Now this is really cool. A utility that allows you to map an FTP site as a Windows drive. This sure makes web site maintenance a whole bunch easier. Make sure you use the Google link in the story to find the download (not the commenter’s link to Novell) – it appears that Novell might have removed the file from their site.
There are thousands of blogs out there which makes the job of exposing your blog to new readers very difficult. There are the usual methods such as pinging sites like blo.gs. Then there’s more shady systems of ‘click exchanges’. I was leary of these services, mostly because it seemed like just a random traffic generator, without actually having people read the content. But I broke down and decided to try one out. I managed to find BlogClicker which is a click exchange system designed specifically for blogs. Basically, you sign up, register your blog, then start surfing other blogs using their web-based tool. You have to spend 20 seconds or more on a site, and you get credit for viewing that site. These credits will add your own site to other people’s viewing (the more you view, the more your own site gets viewed). I’ve been using it for a couple of days, and I’ve managed to find a couple of very interesting blogs, as well as hopefully expose my blog to a new audience.
The XBox is a very nice piece of hardware. The simple addition of a modchip and large hard drive turn it into the ideal media centre. In fact, I’ve now got two of them in my house. One of them isn’t even used for games playing – purely for media playback.
It’s the media playback capabilities of software such as XBMC that make it so versatile. I use a Linux box running Azureus to acquire a large quantity of my video entertainment. It allows me to catch up on my favourite UK sitcoms and soap operas from Canada. The Linux box shares the download directory as a Samba share, and XBMC points to that share.
The missing piece is to be able to watch recorded shows from my satellite. I already own the Bell ExpressVu 5100 PVR, but it’s a sorry excuse for a PVR – it can’t record by show name, only by date an time, so it’s not much better than an old VCR! So I decided to see what MythTV could do for me.
MythTV gives me all of the functionality of a TiVo box, but without the DRM. I set up a second Linux box as my MythTV backend server. It is connected to a Bell ExpressVu 2700 receiver. I built an IR blaster using the plans found here. After fighting with lirc for a few days, I finally got it set up and changing channels on my receiver.
The front end involves using the XBMCMythTV scripts on my Xbox. These scripts are still a little rough around the edges (watching live TV is still touch and go), but it works well enough for recorded programs. There’s a problem with XBMC and MythTV at the moment. Apparently, the two projects have differing ideas about how to interpret the NUV file format standard (this is the format that MythTV uses). The scripts work fine if the video source was recorded using a MPEG2 hardware compression capture card, but doesn’t work if the video is encoded in MPEG4 (which is the case for the lower end capture cards). There are rumors of a patched mplayer.dll file for XBMC that fixes this problem, but it didn’t work for me.
I came across this blog entry today. Very interesting. It outlines how to use the 1-800-FREE411 service with SkypeOut to make a call to a normal landline without using your SkypeOut minutes (because Skype doesn’t charge for calls to 800 numbers). The only caveat with this process is that you have to have a SkypeOut account set up with a balance (even though the balance doesn’t get used for these calls). Very cool!
For several years, my main internet connection at home has been via ADSL service from our incumbent telecommunications carrier Telus. These people aren’t exactly known for their customer service, and I’ve had many, many run-ins with them over the years (both with my residential services, as well as my company’s business Internet services, voice, and cellular services). For the last six months or so, they have been sending me threatening emails explaining to me that my excessive bandwaidth usage violates their terms of service. Now please understand that I’m not talking about your everyday $20 residential service. I pay $85 per month for 2.5Mbps business service with two fixed IP addresses.
I thought that I had better do something to help with the bandwidth consumption before I lost my internet connection. My first attempts (which were quite successful) were to set up a wifi card on my main linux router machine to ‘acquire’ a connection from one of several neighbour’s wifi connections.
This worked fine for several months, but started to become more unreliable (such as some neighbours enabling WEP, and others moving their access points, possibly to move them away from me??) Then a stroke of luck – Telus told me that I could ‘upgrade’ my service to 2.5Mbps for only $40 per month. As I mentioned before, I already have 2.5Mbps, as well as fixed IP addresses, which cost me $85 per month. I pounced on the offer to upgrade my service and drop my monthly fee. The sales person on the other end assured me that I would be able to keep my fixed IP addresses and drop my monthly fee to $40 per month. This sounded great, so I signed up. Everything was fine for the first month, so I decided I would take my monthly savings, and splash out on a residential cable Internet connection from Shaw. For $30 plus $40, I now had a dual homed network in my basement. Everything was beautiful for several months.
Then I checked my credit card statement. It appears that Telus was billing me $85 again. I immediately telephoned them and asked them waht was going on. They explained that their system had discovered a configuration error with my account, and fixed up the billing. After explaining the entire story, they proceeded to tell me that the employee was in error, and if I wanted to keep my fixed IP addresses (which I wanted to do), I would have to continue to pay $85 per month.
