18 people in China downloaded my silly rendition of yankee doodle via some crazy search engine (the ranking seems to change by the minute). World tour in 3..2..1..
Realtime video transmitted over wireless
A long time ago, I lost my way. And by “way” I mean “the F-connector die set for my racheting crimper.” That thing is impossible to find. I’m trying to locate it because I just got a large new aerial TV antenna so that I can get more hi-def channels (for a mere $25 – don’t waste your money on the $100 ones at BB or CC). I plan to mount the monstrousity of aluminum in my attic and connect it via RG-6 running through the same path in the walls that my cat-5 cables take. This will be a bit more challenging the second time around since the holes in the walls cut for that purpose are now all sealed up. Anyway, last night, unable to make a 100′ cable without the crimper, I assembled the antenna in my living room and connected it via some short coax I had around, and the results are fantastic. Before, I could barely receive FOX and get nothing else; now I get all the networks, mHz, and PBS in glorious digital picture and 5.1 sound. Hooray for the electromagnetic spectrum! WB still doesn’t come in, as if I watch that anyway. Maybe this weekend I’ll get it all setup in mythtv so that when I record, say, the mind-enhancing television show 24, mythtv uses the HD card instead of cable.
(Kill your TV.)
Flicks
Since I’m a recent Netflix subscriber still determined to get my money’s worth, I’ve been watching tons of movies lately. Last night I watched Cidade de Deus (City of God). What a powerful movie. I was planning on watching only the first hour because I started it relatively late, but it really drew me in. It’s like Menace II Society with subtitles, but more violent. And you even feel empathetic towards a murderous drug dealer, for a little while.
Also, I watched Sideways last weekend. Vastly overrated and really, really boring. If only the directors had spent another half hour spelling out the painfully obvious grape-as-life metaphor! The movie just made me want to go to a winery… and punch everyone there.
Cinco de Mayo is coming up so I need to find something to do for that. Also the Chili Cook-off is coming up – anyone going?
En Español
If I had it to do over again, I would’ve taken Spanish in high school or college. Not only would I then have the obvious benefit of being able to hit on J. Lo in two different languages, I would also be able to help out the occasional lost non-English speaker. Telling someone how to manuever the complexities of transfers at Rosslyn is difficult enough without a language barrier, but yesterday I tried to help a guy who asked, “Donde esta cor how?” I think he was asking how to get to Court House, but I have no idea, really. He also showed a card with an address on 14th St in DC, but said that he wasn’t going there. Right, that’s not confusing at all.
After several minutes of gesticulating, I think he got the point: Orange line, this platform, one stop. My limited Spanish vocabulary stops short of colors, so I couldn’t really convey which train to take, except by indicating the number two. Yes, I suck at charades. My train, the blue line, arrived first, so I don’t know how he fared, so to speak. He may still be wandering the tunnels of the DC subway system. Good luck, amigo. Vaya con dios.
Codetalkers
Last night I went to see Col. Bruce Hampton and the Codetalkers, with special guest Jimmy Herring. Hampton of course was the brainchild behind the unit who rescued the aquarium, where Jimmy first came to acclaim by literally dozens of fans. The crowd at historic State Theater last night was also pretty sparse, around 150 at the most, but those of us who made it caught a real treat. The State bills Codetalkers as “eclectic,” which was right on: selections ranged from bluegrass to standard jazz progressions, all mixed in with the band’s great stage antics. (At one point, on cue from the colonel, everyone began playing with their instrument behind their head. Including the bass player. Who was playing an upright string bass.)
I’ve raved about him before but I have to say that Herring once again reinforced my conviction that he is today’s best unknown guitarist. He effortlessly plays in, around, and outside the changes, at times with a Allman-esque pentatonic simplicity, at others with blistering arpeggios and bebop riffs. Also contributing was local Ron Holloway on the sax. I thought I had seen him play before, and after poking around on his website, I’m pretty sure he sat in on a DTB show at the Birchmere once.
Codetalkers aren’t what I would consider “serious” music, but they are all serious musicians, just having fun on stage. And if you don’t have a good time watching them, you suck.
Eat more potassium benzoate
I still can’t decide if Coke with Lime is the best thing to happen to soda, or if it is poison. I typically change my mind from one to the other about halfway through. I love that it has as an ingredient, “Potassium benzoate (to protect taste).”
The GT alumni club’s softball team really sucks, and I say that as one of the proud owners of an “E” last night. Signs of agility: before the game even started I picked up two bruises on my right shin and hurt my lower back. At least we dominate post-game drinking contests.
Got my HD card working last night. Seems the trick was using dvbstream to capture things as opposed to cat. So my $10 rabbit ears from years ago proved still useful here in the 21st century: I could watch a digital version of old standard def Friends reruns. Woohoo. I’ll still probably go get a better antenna this weekend. Anyone taking bets as to whether I impulse buy a 50″ DLP TV as well?
My illegal computer
My PVR now does HDTV. Sort of. I bought the pre-ridiculous broadcast flag law HDTV receiver card from pcHDTV, before they become a gray-market commodity on eBay. It arrived last Friday in a box containing a brochure about the EFF, which I found a nice touch. Note to self: renew membership for this year.
