Communication Channels

My Wiring 'Closet'

I finally got around to replacing the across-the-floor ethernet cable with one routed across the ceiling and inside the wall. When we started the big remodeling project over a year ago, we moved into the basement and we took our TV with us. The remodeling project was only supposed to last a few months, so it's okay to have a cord running across the floor. I mean, we're in the basement. Actually the only place it ran across the floor was at the bottom of the stairs and we covered it with a rug, so it was practically invisible. But it's been a while, and the TV is still in the basement, so I ran a new cable in a more secure and permanent manner.

The Portland Trail Blazers, Oregon's NBA team, have been having a rough time since all their star players have moved to greener pastures. They're getting better, slowly. They beat the Atlanta Hawks Tuesday night in a nail-biter. Since they are rebuilding the team, they are also trying to rebuild their fan base, which has been decimated since the all-star team they had is no more. To that end, they are now broadcasting all of their games on commercial TV - Charge! 2.2. We have an antennae in the attic, let's see if we can pick it up. Plug the upstairs TV into the coax and bingo! NBA basketball clear as a bell. The antennae is a big old thing that I probably set up 30 years ago. It's not one of these miniature things they are using for their ridiculously high frequency, but it works fine.

Since I was running a new ethernet cable, and since we discovered a new use for coax, I figured I might as well run a new coax cable as well. Plug in the basement TV and run setup to scan for broadcast channels. It found, I dunno, a couple of dozen including the one channel we care about. 

But then I remember that new stuff has been showing up on the ROKU, so I go take a look. One of the new things is TV channels, and there are a bunch of them. ROKU displays a list and I spent a couple of minutes scrolling through it looking for Charge! 2.2. I must have scrolled through a hundred channels. I did not find Charge! 2.2 and I did not find the end. It might be there. Seems as though everybody and their mother that has a broadcast license is making the content available over the internet. I noticed half a dozen news channels from around the country.

There is only one coax cable running to the upstairs TV and no easy way to run ethernet, so now I'm wondering if I can send ethernet signals over the sane wire as the antennae signal. I mean, what frequency domains are we talking about here? Are they even in the same ballpark, or are they in different leagues, playing in different cities, on opposite sides of the country? I have no idea. 

Turns out you can run both broadcast and ethernet signals over the same coax and both signals come through loud and clear. Previous post about the Hitron adapters I used. I am only using one set of signals at a time, so it's possible if you were using both sets of signals simultaneously there might be some interference.

Those stupid screw-type coax connectors are a royal pain. If you hold the cable at the correct angle, the nut screws on easily, but get just a little off center and it jams up. You make or break half a dozen of these connections and your fingertips start complaining. It's basically ridiculous, but it's what I've got. There used to be quick connect coax connectors that just plugged in, no nut screwing required. I think those came with video games, but I don't have any of those connectors and all my coax cables have threaded connectors.

Our country has a zillion video channels all being broadcast simultaneously. YouTube has like a zillion channels, but each of those YouTube channels only put up new stuff intermittently, like once a week. But there are a zillion people watching those channels. How many channels are active at one time? Channels where we have someone broadcasting and somewhat actually watching? Is it a zillion times a zillion times a zillion? Or maybe the cube root of a zillion? If you had access to YouTube statistics you might be able to come up with a number. Of course, YouTube is only one player in the great social media landscape, and all of the traffic that involves an actual person is no doubt dwarfed by the tsunami of bits flowing between machines.

Meanwhile, over in Finland, somebody cut one of their undersea communications cables:

Undersea data cable between two NATO countries breaks 

Excerpt: 

“Disturbances occur from time to time and there can be various reasons,” Bergstrom added. “For example, they are susceptible to the weather and damage caused by shipping.”

Finland’s Security and Intelligence Service (SUPO) told Yle that it was too early to assess the cause of the cable break, noting that around 200 undersea cable breaks happen around the world every year.

“The most common cause of cable breakage is human activity, such as fishing or anchoring,” a SUPO spokesperson said.

Two days later we get this report:

Danish Navy Hunts Down Chinese Ship Suspected Of 'Sabotaging' Baltic Sea Cables

From Michael Every:

So, if you want to worry, look at less glamorous but arguably more significant headlines that don't point to world war, per se, but to world disruption, and major world market volatility.

Official allegations of sabotage were made in the EU as: two of Finland's five nuclear plants had to be shut down; a key Norwegian oilfield was shut by a power outage; the support cable on a Finnish suspension bridge broke; and two key Baltic EU data cables were severed. The Chinese vessel Yi Peng has been flagged as a possible cable culprit and at time of writing was forcibly moored in Denmark. This is likely to prompt a strong Chinese diplomatic response; and perhaps an EU one if it proves a Chinese ship damaged key seafloor infrastructure (again: this also happened to a gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia in October 2023).

Home Theater

This may not interest anyone, but after screwing around for most of day with this mess I thought I better make some notes.

We are still decompressing from the big remodel project. We moved into the basement while the upstairs was being remodeled. This resulted in all kinds of stuff being squirreled away into all kinds of corners.

