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By Stephen, on January 11th, 2012% For those Cable TV subscribers looking to ditch their set-top boxes, CableCards provide a way for your equipment (Tivo, Moxi, etc.) to decode encrypted and High-Def TV channels without having to rent a set-top box. I was able to ditch the horrible Motorola DVR box my cable company was charging around $20 a month for with a new setup, described below. The new setup cost me for the hardware, but the CableCard rental is $2 per month from Cox, so they’re taking less of my money each month (though still way too much).
Last spring, we moved from a modern, fully wired house (Cat-5e and Cable TV jacks in each room and a wiring panel with a GigE switch) to an antiquated house without such amenities. There is a cable jack in the living room and another in the back room, but none elsewhere, including the master bedroom. So I needed a solution that could use wireless networking, because I didn’t want to deal with running cables, because there aren’t any convenient conduits.
A company, SiliconDust, makes the HDHomeRun Prime, a nifty cable card tuner that puts the cable TV signals on your home network. I put in an M-Card CableCard, which provides 3 separate tuners (I also needed a Tuning Adapter, provided by Cox with the CableCard) and can watch or record 3 HD channels at once. To watch, I use a Windows 7 PC connected via HDMI to my TV. Windows Media Center knows about the 3 tuners and manages them nicely. My laptop can simultaneously use Windows Media Center and watch, too.
This helps me get TV to the master bedroom because an Xbox 360 can be used as a “Media Center Extension” so it can access the tuners via the living room PC over the network and display live or recorded TV on the bedroom TV. It will wake the PC when needed and the PC will then go back to sleep when not in use. There is a slight problem with this in my current configuration: I’m using wireless networking between the PC and the Xbox 360 at the moment, which is a problem. Since wireless bandwidth is shared, even 802.11n doesn’t have enough bandwidth for the PC to send data to the base station which then forwards it to the Xbox 360. To remedy this, I’m planning to move the wireless router and cable modem to be wired to the living room PC so the video stream only goes across the wireless once.
There is apparently an iPad app that can also use the HDHomeRun Prime from El Gato, but I haven’t tried it.
In summary, the HDHomeRun Prime is a really great solution that allows us to take charge of our TV. I have 2TB of DVR storage and can access it over the network, which would be much more expensive using any other solution.
By Stephen, on January 10th, 2012% The fancy new voice- and gesture-controlled TVs being introduced at CES this year are evidence that the TV makers don’t get (or even worse, can’t fix) the frustrations many people have with their TVs: The problem isn’t the TV!
The problem is controlling the TV and the cable box and the A/V receiver (and the Blu-ray player, etc). Elderly people, in particular, but many other non-techie people can’t grok multiple remotes to do something as (formerly) basic as watching TV. Many of my conversations with my mother involve trying to configure her TV and cable box so she can watch a show (channel 3 on the LG remote, then use the cable remote to change channels, but it doesn’t sink in for long).
I love Logitech’s Harmony remotes (and had one before Logitech bought Harmony), but neither my mother nor my wife can tolerate that it sometimes doesn’t turn everything on right the first time and you need to use the Help button and follow the steps to get it right. FYI, the Harmony One is a great remote and I highly recommend it to anyone who has more than one component in their home theater system!
So the problem is that universal remotes aren’t perfect nor very universal (and modal remotes that come with most TVs are worse). Something like control via HDMI tends to work very well, but no cable box I’ve used can be controlled via HDMI. For those who haven’t played with HDMI control, if the system is properly set up, turning on one component starts the other components and sets them to the right input. It sometimes even works, but is by no means foolproof. But then, the TV remote can change the receiver’s volume via the HDMI connection.
These fancy new TVs being introduced by the likes of Samsung and LG provide voice and gesture control, but they likely can’t do much with the cable box, which is solely the domain of the greedy and closed-thinking cable companies. Even if Samsung and LG do understand the problem, they probably can’t easily fix it. I hear everyone in the TV industry is quaking over the potential for Apple to make a TV, but I don’t even know if Apple can fix it unless they cut the cable TV providers out completely (which they could do with iTunes selling shows). Samsung’s new TVs will apparently work directly with DirectTV without the need for a tuner box, so that is a huge step in the right direction, but only if you want DirectTV. Those of us that rely on our cable companies for phone and internet access will not be as likely to jump on that bandwagon.
