Tivo

The family Technology Consultant

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So since I work with computers for a living I am the familys technology consultant. No one remembers my sister works with computers also, but I guess programing doesn’t count! I mentioned last week that I got my dad a new Treo 300 for Sprint PCS. I finally got it to sync to his computer at home. He had problems for months with his home computer and his old Palm 505. After trying 3 versions of the palm desktop, deleting the USB drivers (and killing his mouse in the process) I finally got the Treo to sync to his computer. He was very happy to get rid of his Palm 505. The screen was very dim. he also has to carry 1 PDA/Phone instead of a phone and a PDA. I tried to convince him to wait 2 weeks and get the Treo 600, but he said that it was too small. As long as he is happy, I won’t force him to buy the latest and greatest. The Treo fits into his scrubs pocket easily so he was very pleased.

While I was sick this week I spent some time taking some old videos and converting them to MPEG-1 files to be put on Video CD’s (VCD). I use Elgato systems EyeTV. It is a USB device that makes your mac into a Tivo like DVR. You can export the files to MPEG-1 format to burn onto a VCD. I also played around with exporting the files to imovie, but it was time consuming and the files were huge. I didn’t need to edit the files so I just burned the MPEG-1’s to VCD. The quality wasn’t so bad. What you would expect from a VCR. The better the source, the better the results.

Doing the video extraction made me realize that I need more hard drive space on my mac. The Powerbook I have only has 40 Gigs on the hard drive. 10 of which are taken up by my music. I need to get a Firewire external drive. I am pricing them out now.

What’s On TV

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I used to watch TV all the time. It was my way of relaxing when I got home from work. Tivo has changed my life, or my TV watching life. It records the crap I want. I don’t channel surf anymore. I also find myself watching less TV. I even fast forward allot of what I Tivo, or just decide to delete it after I capture it. It is rare to find good television, especially during the summer.

My new favorite thing on TV currently is Mi-5, on A&E of all places. I mentioned it before in another post. It is a well done BBC show that A&E picked up. Their are only 16 of them over 2 seasons. I just saw the entire season 1 over the past week or two. A&E had a marathon monday and I captured all the ones I had not seen. I like spy novels and shows, but this is just good. This is my spy fix since The Agency was canceled. I just ordered Mi-5 Season 1 on DVD. Gotta love that amazon.co.uk. You can find tons of stuff you can’t get in the US.

On the down side in 9 more weeks the second season will be over and I will have to wait till june 2004 or later to get more installments of Mi-5 (or spooks as it is called in the UK). I guess I will have to wait till September or October and see what crap US television puts on the air. Of course who will be watching TV when the Simpson’s Season 3 comes out on DVD!!!

Tired And Nothing To Do

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I am sitting in a hotel room in Kingston, NY on a Tuesday evening at 8PM. Their is absolutely nothing to do. I could goto the pool, but I would have to deal with screaming and splashing kids in the hot tub. I could go eat, but I am not hungry. Joe and I ate a late lunch. I could goto the hotel bar, but the last time Dan and I did that we saw one women and a bunch of old guys. That time we were both really drunk, so I wont do that alone and sober. Not that into whatever is on TV. I am tivo’ing anything I want to watch tonight anyway so what is the point. I am catching up on this blog and then I think I may have a movie or something I can watch on the laptop. I have to check what I have. Other than that I am out of ideas. I probably will goto bed early. I have a big day tomorrow. I hope to be back in NYC tomorrow night. Lets just hope things go well.

Two Of The Best TV Show’s, Ever, And You Probably Didn’t Know It

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I have mentioned that I got Homicide life on the streets on DVD. Or at least the first and second seasons. It sits in my waiting to be seen pile. I also just got another show on DVD that is also arguably one of the best shows every. It is Babylon 5. I do not deny the fact that I like decent Sci-Fi, and Babylon 5 is a fantastic show. I cannot think of any series that is better. The story was unbeatable and the effects rocked. I recently got Season 3 on DVD. By far the best season of the 5 years of the show. I am nearing the end of the DVD set, and just probably watched 3 or 4 of my favorite episodes. I like special effects like anyone else, but some of these stories were crazy, or so deep it makes you stop and think. A fantastic show that not that many people ended up watching. Too bad, but at least they are making it on DVD. Why is it that some of the best made stuff is not even close to popular? Both shows I mentioned in this blog entry were never popular, and always had to fight to get renewed. Then you have shows like ER, that used to be good but are way past there prime. That show needs to be put out of everyones misery. I used to like it, but now it is painful to watch.

