HDTV, DLP LED TV's, 32 Sats in GPS, Benefits of the Space Program, Windows Live Writer

Been getting over one of the worse flu's I've ever had, still recovering but here's a few blog entries to read.

HDTV, DLP LED TV's

An engineer from one of our local tv stations (WWNY) has been posting a small blog about their station's transition to HDTV, a good little reference if you're looking for one. Link.

He too, seems frustrated that there us so much misunderstanding among the citizens of the US when it comes to the whole HDTV and Digital TV thing. See my previous blog entry for a general explanation if you need one.

We recently upgraded from a very nice HD-compatible rear projection tv to a pretty good DLP LED tv with an HD tuner. The quality of the HD signal is excellent, and we have not had any drop-outs from weather or anything else. We may not, as the signal strength for the local signal is nearly pegged.

The tv itself was a bit of a compromise. Of course, if money were no option we would have gotten a plasma. But they are not only more expensive, by a lot, but WILL fade eventually.

This DLP is slightly smaller then our old one, which is a great disappointment to me but it was the largest DLP LED we could find. And we definitely did not want to go with the DLP that used the lamp instead of the LED (who wants to replace that lamp every few years, despite the display's slight increase in response time with the lamp).

We have no experienced any of the rainbow effects that a small number of people seem to be able to see with DLP's, though the LED may slightly decrease this chance.

I also haven't the pixelization during heavy action/high quality audio that some people notice and that I noticed on my wife's mother's tv (similar model but smaller). That television had some bad pixelization. Then again, it was strictly being used through the local cable systems - neglible quality at best through the Time-Warner system, so that doesn't mean much.

We haven't seen it through the six or seven local HD stations we receive, nor the DVD (upconverted DVD player) nor through our digital satellite service.

I like the HD, but I wish everything were in the full rez 1080 as this doesn't seem to be consistent.

You can even see Obama's muscle twitch when a question stumps him. Now that's good TV!

Thirty-Two GPS Sats

I believe that we have a full 31 or 32 GPS satellites opened up the civilian GPS nav system now. Combined with WAAS we have the ability for some fairly accurate positional measurements with the GPS'es sold now. Our local TV station (WWNY) even did a little story on Geocaching.

Benefits of the Space Program

We're all ignorant about some things, no matter how well-informed we think we are as Americans. But there's some things that some of us should at least be marginally more aware of, at least basically.
Like the basic principles of how some of our everyday items work so that we can better use them - electronics, phones, cars, tv's, etc. Do most of us have the smallest inkling of the principles behind them. Do you know why your phone fades out in certain areas or why your car's oil needs changing?
Probably not, and likely it won't hurt you not to know. I'd like to go into this in a later blog with an idea I have. But right now; talking about the average American's ignorance - the Space Program.
I think an overwhelming opinion is that it's a waste of money, a boondoggle, there's not going to be any benefit from it, etc - have your pick.
Fortunately this is far from true, and a little quick research on the Internet allows any person to make their own INFORMED conclusion versus an UNINFORMED opinion. There's way too many uninformed opinions going around as it is.
Basically, any high technology - no matter how small - usually brings benefits to humankind. Sometimes directly, many times indirectly, and sometimes with unintentional or side-benefits not envisioned initially.
Take the war in Iraq, for example. No matter how much we may detest it in general there are many technological, science, medical, offensive and defensive, safety and protection, etc benefits coming out of it.
Anything that pushes technology, scientific principles, medical advances and hundreds or thousands of other corresponding and related and sometimes unrelated and unintentional - will at least have some good side benefits.
And the Space Program sure does all of the above. The aspects that go into getting people into space cover a wide, wide spectrum of science and technology. And our subsequent direct and indirect benefits are immeasurable. There's not one person who's reading this who hasn't gotten some benefits from one of the technologies that were direct or indirect spin-offs or by-products of the space program.

Windows Live Writer

What, did Microsoft actually create a piece of free software that is damn usable? Like Windows Live Writer?

Yes, I would say so. Basically, it's a standalone blog editor that supports any of the standard blogging formats, including Google's Blogger.

It's kinda what I've been looking for (and how did I not run across it before). Forget Scribefire and Flock, or blogger's sometimes-awkward online editor.

Give Windows Live Writer a try, it's a snap to download and set up and should work with most any blogger (but not all). Spell checker, formatting, draft saving; the same stuff you'll find elsewhere but implemented in one package that works well.

Tweaking Vista, TV Converter Box Program, Bricked WT54G, Minifox for Firefox

Tweaking Vista

Vista. Yea, you've all heard of the problems or more then likely ran into them yourself if you got it on a new computer system or installed it.

I've been helping people with it, usually to get rid of it in most cases or live with it and learn it in others. But really I haven't had the opportunity to sit down with it and figure the in's and out's of it, on a deeper level.

My new laptop came with it. Of course, my first thought was to dump Vista and install XP. I'd dealt with so many headaches concerning Vista, and read about many more.

Well, no, I guess my first thought wasn't exactly to dump Vista - my first thought was to dump the incredibly slow and resource-munching Norton. I did that; which is pretty much mandatory with me. Norton, in any of it's present forms is a hulk of bloatware. It does it's job, especially for those who really need it, but there's many better alternatives.

So after that I set out to really get into the 'innards' of Vista and see if I could make it usable for a super power user like me, and maybe go a bit further for some of my customers then just making sure they know how to use it and turn off the standard crap that they don't need and slugs everything down.

