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Fri, 28 Dec 2007I decided to do some more shopping for my game system, and went to the store to buy a (non existant) HDMI-Wii cable.
"I see the component cables, but where do you keep the Wii HDMI cables?", I ask. After a quick iPhone googling in the store -- there really was no such thing. No need to argue, it just does not have any digital out. Lots of forum posts with this exact same HDMI question, and plenty more Fred Meyer electronics section employee-esk responses. Ugh. Time for video school forum posters and store clerks alike:
I don't care about the "jaggies" or blocky video game graphics. All I want is there to be one mario, not one mario and three of his ghosts, because nintendo has a slight impedance mismatch on the component jacks. Wed, 26 Dec 2007Its great to finally see some higher resolutions in the plasma market at affordable prices. It also appears that all of my complaints about plasma dot pitch (aka, the gap between the pixels) have gone away with some of these new sets. It no longer looks like peering through a screen door! Now if only they weighed less and did not buzz so much. :p Price drops are also getting silly in the LCD market. If you look around, and do not care much about the nameplate on the front, you can pick up a high quality 1080p 42" set for under $1000. Most of these are OEM from well known brands. How great do things look on a 1080p set? Couldn't tell you. I'll wait for this Blu-Ray/HD-DVD thing to finish and let you know later. I am not putting my money on either format just yet. Sun, 23 Dec 2007Matt got me to impulsively buy the second generation ZipIt, which features a color screen and loads of new features. Some of the highlights:
and then one of the most interesting features:
There is a port inside the battery compartment, a larger ipod-isk connector on the back, and a small 4 pin jack next to the headphone jack. I am not really certain what any of these do. The battery on the unit is unusually large for the capacity of the battery. I can get the same capacity with half the size, and nearly double capacity (2000mAh) in that exact form factor. Sounds like the first hack for this nifty device, as it could really use a lot more run time. Second, a lot of the configuration (backdrop, themes, and radio stations) are pushed to the device from the company's website control panel. I am certain that these can be intercepted by faking the DNS on a local network. It could also serve as a way of uploading new code to the device, as it frequently checks for firmware updates from ZipIt. No word on whether the device will be "opened up" or perhaps an SDK offered. Hopefully the GUI menu is expandable with new applications, as its not a bad launcher, so someone will not have to re-invent the wheel. Anyway, I have no time to do anything productive with this device, so i will wait until someone gives me a serial port with "terminal", an IRC client, an SSH client, and all that jazz.
Thu, 13 Dec 2007
One Thousand Monkeys on One Thousand Typewriters
Can one thousand monkeys on one thousand typewriters eventually write a novel? For fun, I decided to put this to the test. No--I did not fill a warehouse full of monkeys. I used the next best thing: /dev/random. This unix device, or file, can generate a limitless stream of random text and binary for your enjoyment. We are also making /dev/random do something it was not designed to do: produce non-random data. Conclusion: They probably can't write a novel. But they can write a few words. If you ever get bored in a shell, and have a lot of computational power at hand, you could try something like this:
cat /dev/random | strings | grep -i wtf\? Wow! now that was kinda creepy. Lets gather some statistics... Use the 'tee' command and try to count just how much useless noise there was before our monkeys typed something of interest:
$ cat /dev/random | tee junk | strings | grep -i wtf\? So there you have it. In 330 megabytes of sheer randomness, our monkeys finally asked "wtf?". You can also try using base64 or uuencode to make /dev/random generate alphabetical characters to increase the odds.. Sun, 25 Nov 2007Alright, so I really do not have a good name for it yet. I'll just call it that for now...until someone can suggest something better. This game was fruited from a late night conversation at the first Mind Camp last year. I have goofed around with the concept on and off throughout this year, and finally found some spare time last weekend to at least complete a demo. Of course, the "production" version of this game would be much more complex. Hopefully this demo will get the creative juices flowing. The game server engine is fully automated, modular, scriptable, and can handle multiple players. Think of it as the mother of all state machines. For simplicity, the demo is only going to accept one player at a time. So far, only two people have been daring enough to play it. Both people really enjoyed it. The demo can usually be completed in under a half hour and is very low key.. Several people, suprisingly, declined due to lack of details. Are you daring enough? I promise it won't hurt, nobody will bother you, and will not have to do anything illegal :) There are no real requirements for this game and its free for you. If you are interested, contact me, and i'll put you in the system. Tue, 02 Oct 2007
