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Internet Archive: Free Download: The Spirituals to Swing Concerts of 1938 - 1939 (April 11, 1971)

2009 Sep 25, 12:14"Phil Elwood presents the complete recordings of two concerts organized by John Hammond and given on the Christmas Eves of 1938 and 1939 at Carnegie Hall; featuring the best Swing, Blues, and Gospel musicians of the day. Performers include Charlie Christian, Lester Young, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Bill Broozy, and many others"PermalinkCommentsmusic cc swing concert

Comcast Digital Switch Impact on My Windows Media Center

2009 Sep 25, 2:19

Amateur wireless station (LOC)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:

  1. I can only record one thing at a time now
  2. Changing the channel is slow taking many seconds (no flipping through channels for me)
  3. 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.PermalinkCommentsdigital tv hauppauge mce cable windows media center comcast

Printing police handcuff keys … « blackbag

2009 Sep 16, 4:48"German SSDeV member Ray is known all around the world for his impressive collection of handcuffs and his fun ways of opening most of them. ... At HAR he pulled another stunt: He used a 3D printer to print handcuff keys. And not just any ordinary handcuff key … no, it’s the official handcuff key from the Dutch police!" Plus at the bottom a story on the legality of possessing handcuff keys.PermalinkCommentslegal security printer 3d key handcuff police

The first Windows 7 commercial airs - Ars Technica

2009 Sep 11, 8:31Win7 commercial featuring ponies and bunnies and pink and the final countdown...PermalinkCommentshumor video windows win7 ad youtube microsoft

linkiblog | How to Build a Popularity Algorithm You can be Proud of

2009 Sep 9, 5:49PermalinkCommentstechnical statistics algorithms howto social tutorial math popular reddit digg programming

Love this laughter: Sony's sublime emotion-detecting patent illustration | Offworld

2009 Aug 19, 8:06"I can conceive of no reality in which the designer behind Fig. 2 of Sony's newly patented emotion-detecting system didn't understand what he'd just created, especially as they perfectly distilled What TV Comedy Looks Like."
PermalinkCommentshumor tv ps3 patent design videogame

payyattention / a social network of micropatronage

2009 Aug 14, 10:17Micropayment service for bloggers -- "per article micropatronage". Supports levels of benefits for readers - pay X or more and get the ad-less version of my blog. Link to your fav. article through payyattention and payyattention will count how much money your reference generated. Some neat features in there. Too bad its not a distributed protocol.PermalinkCommentsvia:sambrook video money micropayment patronage journalism economics newspaper business

If It's Hip, It's Here: Craftsquatch Geeky Pillows & My Suite Stuff Adobe CS Pillows

2009 Aug 11, 7:36Its like favicons on pillows.
PermalinkCommentscute internet geek pillow favicon social shopping

Behind the Scenes of TED | Brain Pickings

2009 Jul 20, 5:20"what better way to celebrate the tremendously fascinating week ahead than with a special behind-the-scenes look at all the incredible energy — physical, intellectual, emotional — that goes into the making of a TED talk?"PermalinkCommentsblog ted conference design video

YouTube - Louis Vuitton "SUPERFLAT MONOGRAM"

2009 Jul 9, 10:53"...but the inside of his stomach is gateway to a psychadelic wonderland." Need I quote more? The whole thing made me think of a rather upbeat and trippy episode of Lain. Also, one of the repeating noises in the soundtrack made me think I was finishing a lap in Mario Kart.PermalinkCommentsvideo art ad commercial anime animation louis-vuitton superflat Takashi-Murakami cute psychadelic

Free Associations

2009 Jul 7, 1:01Zeke's blog|Zeke Odins-LucasPermalinkCommentszeke friend blog microsoft ie ie8 programming

CAN PEOPLE DISTINGUISH PATE FROM DOG FOOD? - AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF WINE ECONOMISTS

2009 Jul 6, 2:06"Considering the similarity of its ingredients, canned dog food could be a suitable and inexpensive substitute for pate or processed blended meat products such as Spam or liverwurst... Although 72% of subjects ranked the dog food as the worst of the five samples in terms of taste... subjects were not better than random at correctly identifying the dog food."PermalinkCommentshumor science statistics food culture research study paper

WGMX 4 - Zombocalypse on Vimeo

2009 Jun 30, 4:59"Congratulations on not being devoured and purchasing the Wagglemax Zombocalypse TM Survival Kit"PermalinkCommentshumor video commercial ad apocalypse zombie horror for:hellosarah videogame

Linking to or Embedding a Portion of a Video

2009 Jun 19, 10:12

I'm excited by HTML5's video tag as are plenty of other people. Once that comes about and once media fragments are adopted, linking to or embedding a portion of a video will be as easy as using the correct fragment on your URL thanks to the Media Fragments WG who has been hard at work since the last time I looked at fragments.

