2009 Sep 25, 2:19
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.
digital tv hauppauge mce cable windows media center comcast 2009 Sep 24, 3:51A proposed new HTTP header 'X-Force-TLS' to indicate a site only wants to be over HTTPS.
http header security https extension noscript web browser webbrowser 2009 Sep 23, 7:56"I do understand that it would be annoying to warn users every time they run a bookmarklet, but I think it would be sensible to show a warning at least the first time a given bookmarklet is executed.
If you work for a popular web browser vendor such as Microsoft or Mozilla, you can think of this as my wish for the day! I'd love to hear your feedback if you are reading this!"
technical bookmarklet bookmarklets security web webbrowser javascript 2009 Sep 14, 4:36Facebook makes a 'Fax This Photo' button but only lets TechCrunch employee's see it... Also, enjoyed the 'Oh my god this guys arm!' AD reference.
humor prank facebook journalism fax photo 2009 Sep 12, 3:57"An introduction to Apple's Hypercard... Originally broadcast in 1987."
history apple hypercard mac computer programming video 2009 Sep 12, 3:51
sequelguy posted a photo:
Wtf? For more see the 'Most Condescending Game Ever' thread on www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/33357
wtf boardgame parkerbrothers careersforgirls 2009 Sep 11, 8:39"In the W3C Media Fragment Working Group (MFWG) we have had long discussions about the use of the URI query (”?”) or the URI fragment (”#”) addressing approach for addressing directly into media
fragments, and the diverse new HTTP headers required to serve such URI requests, considering such side conditions as the stripping-off of fragment parameters from a URI by Web browsers, or the
existence of caching Web proxies."
fragment uri via:connolly media url query http http-header 2009 Sep 11, 8:31Win7 commercial featuring ponies and bunnies and pink and the final countdown...
humor video windows win7 ad youtube microsoft 2009 Sep 10, 10:26"Here’s the reading list for an upcoming session of Scott Bradner’s class on Internet Architectural Principles"
reference internet history architecture todo technical 2009 Sep 10, 8:22Geoff Nunberg investigates issues in Google Books and in the comments Google Book's team manager responds in the comments. Apparently metadata is bad everywhere and not an issue new to the Web and
user generated content or tagging. Like finding Feynman lectures categorized as Death Metal on Napster back in the day.
language google library metadata catalog 2009 Sep 10, 6:26Typekit's protections for their hosted fonts include referer header checking, and various obfuscations: "Our intent is only to discourage casual misuse and to make it clear that taking fonts from
Typekit is an explicit and intentional act."
via:kottke font typekit internet web security legal technical 2009 Sep 9, 5:35The FTP spec's section 3.5 'ERROR RECOVERY AND RESTART' describes how to resume an FTP download.
ietf reference ftp rfc resume download internet technical 2009 Sep 2, 4:44Humorous Nintendo/Ghostbusters t-shirt.
humor videogame nintendo ghostbusters shirt 2009 Sep 2, 4:36"Consider it, maybe, the souped-up Tiger/Game & Watch LCD version of Mirror's Edge, then: you have one goal, and one button, and the goal is to run, and the button is jump, and the game comes
from simply maintaining breakneck momentum as you leap from rooftop to randomly generated rooftop."
game flash mirrors-edge 2009 Sep 1, 4:59"...toy and apparel designers Kid Robot (with the help of creative ideas studio We Are Plus) have organized a mobile phone-based scavenger hunt in Manhattan centered around scanning QR codes."
qrcode phone scavenger-hunt toy advertising 2009 Sep 1, 4:36"I’ve written a small Java application that will read in a CSS file and output its contents to stdout or another file in a format that’s optimised for gzipping." Cool!
via:kris.kowal technical compression css web performance gzip java 2009 Sep 1, 4:25"Each unit has a stable URI, making it possible to link to it from your own domain models in a reliable way. For each unit, the ontology defines some useful metadata including abbreviation, a link to
DBpedia and a categorization of units into groups, such as length units."
semanticweb via:connolly web unit conversion uri technical 2009 Sep 1, 4:20"Grant says that PBS, CPB and the Department of Education put significant funding toward programming that would teach kids how to read — but that's not what Reading Rainbow was trying to do."
via:waxy history tv read reading-rainbow levar-burton pbs npr 2009 Aug 28, 9:12
sequelguy posted a photo:
Saw this at the Fremont Market. The tag read along the lines of Veterinary related tool -- three guesses.
seattle wa tool veterinary
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