Unlock your iPhone, use it on another carrier, and lose visual voicemail, right?. Well, not so fast. Primer So, first, lets look at how visual voicemail works on at&t: The iPhone makes use of 2 GPRS PDP contexts for IP data: a connection to the "wap.cingular" APN for general internet access, and a special connection to the APN called "acds.voicemail". The phone likes to keep wap.cingular on interface IP1, and the voicemail on interface IP2. For the most part, the phone will remain on wap.cingular for general internet access. On reception of a special SMS with voice indication value specified, the phone knows that it has received a voicemail. Within a few seconds, it switches over to the acds.voicemail context, obtains an IP address, and connects to the visual voicemail server on port TCP 5400 (probably a VIP). The phone will do a simple HTTP 1.1 POST, accepting audio/amr format. The server responds with quite a few details in the header regarding the message, including source number, etc. Eventually, you will get the AMR binary data for playback. This all occurs in the background. You may have noticed that sometimes, your visual voicemail will not play immedately if you quickly go in and try to listen to it. This is because it is still in the process of fetching the data files. After the transaction is complete, the phone quickly jumps off and eventually releases its IP address on the acds.voicemail PDP context. I am not certain if it is using a CMUX interface so both acds.voicemail and wap.cingular can be accessed at the same time. I am also not certain how it knows to connect to one particular voicemail server. The IP address is either hardcoded, resolved via DNS, or passed in the messaging. So what does that mean? This means that for users with unlocked iPhones on different carriers, there is a chance of getting visual voicemail working on your phone too with a combination of VoIP, asterisk, and a simple web server -- if you got creative. This also could open the door to a couple third party apps to entirely replace the phone application. This post should get someone started. Frankly, I am not very motivated to work on this (or even test it), as I am on at&t. Thu, 30 Aug 2007There is an unusual, but thriving population of palm trees in Barrow, Alaska! Okay, well, only three.
This is the worst front yard I have ever seen. Infact, I thought it was worthy of some sort of award.....but I was unable to reach their front door to present it.
Wed, 29 Aug 2007
Football at the Top of the World, Barrow, Alaska
I was in Barrow, AK this August, and caught the 2nd game of the season. Here's a video of the game, and the new turf donated this year by Cathy Parker.
Lots of yummy tutu soup and eskimo donuts. mmmmmmm. Tue, 07 Aug 2007
Copalis Beach State Airport (FAA LID: S16) is the only airport in the United States that is located on an ocean beach. This airport is located on the beach near Copalis Beach, Washington, elevation 1. It is only available during low tide. The clam digging is excellent, but no camping is allowed at the airport, according to the Wikipedia article.
Sun, 08 Jul 2007
1 in 300 Americans, EDGE grows up?
I am breaking one of my rules blogging about something as overblogged and amateur reviewed as the iPhone, but it is a noteworthy topic in some aspects. With over 1 million units sold, 1 in 300 americans is prancing around with a glass and stainless steal battery-sucker-o-matic. In what was nearly an impulse buy, and after listening to some of my wife's friends convince her the night before that only celebrities could obtain these "rare" phones, I figured I could not lose buying his and hers iPhone's. In fact, its reception was better than bringing home jewelry...aside from being comical and worthy of its own blog...and for those who have read my "black box" OSX Xterm window rant involving the IRC client "BitchX", and my suspicious wife, you can only guess. I opt for the 8 gig unit, as the improvement was almost at cost, and the fact it has no expansion. Yes, thats right, CDMA and EVDO fanboy is on a GSM network. What is the most interesting about this Cingular/AT&T Wireless, now AT&T, EDGE network is this carrier had an ace up their sleeve. Apparently, for unknown motives, Cingular launched EDGE crippled. It was under-engineered in more ways than one. Not only were there less EDGE carriers, but the backend was not fast enough to even support the most basic of speeds on the network. This means that the reason why you only got 40Kbps on EDGE was probably not just the air interface, but the back-end connectivity to the tower. The short story is that AT&T dumped 50 million dollars into a project called "Operation Fine Edge". This project involved installing more EDGE line-cards into cell sites (boosting air interface capacity), but actually making sure the back end connectivity in the poorest performing towers was there too. This effort bumped EDGE to about 200Kbps on average, depending on location, time of day, and signal strength. I have seen 200Kbps in residential areas in the evenings, and about 90-110Kbps in the business cores during peak times. Not bad. Infact, EDGE is about as fast as their UMTS offering. Sad, but true. Its too bad the iPhone does not have EVDO, but taking in account that nobody knows how to optimize a TCP stack on a handset to begin with, the EDGE network on the iPhone has the visual apperance of an EVDO network. Pages load fast. Sat, 07 Jul 2007
I cancelled satellite service thursday in favor of a mix of AppleTV and potentially "over-the-air" HDTV receiption. Not in a rush for local channels just yet, I guess we'll see. Fri, 22 Jun 2007
Group of Lower 48 Motorcyclists Ignore Warning - Drive on Dalton Highway
About two years back, I wrote a short article about a 489 mile long dirt road I drove. Its in the middle of nowhere, with practically no services available, and no destinations along the way. When you get to the end, you end up at a locked gate near the arctic coast, at which point you get to turn around and drive the whole road again.
