We’re having a big storm in SoCal with high winds and horizontal rain, but on the occasion when it clears a bit, the ocean is beautiful with all the whitecaps!
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Saturday was another lovely day, so we walked up the hill and along a ridge with a fire road. Lots of plants and birds and many dog-walkers.
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. |
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