While on the subject of my TV habits I would like to mention another new show that I have started to watch. MI-5 on A&E. It is a rebroadcast of a BBC show. It is actually really good. I also like the British filming style, not a hollywood version of a british agency. I have my Tivo set to grab it.

Cute Morgan

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I got home just in time to get a call from my sister about going to dinner with her and my parents. We went to the local deli. The highlight was playing with my niece Morgan. She is so cute. I threw someone out of my office today who commented on my computer background by saying “oh a cute boy”. The pink didn’t give away she was a girl, I don’t know what to say.

My family ended up at my place since my sister needed to feed the baby before she drove home. Morgan was not in any mood to wait to eat. My parents are still using my place to shower while they redecorate. I showed my mom how to use Tivo tonight. That means it will be all screwed up tomorrow when I get home.

Still Tivo hacking, not so thirsty anymore.

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I was able to extract 1 show onto a DVD. I can get them into MPEG2 format which is what a DVD is made up of, but I am still having issues with the part where I actually get it onto a dvd that is viewable in my DVD player. I did this one, and it seems to work. Even better the video and audio at the end seems to be in sync. That is a problem with alot of these conversions. The down side is I left the burner on all night and I don’t know when it finished. it took a while. Also unless the numbers are wrong a 1 hour tv show took up 3 gig’s of space. The MPEG2 file on my hard drive only took up 1 gig, so I am not sure if that is correct. This whole thing is a work in progress.

I am going to show Gus my work today. I was on IM with him last night. he was excited about the possibilities for him. I think he is out of room on his Tivo but does not want to delete anything.

All this tivo hacking makes me thirsty!

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If you don’t watch the Simpson’s you don’t get the title of this blog. No big deal. I still thought it was funny. I actually did it. I was able to extract video from my tivo. I am working on the assumption that it is legal to do what I am doing since I am truly archiving my video for my own use. Like I had 50 video tapes with old TV shows on them. I have no plan on distributing anything. That being said, I was able to export video to my PC, and then encode it to a mpeg2 file. I have not yet been able to get it to a DVD and watch it in my DVD player, but I was able to view them on my mac. I used a program called tystudio. It is a Windows or Linux based client and a program running on your tivo called tyserver. Once configured you can even encode right off the tivo without copying files off of it. I have not let the indexing complete yet to do that, so I am extracting what they call the ty stream file and then converting to mpeg2 on my PC. it takes a while for an hour long show but it is worth it.

To get this extraction to work you do need to have done previous hacks to your tivo. Such as install and configure a network card, FTP, and Telnet. I had my hard drives upgraded and the network card installed for me by PTVUpgrade last year. It is cool. I can program the tivo over the network, or telnet into it. But this is the best feature so far.

So I am sitting here extracting video’s while doing my laundry and the dishes. This sunday is shaping into clean my apartment day. I am cleaning up the mess from a week of neglect, and cleaning crap off my tivo. Even with 120 hours or so you can fill these things up. I have been waiting for a solution like this for a while so I can get stuff off the tivo. I am a sci-fi fan. Yes, I like computers and science fiction, what a shock! I don’t like all sci-fi though. I am rather picky. So I liked this show that was out this september called firefly. I have most of them on Tivo, and I have not deleted them since the show was canceled. I figured keeping the tivo files was the only way I was going to see this show. Well I am extracting them now to save like 8 hours of space on the tivo. I also have like the past 10 24’s that I have not watched yet. Can you tell I am excited about the new found ability?

What I cannot seem to do is get simple html to show up in these entries. Not sure why. I am looking into what to do.

I just turned on the pinging options, so maybe someone will read these things now. I have not advertised this blog’s existence until now.

Computers, do they suck up or free up time?