So what’s the solution?
I wish I knew. Perhaps Apple can beat the cable companies into submission like they did with AT&T and Verizon (OK, not submission, but at least they had to be a little more consumer friendly).
A short term solution would be to build TVs with CableCard slots, thus allowing us to bypass the cable boxes and use the TV to change channels (perhaps build in a DVR too). This is similar to Samsung’s DirectTV solution, but should have more general appeal.
Another solution would be to make the HDMI control scheme work better and be configurable (allow us to choose which inputs are selected for which activity, much like when setting up a Harmony remote). Then make the cable companies provide boxes that participate in HDMI-based control.
In the long term, perhaps Google or Apple or someone can get rid of the cable bundling and all the other crap and let us watch the shows we want when we want, allowing us to pay for what we want and not making us pay for a bunch of crap we don’t want. Then present it all through a simple on-screen interface and abstract however the video gets to the screen, whether it is downloaded, tuned, etc. The old media (TV networks) and cable companies won’t like that one bit, so we can only hope they either embrace change or get steamrolled.
By Stephen, on April 28th, 2011% Now that Steve Jobs and co. have spoken on the location tracking controversy, we now know that it was merely a cache of recently (okay, maybe not so recently) connected WiFi nets and cell towers in order to speed location finding. This revelation means that nothing bad was intended, but the worst was assumed (and rightly so – no harm in being paranoid. đ
As I predicted, Apple will make a patch that will reduce the file contents. It will even remove the file when Location Services are turned off.
By Stephen, on April 26th, 2011% The current outcry over the location tracking file in your iPhone (and presumably iPad) isn’t exactly much ado about nothing, but is mostly the news media trying to make hay out of it and counting on Apple’s name to attract viewers.
This location tracking file is present both on the iPhone itself and in your backups that you make when you sync your iPhone. By itself, the file doesn’t do anything. Your iPhone apparently doesn’t send it to Apple or anyone, and you can’t be tracked in real time (using that file – there may be plenty of other ways to do that). The biggest concerns are (1) why is Apple doing it? What benefit is it to them or the user? and (2) it can be exploited by a third party that can access your backup on your PC or Mac.
- As to why Apple is doing it, who knows? It may be a debugging tool that was left in place because nobody thought it would hurt anything. Perhaps Apple was planning to use it in the future. Maybe even they have nefarious plans to perhaps anonymously aggregate it and sell the data to location-based ad providers. I doubt we’ll ever get a really straight answer to this one, but for the moment, the file is harmless as long as it stays on the device. It isn’t harmless to Apple’s image, however, so I assume it will go away or be changed soon.
- If someone has access to your backups, you’ve got bigger problems than them knowing where you’ve been. They can get your financial information, your passwords (assuming you have your browser save them), and more. I know people are suggesting you encrypt your iPhone backup using iTunes’ encryption feature, but that surely isn’t enough to keep yourself safe. Use FileVault if you’re on a Mac or BitLocker or TrueCrypt for Windows. I’ve used all of these and they all work well and don’t seem to slow things down. So far, I haven’t lost a byte due to these encryption mechanisms. By using these approaches, along with good passwords, you can keep your data safe. If you don’t use something like that, there isn’t any sense in worrying about your iPhone location file. The door is open, so worrying about whether you closed a window isn’t relevant.
While this little Apple controversy makes for fun and exciting news, it is a trivial threat to our privacy, particularly given all the scary things that ad networks and others do to track us and our browsing/buying habits. Anyone who threatens to dump their iPhone over this issue is a little overly reactionary (there are other reasons to be mad with Apple about iPhones, but this isn’t one I’d worry about). I’m sure Apple will issue an update in the next month that either removes or significantly reduces the history kept in that location tracking file.
By Stephen, on February 1st, 2011% Since Apple enabled AirPrint in the latest iPad and iPhone updates, I’ve wanted to be able to use it. AirPrint currently only works with a few HP printers, though some software solutions can make printers shared by your Mac available too. Since I didn’t want to leave my Mac on all the time, and I wanted to replace my Lexmark all-in-one inkjet anyway, I got an HP 6500A Plus from Costco.