One of the things that got squirreled away was the Wireless surround speakers for the Panasonic Home Theater Sound System. I came across them this week and set them up. Everything seems copasetic, the pilot light changes from red to green, but I'm not getting any sound. Start investigating and find that I'm not getting any sound from any of the speakers. All the sound we're getting is from the speakers in the TV. Huh. Either those speakers are very good or maybe they're just good enough for us.

Well, if we've got this sound system, it ought to be working, so I set to work sorting things out.

There were only three cables plugged into the back of the TV: one power line and two signal (HDMI) cables. One goes to the ROKU box and one goes to an HDMI switch. If we're using the ROKU there's no path for the audio to get to the Sound System, so I needed to add a pair of audio cables. The audio cables I found included a third cable with yellow plugs for video. Plug that one in and nothing works. Fine, just the two audio cables then.

After much mucking around, I think I have it all sorted. We have 5 remote controls

1. ROKU
2. HDMI Switch
3. TV
4. Panasonic DVD Changer and Home Theater Sound System
5. LG Blue Ray Player

We can watch:

• Netflix vid ROKU
• DVDs using the Panasonic Changer
• BlueRay disks using the LG Player

The HDMI Switch has 5 channels:

1. Not in use
2. Not in use
3. Panasonic DVD Changer and Home Theater Sound System
4. LG Blue Ray Player
5. Not in use

To get Home Theater to listen to the signal coming in over the audio input jacks, you need to switch the TV to AUX. On the TV remote control, use the TV/VIDEO button just to the left of the MENU button which is just above the big round tilt-o-whirl cursor keys. If you try and use the Home Theater System for anything besides just audio, it will get confused and refuse to listen to the audio signal. Pressing the button on TV remote seems to get it unstuck, even though it is not connected. 

Well, I guess 'connected' doesn't mean what I think it means. The DVD player is plugged in the HDMI switch and the switch is plugged into the TV, so I supposed there could be some feedback signals running from the TV back to the player even though the switch has been changed to connect the LG player.

If we are just watching something from ROKU, we only need two remotes: the one for the ROKU for video play functions, and the Home Theater one for volume control. Maybe I should look for a fancy one that could replace all of these.

New Roku

TV Central

It's fall which means football quickly followed by basketball. Time to get everything lined out so it all plays smoothly come game time. We canceled our TV service with Ziply a couple of months ago, which saved us about $150 per month, but now we've signed up for some Fubo sports package that is costing us about $100 a month. 

Anyway, we're trying to sort out just what packages we need, which is a giant pain, and we come across one channel that will be showing some important games, but the game is only going to be broadcast in 4K, so if your Roku box can't handle 4K, you won't be able to watch the game. Sounds like marketing bullshit to me, but it's not worth the time and effort to investigate. First it will be almost impossible to figure out whether you will really need a new Roku box to properly receive these new 4K signals, and 2nd who knows what will actually be coming down the wire, what with all the high skilled meth-heads putting their own sick twist on the encryption scheme.

Short version is I went ahead and ordered a new Roku unit from Amazon for $90 and it showed up that afternoon. That was yesterday maybe, or maybe it was Saturday. I forget. In any case I sat down today to plug it in, but when I opened the cabinet door I saw an inch deep layer of dust. Okay, maybe not an inch, but it covered everything. Shit, can't have that, so everything comes out and all the wires get disconnected. You might be able to clean the cabinet without disconnecting the wires, but for me it's just easier. Get all the gizmos and wires out of the way and it's very easy to clean out the dust from the cabinet.

Curiously, the shelves in the cabinet that hold the gizmos were bowed. Not much, mind you, maybe a millimeter over 40 centimeters. (That's me experimenting with the metric system.)  The shelves weigh more than the gizmos. I think they just sagged because of their weight and their weak construction. I only noticed this because I carried them into the kitchen to clean them and when I set them on the counter they wouldn't stay still, they wanted to slide all over. Turn them over and they would stay still. That's when I sighted down the edge of the shelf. I could see the slight bow.

After we got everything hooked back up, we sat down to see if it was all working. Going through all the menus and sign up services to get everything working took us at least half an hour, maybe a full hour. We had to resort to the laptop and my password file a couple of times, but we got everything lined out and apparently working.

As a bonus I got the HDMI switch moved into the cabinet. It had been sitting on top, but it really belonged with its brethren behind the glass door.

Gizmo Brethren in the Cabinet
Top row: HDMI Switch and new Roku Ultra
2nd row: LG Blue Ray Player sitting on top of
Panasonic DVD Carousel / Home Theater sound system
Bottom shelf: Power strip festooned with wall warts

We got the home theater system around the same time we got the TV. We got the Blue Ray player because we needed to watch a movie someone had loaned us. It was cheap enough, cheaper than the Roku box even. I am not sure when we got the HDMI switch. We must have needed it for something, but I don't know what. The TV has two HDMI inputs and that was enough for a while, but something happened and we got a new widget so two HDMI ports just wasn't enough any more, so I got the switch. We don't use it anymore, but we have it just in case we need to watch a DVD or a Blue Ray disk, and who knows what will turn up?