After a week of tinkering I've sped Vista up tremendously; I've gotten rid of the idiotic pop-up messages that ask you questions all the time (like from the "User Account Control" [first thing I disabled] and the built-in firewall), turned off the useless sidebar (installed Rocketdock instead) and hungry real-time indexing, unselected some start up services that were totally unnecessary, put on a compatible firewall and anti-virus, and am delving into the other services that can be disabled. Black Viper, who you'll know if if you're a tech or a tweaking junkie, has some great stuff out. Absolutely required reading.

I eventually partitioned the harddrive and stuck XP on another partition, then repaired the freaky boot stuff that Vista uses (and the XP boot loader destroyed) as well as the MBR. The whole thing took a couple hours of playing around, though it's not that complicated once you use some of the various software made to make it easier. I wanted to figure it out myself though.

Now I have XP on it also, with a nice menu for dual-booting. Maybe Linux next.

But you know what? With the tweaks and such I don't mind Vista. It's not great, but it's not real bad.

There's a bunch of stuff it won't run, especially some of the higher level stuff. Things that you guys who maybe stick to using browsers and e-mail and Office might not run into. But I bet sometime you'll find something it won't run, at least until software is updated from each manufacturer/programming house.

Even with the tweaks the normal use of the GUI interface is slightly slower then XP on the same machine. Aero may be the culprit, but it's too damned pretty to get rid of (at least until I get sick of it - and then likely I'll turn off themes altogether; a great savings in speed and resources). And some programs seem to run slower, especially their interfaces which, again; may have something to do with the Aero theme.

On the other hand some things blaze while they go somewhat slower on XP. Math-oriented, those with high levels of processing for example. Celestia is a good demo - the 64 bit architecture of the machine as well as Vista makes the smooth rendering even smoother on this machine.

So, I plan on keeping it on my laptop - running alongside XP, but more then likely the primary OS on that particular computer. Why, oh why, did MS make such a crappy system out of the box with so many nonsense and wasteful and plain idiotic parts that could; easily be turned off to make it run better and easier and more user friendly.

My conclusions are fairly simple.

It's a crappy operating system in it's stock form. For those who don't do a whole lot with their computers they may not notice it much, or it may be a minor annoyance. More then likely a good percentage will really not want to switch at this point or may want to go back to XP (like so many already have and will continue to for awhile).

If you're into tweaking or have someone like me to do it for you; Vista can be hyped up, streamlined, and made much much more usable and faster. You really won't mind it as long as your favorite programs run on it in that case. Otherwise, avoid it for now.

TV Converter Box Program

We don't live too far from a good-sized city. Unfortunately the area is serviced by a somewhat disreputable and money-hungry conglomerate. You've probably heard of them if you live in this part of the country, and if you have you've probably heard the same problems with them.

We've only about six hundred feet from a cable line but the company refuses to run it to us. Scratch that - they'd run it for us; for thousands and thousands of dollars. We've tried for years to get them to.

On an earlier blog entry you'll see the set up I put into place using two of my hacked routers to span the distance between a neighbor and us, so as to allow us to share his broadband. But after awhile, though we had the system in place, we lost the interest in giving the money-grubbers a cent of our money - either for Internet or TV.

So we get our TV off the satellite (DishNetwork) which works tremendously well and has been digital for years. HD channels are also available but we've never gotten around to go with it as it costs a bit more.

But for local channels we need to receive them off-the-air. Our TV doesn't have an HD converter box nor integral tuner for it, even though it's compatible, and our local stations are simulcasting in both analog and HD right now, and have been for quite some time.

As most of you probably know eventually those receiving over-the-air broadcasts will have to be receiving it in HD as the analog signals will end next year.

What a pisser, huh? We have all this high quality TV equipment with a high quality digital signal but to receive a couple local channels we have to get them in a crappy analog signal, and will be out in the cold next year when they stop broadcasting in analog.

Like many areas, our local TV stations aren't carried by the satellite company as yet, otherwise it wouldn't be a problem.

So at midnight on January 1st I logged onto The Government's TV Converter Program Website and applied for a couple vouchers for converters boxes. Yes, they turned the site on at exactly midnight ;)

Unfortunately it seems that the general idea is for the government to supply these vouchers for the cheaper or moderately cheap boxes. In other words most will only take the digital HD signal and down-convert them to analog - at least it's looking that way.

What we want is a converter that takes the digital HD signal and outputs it into an equally good signal via any number of ways so that our TV can access that high quality signal. We'll have to wait and see what the boxes will really be capable of doing. My guess is they will at least have RCA cables and maybe S-video; better then analog.

This whole process though... Sure, the analog range is kinda splotchy and wasteful because our transmitters are much more precise now then when TV first went on the air. And the bandwidth being wasted can be used for bigger and better things. But I can't help but wonder about this whole thing. The explanations the FCC gives, well, I think a group of politicians are getting their hands royally greased in this whole deal by certain large manufacturers and services, while we; the taxpayer, take up the slack by helping to provide the vouchers and paying for converters our of our own pockets as a stopgap measure for those who receive off-the-air signals. What a boondoggle.

Bricked WT54G.

Ugh, out of the blue my WT54G V5 bricked on me. I'm going to try all the usual methods first, but I'm afraid that I am going to have to take it apart and do a manual restart. Great. Risky.

My WR54G V3 is still running strong on the Linux DD-WRT software (though I was writing a configuration and accidentally turned it off before it was finished. A simple reset fixed it, no problem.). But the non-Linux version seems to be pretty flaky on the V5, squished onto the smaller space as it is too.

Minifox for Firefox

For those who like to tweak Firefox and want as much screen real estate as possible check out the Minifox extension. It squeezes everything down, gaining you a few lines of space in your browser window, There's also a version for Thunderbird, though I haven't tried the Thunderbird one as yet.