The printer hardware looks to be quite good and robust, though HP is always good with hardware. Software has been weak in the past, but the new HP drivers for Windows seem good (the Mac drivers still stink, but more on that in another post where I rant about lousy printer and scanner drivers).
After a quick firmware update, I tried AirPrint, but the iPad didn’t see the printer. I had made the dreadful mistake of hooking the printer to my wired network rather than wireless. Once I switched to wireless, AirPrint worked fine.
So what’s the problem? Printing and scanning over wireless are much slower than on a wired network (I have GigE everywhere in my house). And the printer can’t be on both at the same time. So if I want AirPrint, I can’t have good performance and vice versa.
It seems to me that broadcast is broadcast, so the printer should be just as discoverable on the wired network from my iPad as it is on the wireless bridged network. So it looks like the idea of AirPrint is good, but HP’s implementation is not so good.
Perhaps this will get fixed in an update, but I won’t hold my breath.
By Stephen, on January 22nd, 2011% I am and have been a huge fan of the powerful Oracle (formerly Sun) VirtualBox, but if you use VirtualBox and want it to continue to work well, wait a bit before upgrading to the shiny new version 4. As with most big upgrades, this one took 1 step forward, 2 steps back, and a step sideways:
Forward: The new user interface is a significant improvement and I look forward to the day I can use it properly. (Bonus half step forward: the new architecture with separate extensions seems to be a good idea, but is perhaps not trouble-free yet.)
Sideways: (This problem existed in the 3.2 releases as well, so is not new.) I use a Windows 7/32 guest on a Windows 7/64 host, and if I enable both the 3D and 2D graphics acceleration, the guest Windows crashes right as it reaches the high-res login screen. This seems to be an interaction with current NVIDIA drivers, as it only started happening a month or two ago when I updated to the latest drivers for my GTX280 card.
Back 1: I need to use USB flash drives a lot, and there was nothing I could do to get VirtualBox 4.0.2 to mount my flash drive in the guest OS. Even after installing the extension that provides USB 2.0 support (perhaps the UI should prompt for that if USB 2.0 is enabled and it is missing), the VB driver captured the drive from the host (it disappeared from My Computer), but any attempts to mount it in the host were met with an error dialog from VB. I tried deleting and recreating the filter to no avail. The latest Guest Extensions were installed (see below), yet nothing proved able to mount the flash drive.
Back 2 (half step): In order for the new Guest Extensions to install Direct3D support (which I don’t really use, but install anyway because I like the idea of having it available), you have to reboot the guest into Safe Mode and install the Guest Extensions. While this ends up working, it’s an unusual and annoying step.
So my solution was to revert back to VirtualBox 3.2.12, which works just fine. My flash drive mounts without trouble and I can insert it as needed.
I tried to check the forums for the solution to any of these problems, but was unable to search the forum, so didn’t see these specific problems amidst the active discussions.
I want to be clear that I think VirtualBox is a good thing and this post is just warning people that the latest version is not trouble-free. I have no doubt that in another update or two, it will be superior to the old 3.2 version and meet all my needs. Keep of the good work Oracle and VB devs!
By Stephen, on December 1st, 2010% Norton Internet Security 2010 quit working on me today telling me that the subscription expired. Yesterday, it told me it had 2 days left. As you can see from the screen capture below, it tells me I have a day left, but it expired anyway. Apparently the Norton programmers were sloppy when it came to deciding it was the expiry date and shut it down early.
Now I have Norton Internet Security 2011 at home ready to install, but after this crappy behavior, I’m very tempted to return the unopened box and just use the free Microsoft security product and never give Norton another penny.
