a long time, hmm) until it’s at ‘off’. Then back up, navigate to what I want, etc. Usually this happens while I’m driving. (For this, a Radio Shack #17-548 is a godsend.)

I’d hoped that the improvement would simply bump the Shuffle setting (off / songs / albums) up to the main menu, if the user wants it there. But that’s not what they did.

Instead, there is just a ’shuffle songs’ command. Which is fairly useless, since I already have them shuffled. Oh, and it’s like hitting ‘play’, too. But it doesn’t appear to correspond to the Shuffle setting in the menu. If I have Shuffle (setting) turned ‘off’, then I hit ’shuffle songs’ in the main menu, the songs DO randomize. The little crossed-arrows icon appears. But I go to the menu setting and … it still says ‘Off’ !!! (WTH?) Dumb, not consistent.

I, for one, would like for one or both of the following:

1) Real shuffle setting in main menu (off / songs / albums)
2) Play an Entire Album: command, which lets you browse to an album, then sticks all of its tracks ahead of the rest of the ones currently in the shuffled order.

I have tried resetting the unit to see if this cleared it, nope. Still the same dumb behavior.

(Oh, and for it to randomize the albums on its own time, so the menu setting is a bit more snappy.)

Oh yeah, and… while I’m at it, I wish that when I set the Backlight setting to ‘always’, it would remember the STATE that *I* left it in, eg so it’s either ALWAYS ON, or ALWAYS OFF, toggled by holding the Menu key like always. Then, if I’m in the car during the day, the iPod comes on, no backlight.

Now I can’t stop. I also wish there were a different shuffle icon for Albums. And that you could toggle between shuffle modes with another key combo, like forward and back at the same time. But I’m not sure if that’d be possible on all models.. would it? Ho hum.

Furthermore, it’d be nice to have some kind of ‘play all songs from this album’, or when shuffling, the ability to go back/forward between songs in the same album, etc. But I can’t think of key combos off the top of my head which would be suitable.

Maybe, when you hit the ‘center’ button during song play, to switch the wheel’s functionality (default: volume, then song position, then rating) — maybe if you hit the center button once, then from the song position menu, hitting back / forward buttons would go back or forward one song in that same album, regardless of whether you were shuffling. etc.

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The setup so far

Wednesday, February 16th, 2005

My home AV setup is coming along pretty nicely. Ordered the TV at the end of January from OneCall; they were having a closeout for units used as display models at CES. When I called, they’d run out of those units but were offering pricing on new models for only $100 over. They only had specials on the models with tuners, though.

The same day I ordered the TV, I also placed an order for the EyeTV 500. Got it in and tested it. Tried to schedule the Amazing Race finale but for some reason that got lost. Did it later and it recorded Lost & Alias just fine, though.

I tested the EyeTV 500 on the Mac Mini 1.25 I borrowed, and it looked like it did pretty well during playback, full screen, etc. Getting the resolution to display properly on the TV in ‘dot for dot’ mode was kind of a trick, requiring the use of SwitchResX. I still have some concerns about it (not sure it’s 100% correct yet) and at one point, I switched away from it for a while, then back… and the TV would only display the analog component of the signal and not the digital. Hrm.

I used the Virtual DVHS app which came with Apple’s Firewire SDK v18. Though the scheduling is rough, the recording and playback work fine. I can already use the 500 to schedule, I’m mainly interested in playback. I’m glad I got the model of the TV with the tuner built in, because it came with the i.Link. By using Virtual DVHS to send the MPEG transport stream to the TV, it does the ‘heavy lifting’ to display it instead of requiring the computer to decode it.

At first, the i.Link connection didn’t appear to be working, until someone on the AVSForum suggested switching the order in which I connected the cable / started the app, and that worked. (Whew.) And again, at first when I tried playing back the LOTR clip, it didn’t seem to be working. But after recording some stuff and playing that back, then recording using the EyeTV 500 and successfully playing that back, I tried the clip again and was successful.

Apparently Apple uses MPEG decoding routines in hardware, on the GPU, when playing back DVDs. But they don’t open up APIs for those routines to developers. Meaning that folks like ElGato can’t take advantage of hardware decoding for displaying EyeTV programs during playback. (Boo hiss. Can you say: ‘Politics’? Or ‘competing product?’ I don’t care, it stinks.) Regardless, I was able to get decent playback. I don’t think the Mini will be able to do much *beside* decode (pretty high CPU hit) but that’s okay, it doesn’t have to. And if it can’t keep up, I’ll just use the firewire AVC playback.

The digital tuners in the TV and the EyeTV 500 can both tune ATSC (OTA, or ‘over the air’) HD, and Clear QAM (unencrypted channels on cable, when and where available.) I decided to try the cable stuff first. After auto tuning, it came up with a whole bunch of those ‘music’ channels; both the kind which just play music, and the kind which show the album info, genre, stupid trivia, etc. It also had MeTV, apparently a local station that plays all the old classic shows…. the Lucy Show, Honeymooners, The Lone Ranger… (woo, perfect for high def!) The only two channels in HD that I could find were Fox HD and ABC, plus some of the other subchannels with weather 24/7, news 24/7, etc. I was kind of bummed because someone in Evanston had reported being able to tune most of the major broadcast networks via Clear QAM. Oh well.

Backup plan: Silver Sensor from Zenith, available at… Sears? Okay. $39. Basically I’d seen enough people on the forums badmouthing Terk antennas to know enough to not go there. Set it up inside on top of the TV cabinet and hardly got anything. Kind of disappointing. But I’d also picked up a 25-foot coaxial cable… so I ran it out next to the AC unit, along the balcony, and set it up there. It picked up almost all of the major networks, so I was pretty happy about that. Only between 55-68% signal strength on average, though. So I borrowed a ladder from the guys fixing up the building and went up on the roof. There was a tiny gap between buildings where I could just get a clear line of sight to the Hancock. Maybe one of these days I’ll go up there and install a better HD UHF antenna… but for now, the little Silver Sensor does okay. I clamped it down with a Quick Clamp to the balcony and it seems to be staying put.

Posted in Home A/V | No Comments »

Flat

Tuesday, February 15th, 2005

While riding home tonight, about two miles out of ten, I got a flat on the rear tire. This, the Continental. Five ply. Not sure what kind of tube I have in there, haven’t looked yet. Didn’t have the patch kit on me. Cell phone was dead. Decided I’d walk until I found a phone or someone with a cell. After about four miles of walking (45 mins-1 hr) got to the construction site, the security guy there let me use his phone. Alisun was nice enough to come pick me up. We’ll see tomorrow if I wrecked the tire by pushing it all that way. I tried to keep most of the weight on the front tire.

Grr.

Posted in Cycling | 1 Comment »