Last night was the first chance I had to try it out. I downloaded kernel 2.6.12-rc2, compiled it, repeated the process until I figured out which modules I was supposed to use, then dmesg reported success. I proceeded to try to tune the six or seven channels I can receive in my area. I don’t have a real antenna so I used an old pair of rabbit ears that I had. Got locks on 3 or 4 channels, which is good. The signal was too noisy on all of them to actually capture anything, which is bad. I also tried tuning QAM over my (analog) cable with no luck. So I guess I’ll be buying an antenna soon. Then all I need to get is an HD television, a minor detail.
Having finished the issue, I do have to say that MAKE has too many articles of the following form, which is to say more than one: I found myself wondering how to do [some incredibly mundane task] on my [Powerbook|G5|ipod], then I located [overpriced commercial package] and it solved all my problems! What that has to do with making things, I don’t know.
Make
A nice complement to my recently manifested build-lust, I found in my mailbox on Friday the first issue of MAKE magazine. First impression: it is like a print version of BoingBoing. All your favorite writers are there: Messrs. Doctorow and Frauenfelder, that chick who always talks about herself or semi-famous people she knows, and that David guy. And the writing styles are pretty familiar; for example Cory D’s submission turns a cool article about kids taking apart cheap toy dogs into some kind of anti-Sony IP polemic. Along with articles detailing student projects taking place in various university labs, the mag contains four DIY projects ranging from the overly simplistic (making an ethernet cable) to some soldering skill required (make a magstripe reader). If you are currently a thorough consumer of the internet, you will probably have seen some of the content before, such as the cheap steady cam built with pipes. But on the whole, it’s a solid zine, and for now it lacks the page after page of ad copy that makes reading Wired or pretty much any other tech mag especially tiresome. Worth the price of admission.
Mod part 2
Lately I’ve been consumed with an urge to build things. Call it a manic phase. So last night I indulged, armed with my newest power tool: a Dremel. 35000 RPMs of pure madness. When I have it in my hands, you’d be well advised to stand back ten feet.
Okay, I know case modding is the geek equivalent of spoilers and ground effects. All the same, it is nice to add a little bit of personal touch, however slight, to one’s homegrown Tivo replacement. Since my newly-acquired LCD module didn’t fit in my case, I knew I’d have to do a little bit of surgery.
Obstacle number one is that the hard drives bump right up against the location where the LCD would have to go (there is already a display window that for some reason was placed there). I took the hard drive cage out, and moved the hard drives to the 5.25″ bays with mounting brackets. My ZIP drive occupying one of those spots got the boot. This was a bit of a tight fit because there are front panel USB and firewire connectors on the case that intrude into the bottom-most drive bay, but with some better cable routing and by mounting the harddrive a little high, I squeezed it all in there.
Obstacle number two is that the existing opening for the LCD is nowhere near big enough for this module. I had originally considered making a hole large enough for the entire PCB assembly and mounting the LCD from the front, but then I decided it would be sufficient to just widen the existing hole and mount the PCB assembly to the inside of the case. The latter scenario allows me to fall back to reinserting the hard drive cage if I ever decided that was needed, whereas the former would have me taking out the cage’s mounting screw terminals. So I put the metal cutter on the Dremel and cut out a larger square from the case. There’s something industrially visceral about the shower of sparks and taste of toxic paint accompanying this process. With a little fine tuning and some sanding of the edges, I had a perfect matched opening in the case for the LCD.
In order to mount the module, I picked up a piece of perfboard from Radio Shack that I drilled appropriately to attach to existing screws on the PCB. Then I screwed the perfboard to existing mounting holes inside the case. The results? Quite nice. The window glass in the case, unfortunately, is tinted, making the LCD difficult to read at a distance, but it still looks good up close. Mythtv is already built to display the program information and progress as you watch TV, and menu items as you navigate with the remote. Probably not worth all the work and cost, but what else did I have to do?
More pictures in the gallery.
JAXB sucks
Allow me to enumerate the many ways I hate JAXB. JAXB is an XML data binding tool for Java; that is, it generates code to make using XML more Java-like. This is great in concept. In reality it is not so great:
- Two days away from your project due date, JAXB lets you know that it isn’t mindful of the method size limits in the JVM. Javac tells you: “code too large.”
- There’s a limit to method sizes in the JVM?
- Upon examining a generated class, you discover 25k lines of utter garbage. Things like the same if-then clause being repeated twice in a row.
- Turning off generation of the validator, or the unmarshaller, or the validating unmarshaller does have the effect of reducing code size, at a cost of generating code that doesn’t compile.
- Or if it compiles, it throws a runtime exception when you use it.
- The object hierarchy is all screwed up, such that a concrete implementation type may implement a (JAXB internal) interface that is not also implemented by the corresponding abstract interface (the two are supposed to be interchangeable).
- You have to do naughty proprietary things to make type substitution work.
- Creates a new namespace prefix for practically every element even though I only use 3 namespaces in the entire document.
I only just learned about XMLBeans. Dammit.