Sorry about the out-of-focus pictures. I have no patience with my smartphone. They're not great, but it should give you an idea of what's happening.

Checking my archives I realized I had written a bunch about this stuff. If you want to know that hole gruesome story, click on this Home Theater link.

P.S. This simple little task was a major ordeal for me with my cranky body. Bunch of crawling around on the floor and changing from sitting to getting up on my knees and back again. Next time I'm gonna have a couple of tough guys lift the whole dang thing three feet in the air and set it on some sawhorses. It'll be tough for them but it will make my job easier.

Daughter of the Wolf

DAUGHTER OF THE WOLF Official Trailer (2019) Gina Carano Action Movie HD
ONE Media
Richard Dreyfuss (!) plays the evil 'father' of a gang of stupid, brutal thugs. They kidnap a woman's son and plan to collect a ransom payment and then sell the boy on to someone else. The woman is in the military and is like ten times as competent as father's gang. You can imagine how it goes. Besides the usual violence we also have several disasters that befall various characters, sometimes our heroine (ouch) and sometimes the bad guys (yea!). People fall into freezing water, off of cliffs and get savaged by wolves, though the wolves leave our girl along. Mutual respect for a fellow predator?

There were a number of faux pas, like the time Gina knocks the one female member of the gang off of a snowmobile just before the snowmobile runs off a cliff. Why did you do that Gina? You should have just let her go. Of course then we wouldn't have had the cat fight, with knives! It wouldn't have taken much to rearrange the action to make it more plausible, but maybe they were on a budget.

There is one scene that features a rather spectacular waterfall - Helmcken Falls.

Gina has appeared here before. Haywire was much better movie than this one.

We watched the movie on PLEX, which means there were ads. I had a lot of trouble with the controls on PLEX, we had to restart the ROKU box twice. We won't be using PLEX again.

Turns out the whole movie is available on YouTube.

Fraud

The Matrix's "digital rain" - ANIMAL LOGIC/WARNER BROS.

A $70 charge showed up on my credit card bill this month from Roku / Fubo. Let me back up. Last month we got a letter from Ziply, the fiber optic, broadband internet company, telling us that rates for the TV packages were going up. No surprise there, but then the letter goes on to point out that almost everything you could want from the TV services is available on the internet, and it's probably a lot cheaper.  Kind of weird that the cable company would be suggesting that we cancel anything, but maybe they got tired of people complaining about the ever increasing rates and the new taxes that keep getting tacked on. Complaints have to be dealt with, and that consumes customer service hours, so maybe they are just taking a proactive approach to deflecting complaints.

Okay, so we signed up for Fubo which seems to provide most of what we want in the sports arena. It's like $90 a month, but that's half of what TV package cost, so bueno. But now we get the credit card bill and there's this extra charge. There's a phone number attached to the charge, so I call but all I get is a recording telling me to logon to Roku.com. I do that and find there are no charges and since there are no charges there is nothing to dispute. So I call Chase, wade through the robo-cop nonsense, hang on hold for some indefinite amount of time and eventually get to a person. I tell him about the charge and all he can say is fraud. I don't think it's fraud, it's probably just a glitch in the matrix, but there doesn't seem to be any way forward unless I say it's fraud. Seems kind of extreme, but we are in the matrix now so we have to play by matrix rules.

Okay fine, but since it's fraud, my card must be compromised and since it's compromised they are going to turn it off and send me a new one. Welcome to the matrix, where I have been reduced to paying for my gasoline with cash.

I've been carrying an AMEX card in my wallet as a back up, just in case something happened to my Amazon / Chase card, but when I pulled it out I found it expired two years ago.

Family Night at the Fights

Colby Covington vs Jorge MasVidal

There was a big MMA - Mixed Martial Arts - event at the T-Mobile arena in Las Vegas last night. One of the two main contenders - Jorge Masvidal - father is from Cuba. Osmany is from Cuba and is a big fight fan so naturally we have to watch the fight. It was PPV - Pay Per View - and very expensive compared to most other forms of televised entertainment - $100. $70 was for an annual "membership" and $30 was for this event. I guess I can understand that. They undoubtedly train as much as any other professional athletes, but I imagine they only fight a few times a year. Basketball and baseball players may play 100 games a year. And like all sporting events, only the obsessed are going to want to watch a rerun, so the promoters need to raise as much moola as they can at the time. Not much to be made in residuals.

One of fighters announced that he was donating half of his prize money, $45,000 to a children's charity, which means the prize for that fight was $90,000, and it wasn't the main event.

There were half a dozen or so fights on the card including one fight between two women. We missed that one because we didn't find out about the $100 price until showtime and then we got involved in a discussion of whether we should go to a sports bar to watch it. In the end, we decided to pay the fee. Of course, now we have to navigate the new, modern, convenient way of gaining access to the event. We needed like six pieces of information, some of which was for accounts we didn't know we had. We got there eventually, but we missed the girls.

