Colin’s blog

I Just downloaded a really cool piece of software called Mars Edit 2. It allows me to post to my blog directly from software on my computer instead of having to login to word press and go through the admin panel all the time making it much easier to post blogs here
I’m hopeful to be using this to post more often in the future.

I just came up with an interesting thought after hearing that you can stream online video live with a nokia 95n and looking at the dock connector for the touch thinking it would be cool to be able to do on the touch/iphone.

It seems like if the touch/iphone ever got flash support in safari it wouldn’t be hard for someone to make a usb webcam accessory using the usb pins on the dock connector. Most likely it wouldn’t need anything special software wise because of osx. It makes wonder if somewhere down the road we could see webcam accessories for both the touch and iphone that is if apple allows this.

of course you wouldn’t really need one on the iphone unless you wanted a better cam that might be adjustable too.

I’m actually tempted to try this if the time comes were there is flash support available in safari. I would by some generic el-cheapo usb webcam i know that works with a mac out of the box. Then get a dock connector and splice the correct usb cables together too see if it recognizes the device as a camera. Course i would have to get it right I don’t want to fry a $400 ipod now do I lol.

I ordered a 16gb ipod touch last night and I am both excited and nervous about it. This will be my first ipod too btw as before I had always used creative’s stuff. I’m nervious however because I’m scared now that i bought it apple might turn around and update it a month or so with a 32gb version for the same price i payed now. Lets hope not Also hoping they do the SDK right and some jailbreaks the latest update so I can install the perian codec pack.

More to come later….

We had a major windstorm last night! Scenes like this were common all over the region.

this might be anouther option for an htpc. The amd processor is suposedly the best choice for that however all the motherboards that seem to be available have ati video built into them which doesnt work well in linux. Not good for me since I will be runing mythtv on ubuntu.

GIGABYTE GA-73PVM-S2H Micro ATX Intel Motherboard - $79.99

with an

Intel Dual-Core E2140 Allendale 1.6GHz 1MB L2 Cache LGA 775 Processor - $73.99

I have decided to build my own HTPC box running Mythtv on top of Linux. Most likely I will be either using the Mythbuntu distro or a custom install atop of Ubuntu or Debian.

To Give you an idea of what MythTV looks like here are a few screenshots:

My goal is to build a mythtv box for the least amount of money possible but still have the ability to do what I would like it. I’m looking for this to function as not only a DVR but also play videos as well as play music or stream online stations.

The following components are what I came up with:

Antec NSK2480 Black/Silver MicroATX Case 380W PSU - $99.99

GIGABYTE GA-MA69GM-S2H HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - $79.99

Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1600 NSTC/ATSC/QAM/FM PCI Tuner - $99.99

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+ 2.1GHz 65W Retail Processor - $61.99

Kingston 512MB DDR2 PC2 6400 Desktop Memory - $13.99

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB 7200RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s HD - $84.99

LITE-ON Black 16X SATA DVD-ROM Drive - $17.99

I’m still not set on the hard drive size or amount of ram as I might decide to go bigger. So far the total cost for the box would be $458.89. Also I wondering if there are any qam based capture cards out there that support hardware MPEG4 or even better yet H.264 encoding because its far more efficient then MPEG2 that the Hauppauge does. This would allow for more recordings on the same amount of disk space. If since I’d rather use one of the two over MPEG2 I would have to have the main cpu go back and transcode the videos to H.264. This as you can image requires quite a bit of processing power.

That brings me to my next thought. I have discovered that they make motherboards that are even smaller then my MicroATX solution I already came up with and posibly cheaper. They call these ITX or mini-ITX.
Personally I would rather go this route as there are some other benefits to it besides size. They also use extremely low amount of power(thus the term green pc) usually around 65W or less, and run cool requiring less fans and generating less heat.

Below is an example of an ITX mainboard and case:

These things are tiny(think mac mini size). However they have a few downsides. First I’m having a hard time find are board that has a decent on board sound with spdif + analog output, HDMI/DVI with decent gpu, and a gigabit nic. There the the issue of cpu power as most arent as powerful as larger systems most likely ruling out the possibility of transcoding video to H.264 let alone MPEG4. I’m also wondering if they might struggle with MPEG2 HD content? there isn’t a lot of info out there on these new systems yet and how well they perform as a HTPC/DVR.