By Stephen, on November 24th, 2010% I recently upgraded my iPad and iPhone 3GS to iOS 4.2.1 with eventual success, but some problems along the way. In both cases, the OS installation appeared to go fine, but later in the day when I launched the iPod app to listen to some music, nothing showed up. All my music, podcasts, and playlists were missing. When I plugged each back into iTunes, the utilized space graph showed that the music must still have been there, but somehow the iPod app didn’t see it. Another sync for each (with a REALLY slow backup in the case of the iPad) restored the music to its previous state without having to re-download any of it to the units.
iOS 4.2.1 seems like a very nice system, but Steve Jobs’ quote saying “iOS 4.2 makes the iPad a completely new product” is a bunch of crap. The iPad with iOS 4.2 gives almost the exact experience of the earlier iPad OS, but with a few goodies around the edges. The multitasking, for example, is very nice and probably more useful on iPad than iPhone, but most users won’t notice it. Apps launched fast on the iPad before, so the slight improvement of swapping in an app that was in the background is not as impressive as it is on a slower device like my iPhone 3GS. And the iPad’s battery is big enough that it can handle the slight additional power draw of background apps.
I played a bit with AirPlay by sending music and sounds to my home stereo via an original Airport Express. It works well. When I get an Apple TV, I’m sure it will be even better, with the ability to stream video.
I am also very pleased with one particular bug fix. I have a nice Samsung bluetooth stereo headset that is great for listening to music wirelessly, but the play/pause controls didn’t work on the iPad (but they did on the iPhone under iOS 4.1). Under the new iOS, they work on iPad as well! Nice job, Apple!
So far, iOS 4.2 is a big plus for the iPad and a small improvement over iOS 4.1 on the iPhone.
By Stephen, on November 18th, 2010% I’m in favor of the idea of backing up data offsite to avoid disasters and their effects. Living in California, where we overdo it in both earthquakes and fires, data safety is essential. While I was working on my dissertation research and the dissertation itself, I would back all of it up on a CD every few months and mail the CD to my wife’s relatives living across the country.
These days, it should be easier to do offsite backup, but our data is much bigger, too. Companies like Mozy and Carbonite offer unlimited online backup for reasonable monthly fees. Jungle Disk is a pay-as-you go plan that uses Amazon S3 or RackSpace Cloud for storage (since those commercial services charge by the GB, that cost is passed on to the customer).
I use Mozy on my Windows PC and it mostly works (on the PC, I’ll talk about Mac in a minute). The biggest problem with Mozy (and if you read all the complaints on the web, Carbonite too) is that it is so slow. I use the PC in a building and on a campus that has gigabit speeds all the way to the internet provider, yet the upload speed was always kilobits per second or maybe 1 mpbs. And there were long periods of time where the upload rate was 0, yet the internet connection was fine. Clearly Mozy throttles bandwidth and sometimes even stops uploads. This is apparently a really big problem if you need to restore a few hundred GB of data. Mozy and the others don’t really have a good solution to this. At least the services, such as Jungle Disk, based on commercial storage clouds can’t do as much bandwidth throttling, because the cloud owners manage the networks and it is in their best interest to make access fast (and they likely don’t know or care what data is being stored there).
While Mozy is tolerable on my PC, it was completely worthless on my Mac. I designated a few hundred MB of files, including my Quicken file and other documents that I couldn’t afford to lose. Mozy claimed it was done backing up for months, yet when I checked into it, it had apparently only backed up a single 42KB file. So I had a false sense of security, but really was completely unprotected, which is intolerable. Therefore, I deleted Mozy forever from my Mac and will delete it from my PC when my subscription expires in a couple months.
I have recently been trying CrashPlan on my Mac, which is pretty nifty. It manages both online backup and backup to local storage. It seems to have a family plan for a very reasonable rate, but for the moment, I’m using the 30 day free trial, and the online backup has been fast (my cable modem’s full upload rate). The backups to local storage also work fine, though it seems to have a bit of trouble remembering to be able to use a disk image on a network file server as a backup destination. But overall, CrashPlan seems like a pretty good solution to backup, plus would make restoration from local backup fast and easy while remote restores would obviously be slower, but available in case of disaster.
By Stephen, on October 18th, 2010% I just installed a really nifty WordPress plugin called WPtouch. If you are reading this on a normal PC, Mac, or Linux browser or even an iPad, you won’t see any difference. If, however, you look at the site on an iPhone or other smartphone, you’ll see a friendly mobile interface that takes less time to download and looks like a mobile App. Of course, you can switch back to the normal view at the bottom of the page.
If you run a WordPress site, give WPtouch a shot. It does exactly what it says it will do.
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