I thought ‘f*ck this’, and thought I’d look into fixed IP address services from Shaw, and drop Telus completely. I called their sales office, and discovered that I could get their SOHO business class service, with two fixed IP addresses for $85 per month (sounds familiar…). I decided to go for it, with every intention of phoning up Telus and cancelling my service.
I upgraded the home Shaw service to SOHO. And then the problems began. I unplugged the Telus connection, and did some speed tests using only the Shaw connection. Quite frankly, it sucked. I couldn’t get anything more than 1.5Mbps, and most of the time, it was worse. I felt like an idiot. I checked the Saw website again. There it was – ‘Up to 5Mbps’. I sure wasn’t getting that! A call to tech support confirmed that I wasn’t getting that, and after some troubleshooting, it was recommended that I replace my modem. Instead of waiting for a service call, I went to the local Shaw office, and picked up a replacement modem. I plugged it in, and discovered that the speed was exactly the same. This time, the tech told me that I was getting a perfectly acceptable rate, and I should be happy. Well, I asked for a supervisor, and explained the whole sorry story. Unbelievably, this guy was very understanding, and conceded that the current network design wouldn’t get me the consistent speeds I was looking for. He was very helpful in crediting my account and closing it.
Now, I’m back to my Telus service. I’m glad I didn’t get around to disconnecting! At least I have my 2.5Mbps back. But I still have the problem of not enough traffic allowance per month…
As I recently blogged, I’ve set up a Bell ExpressVu receiver to receive NASA TV. Soon after installing the system, I ran in to a TV ‘scheduling’ issue with the rest of the family (who aren’t nearly as interested in watching images of astronauts brushing their teeth in zero-g). Instead of moving the entire setup to a second television set, I decided to move the receiver to my server room, and build a distribution system to distribute the channel to all of the televisions in the house.
I don’t use any antenna inputs on any of my televisions, because all of the devices I use (satellite receivers, XBOX consoles, etc) have composite, component, or S-video outputs. This means that every set has an unused antenna input that would be an ideal input to view the NASA TV. Unfortunately, I would have to run a second coax cable to each set just for this. Instead of that, I discovered a way to ‘multiplex’ the Bell ExpressVu LNB signal and the channel 3 signal from the NASA TV receiver.
The trick is to use some satellite/UHF/VHF combiners (a fuzzy picture here). I put one of these in the server room on the output of the NASA TV receiver to multiplex the channel 3 signal on the LNB feed back upstairs to the TV. On the TV end, I put another one of these to de-multiplex the LNB signal and the channel 3 signal, which goes straight to the antenna input of the TV. This worked beautifully, so I then split the channel 3 signal into 3, ran this in to 3 separate combiners, and multiplexed the signal on 3 separate LNB feeds to separate TVs around the house.
This now gives me the ability to watch NASA TV at three separate locations in the house.
Can We Fix It? I’m not sure. I’ve known for a long time that the voice characters for Bob The Builder are very much different in the US/Canadian version than the original UK version. I can’t tell you the look on Matthew’s face when he watched a UK import of Bob the Builder and heard all of the different voices. Because of my family’s British history (and my tendancy to BitTorrent newer Bob episodes from the UK) Matthew is more than comfortable with the two versions of the voices.
Recently, a whole new story arc started in the UK version, called “Project Fix-It”. This is a sequence of stories with Bob basically building a whole new town in Sunflower Valley. The UK version has the original voices (such as Neil Morrissey as Bob. I woke up this morning to see that Sunflower Valley had finally arrived on Treehouse in Canada (More info here). However, both Matthew and I were shocked to hear yet another Bob voice!
I did some Internet searching, but I can’t find anything on the voice changes.
Edit:
After viewing the PVR recording, I see that Bob’s voice is now done by Greg Proops (you’ll recognize him from the American version of ‘Whose Line Is It Anyway’). It’s funny that I couldn’t find any reference to this on the web. It’s not (yet) in the IMDB entry, and I can’t find it on The Official Greg Proops Website.
nola-intel.org has been set up with a Wiki for distributing online sources of information on New Orleans. There’s links to streaming audio and video.
The disaster that is unfolding in New Orleans has left me without words. I came across this blog entry that has done an excellent job of bringing together images from various sources and pinpoints the locations of the levee breaches.
I’m a programmer by trade. As such, I find myself visiting several different web sites just to get my daily fill of programming-related news stories. To help me out (and to experiment with Movable Type’s XML-RPC interfaces), I put together PsychicProgrammer.com. It uses RSS feeds from popular programming news sites to populate a Movable Type blog using XML-RPC. Feel free to try it out.