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The weather today is magnificent in SoCal, so we took a walk around the neighborhood, along the path behind the house up to a ridge, then back down a trail into the valley south of our street.
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. 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. I originally kept the Ocean Views category off the front page, because I had ambitions to put up a picture every day or two. Well, that hasn’t worked out, so I will let those posts show up on the front page. They will certainly not interfere with the web crawlers that grope their way through my site hourly. The ocean pictures posts should be infrequent enough that they won’t bother the one or two actual humans that visit the site looking for parallel computing stuff or Hiperwall history. The weather got a bit colder and foggier yesterday, but this morning, we had bright sunshine on top of the hill, while the fog settled in the valleys and on the ocean. Mid-morning, though, the fog rose in great billows, as these photos show. You can see Catalina Island in a couple of the pictures, and in one it is clear that the fog does not extend all the way there. The cloud/fog layer was right atop the ocean at dawn. We had a colorful and spectacular sunset. I’m including lots of images, because I think each has some slightly different appeal. An occasional moment of fun in the Calit2 Visualization Lab as the Hiperwall team checks out video games on the Hiperwall system: http://youtu.be/RSUlBdDK2ds Dr. Sung-Jin Kim brought a Playstation 3 and his guitar to play Rocksmith. The video shows other games, including Battlefield 3 and Tetris. I can be seen briefly playing a co-op game with Sung-Jin. Our dog died this week. Sandy had been with us for more than 13 years, but had been having health problems for the last 6 months. Late in life, she developed diabetes and started having epileptic seizures. We kept it under control for quite a while, but eventually it was too much for her system. It also turned out she had liver cancer, so that may have precipitated the failure of everything else. We are very sad about her death and will miss her greatly.  Sandy and a toy We got Sandy from a rescue group where, though being scrawny and having just come off the street, she wagged her tail like crazy and was a very sweet dog. We got her just before Halloween, and she was terrified by the Trick-or-Treaters, so she hid under my chair for the evening (and never did so since). We knew she was a little special because when the vet spayed Sandy, we were told she had a couple extra blood vessels that caused a bit of trouble, but it all worked out. She hated the cone over her head to prevent her licking the stitches, so I took it off and she never messed with her incision. We got a great trainer and trained Sandy to behave well. She was a quick learner, particularly when food was involved. She could be bribed to do nearly anything, which was good later in life when we had to give her insulin shots and such. She also learned from corrections, but we had to do it well. She drove my wife crazy by trying to bite her way up the leash on walks and runs. I think Sandy thought it was both playing and protest, but my wife couldn’t stop it. Finally, she got in one good correction with the collar snap, and Sandy never tried it again. While my wife did most of the walking and poop-picking-up, Sandy saw her as slightly subordinate and a plaything, perhaps because my wife sometimes got down on the ground to play with the dog. I was always seen as the alpha dog and Sandy was very good at obeying me, much to my wife’s chagrin. We could get Sandy to jump through hoops, crawl through tunnels, and do figure-8 around our legs as we walked (particularly if there was promise of a treat coming). She was a good watchdog and barked at all the deliverymen and anyone else that came to the door. Despite Sandy’s questionable time before we rescued her (she cowered sometimes when we made certain motions, so she must have been beaten), she was housebroken and never pooped in the house, except when she was terribly sick and couldn’t help it, and that was only a couple of times over all those years. She only peed in the house once, and that may have been her experimenting with what she could get away with. She squatted over a mat and started to pee and when I shouted “NO!” she stopped and never tried it again. Sandy was quite a chewer when she was young. When we were at work, we confined her to the kitchen for a while (as we were training her and trying to understand her behavior) and she chewed up part of the linoleum! We put her in a huge cage in the middle of the kitchen (well, not really a cage – we called it the Bellagio, because it was so grand) and one day, she managed to knock it enough over that she jumped out over the kiddie gate and escaped into the rest of the house. My wife came home at lunch to walk the dog and opened the door to see Sandy with some undergarment in her mouth racing past. Sandy had caused a bit of devastation in several rooms, including licking a pair of my slippers to death (the linings were completely trashed), eating my chapstick, and generally chewing things that shouldn’t be chewed. No real harm done, but shocking that she had so much energy. This was even though my wife was running with her several miles a day and going on several walks. We expanded the Bellagio (making it so large that my wife could wheel a chair in and sit with Sandy with the roof on) and put a roof on it to prevent future great escapes when we were out. Eventually, Sandy calmed down and had the run of the house. She loved laying upside down and napping everywhere, but she had an odd quirk. She always wanted to sleep with something pressing against her, often digging into her head. When we would try to convince her to move her head somewhere more comfortable, she would push it against something else. Sandy, of course, loved food, especially meat. Once day, I accidentally dropped a frozen burger on the way to the grill and she thought “wow, meatsicles from heaven!” and started licking it. She didn’t get to keep it, but she had a nice time while it lasted. My wife dropped a taco once, and Sandy inhaled it before we could say anything. She also liked many vegetables, particularly corn on the cob (see the movie on my YouTube page), broccoli, and carrots. She hated fruit, tomatoes, and alcohol (if I waved the top of an open beer bottle near her, she turned away). For a long time, Sandy slept in the kitchen of the Redondo Beach house, but when we moved to Irvine, she started sleeping at the foot of our bed (on the floor – she wasn’t allowed on furniture). Thus began the multiplication of dog pillows – we eventually had 4 or 5 around the house to suit her whims. She did use them all. The only time she tried to get on furniture was after we had taken care of a friend’s dog. We think the other dog must have gotten up on the couch while we were out, because shortly thereafter, Sandy very slowly and deliberately put her front paws on the couch and made to climb up. She was watching me all the time, and I was speechless with what I was seeing. Once I recovered my voice and said “NO!” that was