2011 Apr 8, 2:28Trailer for the upcoming video for the upcoming Beastie Boys album. Took me a second viewing to realize that was Elijah Wood and to see the DeLorean (from the future?!). humorvideoyoutubebeastie-boys
I've made GeolocMock. If your PC has no geolocation devices, IE9 uses a webservice to determine your location. GeolocMock uses FiddlerCore
to intercept the response from the webservice and allows the user to replace the location in the response with another. This was a fun weekend project in order to play with FiddlerCore, the W3C Geoloc APIs in IE9, hosting the IE9
WebOC in a .NET app, and the Bing Maps APIs.
2010 Dec 8, 5:43This that lets your PC read four digital encrypted cable signals at once with a cable card from you cable company. This is cool although expensive. What frustrates me is the lack of choices in this
area.cablecablecardhardwarepctechnicalmediacenter
2010 Aug 22, 4:04Demo of marked-up video with the people and places shown in the video popping up along side in real time.videohtmlhtml5javascripttechnicalmozilla
I've just got a new media center PC connected directly to my television with lots of HD space and so I'm ripping a bunch of my DVDs to the PC so I don't have to fuss with the physical media. I'm
ripping with DVD Rip, viewing the results in Windows 7's Windows Media Center after turning on the WMC DVD Library, and using a powershell script I wrote to copy over cover art and metadata.
My powershell script follows. To use it you must do the following:
Run Windows Media Center with the DVD in the drive and view the disc's metadata info.
Rip each DVD to its own subdirectory of a common directory.
The name of the subdirectory to which the DVD is ripped must have the same name as the DVD name in the metadata. An exception to this are characters that aren't allowed in Windows paths (e.g.
<, >, ?, *, etc)
Run the script and pass the path to the common directory containing the DVD rips as the first parameter.
Running WMC and viewing the DVD's metadata forces WMC to copy the metadata off the Internet and cache it locally. After playing with Fiddler and reading this blog post on WMC metadata I made the following script that copies metadata and cover art from the WMC cache to the corresponding
DVD rip directory.
2010 Mar 23, 12:02"Trailer for the upcoming Weird Al Yankovic biopic. This film is sure to sweep next year's Academy Awards." humorvideoweird-alparodytrailer
2010 Mar 9, 5:26I have often wondered where furniture stores get their fake TVs, PCs, etc. Yes, apparently there is a store where they buy that. Now about the chotchkies in Applebees or Red Robin...electronicsfaketvpcstorepurchase
2010 Feb 3, 1:09If you've got cable, Internet, and Netflix you end up with a large number of TV viewing options. Its nice to have the options but is there some way to collect and summarize my available options at
any one time?
2010 Jan 19, 2:21"In the latest of an occasional series of demoscene-related posts on GameSetWatch before, AteBit's Paul 'EvilPaul' Grenfell presents a multi-part retrospective on 2009's best demos - starting out
with the top ten real-time PC demos of the year." demodemoscenegraphicgamevideogamevideoprogramming
2009 Oct 30, 10:41All the stuff Nintendo forces developers to take out of the Nintendo Maniac Mansion port. I had read this before and didn't connect after watching Douglas Crockford's JavaScript talk that this was
the same guy.douglas-crockfordgamevideogamenintendocensorshippchistorygeek
Irritatingly out of line with what their commercials say, in my area Comcast, under the covers of the national
broadcast digital switch, is sneaking in their own switch to digital, moving channels above 30 to their own digital format. Previously, I had Windows 7 Media Center running on a PC with a Hauppauge PVR500 which can decode two television signals at once setup to record shows I like. The XBox 360 works
great as a Media Center client letting me easily watch the recorded shows over my home network on my normal TV.
Unfortunately with Comcast's change, now one needs a cable box or a Comcast digital to analog converter in order to view their signal, but Comcast is offering up to two free converters for those
who'd like them. The second of my two free converters I hooked up to the Media Center PC and I got the IR Blaster that came with my Hauppauge out of the garage. I plugged in the USB IR Blaster to
my PC, connected one of the IR transmitters to the 1st port on the IR Blaster, and sat the IR transmitter next to the converter's IR receiver. I went through the Media Center TV setup again and
happily it was able to figure out how to correctly change the channel on the converter. So I can record now, however:
I can only record one thing at a time now
Changing the channel is slow taking many seconds (no flipping through channels for me)
The Hauppauge card can't know if the channel change worked. So if it tries to change to HBO (I get it for free with one of the Comcast packages) which is encrypted and the converted won't show,
the channel doesn't change but the PC doesn't know it and ends up recording some other channel.
To fix (3) I need to manually go through and remove channels I don't have from the Media Center. To fix (1) I may be able to get a second IR transmitter, a third digital converter, hook it up to
one of the other inputs on my Hauppauge, and go back through the Media Center TV setup. There's no fix for (2) but that's not so bad. All in all, its just generally frustrating that they're breaking
my setup with no obvious benefit.digitaltvhauppaugemcecablewindowsmediacentercomcast
2009 Sep 10, 5:52Just in time for Comcast switching channels above 30 to digital only. My current Windows Media Center setup will not function soon. How much do you think I'm going to have to spend to get it working
now...cablecardcabletvwindowsmediacentermediatechnical
There's no easy way to use local applications on a PC as the result of an accelerator or a search provider in IE8 but there is a hack-y/obvious way, that I'll describe here. Both accelerators and search
providers in IE8 fill in URL templates and navigate to the resulting URL when an accelerator or search provider is executed by the user. These URLs are limited in scheme to http and https but those
pages may do anything any other webpage may do. If your local application has an ActiveX control you could use that, or (as I will provide examples for) if the local application has registered for
an application protocol you can redirect to that URL. In any case, unfortunately this means that you must
put a webpage on the Internet in order to get an accelerator or search provider to use a local application.
For examples of the app protocol case, I've created a callto accelerator that uses whatever application is
registered for the callto scheme on your system, and a Windows Search search provider that opens Explorer's search
with your search query. The callto accelerator navigates to my redirection page with 'callto:' followed by the selected text in the fragment and the redirection page redirects to that callto URL.
In the Windows Search search provider case the same thing happens except the fragment contains 'search-ms:query=' followed by the selected text, which starts Windows Search on your system with the
selected text as the query. I've looked into app protocols previously.
Irritatingly out of line with what their commercials say, in my area Comcast, under the covers of the national
broadcast digital switch, is sneaking in their own switch to digital, moving channels above 30 to their own digital format. Previously, I had Windows 7 Media Center running on a PC with a Hauppauge PVR500 which can decode two television signals at once setup to record shows I like. The XBox 360 works
great as a Media Center client letting me easily watch the recorded shows over my home network on my normal TV.
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