Trey’s Blog|brain spillage!

Pulled from a daily devotional:

Sometimes we come to an unhappy place in our lives. If we examine ourselves on those days, we will most likely discover that the things that make us unhappy are the fruit of the choices that we made earlier.

Today can be a new start. I think God gave us twenty-four-hour days because He knew that was all we could handle. His mercies are new every morning (see Lamentations 3:22-23). You can start over this morning and live today for the Lord. Determine to follow wherever God leads you, and do whatever He tells you to do. You can expect better tomorrows when you live right today.

One thing I’ve kind of lost track of in the last two weeks is living each day to the fullest. Before this point, I would often send simple messages to people (often random friends) stating Happy Monday or Tuesday or whatever day it was. I would typically get a response back like “Thanks!”, but on occasion I would get someone asking why I sent them that. To those people I would tell them that each day we wake, we should take full advantage of the opportunities the Lord has given us. He chose to give us more time to impact others lives. We should celebrate these opportunities. As I rebuild my faith in the Lord, I think this outlook will grow exponentially. I’m thankful for what I have today.

I just purchased my first computer in 2 years.  For me, this is a big deal.  That last computer was a Mac Mini that I still use quite a bit.  Since the purchased of that Mac Mini, I decided I would not purchase a computer other than an Apple.  Just before Black Friday, I purchased a refurbished MacBook Pro.  Why refurbished?  While I really appreciate the design and software provided by Apple, they are very proud of their products and charge the end user for that.  A refurbished Mac puts the computer in my price range.  Is it worth it?  Well, that really depends on the user.  I’m completely happy with my purchase.  It works just as advertised.

This purchase made me realize something.  I’m very fond of most Apple Products.  In my collection, I have a MacBook Pro, two Mac Minis, an Apple TV, an iPhone, an iPod Touch, two 4G iPods, a 1G iPod Nano, and a 2G iPod Shufle.  Though it is not a complete collection, I think Apple has done well to get my money.

When I first became aware of QAM, I connected my HDTV to see what I could get. I was surprised to find some channels available in HD that I didn’t receive OTA. For example, I was getting USAHD, TBSHD, TNTHD, ESPN2HD and Music in HD. For local networks, I received all but PBS in HD. Comcast has since shifted the channels 3 or 4 times and removed all HD channels except NBC. I’d like to know if there is a rhyme or reason to their QAM programming or if it is just considered leakage? It certainly is good to know that Comcast could offer a full HD package without renting a cable box. BUT that wouldn’t make them money, would it? I’d be happy of they just offered a standalone HD package like Dish Network’s TurboHD.

Since starting to pay attention to the HDTV advertisements lately, I have noticed a feature that is being mentioned quite a bit. That feature is the QAM tuner, which comes integrated with most HDTVs. I had never heard of it until recently, and decided to look it up. I was surprised to find out that the QAM tuner can receive unscrambled television broadcasts sent by the cable provider through the standard cable lines. If you are wondering what this really means, it means that most cable companies are satisfying their FCC obligations by providing more broadcasts (some HD) outside of those being broadcast through your current setup. Extra Channels? Not really, most are just the same as you find on your Basic Cable package, but this varies on location, not just city. Specific areas can vary as well. For the record, I’m right between Katy and Cypress, Texas, Northwest of Houston and our cable provider is now Comcast (formerly TWC).

With my current setup, I have Basic Cable, with roughly 70 channels, and I have an OTA (Over-The-Air) HDTV Tuner pulling my local network broadcasts, which is about 10 channels. To my surprise, this Samsung HDTV Tuner I’m already using has a QAM tuner as well. I ran the cable line into my tuner and had it search out channels available. I found about 50 channels being broadcast between what we consider channel 75-100. I know that sounds like strange math, but anyone who has dealt with OTA broadcasts will confirm that many channels will feature subchannels. Our NBC affiliate has 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3. None go higher than X.3 with OTA, but with QAM, many will go as high as X.11, thus cramming many channels into the 25 range mentioned above. Of the 50 I found, only 5 were being broadcast in HD, but the good news is that 4 of those 5 I didn’t have access to prior to this. The new channels I found were USA HD, ESPN HD, National Geographic (in HD), Music In HD. The other channel was PBS, which I had access to with OTA and I must say, they do a phenomenal job with providing good HD content separate from their standard broadcast. Strangely missing from the HD broadcasts were the other major networks, NBC, ABC, CBS, WB, etc. I’m not going to rule them out just yet, because they may not have been broadcasting those particular shows in HD, but it was 8:00 PM CST when I did my test. We’ll see when I try again.