This article in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner made me chuckle a little bit only because i remember how rough this sucker was in my Ford Escape...I could not even imagine what it would be like on a motorcycle...to say its like driving on a washboard is an understatement. Too bad its for a good cause. They are trying to take a 6,700 drive from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska to Key West, Florida to raise money for the Special Olympics in Georgia.
Bikes take a beating on the Haul Road The good news is, they actually made it, and are on the mostly paved path from Fairbanks to Key West today. Again, if you want to donate money to the 6,700 mile Iron Torch Ride for the Special Olympics, click here. Thu, 21 Jun 2007
What causes those landline "ghost rings" late at night?
Late at night, almost at a specific time, your phone ringer chirps or may even make a complete ring. Pick up the phone, and nobody is there. It does this around 10:23pm at my parents house, and 1:00am at my home. I just happend to be awake at the time to finally confirm that all of these "dreams" of the phone ringing late at night, only to wake up and notice that it isn't, were actually factual. No, hackers are not trying to hack into your house, nor are the feds charging their wiretap batteries. Apparently, all of our lines are subject to routine, automated testing of line quality. A small voltage is asserted on the line, but this apparently is enough to triger hyper-sensitive ringers in newer digital phones. Read the article for an interesting history, suprising awareness, and root cause of the "problem".
Mon, 18 Jun 2007
Thinking about turning in your cable box and signing onto AppleTV? Some have already. But before screaming at the $34.99 season pass for each primetime television show, lets do a little cost analysis. I admit, I do not watch much TV. I looked through the ITunes store and compared it to a list of what is "pretty hot" right now in television. I then compare this to my current Dish Network service. And then finally to a third alternative of using a component such as "EyeTV", which is a high definition over-the-air receiver with recording capabilities. Its about a hundred bucks. Dish Network Satellite Service
AppleTV + iTunes
AppleTV + EyeTV
Even when you take in account the initial one time hardware costs of purchasing an AppleTV ($299), our total still comes short of what I budgeted for satellite television each year. Ultimately, the less TV you watch, the more you will save from not paying for unwanted content. At what point does the AppleTV cost more to own? If you avidly watch more than 21 prime time television series simultaneously or you are just buying broadband internet for the sake of an AppleTV. I think I might buy 2 or 3 television series this year. Mon, 28 May 2007
ARCO Commercial: Underground City in 1991
Back in the 1970's, ARCO painted a pretty grim picture for life in the year 1991. You remember 1991? When everyone was forced to go live in the underground city? It didn't really end up happening, and we owe a world of thanks to ARCO Petroleum for saving our way of life above the surface.
The hack didn't work at first because I copied the plist file directly off my laptop. I don't have SSH enabled, so thats probably why it didn't work. I used another xml file i
found on a
AppleTV
Because of the sshd binary i used, I can only do ssh v1 (ssh -1 [host]). You login as "frontrow" and "frontrow". There is a silly challenge/response at first, just ignore that and enter the password. At this point, I could sudo and do whatever I wanted on the box. Note that the OS partition is mounted as read only by default. mount -uw / and mount -ur / are your friends here to mount writable and read-only, respectively.
