liryon.net

Lazyness wins over Evil

June 6th, 2007

I read a very enlightening story on /. yesterday. The Slate.com story was about watching Video on Demand (VOD) which other people nearby had selected. It turns out that comcast is not nearly as sinster as I would have made them out to be. I’ll summerize the important and non voyeristic results of the story and my testing below.

Before yesterday, I had always assumed that because they could cables companies would intentially obfuscate all signals carried over thier wires with the exception of the 50 or so channels which must be carried in over the air (OTA) format for all those legacy cable ready TV sets. Since they say that you need a cable box to recieve any other channels, I assumed that they were technically correct. It would not be difficult to slightly modify any existing transmistion protocol to the point were only “in the know” cable boxes could decipher the signal and display it. You don’t even have to eyncrypt the content to prevent its display; although, that is certainly a more fulproof method. Given how much cable and content companies are spending on DRM these days I took it as a mater of course that I was out of luck getting HD (or any digital) signal off of my cable wire without the appropriate $5-10 a month box.

But I was wrong! Comcast, at least in the DC (see above story) and Boston areas, is much more lazy than they are evil. They transmit HD signals for your normal OTA channels in the clear along side the the analog OTA channels, over their cable in a format called QAM. Now, it just so happens that my new HDTV has a built in QAM tunner. At the sugestion of the Slate.com story I tired it out, hooked a cable straight from the wall to my TV, and told my TV to search out the channels.

It found ~120 channels. Now, that includes the 50 or so analog channels as it also has a normal analog NTSC tunner in it. (To round out the info the tv also has a ATSC tunner which is the format for OTA HDTV). That number does not inlcude the sub, dot, or hyphen channels depending on what you want to call them. A digital tv singal can contain some number of sub channels it appears at least 14. The available bandwidth is split between these channels so you can say run 1 subchannel at 1080i resoultion, but you could run say 4 at 720p resoultion, or even more if you intended to only display standard 480i content you could run 14 or something nuts like that.

Most these subchannels above channel 80 were broadcasting black, not no signal — actually broadcasting black. Three of these were actually broadcasting video. One of them was playing V for Vendetta, another some unkown movie, and third one was playing something with an MTV on Demmand logo in the lower right — confirming that these are the on demand channels as described in the story. There is little reason why we would want to watch this stuff, but its interesting that we can. I am paying for digital cable so non of this should be content for which I am not already paying. Anyways, I am quite excited about the OTA HD channels coming on the cable because it means I won’t have to futz around with an antenna.

Posted in Rants, TV | Comments Closed

Blast from the Stupid Past

June 2nd, 2007

I just got hit up with a hoax email forwarding scheme, this one to be exact — talk about 1998. I must say with all the spam the flies around I thought this kind of thing at least was dead and gone. The oldest date on the copy I got was April of 2007, but snopes says this has been going around since 1997, with the text taken from a 2004 email (the text is exactly the same). I know that we may not always be able to trust snopes, but come on. In 1998 we didn’t have snopes, so realizing that the claim is ludacris took some kind of technical knowledge but today all you have to do is read.

Posted in Rants, xkcd | Comments Closed

Desitnaton: Ohio

May 30th, 2007

The My Maps version of my Ohio trip. It includes:

A mini review of Pirates 3
Cedar Point’s brand new coaster Maverick
Beth’s Wedding

Posted in Fun, Maps, Movies, Trips | Comments Closed

Gilmore Girls Movie

May 25th, 2007

And here I thought I’d never move beyond 5 enteries in the Gilmore Girls category. According to this, the show’s original creator wants to make a made for tv Gilmore movie. I am a skeptic, but aparently she had a great ending all planned out with four magical words which she has told no one. Maybe she could just remake the 7th season? maybe she should make a web comic if she can’t get the actors; similar to what Firefly did to bridge the gap between the show and Serenity (but with the web not a book). Or, or, she could anonymously submit the script to a fan fiction site. All of these things seem equally far fetched to me; at this point it might be better to let dead dogs lie. I do want to know what those four words are and what they mean.

Posted in Gilmore Girls | Comments Closed

Eve Was Framed

May 24th, 2007

Since I posted my other geeky car image today, I might as well knock this one out at as well. Why is that geeky? I was introduced to to Eve (and company) by the xkcd comic Alice and Bob, not, as I should have been, in some sort of security class required of me in obtaning my CS degree. If you are still confused, consult wikipedia on the topic.