Mixed martial arts weight classes

There were like five fights in ascending weight classes. The first fight consisted of 3 rounds. The heavier classes had five rounds. Each round was five minutes, so some of these fights went on for 30 minutes. One fight ended early when one fighter got a choke hold on the other. 

This is Mixed Martial Arts, so fights can involve boxing, kicking and wrestling. I enjoy watching the fight when both fighters are both standing up and trying to strike the other, but often one will tackle the other and then it turns into a wrestling match and that is very tension inducing. Not much action, but you tell they are both struggling mightily. Some of these wrestling matches turn very ugly, where the guy on top is beating the guy on the bottom. One fight was almost called because the guy was so badly beaten. But he got up for the next round and landed a big punch that came close to knocking the beater out. One time one fighter knocked the other down with a punch but did not tackle him. Apparently he wasn't a fan of wrestling either.

Our Modern, Computerized Life

Jean Jennings (left) and Frances Bilas set up the ENIAC in 1946. Bilas is arranging the program settings on the Master Programmer. - Courtesy of University of Pennsylvania

Seems like lately we have been running into a plethora of computer system problems. Not the computers in our house, they are all working fine. I'm talking about the big computer systems at the other end of wire, the systems we are talking to to get what we want.

RUST sports took over the Trail Blazers basketball games from NBC Sports Northwest (I think I have the names right) a couple of months ago and ever since we have been seeing video glitches during the games. I can understand one once in a while, but we are getting glitches every few minutes. It's annoying because it shouldn't be happening. It's very annoying when it happens in the middle of some high paced action, you can't see what happened. We are paying big money for this stuff and their ham handed handling is irritating. 'Big money' is a relative term, I think we paying about $60 a month to watch the Blazers, which is like four times as much as Netflix.

Two days ago we tried to watch a movie on HBOMAX and we couldn't. We pointed and clicked, dialed numbers, listened to stupid robo-cop answering systems, but got nowhere. Everything goes through Ziply Fiber and they were reporting widespread problems in Oregon, and at the end of a long slog we got a message saying that customer service was only open during business hours, like 8 to 5 Monday thru Friday, so we gave up for the night.

We got back on the problem yesterday afternoon. After what seemed like a couple of hours, two laptops,  and endless repetitions of logging onto sites I haven't used since the last time we ran into this problem, we finally got it resolved. I think the trick that finally got it working was to logoff of HBO on the ROKU box and then log back in. I didn't even know you could do that. On the plus side I learned something new about the ROKU, but on the negative side it was information I didn't want to know. I would say we never have this problem with Netflix, but I am afraid I might jinx us and I don't want that, so I won't.

It seems I have been having to call Walgreens every month for the last six months or so, ever since they hooked up with Alliance Rx to do their delivery-by-mail service. It usually takes two phone calls. The first call reliably fails, either I get disconnected or I get an operator who doesn't know what they are doing and nothing gets fixed, but the second usually connects with someone who is able to correct the problem in short order. It's probably not always two, but that's the way it seems. Maybe two is just the average, but I don't keep track, but that's what my memory is telling me. Always reliable, me memory.

We won't talk about how a couple of changes in the medical business took an endless number of calls to get sorted. My cardiologist closed his practice and moved to another one, and my wife decided to change my prescription insurance. Either one of those events would have been a nuisance, but together they were a nuisance squared.

Having a decent speakerphone in my smartphone means I don't have to hold the phone, I can lay it on the desk and let it blare the very poor quality muzak and the super annoying bullshit while I continue to play solitaire on my computer and wait to be connected to someone who can actually help. I swear, the announcements from these outfits are designed to be extra long and as aggravating as possible to encourage people to hang up. I mean, is it really necessary to tell people to call 911 if this is an emergency? (P.S. I wonder if there has been a spike in calls to 911 by people who just got fed up with this crap.)

At a Sitel Group call center in Metro Manila.Photographer: Xyza Cruz Bacani for Bloomberg Businessweek

Of course, customer service is an expense and companies are loath to spend any more money than absolutely necessary, so you get crap phones, crap computer systems, and crap training. I really feel for the people who work these jobs. I would hate to be a position where I had to do that kind of work. On the other hand, misery loves company, so if you are in with a decent bunch of folks it might be okay. Plus there might be coffee and donuts. Mmmm, donuts.

On the other hand we have an endless supply of high quality video entertainment, which is great, though we watch so much I might be getting burned out. Probably ought to take a couple of nights off each week to read. And when mail-order delivery is working, it's great, I don't have to run to the pharmacy.

Blu Ray

LG BP175 Blu-Ray DVD Player

This must be the month for electronic gizmos. Older son has been amassing a collection of movies on Blu-ray disks. While Netflix and other streaming services offer a wide variety of movies, there are some very good movies that are only available on disks. I have a DVD player, but a simple DVD player won't play Blu-ray disks, so I bit the bullet and ordered the above LG player from Amazon.

Hooking it up wasn't too bad. I t was made easier by the fact that my wife had cleaned out the bottom shelf of the console so I was able to relocate the power strip from the tangled snarl of cables underneath the cabinet onto this shelf.