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From the title you may think I am pondering the usefulness of computers. Not true. I think they are great. So much so that I made a career out of working with computer networks. But, sometimes I think they can cause tons of wasted time. I think that today because I needed to spend hours yesterday and today rebuilding my computer. Last Wednesday I blew my desktop away and re-installed windows xp. tuesday night I put the machine in a new case and during the move I physically destroyed a hard drive. Out of the 4 drives that I had I lost the one with the important data on it. The good news was that I made a backup of it that morning. The bad news was I didn’t get everything. I left off some less important stuff. you don’t realize how important it is until you don’t have it. But ok, there I was with a bad drive and a backup. I was feeling dam proud of myself for making a backup. Well try importing the data back off the dvd backup I had was a pain. At first I didn’t think it would work. I kept getting major bad errors when copying. I ended up throwing the dvd in my mac and restore it from there. At this point I may just leave the “personal data” like word doc’s, pdf’s and images on the mac. I didn’t want to do that, but it is turning out to be ok. Yeah, I am just grumbling. Everything seems to have turned out ok, but it took a day and a half working on and off to get things restored. That does not count all the programs I still need to reinstall on that XP machine. I will be doing that for weeks. So this week, computers have been a drain on my time, not a savings. next week hopefully will be different.

On the flip side, I am sitting here with my handy offline blog editing tool writing this blog as my trusty powerbook is taking my photo album I had backed up and sucking it into iphoto. It places them in nice categories. I have very few complaints about the program. I was also able to hack together a non-frontpage enabled version of my website on the apache server. the photo album site of 1gig of my images will take allot longer. Also not up is what I used to call the edata site. it contained data out of an access database. apache can’t read ASP files so I need to figure out PHP & Mysql to do the same thing on apache. that will take some time also. I honestly am not sure if I will take that plunge. I would have to export a bunch of data into mysql and I don’t know it that well yet to be the sole location for that data. I am so crazed about screwing up my apache server and the content that every change I make I am backing up the directory to my windows 2000 server. I just need to get comfy with everything.

Today was another lazy day. I got up late (11:30) and just bummed around all day. worked on the website and cleaning up my desktop computer. Tons of fun stuff:) I also made a ghost image backup of the desktop OS just in case. Also got the TV watching down. Trying to catch up on things I missed this week on tivo. I also watched harry potter II last night on DVD. it was ok, but they leave so much out of the book. I totally understand they cant put everything in the movie, but it is just a let down. that is probably why I didn’t see it in the theater.

My parents probably will call and want to do the traditional sunday dinner. Not sure if I am going to opt in tonight. I had pizza for lunch and that is what they do every sunday.

I am also shopping around for a new handheld PDA. everyone who knows me knows that I go through stuff like that and cell phones relatively quickly. I do a pda about once a year. This year I went through them like every 6 months. The reason I do that is because I have not yet found the perfect device for me. If I did I would stick with it, but alas I cannot find it. also my requirements change as my needs change. what I need now is totally different than what I needed when I was traveling all the time. I am thinking of a pocket pc. the palm I have is nice, and does almost all I want it to, but it does not do everything. the problem is if I switch to a pocket pc I will probably have to give up something. Either weight, wireless ability, allot of $$$ from my wallet, or a combination of the 3. I probably will go to bestbuy tomorrow during work to take a look.

Almost a full week of missed post’s

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I havent written in a bit. I have been sick and busy. not a good combination. here is what has been going on since the last post.

A bunch of us ended up going out to drink Wednesday. I got really drunk. It was fun, but I became a very light weight and felt it after 2+ drinksL a bunch of us ended up at no idea. It is the bar we end up going to after work most of the time. Yes we are lame, we need to expand to other places.

Not to get to graphic but because of some drinking Wednesday night and my pre-existing cold from earlier in the week I was a bit sick Wednesday night and Thursday morning. I got really sick (get the picture) and was unable to sleep most of the night. I was so out of it Thursday morning I sort of missed work. Not good. Also my all around my eyes were nice and read from blown capillaries. That was not pretty. I suffered through the day.

Turns out the office was not doing very well either Thursday. I heard that lots of people came in late Thursday morning. Also my department ran a disaster drill. This is when they simulate a failed server or other device. So they ran a fail over of our web site to our local office. Turns out something was not updated during a release and the test failed. Many people (myself included) was not happy about that.

Was able to make it into work Friday. Thankfully things were relatively quiet. I don?t like to say it is quiet. That is a no no word in technology. Usually you say that and something breaks. My stomach still wasn?t 100% all day Friday, but I survived. Thankfully things were fine Friday. Keith was had the day off so I was short handed. Keith is a network engineer I work with and he handles a lot of the end user problems. So it worked out well this week. I took off Thursday and he took off Friday. Thankfully neither of us went crazy short handed.