To find about more about QAM Tuners visit WikiPedia.For a good list of HD Channels and their listings, check out CNET’s HDTV Listings page.

I posted about a year ago, maybe longer, about my HDTV experience with purchasing equipment, and what provided quality results. What I found was that online sources had more affordable HD antennas than any consumer electronics store. The brand I fell into online was Terrestrial Digital, which is now available through Target.com. Apparently, someone at Target realized how important these antennas were, or perhaps they got tired of people returning the typical indoor antennas that provide mostly lousy results.

Check out their antennas here

Just recently I decided to try enabling Internet Sharing through my Mac Mini to have my Tivo, across the house, access through it’s Internet connection. The reason I wanted to do this was beause my wireless network is currently 802.11b, and transferring files from my Tivo to my computer over wireless takes several hours. Since the Mac Mini is hardwired to the network, I thought I’d take advantage of its unused Wifi card which features 802.11g. I bought a new USB Adapter for my Tivo and began the configuration. Everything seemed to be going okay until I tried to configure the Tivo to see the Mac on the network. It saw 6 of my neighbors, but no Mac. My conclusion is that the Mac’s built-in wireless card is not strong enough to penetrate walls and floors of a moderate size house. If it had an external antenna, it would have likely performed better.

My next step is to buy a new 802.11g router and a new PCMCIA card for my laptop. Once my entire network is on 802.11g, I assume I will have no problems getting files from my Tivo in a timely manner.

It seems Tivo has outsourced their TivoToGo initiative to the good folks over at Roxio. This is good and bad news for Mac users. The good news is that Tivo has finally addressed the issue of having TivoToGo for Windows, but not for Mac. The bad news is that in order to get TivoToGo for Mac, you have to purchase Toast from Roxio. Though being packaged with Toast,

Tivo Transfer, as they call it, seems loosely integrated with Toast and the only obvious tie it has with it is the burning of your recordings. I think this is a good idea to keep things from getting bloated. Sometimes I want to burn a Tivo recording to DVD, but most times I don’t. The overall interface is very easy to use.

One thing against this offering from Roxio is the fact that TivoDecode Manager just came out last month for no cost to the end user. The would seem more inline with the previous offerings from Tivo since we do pay for a subscription after all. Which should you go with? That depends on what you are looking for. If you need a cheap way to watch you recordings or back them up onto your Mac, stick with TivoDecode Manager, but if you want the ability to make DVDs from your recordings, and have the interface integration with Toast, go with Toast. I’ve personally been using Toast for burning on my Mac, so I’m kind of torn between the two options and might just go for both.

Today I was taking some cute shots of my youngest daughter as she was jumping on the trampoline with her hair full of static, but when I wanted to show my wife the pictures I took, my camera said, “No image” with a error code displaying “Err 02.”  Having never seen this code, I thought the worst.  Will I need to get my camera serviced?  I have a first generation Digital Rebel, so I looked on Canon’s site to find out what that error meant and their site really didn’t help matters.  It simply said, if normal troubleshooting didn’t work for this error code, I would need to have my camera serviced.  Worst case come true?  No.  I decided to try another card and see if it was able to write and read using the camera and it had no issues.  All was good with my camera, but I was still missing those pictures.  Having accepted the loss, I decided to reformat the card using the camera’s interface.  When I went to the format screen in the menu, it showed me that I had 22MB used on the memory which sounds like a small load of pictures, right?  Right!!  The filesystem on the card was corrupt, but using an application on my Mac (also available on Windows) called PhotoRescue, I was able to do just that.  I recovered all of the photos I thought I had lost forever, and actually pulled a photo from a few years ago that I hadn’t seen since then.  This software was very very easy to use and only cost $29, but that cost seemed smalled considering how often this might happen.  I think I was fortunate to go this long without having this issue before.

http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/

I always find these to be very fascinating. The first one I saw was about a year ago when some person online had installed a Mac Mini in their Toyota Prius. This one is installed in a Subaru and the owner has posted many videos demonstrating its capabilities. This is one of the best uses I’ve seen for Front Row. I especially like that he is using his cellular phone’s Bluetooth connection to get Internet to his Carputer. I guess this means I need to make sure my next vehicle has some sort of touchscreen LCD in the dash somewhere.  There is no amount of describing I could do to let you how awesome I think this is, so check out his video here.