Posted in Technical, xkcd | Comments Closed

MMMMPI

May 24th, 2007

So a guy who lives on my street’s car (direct image link here) made the front page of digg.com today. I had been saving up my pics of it, which are still on my phone for a little write up on geeky cars I’ve seen and had time to snap a picture of while driving around Boston, but looks like someone beat me to it. As is often said, Picture or it didn’t happen, so here are some pictures from my craptastic phone as per usual. Note that these are taken in winter, I’ll post some more from today when I get home. Someone on digg suggested I buy my neighbor a beer, I’d be happy to, neighbor.

Posted in From the Internet, Numbers & Statistics | Comments Closed

Destination: New Haven

May 21st, 2007

On Sunday I took my first “road trip” in my new car. That is if you consider 272 mile round trip as a “road trip,” but it was long enough for me to test out some new things. The reason for the trip was to meet up with Josh to settle round one of our bet over the Yankees/Red Sox series this season. For each series or pair of series the loser buys the winner dinner. This dinner was for the first series at NY; we hadn’t started the bet before the first series at Fenway. Anyways it was a nice trip, esp once I got out of the rain in Boston. Below are the things I tested on the trip and the results:

M$ Streets and Trips: Verdict: Crappy
I played around with this once before on the way home from work and had issues with route recalculation not working very well. These issues resurfaced on this trip. All was alright (not good) until I got off the highway due to traffic in New Haven. First the gps lost track, the software’s response to this was to not tell me anything and lock up. Josh had called to tell me I was early, so when the software got done locking up I tired to get it to tell me where Yale is so I could drive though it since I was there and had time. Well it couldn’t tell me, how worthless. Of course, as it turns out, Yale is spread out all over the place there, but I managed to miss all of it.

Tonight came the next problem, the reason why I will never use this software ever again. The program recorded gps trails of exactly where I went, which are pretty high fidelity looking at the map. I want to export these traces and put them up on a my map. Well try as I might all this data remains locked up in a proprietary MS binary file format. All i need are the coordinates in text form, I can do the rest, but no I can’t get anything out the program except the screen shot above. Next time I’ll just have to use Linux to log the raw gps data for me. I know, I should have known better than to expect that I would be able to do what I want with locked down closed source software.
Car (2007 Honda Civic Hybrid) MPG: Verdict: Amazing
I’ve been wanting to go on a long trip with my car to get a good sense as to what its true highway performance is. The primary, trustworthy, MPG displays an average, you can have 2 running averages at one time. I use 1 per tank, and the other has been running since I got the car. Normally the per tank average is lower than my usual to work and back real mpg. I can tell this because the average always ticks up during the week. On the weekend when I only make short in the city trips the average dips. As such I didn’t know my true highway performance until now, with a ~270 mile trip @70mph almost the whole obliterate any low readings pulling down the average. The revised 2008 mpg numbers for the 2007 Civic Hybrid are 40 (city) and 45(highway). Well I got 42.3 on my trip. I bet I could hit that 45 if i drove 60mph. Also this spring my normal millage has increased from ~34 to 38+. I will be confirming just how much plus this week by watching how much the 42.3 average drops. So far in 1 22 mile round trip to work the average is still 42.3, it went up to 42.4 for a bit. The overall average since I got the car is now ~36 up from ~32 in the winter. I’m not sure all of this can be attributed to weather, as I’m probably becoming a more efficient driver. I purposefully did not drive 75 on my trip after I noticed my mileage dropping when I tried it. In any case I am very happy that my numbers are very much in sync with the new revised EPA estimates now. I had previously been unimpressed with my mileage.

Posted in Car, Maps, Purchases, Rants, Trips | 1 Comment »

Slashback

May 17th, 2007

For the uninitiated Slashback is a /. feature that periodically redresses previous stories with clarifications, more information, or new developments.