However, until that work is embraced by browsers, embedding portions of videos will continue to require work specific to the site from which you are embedding the video. On the YouTube blog they wrote about how to "link to the best parts in your videos", using a fragment syntax like '#t=1m15s' to start playback of the associated video at 1 minute and 15 seconds. Of course if you want to embed part of a Hulu video it will be different. Although I haven't found an authoritative source describing the URL syntax to use, you can follow Hulu's video guide on linking to part of a video and note how the URL changes as you adjust the slider on the time-line. It looks like their syntax for linking to a Hulu page is to add '?c=[start time in seconds](:[end time in seconds])' with the colon and end time optional in order to link to a portion of a video. And the syntax for embedding appears to be "http://www.hulu.com/embed/.../[start time in seconds](/[end time in seconds])" again with the end time optional.

For more sites, check out the Media Fragments WG's list of existing applications' proprietary fragmenting schemes.

PermalinkCommentshulu technical media fragment wg url youtube video html5 uri fragment

Mostly Moved Into New House

2009 Jun 19, 8:07

New House ExteriorThe weekend before the previous, Sarah and I moved our belongings into the new house and spent a lot of time packing and unpacking, and now we're officially living there (interested Facebook friends can find my new address or just ask me). The Saturday of the previous weekend Sarah's family came over for a half house warming and half Sarah's birthday celebration which was fun and served to force us to do more unpacking and forced me to take trips to Home Depot, Bed Bath and Beyond, etc. On Sunday, Sarah and I went out to her favorite restaurant and she opened her gifts that I had to hide to keep her from opening before her birthday. Happy Birthday Sarah!

While at Home Depot I had trouble finding what I was actually looking for, but I did find everything I needed to terminate the Cat5e cables that are wired in the house. Each room has a wall plate with two RJ45 sockets, both sockets wired to Cat5e cable. One of the cables per plate was already hooked up to a standard phone service punchdown board and the other cables per plate were all hanging unterminated next to the punchdown board. So now I've terminated them all with RJ45 connectors and hooked them up to my hub, wireless router, cable modem, etc. I had the same sort of fun setting all that up as I did playing with model train sets as a child. Hopefully no therapy will be required to figure out why that is.

PermalinkCommentspersonal2 train address sarah house new-house birthday

Paleo-Future: Robots vs. Musicians (1931)

2009 Jun 12, 9:16"This ad from the March 9, 1931 Simpson's Leader-Times (Kittanning, PA) is in no way subtle. The consequences of using recorded music at theatre performances rather than live musicians are, "Monotony in the theatre - corruption of taste - destruction of art." Yikes."PermalinkCommentsvia:ethan_t_hein music advertising technology robot copyright

It's official: 'Futurama' is reborn! | News | Ausiello Files | EW.com

2009 Jun 10, 11:55"Six years after getting axed by Fox, Futurama is being resurrected on Comedy Central"PermalinkCommentstv news futurama

Social Media Venn Diagram Tee

2009 Jun 2, 11:18"Social Media. Unlocking the awesome potential of behavioral disorders." Can't go wrong with a venn diagram shirt.PermalinkCommentssocial humor shirt facebook twitter via:ericlaw

hey ben dot com : pick one

2009 May 29, 12:48"I don't often link to my own stuff, but this is a little experiment of mine. It gives you two random things, and you pick one. Every time a thing is picked, it gets a point."PermalinkCommentspickone art social top-ten humor

Dispatches from the Island: Went to a Castle

2009 May 22, 6:37Famous people are just like me! That is, Jorge Garcia (Hurley from Lost) also has a blog on which he writes about and posts pictures of his visit to the Neuschhwanstein Castle in Munich (the basis of the Disney castle). But apparently unlike me he didn't take the Bus of the Year 2005 to get to the castle.PermalinkCommentsvia:kottke hurley lost tv blog germany for:hellosarah
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