Others may have not had the difficulty I had with getting files from the PEBL onto their Mac, but for some reason I assumed their weren’t many options. Besides the obvious iSync capabilities that synchronize you contacts and calendar events, OS X has Bluetooth File Exchange under the Utilities list. Bluetooth File Exchange lets you ‘Browse Device” as well as simply Send File. Assuming your phone is already configured from within System Preferences, once you launch Bluetooth File Exchange you’ll need to switch the Device Type to Phones. Find your phone in the list, then select Browse.

The Motorola PEBL provides three preloaded directories for storing personal files. Those are audio, picture, and video. These are self explanatory and actually quite boring. I’m assuming this is to protect the file system that is on the phone.

One thing I can’t seem to find is an easy way to send files from phone to phone without using Multimedia messaging.

Anyone who spends anytime surfing the Net is bound to run across an article with speculation around what Apple will release next, but at some point I think the rumors and fakery images tend to skew our expectations leaving us disappointed when we don’t get what we’ve wanted. A perfect example of this is the rumor surrounding a new widescreen iPod. We’ve been through two different product releases and still no widescreen iPod. Does this mean it won’t ever happen? Not necessarily, but what I really want to know is did Apple ever plan on producing a widescreen version of the world’s favorite digital media player, or will they just produce one now to make the people happy? (Chicken or the Egg) At what point do you listen to the people and give them what they want because they’ve asked repeatedly? On the other hand, I think Apple has done a good job so far giving the people what they didn’t know they wanted. I was listening to MacCast, a Mac-centric podcast, and he mentioned that he tries to not put too much stock in the rumors to prevent from setting expectations higher than Apple product development can achieve. Are we, as a geek society, so hooked on these gadgets that we really get upset when a company doesn’t release what we think would be the next big thing?

On the flipside, I’d like to say that while I enjoy a good bit of progress in the world of computing, I find it unsettling that Apple releases new versions of their computers at least once per year. If anyone ever tries to get the best available at any given time, their purchase will only be the best available for another 9 months MAX. I’ve run into this with my Mac Mini where I bought the best available at the time and upgraded my RAM to the maximum allowed (2GB) and now, not even 6 months later, a newer faster processor is now available. Apple has also done this with the new set of iPods, but this time they’ve actually done a major disservice to their customers. They’ve released the new more featureful models at a lower price than the previously better models. In other words, those who bought the best 2 months ago have just had their model depreciate by $100 overnight. Is this the price we pay for style? Don’t get me wrong, I have an iPod and I think it is a great little device, but when I bought mine, I went with the last year’s model at the time just so I wouldn’t feel so bad when the newer new models came out.

I’m not sure where I was going with this post, so it may have been just a brain dump. Getting these thoughts out of my head should make room for more important things.

I feel like I’m the last one on the bandwagon of Tivo or DVRs in general. Everyone I talk to in my everyday life, assuming they even watch TV, has a DVR of some kind. With all of the gadgets that I have, they always assumed I would have one as well. Anyway, the time has come and my wife mentioned how her work schedule wasn’t going to allow her to watch her favorite shows this season. I saw this as a good opportunity to surprise her with a Tivo.

I went ahead and went for the best deal possible which was $30 for a dual tuner Series2 Tivo with prepaid subscription. No rebates were necessary so the deal was immediate. It was quite a hit to take all at once, but it will be hassle free for the next three years and by then TVs might come with built-in DVRs… or not.

On the coolness side, which is what you all are looking for, I was able to use my hardly utilized wireless USB adapter from my OmniFi unit (the D-Link DWL-120R) to connect my Tivo to the Internet and it worked like a charm. In fact, within about 10 minutes, I had my entire iTunes Library and iPhoto Library shared across my house to the Tivo. Very nice.

For those who are wondering why I’ve waited so long to purchase a DVR, I’m still in the mindset that when I miss a show, it is very likely that that same evening or the next day, I’ll be able to download it via BitTorrent in better quality than my basic cable can provide. When I watch my shows ontime, I’m enjoying them on my HDTV with Over-The-Air antenna which has no DVR options at the moment. My wife on the otherhand, was the major deciding factor, because I always knew I could get by with my current methods, but she wanted something easier… something she could control. Enter Tivo.