Some guys went out after work Friday, but since I was still recovering from Wednesday I decided to just go home. I ended up going to price club with my dad to fill up my fridge. I love that place, but I never get that much stuff. Most things I buy I don?t need a huge amount of. I bought garbage bags from that place like 2 years ago, and I am still on the same box. It was also good to spend time with my dad. I have been very busy at work and unable to see my family that much. After shopping we just went home. I was still tired from being sick so I passed on dinner.

Saturday I just hung out and watched crap I had stored on my tivo. I cleared that thing out a lot. Other than that I cleaned my apartment, and did some visio diagram?s for work. For those non tech people visio is used for network maps. You can do floor plans and other stuff with it but I was brushing up on our new offices proposed network layout. Visio is very cool but very time consuming to do a diagram.

Sunday I went to bestbuy with my dad to buy a vcr. Yes, a vcr. He had one that broke, and my mom still uses it a lot so he needs a new one. Like 6 years ago we bought 2 (one I still have and the one he is replacing). They were low end vcr?s and we paid like $185 each. At bestbuy Sunday we got a low end Panasonic vcr for $59.00. crazy how prices have dropped since dvd?s are the big thing. I still have not convinced my parents to buy a tivo. I think I am close to convincing them, but not yet. I also picked up a new computer case. I got the antec lanboy aluminum case. It is a mid tower case. I downgraded from a full tower case. It was too big and I just didn?t want that much wasted space. The new case is awesome. So far it is quiet, and the power supply glows blue. Unfortunately moving my stuff over I broke one of my ultra 160 SCSI hard drives. I just hope it was one of the ones I backed up.

I also ordered a brand new 160 gig hard drive for my new case. This is so I don?t need 4 hard drives in the new smaller case.

Unfortunately after I did all my computer upgrading Sunday I got a really nasty migraine. I took a 2 furicet?s and they worked (sort of). I ended up napping for a few hours and still felt like crap. I ended up being unable to sleep most of the night, and had a slight head ache all morning.

Monday was not that busy (crazy I know). 4 guys from our dev staff are out of the office all week. 3 are in training and one is on vacation. So my theory is that since they are down by 4 guys I will hopefully have less requests this week. This will enable me to get some other work done. Still working on getting a final hardware quote for our new office. I have setup some meetings for later in the week. I was able to make some changes to our windows 2000 active directory network. I removed the roles of one active directory server in preparation of a disaster test later this week. Right now I removed all the roles from our primary AD server. I will completely remove it from active directory tomorrow and run some maintenance on it and then restore it as an active directory box later in the week.

Got home late tonight. Gus was working on one of our Linux box?s at our data center. He setup some intrusion detection software and was configuring it. It is very interesting stuff. I didn?t get home till a little after 8pm.

I took the old power supply out of my old tower case and put it in my server case. This solved a problem I had with loud noise emitting from the old power supply. After that I think everything is ok after my upgrade.

That brings me to sitting down in front of my TV with my powerbook to write about the last 6 days. This is probably a long and rambling blog, but I think it paints a decent picture of what was going on in my life over the past week. Hopefully more entries a lot sooner than 6 days.

Post party madness!!!

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The award party was fun on Sunday. Turkey was later than expected. Turns out cooking turkey is harder than you think. That is what my friend Amanda found out. In the end the food was great, but took a bit longer to make. We did what I guess a lot of people do, gamble on who will win the Oscar. I was amazed that out of 8 people I came in 3rd place. I can safely say I had no idea about almost all the films I was voting on. I like movies, but I didn?t get to many last year. I also tend to not see may films that are Oscar worthy! Go figure. I was aiming for not being in last place, so I did ok.

Today was very busy. Crazy things going on at work. Have you ever had a day where nothing ever goes exactly the way you plan? It wasn?t a bad day, but just things didn?t go they way anticipated. First all I can say is discount hardware is not always worth it. Also IDE raid, cheap and nice, but it has some work left to be done before I am very happy.

Didn?t get home tonight till 8pm. Cooking dinner now, and catching up on what is stored on tivo. I was going to log onto work, but I am just tired. Probably do something later before bed.

Nothing else going on of value today to note. I got a replacement stuffed animal for my niece Morgan. The first one was all messed up so I called and got a new one sent to me. Got to bring it over to her later this week. Not that a 3 week old will notice or care, but hey!!!