Remote Controls. Clockwise from upper left:
Cable box, Roku, TV, DVD player, Blu-ray player.
The silver one in the center is for the HDMI switch.

Now I'm trying to sort out all these gizmos so I get out the remote controls. Criminently, there are a bunch of them.

And that's how we were able to watch Tenet last night.

Effing Frontier Communications

No more Channel 2 from our cable provider. Some kind of bullshit about rates. Wouldn't be a big deal EXCEPT the Iowa Hawkeyes are playing in the Outback Bowl this morning and it's being broadcast on Channel 2. Fortunately, we have computers and we can get the game via ESPN. We have 4 channels of ESPN on the TV, but none of them are carrying the most important game of the season! (according to all true dyed-in-the-wool Hawkeye fans, like my wife).

Channel 2 is broadcast over the air, so I don't really need to get it via cable. I could probably pick it with my antennae, but . . . that means I'd have to switch the coax connection in the basement, and switch the coax connection behind the TV.

I have another TV, an old CRT which we don't use, but I bought a digital adapter for it once upon a time, so I should be able to verify that I can still pick up the signal from Channel 2. Except the converter failed. Dang nab cheap Chinese electronic do-dads.

The alternative is to run a second coax from the antennae to the TV room. Or I might be able to get by with a small antennae right there in the TV room, but that would upset our harmonious decor.

I could blame Channel 2 for raising their rates, but I'm not dealing with Channel 2, my point of contact is Frontier. It's almost enough to make me change to Comcast.

A while back Frontier was pedaling Direct TV contracts, which struck me as a very poor business decision, but maybe their goal is to get out of the TV business. None of this makes any sense. It makes me wonder who's calling the shots.

At this point I wouldn't be surprised if someone was trying to destroy Frontier so another company could step in to provide high-speed internet. A new company would mean new licenses and new contracts and you can bet they would be more expensive.
---------------------------------------
Turns out we can get ESPN via our Roku box, but only because out cable subscription includes ESPN. So I can watch the game, but only if I am paying a chunk of money to the cable company every month, the same cable company that is not showing the game because they are trying to go out of business. Oh, the joys of our modern age.

Roku

I was looking at our pile of remote controls the other day and thinking that maybe I should go ahead and spring for one of them fancy all-in-one jobs. Then I stumbled over the new Roku unit which has a voice controlled search function. My goodness, how fancy is that?
    My wife's smart phone can translate voice to text. She uses it to send text messages to the kids, so maybe voice recognition technology really has advanced to the stage where you can use it reliably for something.
    We have subscriptions to three or four video-on-demand services for which we pay about $100 a month, depending on how you slice it. So now when we want to watch a show, we have to remember what service it is on. If you didn't remember then you have to search for it. With our old Roku you would need to switch to the service and then enter the title, one letter at a time, using the arrow keys. If you didn't remember what service it was on, well, you could spend minutes, minutes I tell you, pressing buttons on the remote to try and find it.
    The new Roku has a voice controlled search function that works from the top level. You say the name of the show you want and it will search all of your subscribed services to find it. We tried it out on a couple of shows and it worked flawlessly. Cool.
    Then I tried to use it to find the The Honorable Woman. It apparently worked because it found the show on two services, but when I tried to watch it I find out that it is a pay-per-view item. That's weird, because I already watched one episode for free. Could they have decided to start charging for it just now? Perhaps my post about the show triggered a small avalanche of events that caused this. Is my influence really that great?
    No, it's not. I gave up on the show, there are zillions of shows I've already paid for, I don't need to pay some more to watch this one, so I switch to Netflix to see if I can find something worth watching, and what pops up? The Honourable Woman. For free. Huh. So Roku's fancy voice controlled search function is not infallible.

Singularity

Black Hole of Doom

There's an idea kicking around somewhere out there in the lun-i-sphere that somehow all the computers connected to the internet are going to join together to become self aware, i.e. intelligent, and they're calling this idea 'singularity'.

Remember a week or two ago when there was a big fuss about the 'Russians' supposedly hacking into ten of the biggest banks in the USA and how it was an act of war or state sponsored terrorism?

Last night we tried to watch Blue Ruin and Netflix failed to deliver. This was our second attempt. We tried last weekend and the same thing happened. We get about five or ten minutes into the show and a Loading... message comes on the screen and never goes away. Okay, 'never' might be putting it a little strong. No amount of button pushing would convince it to proceed.

Today I tried to contact Netflix on the web to inform (bitch) about this problem and I'm getting mysterious web errors. So I call (using a telephone) and in short order I'm connected to a real person (by 'short order' I mean less than two minutes). The nice lady I am talking to is having trouble with her computer system. It's being very slow and I can hear her muttering under her breath. I enjoyed it, made her seem more like a real person, not some soulless corporate drone. (As always, your mileage may vary, but in this case, if it does, you are wrong.)

While I am typing this message Blogger keeps flashing little pink warning messages at the top of the screen telling me it's having problems.

Thor VS Giants

Last week Coding Game* suffered a server crash and they lost some user files. Now these are some pretty savvy computer dudes and they suffered a server crash? How embarrassing. They seem to have recovered. Matter of fact, if they hadn't told me about it I would not have even noticed.