the end of it and she never tried again. In her early years, Sandy was a counter-cruiser. We caught her on her hind legs with her front paws on the kitchen counter looking for things to steal and chew. And the tail was wagging in such a nervous wag! Later in life, she liked pulling things from trashcans and chewing what she would find. We’d discover a trail of chewed tissues and dental floss leading out of the bathroom. We think she was just trying to get our attention if we were sleeping late, because she didn’t do it when we weren’t home. About 4 years ago, a neighbor dog broke away from her owner and mauled Sandy. The other dog ripped a huge swath of skin out of Sandy’s right rear leg and also left puncture wounds on her neck and shoulder. After a night of surgery, Sandy came home very weak with another of those cones on her head. She was so miserable that I took the cone off and she never messed with her stitches. She eventually recovered, but her leg became stiff so she could never sit properly again. That was sad, because we had trained her to be such a pretty sitter (she started off with a very sloppy sit, but ended up with a perfect sit posture). She also couldn’t manage the stairs in our new house, so she had to sleep downstairs while we were upstairs, which was sad. I’ve spent the last 13 years narrating all my actions and thoughts to the dog. She was a constant presence that I could talk to, explain things to (and she patiently listened), and was very comforting to have around. She was fun and playful, though not particularly cuddly. Sandy was a terrific companion and we loved her. If there is a Heaven, perhaps she is there, and perhaps she will put in a good word for us because of her life with us. We’re getting lots of examples of Cloud Computing for use at home these days. Examples include Apple‘s new iCloud, the Siri digital assistant built into the iPhone 4S, Google Documents and GMail, and cloud backup, like Mozy, Carbonite, and the one I use, CrashPlan. All of these store your data in the cloud (on servers somewhere on the Internet) and provide you services using that data. Cloud Computing means you don’t have to maintain infrastructure (servers and programs and such) and can use the services from nearly anywhere. It’s great for businesses that need to scale services quickly. So what’s the problem for home users? The problem is that home Internet access isn’t up to the task of supporting the data intensive cloud services, and, even if it were capable, capacity limits put in place by our service providers will severely curtail the cloud’s usefulness. The examples below range from annoying to potentially catastrophic. For cloud computing to work for average people, these problems must be fixed. If not, a lot of people are going to have big problems, as described below. Cloud backup is a great way to make sure your data is backed up to a remote location that will survive even if your house is burglarized or burns down. You run a program on your computer and it backs your data up to the cloud whenever you have a network connection. This means you always have a backup in case of disaster. The first problem anyone using these tools encounters is that it takes weeks to make that initial backup. That’s right – the upload speed from our homes is very slow, usually on the order of one or two million bits per second, and I think the cloud backup providers throttle even further, so the upload speed is typically not at your bandwidth limit. Once the initial backup is made, future backups are incremental, only sending changed data, so are usually fast. Problems can occur for people that use virtual machines (Parallels or VMWare, for example), because the virtual disks they use tend to be many GB, so just booting a VM guarantees a significant upload, even if only changed parts of the disk are sent. Everybody is getting better and better digital cameras all the time, so more and larger photos are being stored on hard drives and they also need to be backed up, along with our iTunes files and digital movie copies, etc. Things are pretty ugly, because even average users will soon have hundreds of GB of data that they care about and don’t want to lose. All of the above is annoying, because our home Internet infrastructure stinks, but it gets worse: If you have a failure or loss and need to restore that backup of say 200GB, your Internet Service Provider (ISP) may prevent it. Even with the faster download speeds, such an undertaking will take days, but with capacity caps that are now being put into place by cable companies and other ISPs, we may be blocked when we hit that cap, or at least significantly slowed. Yes, I know some of the backup providers have services where for an outrageous fee, they will mail you DVDs or maybe a hard drive with your data, but that’s on top of the usual monthly charge. So if your MacBook gets stolen, not only will you need to buy a new one, but you’ll need to pay to get your files back or be blocked by your ISP. Not very comforting. Perhaps cloud backup isn’t as good a deal as we thought and we all should keep local backups as well (yes, I know that’s a good idea, but not nearly as low impact and convenient as cloud backup). Apple’s iCloud is a new player in this game, and it will cause lots of trouble. One feature, PhotoStream, automatically uploads your photos to the cloud from your iPhone and then down to iPhoto. It really works and is surprisingly nifty. It took more than a GB of photos from my wife’s new iPhone 4S, sent them to the cloud, and the next day, they were in her iPhoto. That’s pretty handy! But wait, that means it uploaded a GB of photos to the cloud. Then it downloaded them again. Then iPhoto uploaded them again (at least I think that’s what it was doing when it was hogging my internet connection all day). So we’re aiming for those ISP-enforced capacity caps without even knowing it. Even the nifty Siri assistant built into the iPhone 4S uploads the commands to the cloud for interpretation (and the results may require internet data too). So the data plan from your phone company, unless it is unlimited, will be slowly eaten away by constant Siri use. It may not be much, but it isn’t nothing. In short, there are companies selling us cloud services for the home that will be strongly affected by limitations imposed by our network connections and by our ISPs. Before long, these competing interests will collide and we, the consumers, will be screwed. We will have to pay more if we want to use these very handy cloud services. I have some (not nearly comprehensive) suggestions on how to avoid such a crisis.
Essentially, these cloud computing services will transform all of us into heavy data users on our networks, so it will no longer be people downloading porn or pirating movies or songs that are the big bandwidth hogs, but ordinary people that take photos and movies with their phones and back up their media libraries. No longer will the ISPs be able to claim that it is only abusers that are using all their bandwidth, because it might be all of us, but just happening behind our backs by automatic programs accessing the cloud for us, but without us explicitly initiating it. |
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