Some more on the xkcd talk: at one point someone asked Randell “Where are you from on the Internet?” (see the hover text). He talked a bit about a chat room of yore (no reminiscent of the dustbowl) where he hung out, but then he let everyone know that he spent a lot of time at live journal during high school (apparently thats a frowned upon place to be from). So I got to thinking where do I come from. In 8th grade (my family didn’t get the internet until part way 7th grade (1997)) I spent a lot of my time in the wy2 (thats wonder years 2) chat room, on some IRC server I don’t recall. That seems like a good place to be from, at least its on IRC. But really before that I was from geocities. http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/2296, that link, of course, is long broken. I’m proud of that though, I had a website about, um, Star Trek/Sci-Fi , The Site, and later Wonder Years complete with easy to send of a 14.4 modem Real Audio clips. Where are you from?
For anyone missing Gilmore Girls a little bit: Kirk’s top 10 moments. Ok so I don’t really miss it like I miss a person so much as I feel the need to seek out these kinds of stories which you can only find shortly after the end of the show. I don’t remember even half of the episodes kirk lists so I will have to go back and watch each one. Feel free to drop any similar links on the comments.
I have been super busy this week (at home — work is normal). I don’t even know why but it feels like I’ve got no time. Its not like I’m doing lots of things. I guess I should be going ;-)

Posted in Gilmore Girls, xkcd | Comments Closed

Mario Kart 64 Tournamnet #3

May 16th, 2007

After Gilmore Girls (see below) I joined a BBQ in the back yard already in progress, but after that it was Mario Kart 64 Tournament time! We play a lot of Mario Kart 64 in this house; although, we have been remiss in recent weeks. As such we’ve had tourneys before, this being the 3rd. We had 7 people and well we try to maximize the number of games before anyone is eliminated, so our brackets are a little weird. My character of choice is Peach; by the way, she handles very nicely and is almost as fast a Yoshi. Heres how it went down, focusing on my performance:

Round 1.1: Kalamari Desert — 3rd palce (1 point)
Round 1.2: Sherbert Land — 3rd place (1 point)
Round 1.3: Royal Raceway — 3rd place (1 point)
Round 1 totals:
1st place 8 points
2nd palce 7 points
3rd place 3 points (me)
4th place 0 points

This put me in the losers bracket: Bowser’s Castle. As arguably the best player in the losers bracket I easily won this one to advance to round 2. 2nd place also advanced to round 2.

Round 2: Wario Stadium — 2nd place (advance to round 3 – finals). This was my big upset of Sriram, arguably one of the top 2 players in the house.

Finals: Me Vs. Brian at Rainbow Road. I hit a bomb going up the big hill and was set back early. I nearly caught up by the end of the first lap when Brian veered off at the big jump into space. This put me in 1st with 2 red shells. Brian caught up and 1 red shell was lost defending. Brian got in front and I fired the last read shell sending him over the edge; another huge stroke of luck. Flash forward to the end of the last lap, brain with a star and infinite mushroom pulls ahead, my bananas powerless to stop him. He misses the last row of boxes, I hit it, in 2nd place, and pick up and infinite mushroom. Brian, item less, attempts to ram me with Bowser, but misses, and I ride the mushroom to the win in a photo finish. The bracket:

Posted in Games | Comments Closed

Bon Voyage

May 16th, 2007

I got HDTV over the air (yes that works) working about 20 mins before the series finale of Gilmore Girls. This is the first actual HD program I’ve watched on the TV and I was very impressed. First, I couldn’t find the adapter which turns my old rabbit ear’s screw terminal wires into a normal coax wire. I did find, in my search, the little FM radio antennas that came with my TV tuner cards. It had a coax output on it so I plugged it in. The reception on the analog stations was awful. But the HD stations came in crystal clear! That really surprised me, but I took it because I didn’t have much time. I’m very much happy with how they ended the series, these last 2 episodes have really shined, well beyond the rest of the last season.
Part of me finds it hard to believe that the show is over. I really got into it in 2003-2004 when there was a lot of drama going on in my real life and I used the show as an escape/comfort (cause what else is tv really good for?). It is also an icon in my move to not be ashamed of the kinds of entertainment I enjoy most (coming of age dramas and comedies). I’ve found that to be a stength, at time, but none more so than during the season 4 finale:

liryon: ooohh luke and lorali finally :-)
girl: …?
liryon: they kissed
girl: awww
liryon: yup
girl: :)
girl: you’re such a girl
liryon: thx
girl: :) I love you

After season 4 the show, and well the girl too, went down hill. Looks like I have to be over both now, and the tv show is the harder part, 2004 me would not have guessed that.