I really don't like spending lots of time h4x0ring the
AppleTV
My most favorite plugin so far is the "Series of Tubes" plugin. This lets you watch YouTube in all its overcompressed 320x240 glory on your HDTV. The plugin does some smart things in the background, including prefetching and caching of YouTube videos as you browse "Featured" and various "Most Viewed/Discussed/etc" top rankings before you even get a chance to start watching. The only unfortunate thing is that there is no way to login as yourself and watch subscribed content or browse much further beyond the preset filters. But I am certain its only a matter of time before this is resolved. Its only on version 1.0.1. "A Series of Tubes" is also remarkably stable for the second release. "Series of Tubes" requires the Perian codec pack (you might need to copy these right into the quicktime directory using SCP). Other plugins include Omelette, which is sort of a shiney egg bejewelled 3-in-a-row game. "Streamer", a very basic streaming audio application, mplayer wrappers so you can play your DVDs, a perl engine for FrontRow, etc. They all seamlessly work with FrontRow, just adding yet another cute menu item on the spinny display. Lastly, I am really enjoying all of that 720p "HD Podcast" content available. There is some pretty good stuff available that I have found. The video quality is great...which was a real shocker. Offline content delivered to your HDTV is definately a killer app in its self, assuming the content is rich enough for anyone to want to view it. Its tough finding non-techie shows though....even if its some bouncy hottie rambling on about RSS feeds.
Sun, 27 May 2007
Is the AppleTV the Beginning of the End of Broadcast Television?
I bought an Apple
TV
Some of its faults really show almost immedately. Is it a $299 TV video adapter, or a self-contained set top box? Its flip-floppy dependence on iTunes extremely complicates that determination. Content is either streamed from the computer or stored locally on the box, depending on if iTunes bothered to synchronize the content yet. I can see how this can be useful (most people have most of their content initally on a PC or Mac of some sort), but I really wish once I tell it the podcasts I want to subscribe to, it would check and download it directly on the box itself.
Besides, if you really wanted to change the way this worked, there is great news. The
AppleTV
Also, Apple didn't include any DVIX/etc codecs (gee...i wonder why? Could it be that 99% of folks would use this to play their pirated content off bittorrent?), but you can put these on yourself. But this is all software and design concept. The hardware is there, and it works, so lets just forget about the iTunes dependency for the moment.
After a several hour synchornization (I only have about 1.5GB of MP3s, and 5GB of images), my
AppleTV
So far, I am quite impressed. I am able to watch all sorts off offline content (podcasts) to my hearts content. Every hour, the newsbrief videos and audio update. When I idle, a bunch of my digital pictures fly around the screen. I can watch iPhoto slideshows based on roll with effects and the ken burns effect, listen to pre-created iTunes playlists, view movies -- both premium content purchased and views of my own, movie previews, etc.
Can it replace my satellite service? Potentially. Most of the media we view at home is on-demand content via internet. I have looked down on Podcasts in the past, but with the
introduction of
AppleTV
The video display, although very basic, is quite a performer. 720p HD is as smooth as you would expect. I have the display mode in 1920x1080i, so it has to work extra hard upscaling everything. The ken burns effect combined with transition effects works at full frame rate in 1080i mode. I just love photo slideshows on my HDTV....and since the resolution is high, you can actually see intricate details of the imagery (1920x1080 is double what my little MacBook will do too).
I think with a few hacks (or plug-ins), this
AppleTV
Wed, 23 May 2007I used to operate, believe it or not, a weekly "internet radio show" back in 1998/1999. It was called "Amiga Radio News". Sadly, the entire show was lost to the ages, as the files lived on long lost hard drives and websites that no longer exist. I can't even remember how long the show ran for, but eventually I must have found a girlfriend or something and I stopped. The deep, dark secret of this show is that I might have produced maybe one or two episodes on an actual Amiga computer. The rest was on the PC as it had much better audio editing software (Remember Cool Edit Pro?), a faster CPU for MP3 encoding, etc. Oh well -- nobody really knew. By chance, i ran across a lonely GSM encoded file and its ADPCM counterpart. Quicktime actually played the GSM file. So maybe you will be able to listen to it too. Some really funky stuff happens when you play the ADPCM file in quicktime, so unless you got something weird that will play it, dont bother.