Just now Blogger put this message up.

We won't even talk about all the pictures of mine that Blogger has lost. Several posts to the help forum have elicited only idiotic responses. I think it happened because I signed up for Google Plus once upon a time, didn't like what it did to Picasa, so I reverted to ordinary Google, and all this plussing and minusing confused Blogger. That's what I get for not following the herd. Buck the powers that be and they will squash you flat and not even notice.

So the Singularity might be coming, it just won't be the one the lunatic fringe is praying for. It will be more like a physic's singularity where everything just stops because all the electrons have gotten sucked into a virtual black hole.

Update: Remember Moore's law? About how computers will double in processing power every two years? How about the corollary? Ever heard this one,  also from Gordon Moore:

"It can't continue forever. The nature of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster happens"

P.S. I forgot to mention that HBOGO quit working on my ROKU box a couple of weeks ago. In order to get it going we had to find our logon ID and password for Frontier.com, which was kind of difficult because apparently we had never set up an on-line account, or more likely Frontier had lost it, which isn't too surprising since they seem to think that there is a phone number connected to my account, which there isn't. What's more all of the phone numbers they think are mine are wrong, except the one they used to call, which they don't seem to be able to find anymore. Color me severely impressed that their service works at all.

*Re: Coding Game - I've worked my way through all of the Easy puzzles and most of the Medium ones. Recently I've started working on some of the Hard ones and this week I ran into one (Thor Versus the Giants) that has me stumped. This is not an unusual pattern. All of these programming puzzles start off very easy, then gradually get harder, and then at the end add an element completely invalidates the approach you've been taking so far and requires a major rework of your code. But always before I knew how to deal with it. This time it's really like shooting in the dark. I have an idea on how it might be attacked, but it requires more fussing (more code and more execution time, and worst of all, more hand tuning) than I am comfortable with. It all comes down to what one sentence in the description of the problem means. Maybe that's why it is classified as Hard. Bah and humbug. That means I will have to work to solve it.

The King is Dead, Long Live the Dwarf

We watched the first three seasons of Game of Thrones last winter (a year ago). Since then we watched House of Cards with Kevin Spacey & Robin Wright, and Justified, all of which we enjoyed tremendously. I liked Justified so much I even broke down and paid extra to watch the latest season. Producers are spawn of the devil. Don't they know we deserve to watch everything they produce - all the time - for free? They suck you in with free teasers and then when they've got you hooked, they reel in your wallet.

We also tried Revenge and Scandal but they didn't quite cut the mustard. We also tried Breaking Bad, but we failed to connect. Don't know why. Too close to home maybe.

We continue to watch The Good Wife, but we are all caught up and have to wait for the next episode. Curses. I hate waiting. We used to be dedicated followers of CSI (the original Las Vegas based series), but it hasn't been the same since Gil left. The new lead investigator (the former Cheers bartender) just doesn't do it for me. Probably because he's not Gil.

So we've exhausted our supply of super-dooper crime series, and since our resident hacker has departed we no longer had access to Game of Thrones, so I finally broke down and subscribed to HBO. It's going to cost me $100 for the first year, after that it doubles. HBO has a new on-demand feature that we can get through our Roku box, but you need a subscription to HBO to use it. Bah and humbug. These dang subscriptions are piling up. I need to cancel some of them.

Game of Thrones spoiler (if the title hasn't given it away already. We are one episode from being caught up): Joffrey the malevolent gets his comeuppance. I would have preferred to have him stabbed a thousand times and then cut up into little bits but we can't always get what we want. It did look to be an unpleasant experience, though he didn't suffer nearly long enough. I was surprised as this show seems to thrive on showing just how unpleasant people can be and he was among the best (worst) at this, I thought the producers would keep him around forever. Ah well, nothing lasts forever. Now Tyrion is on trial and we don't know if he is going to survive this ordeal or not. On one hand he is the best person in the entire show, and he didn't do it (commit this particular murder), at least not that we know of. On the other hand, maybe he is negotiating with the producers and if they can't come to terms, well, off with his virtual head. Also, Cersei, Joffrey's mother, Tyrion's sister, wants him dead, and she generally gets what she wants.

Stupid Computer People

We have a ROKU box we use to watch movies from Netflix occasionally. Recently we signed up for HULUplus so we could watch Nikita. When we signed up, new firmware had to be installed on the ROKU box. It was bad program. It managed to play the show OK, but none of the controls worked. Last night, we wanted to watch another episode, and new firmware had to be installed again. This time it screwed up the box so bad I had to cycle the power.

Today I got an email with an embedded link. I forwarded it to a friend, but when they got it the link had been converted to text. I go looking at Gmail (Google E-mail) help for some kind explanation. I don't find any, but I find a discussion on the forum where a whole bunch of people have run into the same problem. That discussion is closed, so I posted a new question.

To me, both of these problems look like straight forward bugs in computer programs. Is it really that difficult to produce reliable code? My experience says otherwise, but then maybe I'm a little more obsessive-compulsive than the average social-networked programmer, or maybe I just expect too much from mere mortals.

