MikeW

personal ramblings

Archive for category Miscellaneous

Status Updates

Jun 14

Posted by mikew in Miscellaneous, Public Service, Renaissance | No Comments

I’ve managed to do quite a bit in the last few months without so much as an update here. I’m really not very good at these updates. My Facebook account sits similarly neglected. I think there is a plugin to link the two, I should look that up so they can at least be neglected together.

Mary and I enjoyed the Iowa Renaissance Festival in the Amanas a couple weeks ago. It was a nice day, hot but the consistent breeze kept it bearable.

We’ve had several successful ARES events, most recently the Dam2Dam race in Des Moines and the Copper Creek Triathlon in Pleasant Hill. The next real event is the annual ARRL Field Day and I will be participating although not with any organized club event this year. Some good friends and I are going to do our own thing, part party part operating event all fun. I’ll probably take Q and will likely camp at the farm for overnight operating this year. We have much planned, and some of it may actually happen!

Last weekend I was able to operate parts of the ARRL June VHF Contest and I had a pretty good time. That’s for the next post though.

WD TV Live

Jan 15

Posted by mikew in Gadgets, Miscellaneous | No Comments

So, about 5 years or so ago I decided to built a HTPC to replace my aging Tivo. It was an epic story, a massive amount of money was spent, but in the end I was rewarded with a 2 tuner DVR in a nice brushed aluminum home theater case with a vacuum fluorescent display. It was capable of recording 2 shows at once while watching another or streaming video from a network source, a decent feature set for the time. A lot of time (and expense) went into ensuring it was whisper quiet. No small task when your processor is a Pentium 4 single core power-gobbling toaster.

I don’t watch much “TV” anymore; about 6 months ago I canceled my cable subscription and went strictly OTA/Downloaded content. The only channels I miss are Discovery and Sci-Fi, and the content from those can be found if one looks hard enough.

With the digital transition my 2 tuners and DVR functionality was lost entirely but I was already streaming most of my video from my NAS in the basement anyway. A few months ago the power supply in the HTPC died. No longer having the resources I once did, I replaced it with a fairly cheap one to get by. It was louder, but it worked again. In the last few weeks, some other strange noises have been coming from the AV cabinet and sure enough it was the HTPC again. Nothing’s broke, I suspect a fan is going bad. The HTPC really is in a harsh environment, honestly I’m surprised I haven’t had more problems with it. It’s hot in that cabinet, it collects dust and cat hair.

Although I wasn’t yet searching for a replacement someone was talking about an interesting device yesterday: The Western Digital TV Live. This device is designed to sell more WD external hard drives.

My biggest problem with most streaming devices is that they require that you stream from the Internet or a connected PC running special software. This WD box requires neither. It plays 1080p content nativity with no transcoding or server software required. In addition to streaming from any attached USB device (thumb drive, hard drive, etc) it connects to standard SMB (Windows) network shares using credentials you supply and streams the content from there. It can stream an extremely diverse selection of audio and video formats as well as display photo slide shows.

It’s menu interface is very similar to the modern Sony horizontal bar interface, that is not a bad thing. WD implemented it well.

It streamed every Audio and Video file I threw at it, and I have some strange video file formats. After 4 hours of streaming 720p it was slightly warm. No network hiccups or pausing and skipping. Video/Audio sync was good, which is important since it’s not adjustable.

This is the least amount of research I’ve ever done in purchasing something. I went from not knowing it existed to plugging it in in less than 3 hours. I bought it locally at Best Buy with plans to return it when it performed poorly and didn’t meet my criteria. I was surprised at how good it was, and became curious as to why it was working so well so I went out to do some research and find out why.

This is a Linux box. They’re leveraging all the well implemented free video codecs available in Linux. This explains why it supports Matroska container formats and the several advanced codecs they usually contain. It also explains it’s solid SMB implementation and the hacker community I found working on customized firmware for the box.

It has some Internet streaming stuff for YouTube and some radio streaming but honestly I don’t care. I have no desire to watch 240×320 streams on my 42″ TV. It doesn’t really get in the way and I don’t care how it works. I’ll just assume it works well and never use it.

There a couple small issues.

If it’s going to stream things from the Internet, it better have Netflix streaming. The WD TV Live doesn’t. I don’t have Netflix yet, but every single person I know tells me how wonderful it is, one of these days I’ll break down and try it. My next Blu-Ray player will almost certainly include that, so it’s not a big deal that WD didn’t, but it just seems odd that it wasn’t included.

It doesn’t create thumbnails for content on network shares and it’s default method of browsing is via thumbnail. When browsing network shares with default settings you get many identical empty thumbnails and you have to highlight them to see what they are. Thankfully they included an option to not use thumbnails and use something truly revolutionary: File names. This makes things much easier to navigate. For audio files you can tell it to use file names, ID3 tags, or the artwork stored in the MP3 file.

The WD TV Live has no way to limit itself to 1 server, establish a preferred server, or create a shortcut to a specific server/share combination. This makes for many additional clicks in the UI. When you select Network Share, it presents you with every machine on your network that has sharing enabled (every Windows box does) in the server list, and you have to select on the one you want then move on to select the share that contains your files. It’s all presented in a file/folder view so it’s not really painful, but it’s more clicks than you really should have to make in a properly setup system.

It needs the ability to hide things. Hide menu items I don’t use, hide machines that don’t contain media files, hide shares that aren’t related, etc.