At any rate I’m not in any hurry and plan to do more research on this project of mine.

So Recently I have been thinking it would be cool to have a DVR box in my room for recording shows off tv. First I began looking at what in terms of retail DVR boxes and let me tell you there is not much. Currently the options are basically a Comcast DVR for $12/m, A Tivo HD box($299), or a discontinued Sony DVR.
First of I really don’t want something that requires monthly fees so that rules out the comcast box and the tivo as well. There is a way to avoid the monthly tivo subscription currently by purchasing a lifetime subscript that runs an additional $399 on top of the box which basically puts it out of my price range. That left the discontinued sony DVR as the last option which was looking good because it didn’t require any subscription service and it got its guide data from tvguide(gemstar) through the cable system. Then after a little more research I discovered its downfall is the fact that the hard drive is not replaceable as they have some sort of system in the firmware/bios that restricts it to the drive it comes with. What happens if the hard drive craps out in it? Well it becomes an expensive paperweight and this is even more likely to happen since the boxes are all used and a few years old already. Also if I wanted to upgrade the drive to a larger size that would be impossible as well. So thats out as well.

One of the nice things about either of those three options was they both allow me access to all the encrypted or premium digital channels we currently subscribe to through comcast. This is something I’m currently not able to receive on my LCD TV with its built in qam tuner since it doesn’t have cable card support unlike the tivo, and sony. I got to thinking about that I would be really nice to have a device that supports the use of cable card as comcast will give you one free one if your a digital subscriber. I had then decided I would even be willing to forgo the DVR idea all together and just look for a digital tuner box with a cable card slot. Only to find out no one makes such a device. Why? there has to be a demand for it as not everyone wants DVR’s or wants to rent an STB from their cable providers.

So then I though well it doesn’t look like I’m going to be able to go the cablecard route so I might as well build my own DVR htpc box since there are plenty of digital qam tuners available for pc’s. I first started looking at these and discovered that there are now even a few tuners that support cable card. I was stoked about this news! Then it quickly turned to disappointment. I found out that these such tuners are very limited thanks to restrictions put in place by cablelabs(consortium found by the cable cos that oversees the development of cable systems). The first restriction they had put in place is the only way one of these new tuners will work is if it purchased and installed in a OCUR (OpenCable Unidirectional Receiver) Certified system from computer manufactures ie: dell, hp, gateway, sony, toshiba, etc. They use some sort of a special bit flag in the hardware in these systems so that the tunner will break if any hardware is changed or moved to another system. Then Cablelabs took it a step further and gave Microsoft exclusive rights to the new cable card equipped tuners making it only work with vista because Microsoft was kind enough to through in all sorts of crazy DRM copy write schemes to protect the content. This leaves out the possibility of ever seeing one of these new tuners working on a Linux system and most likely macs as well. The only hope would be if someone were to crack not only broadcast cable encryption schemes(something darn near impossible) but figure out how the hardware checking works as well as discover how to make firmware for the tuner device as well and drivers and software to interface with the device. Mind you there is no documentation on how to do any of this. Cablelabs and Microsoft are the only ones with knowledge of how everything comes together as it is completely closed source and kept under lock and key so to speak.

What a crazy mess modern cable tv is these days! It really bugs me that all of this is causing major headaches for end users or the consumer. With all the technology we have now things should not be this complicated when it comes to TV. At any rate I have still decided that I might build myself my own HTPC DVR. I’ll talk more about that in a future blog post here.

Ok so I have to rant about adobe. I promise it wont be too bad Basicly it realy annoys me that they after all this time still refuse to release adobe audition (aka cool edit pro) to the mac platform. It cant be that hard for them to compile it for the mac like other programs they offer. I’m am not the only one who would love to use this program natively and I’m sure there is enough demand out there for them to do so. Also If I remember correctly before adobe acquired Syntrillium (who origonal made cool edit pro) there was a version for ppc macs. So why couldn’t they have continued with newer versions using apple universal binaries? It just doesn’t make since.