Enter The BIOS, Part 2

Woke up way too early this morning so I thought I would see if I could sort out some of the problems with my new toy (Zotac ZBOX).

Figured out a few things about getting into the BIOS:

• Does not have to be a cold boot.
• Press the Del key immediately after power on. Do NOT wait for the Zotac splash screen. You have about three seconds after you turn on the power and splash screen comes up.
• Wireless keyboard works fine. I bought a wired USB keyboard just to see if that would make a difference. It did not.
• Only the left hand, front panel USB socket works with the BIOS. Either front panel USB socket works with the OS. Matter of fact, I had both keyboards plugged in at once and I could use either one.

The power on push-button can also be used to turn it off. Press and hold for about five seconds and it will shut the machine off. Reminds me of the run-away car tragedy in Southern California back in 2009. Guy couldn't figure out how to turn off the engine in his rented Lexus.

Now we can look at the HDMI problem. Enter the BIOS and look around and find . . . nothing at all about audio or video. I issue reports of my findings to Zotac and Nvidia technical support. I will have to wait and see what they have to say.

Next I try Netflix. I can get to their website and get logged in, but I can't watch anything. You can't play Netflix on Linux. I poke around a little more, and I see something about how you can use Google's Chrome to watch video from Netflix. I download and install Chrome, and now I need Netflix's special plug-in module, but it's still no go. I finally realize that the Chrome / Netflix combination only works on a Chrome Netbook or some-such. Fortunately I still have my Roku.

I am beginning to think I need a panel to hold all the remote controls for this collection of gizmos. At least I'm not paying the $100 a month to the cable company any more.

Stupid Computers

OK, there's a football game on this evening, let's see if we can get this whiz-bang whos-er-whatsit working. Wireless networking isn't, so let's hook up a wire. That takes some fiddling, but I got it connected. Now for the sound. That takes more fiddling and I end up pulling the speakers off my wife's computer and using them. None of the whiz-bang digital gizmos hooked to the TV can handle a simple matter like audio. This takes all afternoon, but by game time, it's all working and we've got ESPN on the screen, over the internet.

The picture is not quite I was expecting, it's kind of jerky, kind of grainy, and you get blurred spots. Maybe this Zotac computer doesn't have enough horsepower to process the compressed video that's coming over the wire. But wait a minute, the ROKU box doesn't have any trouble like this. OK, it might have a little trouble, but nothing I have seen using the ROKU has been anywhere near as bad as this. What we have here with Zotac and Linux looks your good old standard TV, or even VHS. You remember VHS, don't you?

And the ROKU box is tiny compared to the Zotac, and it doesn't even have a fan. Somebody or something is not quite right here.

Tekno-Joy: Blue-Ray, DVR, DVD, Linux, MythTV, PC, TV, Zbox

I canceled our cable TV service, so I now I need to get on the stick and get some kind of computer setup so we can connect our TV to the Internet. We have a Roku, and it works fine for watching shows from Netflix, but it only gives you limited access to the Internet, as in limited to the channels you are willing to pay for. There might be some free channels, but I haven't found anything worth watching there. I can access the photos I have uploaded to Picasa.

I had an old Linux box that used to work fine, until it quit a few months ago. Then there is this program called MythTV that is supposed to turn your PC (Personal Computer) into a DVR (Digital Video Recorder). It's Open-Source and it's free, and I've got this old Linux box, so I thought I would give it a try. Fixing the Linux box was simple a matter of re-seating the video card. Used my Windows based PC to download the MythTV program and burn a CD (Compact Disk). Used that CD to install the MythTV program on the Linux box. The Linux box booted. Once. And then it died, dead.

Error code says the memory "module" was bad. Took the memory stick over and plugged into my old Windows PC and it works fine. We've had other problems, off and on with this motherboard. I think I'm gonna call it scrap.

But now my Windows PC is behaving weirdly. Admittedly it has good reason to act up. It has a virus. It is not a bad virus, it's just kind of annoying, but it is thoroughly entrenched and getting rid of it is going to mean reformatting the hard drive. Again. Which takes time and is annoying. Also, it's got this memory module from the flakey Linux box, and maybe it's flakey as well. And then there's the whole hard disk disappearing and reappearing trick, and who knows what's causing that. It might be time for a new computer.

So I've given up on the old Linux box and I'm looking at some kind of PC to use with the TV and I find this Zotac Zbox, which looks pretty cool, except it comes it 31 different flavors ranging in price from $200 to $600. The most expensive ones come with a Blue-Ray optical disk drive and I am wondering do I even need one?

When DVD's came out, it was pretty obvious that the picture they delivered was a whole lot better than what you got from videotape, even with the old CRT televisions. I was thinking DVD's were just fine, and that Blue-Ray is gilding the lily, but now I hear that standard DVD's only deliver 480p and my big screen TV can handle up to 750p, maybe even 1080p. (The bigger the number, the higher the resolution and the better the picture, I suppose.)  So would Blue-Ray look that much better? I thought VHS was fine when it was all I had.