Amiga Radio News - March 16, 1999 (GSM 6.10) [Right Click and Save] When I saved these files on my mac, it saved them as arn3161999.gsm.txt. Rename it to .gsm, and double click it. It should open. Now, if someone has additional shows sitting around...please contact me. I really doubt I could take credit for the first podcast, as i am sure there have been other weekly "radio" shows off downloadable offline content, but boy was it ahead of its time. Wed, 18 Apr 2007
Recycling is Good for the Environment
So, you just bought that kick ass boombox from Walmart. Stereo sound. CD player. Volume nob. And you sprung for that extra tone control.
After unboxing your electronic wonder, you overhear Al Gore the television ranting on about the environment and something about carbon footprints. You feel guilty about all the packaging material, and how your great-great-great grandchildren will hate you if you simply throw it into the trash. Why not recycle that polystyrene foam that protected your stereo on its twenty day journey from china, across rough pacific seas, and eventually to your home! You decide to recycle this packaging. After some searching on your favorite meta-search engine, you come across a great foam recycling site. This website features all sorts of great locations to recycle your foam.
Clicking on your state, Washington, you learn that you can now recycle without leaving your own home!
Wow! Recycling, BY MAIL! Send it to Crofton, Maryland! This is really great news! You go to the UPS website and request delivery of packing materials (a box). You also buy a pre-paid shipping label. It was expensive, but its for the environment, right? Being green doesn't come cheap. Day 2 Some UPS guy shows up with a box at your door. He mentions you were the only delivery in your neighborhood for the day, and had to drive about 10 miles out of his way to visit you. This is okay though. You mention that you don't really have time to pack up the foam you are going to send out for recycling, so he should come back tomorrow. Day 3 The doorbell rings. You quickly stuff the EPS foam into the box, tape it up with some duct tape, and slap on the little label you printed off yesterday. Oh crap, did you accidently check the "Overnight Early A.M." box?!? You did. No wonder it was so expensive! Darn, you wanted to send it ground. Maybe next time you will be more careful. The UPS guy has been waiting at your door for a few minutes now, you can hear his truck running in the distance. But he doesn't mind. He has all day. Nobody needed UPS in your neighborhood today either. You hand the box to the UPS guy. He mentions the box is extremely light for the size. You mention that you are recycling foam. The UPS guy says, "Oh, right. Foam. Got it.". He carries your package off onto his truck, and you never see it again. Your package takes the most expedited path using large UPS jets on its 2800 mile journey across the United States. Your foam arrives in Crofton, where its...recycled. At least, you can sleep at ease, knowing the Earth is going to be okay. Doesn't it feel good to recycle? Tue, 10 Apr 2007"99% of the population is missing. Technology is dead. 99% of the population is missing. Technology is dead." Afterworld TV is a series of 130 three minute micro-episodes slowly trickled on the video sharing site YouTube. It is just the right size for the ADD "trying to fill a couple minutes of dead time at work" person that you are. The series features a unique CGI still/motion hybrid animation style along with a high quality naration that seems to be more of the focus of the experience. Almost like a picture story book. Currently, Afterworld is on episode 7. Each episode is released on Wednesday, although, there is a promise for daily episodes starting in May. Apparently, Sony bought this piece back in February from Stan Rogow Productions, more notable as the production company behind Disney Channel's "Lizzie McGuire".
[/entertainment]
permanent link
Sat, 27 Jan 2007Its time for more travel. I kinda got bored, so I decided its time to get on an airplane and go somewhere. I will be in Fairbanks and Barrow Alaska over the next week. I have not been there in the winter, so it should be interesting. My wife, on the other hand, used to live there before i held her hostage in Seattle, so it will be nothing new for her. I have been to weather.com to keep an eye on the weather. I keep getting these ads next to the temperature, saying stuff like "click here to get out of the cold" which leads me to travel deals to hawaii. Sometimes i wonder what the hell is wrong with my travel plans. I'll try to blog my trip. Last time i couldn't. Internet access in Barrow is always interesting. Hopefully i'll be able to get my wife's aunt on the local 128k down/64k up service. Plan:
Jan 27: SEA->ANC->FAI For past blog entries, check out the archive on the side or click here. |
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