Now some of you might ask why I want or even need this program with the alternatives that are already available on the mac. Well to anserw this I have to say I haven’t found anything that is close to matching audition for my use. I’m also not much of a garageband fan. Also other audio programs like logic or even protools don’t fit in the same category as audition. There is a free open source project that runs natively on the mac along with just about any other platform called audacity, However it often runs slowly and suffers from many bugs making it annoying to use. Also it doesn’t seem to be as functional as audition to boot.

It seems the only way to get audition right now on the mac is to run a bootcamp install with windows which is a dual boot situation hence a pain in the rear or you can run it a virtual environment like vmware’s fusion. However the problem with that is I’m not sure what kind of audio quality you might get? does vmware fusions even support 24-bit sound to take full advantage of the sound card? Also how can you get audio back and forth between both the host os(OSX) and the virtual machine? Hence many things can go wrong there.

So please adobe release a version of audition for us mac folks so we can run it natively on our pretty Macintosh computers And that is my rant for today. I hope I didn’t bore you to much lol.

For some strange reason I enjoy watching this for hours

I just finally got around to updating my blog software from wordpress 2.3 to 2.3.1. I recommend you do the same as there is apparently a few fairly serious security flaws in the old release. Also that since I updated I want to warn you all that some things might be broken(mostly plugins) because I might have missed a few settings during the update. If you find anything that is feel free to let me know or I’ll probably figure it out myself and get around to fixing it shortly

I think the trick to this was that he used two migets? what do you think?

I just got my preorded leopard today from apple via fed ex. Aparently Fed Ex is having a bit of trouble as well due to huge numbers of orders. In fact my delivery had been rescheduled from 10:30am to 5pm. But they showed up around 12:30pm or so. My driver told me she had her truck full of them as well and thats all shes been delivering today non stop. Anyways enough about that and on to the picts.

First the front of the retail box:

And the back:

What the inside of the case looks like along with the install dvd:

Installing:

Finishing the install:

Its Leopard!:

Man I just heard terrible terrible news the music sharing bittorent site oink.cd was recently shutdown because of a raid by police. That was my favorite online music file trading site. I actually made a point there of having a great ratio. Yes most of what was listed on the tracker was illegal pirated music. But still there was so much music on it nothing else ever came close. They even had lots of old stuff that is no longer available or long lost albums that you couldn’t buy at all anymore. In fact I personally have found many albums on there that I have always wanted and could not get locally because there aren’t any good music stores within miles of here. Truly a sad day

More info here

offical blog on oink.cd goings on

HAHA I can remember the days when every guy in high school would have wanted to do something like this. Apparently some 15 year old kid put a video camera up in a window on a rooftop that overlooked the girls locker room at East Union High School in Manteca.

Link to Story.

Well it finally happened. With only 2 days to go until the official release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard the official GM(Grand Master) release was leaked out to the torrent sites and likewise. Since the build had been restricted to a few trusted apple insider individuals. Someone from the inside had to of copied it and posted it online for others to download. This was unenviable of course but it will be interesting to see if apple starts an internal investigation to find out who leaked it and bring out the punishment axe.

*Side note if you are one of those people who already preordered it now looking to download and install early don’t expect any support from AppleCare or Genius bars until the 26th besides the obvious possible legal concerns of doing so.

I think I’m finaly satified with the new site header I made after working on it for about 6 hours. It beats the heck out of the old one thats for sure at least. And best of all its glossy

For some reason today I keep getting hiccups. Its very annoying. I guess today should be called hiccup day for me

I think I might have finally found a design template that I at least like somewhat so I’m using it now. I’ve already modified it quite a bit though and intend to do even more too make it my own in the future. However for now I’m extremely tired as its almost 5am and I must get some sleep

If you haven’t already noticed I moved my blog to my new domain name colinkelly.org that I just recently registered. This is now my home for my blog and probably a few other things like pictures to come. I’m also still looking for a decent site theme. If anyone has any suggestions to some good ones for word press feel free to let me know

Well I haven’t written in this blog in hella long I noticed so I decided its about time that I do so Also I just updated the blog software to its latest version and hope to be writing more often. Also I’m thinking about moving it to its own web domain sometime in the near future along with adding a few useful plug ins and a neat design to enhance my web presence. So look for my future updates