June 25, 2009
A few months back I moved into a new house. Since then I’ve finished most of my unpacking and moving in but a few projects have definitely lingered. Most notably is running Ethernet cable all around the house. The issue is I’ve got hardwood floors in the upstairs so running along baseboards/carpet just isn’t an option, nor is running in the ceilings. So my only option is to drill into the side of the house and run it outside and that isn’t fun either. So for now I’ve just had a long Ethernet cable running through the main floor of the house. While it’s esthetically wonderful I should probably come up with a better solution as clearly I’ll trip over it and kill myself soon.
Belkin recently announced a powerline Ethernet adaptor that is capable of 1GB/sec. Yup, 1GB/sec. Given that, I figured it was time to try these little things out so I stopped off a BestBuy and picked up a set (they didn’t have the new Belkin ones so I went with the Netgear XAV101). For $129 a set they are perfect.
Setup took all of 3 minutes. The hardest part was getting behind my stereo in the living room to get to the wall outlet. I plugged in there, plugged in my office, plug into networking on both ends and DONE. My first test was to stream a 1080p Bluray rip from my PC to my Xbox in the living room. Perfect, not a single stutter. Next I streamed live 1080i television (so uncompressed and takes gobs of bandwidth) from my Media Center PC to the Xbox – again perfect, no issues at all. Wow.
So if you need to get Ethernet around the house and don’t have cable get a set of these and try them out. Isn’t it great when things just work?
May 4, 2009
April 2, 2009
If you’ve been following the tech press lately you’ve probably heard of the Conficker worm that’s been going around. It was set to activate yesterday, April 1st and pretty much destroy the world. Well given that you’re reading this I guess that proves that it didn’t destroy things after all.
A friend sent me a great Q&A about Conficker today that I thought I’d share with everyone. First and foremost is the check to see if you’re infected. Have a look at the following link to find out:
Am I infected with Conficker?
Ok, a little more information:
Q: So what really happened then, what was all the fuss about?
A: Conficker.C was programmed to start generating a list of websites on April 1st in an attempt to download updates to itself.
Q: And did it?
A: Yes it did. That part of the worm worked just as intended.
Q: So why didn’t something major happen then?
A: Because the people behind Conficker didn’t publish an update on any of the websites Conficker tried to contact.
Q: Was it a mistake on their part, did they forget about the April 1st activation date?
A: Very unlikely. What really happened was that the Conficker Working Group was able to prevent them from registering any of the domains used by the worm. Never before have we seen such a global cooperation within the industry and we’re proud to be a member of that group. Also, it would’ve been pretty stupid for the people behind Conficker to do something on the day everyone expected them to.
Q: But isn’t it so that the worm can also update itself using the peer-to-peer (P2P) technology?
A: That’s right, it can. And it could’ve done this prior to April 1st.
Q: I didn’t turn on my PC on April 1st so I should be OK, right?
A: If your computer is infected then no, the worm will still be there and it will try to download updates to itself when you turn it on.
Q: So what happens now, can we forget about Conficker and worry about other things?
A: No, not really. April 1st was just the activation date. Infected computers will continue to reach out to 500 websites daily in an attempt to update itself. And let’s not forget the P2P technology, it can update itself using that as well.
Q: So that means we’ll have to deal with this for a long time?
A: Yes, until all the computers are cleaned up or until the people behind it decide it’s not worth it anymore. So we’ll keep on monitoring the situation.
If you do happen to be infected feel free to drop me a note to ross@jasbone.com and I’ll do what I can to give you a hand cleaning things up.
March 20, 2009
Well in this case they rap, just had to share this, can’t wait for my next Southwest flight!
At Foundry Group we are in a constant internal battle discussion about our email systems. We are currently an Exchange 2003 shop and are working to upgrade to Exchange 2007 sometime soon. With Google’s announcement of their new service to sync your Gmail contacts/calendar with many mobile devices (Windows Mobile and Blackberry) they are inching ever closer to a full Exchange replacement. You can use your mail offline with Gears and for small groups you can get most of the functionality you need for free.
As I see it the main issue here is the Outlook mail client. Corporate users are well versed in Outlook and for most people it is their most used application. Moving corporate users away from Outlook is going to be a hard battle for anyone wanting to make inroads in the enterprise. So why try to push Outlook off the desktop now, instead embrace it.
What someone needs to do is create a connector for Outlook that would treat Gmail (and all the Google backend services) as Exchange operates now. Contacts, Calendar and Email would be a perfect start, it seems like adding Tasks would be rather simple down the road. This connector would act just like the Exchange connectors does now – users would need no retraining, nothing would change for them. IT departments on the other hand could drop the expense and support burden of Exchange and move all their mail systems to Google if they choose. Seems simple to me, someone get on that will ya?
March 19, 2009
A few months ago I went to stay at Brad’s place up in Keystone and was greeted by a large box in his basement that held the Ion Drum Rocker. I quickly tore into the box as I’d read about it many times and was very curious to see them in action. If you can’t tell from the picture the Drum Rocker is a premium drum kit for Rock Band and Guitar Hero.
The difference in these drums and the toy that comes with the game is remarkable. The standard drums are very light and flimsy, the heads are hard and loud and the pedal, well it sucks. The Drum Rocker is basically a small, inexpensive digital drum kit. A real digital drum kit I might add. You can get an add-on module for it that turns it into a fully standalone drum set that you could play with real musicians. The heads are quiet and very responsive, allowing for rolls and fast fills with ease. While the cymbals are a bit hard (they don’t quite crash like a cymbal should) they are years beyond the Guitar Hero World Tour cymbals. While I’m not a drummer (I can keep a beat fairly well) playing the game with these drums feels like you are actually playing drums, not a toy.