This isn’t for everyone. It can’t play DRM protected content, it doesn’t have WiFi (it’s optional), it doesn’t have netflix streaming or a web interface for control when the TV is powered down (for streaming music).

For me this was the very definition of impulse purchase which I almost never succumb to, but it appears it will work out quite well. I’ll decide for sure over the weekend, but I think it’s a keeper. It’ll appears that it will easily replace my old HTPC while being dead silent and much lower power consumption (12V 2A wall wart). It could replace my AudioTron as well, but I’m not sure I will retire it yet or not. The web interface on the AudioTron is good, and I don’t really want to power up the TV to select a song.

Odds and Ends

Nov 8

Posted by mikew in Miscellaneous | No Comments

So I’ve fallen behind my planned 1 post per week update. This is due to the fact that mostly I have been doing lots of mundane things that I’ve ignored for a while, and taking a break from most items that might be of vague interest here.

I did power up the working GC-1000 clock, I ran it for about 2 weeks off of a 8VDC power supply. It worked exactly as advertised. Until I can make the appropriate power supply modifications to run cool and off of 13.8V, I’ve decided to clear it off of my bench. I’m hoping to look at the 2nd one sometime in the next week or two and see what state it is in. Currently it’s still resting unpacked in the box my friend used to ship it to me.

My D-Star Hotspot died last week, it had never been working 100% properly, but it was very close. For some reason the Motorola GM-300 started refusing to transmit. I turned the whole thing off last Wednesday and looked at it today. It appears a connection had simply come loose. I made some audio conditioning modifications to hopefully fix the 1 remaining issue, but I have not yet tested it. I need to get out the headphones and talk to myself via the local repeater in order to test if things are improved.

D-Star DD mode (1.2GHz Data) is starting to pick up and on my short list this week will be my first experiments with that mode. People have started asking me questions that I cannot answer so I really need to catch up. I have a borrowed ID-1 and I can hit the DD node quite well from my house, so all that remains is to actually do it.

I’ve enjoyed my last couple weeks of doing very little related to electronics, but time to get back into things.

Corn Maze

Oct 11

Posted by mikew in Gadgets, Illumination Tools, Miscellaneous | No Comments

Finally got out to the maze Friday night, Mary and I had a blast. She likes the gadgets as much as I do, sometimes I think more so. She decided to go GPS navigation for the entire expedition.

This year was better than last, the corn was about 9′ tall and there were several other groups in the maze, including at least 1 group we bumped into that had no flashlights at all.

We weren’t sure if we were going or not due to weather, but decided at the last minute to head out.

Ok, while I love doing these, I like to cheat fully utilize my available equipment, and here is what it looked like:

Corn Maze Gear 2009

Corn Maze Gear 2009

I have my Garmin GPS60cs, Icom IC-92, The large SOE Gear holster holds my M6-1185, the side light pouch is holding my 6PD-M60W, A2-Strion/GS and L2 are clipped under the flap until we arrive. My Ra 100WW was on my belt and 8x spare 123′s just in case were inside along with 2 Nite-Ize blinky reflective “tags”. It all fits neatly in/on my Maxpedition Versapack with the entirety of the main center compartment empty. I love this bag. I wish the Cell phone holster and built-in light pouch were molle-attach points, but other than that it’s great.

A multi-level light is a must, you don’t need lots of light or throw when walking around, this is where the A2 is awesome. The floody 5mm leds are great and the extra punch of the incandescent to reach down the aisle. The Ra also does OK, but it’s mix of throw and spill seemed to always be too much of a compromise, it would work well if I hadn’t have had an A2.

The L2 was for Mary, since she lost the A2 I gave her last year. A multi-level light is a must.

The 6PD-M60W is nice, but as usual when I use this light I find myself wishing it were a 2-stage. On high it’s just too bright for most things. It did do great for seeing down rows though, but I likely won’t take it next time.

The M6-1185… Well what really needs to be said? I used it to point down a long row to point out a punch that was needed for the scavenger hunt to another group in the maze and there were audible gasps, one woman asked who brought a car into the maze. For those who don’t know, the Welch-Allyn 1185 lamp used to be commonly used in airports as a runway landing light. Due to this intended use it’s an extremely durable and robust design that can be overdriven from it’s intended 9.6V drive(~900lm) to sunburn-inducing 13V (~1500lm). It’s not a HID, but it’s about the brightest thing you can have in an easily carried handheld design. It uses a custom 3-cell lithium pack that has more juice than modern Netbooks.

On my next trip I’m going to ensure that I have the A2-UV with me. This particular corn maze you have a scavenger hunt, as you find certain areas you punch a hole in an issued card to verify you were there. Each punch is a different shape, and it’s tied on to a rusty pole sticking out of the ground in the corn. I realized that a A2-UV will be great because it should cause the paper punch-outs on the ground to glow making the areas with punches very visible.

We didn’t complete 100% of the ship (this year’s theme), we skipped some detail inside the ship but we will be going back to finish it up another evening.

Here’s what the GPS said it looks like:

Mitchellville Corn Maze 2009

Mitchellville Corn Maze 2009

Has it been that long?

Sep 21

Posted by mikew in Miscellaneous | No Comments

Ok, evidently I shut this down in April because I thought I would run out of things to post about.

Turns out I was wrong. I’ve had a very busy summer I’m still not done yet. My new goal is 1 post each week even if I don’t have anything new to say which is unlikely given my current state of affairs.