At $300 for the basic kit (the picture above adds the third cymbal for an extra $50) it’s not cheap. Given the excellent quality if you enjoy playing drums it’s worth it. Highly recommended.
March 18, 2009
About a year ago I bought a Bluray drive for my Media Center PC to watch Bluray’s on my LCD TV. I decided to go with a drive for my PC instead of a dedicated player as I was planning to rip Bluray’s at some point in the future (as I’ve done with DVD’s for years). I’ve finally began to rip my Bluray’s so I can watch them through my XBox (as there is no Bluray drive for it).
This is a time consuming process to say the least. It involves several steps, which in general are:
- Setting aside enough disk space. The Bluray’s take about 40GB when ripped and you’ll need about 3 times that in free space for all the encoding
- Ripping the disk to the hard drive. I use AnyDVD HD for this – it usually takes about an hour to rip an entire Bluray
- Once the disk is ripped you have to strip out just the movie and audio track you’re interested in. I use TsReMux for this and it generally takes about 20 minutes.
- Next I open the new M2TS file in Microsoft Expression Encoder to convert it to a WMV with 5.1 audio. There is a lot of setup here (that takes about 10 minutes) then you start the encode. You return 2 days later to see how it went (it takes about 48 hours for this to run on my machine)
- Once the WMV is created you’re generally done, unless you have audio sync issues (pretty rare). If you do you have to strip out the audio, convert it separately, then mix it back in. That takes about 6 hours total
When you’re done you’ll have a single WMV file that will play back not only in Media Center but on the XBox360 directly. It’s full 1080p with 5.1 audio – it looks and sounds perfect. They are generally 8-14GB in size depending on the length of the movie, etc. So as you see you’d either have to be a uber-geek or stark raving mad to do this (which one do you think I am???). So for now Bluray is safe from the groups of rippers out there – for now anyway…
March 17, 2009
This weekend I began the process of modifying Ginger for track work. As I’m planning on taking her to the track several times this year I’m starting to get her all ready for it. I’m mostly doing suspension upgrades (since I drive road courses) but I’m guessing a few power modifications may sneak in also. So far I’ve installed a set of K-Sport coilovers (they are VERY stiff), new rims (they have my snow tires on them now, track tires are on order) and a front lips spoiler (that was mainly for look). My big brake kit is sitting in the garage waiting to be installed (in a few weeks). I’ve got a cold air intake on the way as well as a set of adjustable front and rear sway bars.
As you see from the picture I need to adjust the rear suspension to lower it inline with the front. So far I haven’t scrapped anything as I do wish it wasn’t quite so low (I’m going to see if I can raise the front some).
I’ve also been busy inside the car – I’ve enable the navigation system while the car is moving, disabled the seat belt chime, and enabled video input on the back of the navigation screen (I can watch video from my iPhone on the screen and hear it through the audio system). And no, I won’t be watching movies while I’m driving – I did it mostly because I could.
Actually scratch that, proprietary anything generally sucks. I know there are times when it’s necessary for design considerations but it still makes things very difficult for consumers. About 4 months ago the power supply in my Media Center PC died. I powered it off to reboot it and it would never power up again. I didn’t have a good way to test the power supply but after testing all the parts in another machine I was 95% sure it was the power supply. The problem is I have a slim line case that’s designed to fit in with a rack of stereo gear so it has a irregularly shaped power supply.
I headed to the manufactures website (Asus) and after about 15 minutes of searching finally found the part. On back order, ETA 1 month. Ugh, so no Media Center for me for a month. I fire up an online chat with their support group who tell me it should only be a few weeks. This is in late October. MANY chat sessions later and it’s still not in stock. 4 months go by and each week I’m told it should be in later in the week.
Finally I escalate to the head of the parts division via email. The next day I get an email with some information to order the one they have set aside for me. Apparently they pulled it out of the new build pipeline so I could have it. Once installed that was indeed the problem and I’m finally back working. After four months. So yeah, proprietary hardware sucks.
March 13, 2009
It’s been quite a while since I posted anything so I figured now was the time to give an update. I’ve got several more posts in the hamper so hopefully I’ll be back to regular blogging soon.
So without further ado I introduce to you Ginger. Ginger is a 2009 Subaru Legacy Spec.B. What is a Spec.B you might ask? Well it’s the adult fast Subaru. Not the 22 year old WRX STi fast one, the adult one. She has a 250 hp flat 4 motor (soon to be doing about 300 hp), Bilstein suspension, 18″ rims and a significantly upgraded interior over the standard Legacy GT (Alcantara seats, Harmon Kardon audio, Kenwood NAV system, etc). Soon she’ll have new sway bars, coilovers, rims, exhaust and a big brake kit.
I’d been unsure of this purchase for a while as I was upgrading from a base 2008 Legacy 2.5i. I wanted something that had all wheel drive, would be good around town, good to take to the mountains but quick and nibble enough to take to the track. So far I’m extremely pleased with her, for the money I don’t think there is a better car out there (at least not one that fit me). I also wasn’t sure about a red car (when I went to pick her up I’d never seen her) but I’m extremely happy with the dark color. The Spec.B is a limited production car, with only 500 being built a year (and only 100 in this color).
So welcome to the family Ginger, I’m sure we’ll have a long and happy friendship!