So now I'm wondering what kind of resolution I am getting over the Internet, and what will it be like in the future? Is Blue-Ray really going to take over? Should I go ahead and get a Blue-Ray player now just to avoid having to look for one in the future? Also, as Blue-Ray gains momentum, manufacturers are going to be looking for more short cuts, and the life expectency of Blue-Ray players may go down. Might not make any difference though. By the time the Blue-Ray players fail, Blue-Ray may be obsolete.

On the other hand, we hardly use any DVD's at all. Most everything we watch comes via the internet. We do get some broadcast channels, but until we get a DVR, I am not even going to consider them.

Update: I wonder if there is any possible use for old optical disks. Sure, there are some music CD's you will want to hang onto forever, but we are generating a zillion useless disks everyday. They are this decade's version of a sheet of paper, use it once and throw it away. I wonder if you could build a stove that would burn them cleanly? Or maybe you could glue stacks of them together to make casters, or chop them up to make chaff for military aircraft. Gee, I'm just full of good ideas this morning.

Commercials

I just ordered a ROKU internet box for my TV. $80 from Amazon. I spent a couple of hours reading about different devices this morning and finally decided cheaper is better. Not cheapest, next to cheapest. We shall see.

We have a DVR (Digital Video Recorder) that we rent from Frontier (formerly Verizon) for the ridiculous price of $30 a month, but we use the heck out of it. We can watch whatever dramas we want when we are ready, not just when they come on, and we don't have to sit through the ads, though we still have to futz with the fast forward and reverse buttons to skip over the ads, and that can be tedious.

I find most TV commercials are extremely boring and / or annoying, but there are also some that are very clever that I don't mind seeing. Once. Once is usually enough. More than that and they quickly become annoying. So I was thinking, how about a commercial channel? All commercials all the time! If you ever wanted to see what was going on in commercial land you could switch to that channel and in an hour you could probably watch all the new commercials made in the last week. Get your fix of mass marketing all at once.

Then I got to wondering how much a TV show is worth. It takes a bunch of money to produce a TV drama, just guessing I would say maybe a million dollars an episode. I mean just look at all the people listed in the credits, all the locations, all the props. And you have to produce the episode in a week. I think a million bucks is a fair estimate. But the show gets broadcast to millions of viewers. There are about 15 minutes of commercials in each one hour of broadcast time, so if you are charging a $100,000 (one hundred thousand dollars) per minute, you could bring in 1.5 million dollars, which would make the whole endeavor worth while. If a million people watch the show, then the advertisers are paying a buck-fifty for every viewer, and since only about half of the ads are watched, and only ten percent of them are actually in the advertisers sights, the advertisers are paying $30 for each viewer, or $1 per viewer per 30 second commercial.

Of course, any one of these numbers could be off by a factor of ten or even a hundred, which would make all my carefully wrought calculations worthless, but I think I am hitting pretty close to the mark. A show needs to pay for itself up front, broadcasters aren't going to waste valuable air time on something that isn't paying for itself. After the initial prime time broadcast things can get a little easier. The show has already paid for itself, so any money that can be made now is gravy. Remember the printing press model of capitalism.

All of which is a long way of saying that one dollar per hour of commercial free video entertainment is a fair price.

Remote Controls

Home Theater Controls

We got four new pieces of home entertainment electronics and they all came with their own remote controls. Along with all the old ones, not to mention cordless phones, we have a veritable pile of similar shaped things with buttons.

On a good day, I can get by with one remote and one cordless phone. The cordless phones are easy, even though we have three different ones. We got them all at different times, so I was able to adjust to them slowly. I didn't have to figure them all out at once. Also, I try to avoid all the fancy features, mostly on principle.

Basement Controls

The remote controls are another story. There has got to be a better way of dealing with this stuff. I am pretty sure I only use half a dozen buttons on any control. Some remotes can be programmed to operate other devices, but I tried that a few times and it hasn't paid off. Several years ago I bought a Universal remote and dutifully programmed. Then the batteries died and it forgot all I taught it. Wonderful. When we got the DVR from Verizon I thought I might try again. So I dutifully tried all of the codes they listed in their book for Panasonic. None of them worked. What a crock. I supposed I will have to call Verizon, or go visit their web site or something to get this straightened out, but you know, I really don't want to have to mess around with this.

Here's an idea: contact programming. You hold the remote up to a spot on the device and press the program button, the remote sends a request to the device for instructions, and the device beams them back to the control. You require contact to eliminate confusion. You are also going to need to label some of the buttons dynamically, which will mean some kind of screen. And for Pete's sake, put some lights in these things. I want a light button that causes all the buttons to be illuminated so I figure out which button I need to push.

Are any of these remotes any better than any other? I like the one's that use AA batteries instead of AAA, but only because I expect the AA's to last like forever. Triple A's are constantly dying and they are expensive for the amount of power they hold and they save you, what, half an ounce of weight? Big whoop. Other than that, they are all about the same. Someday someone is going to come up with a remote control that is run with the fingers, rather than the thumb. I mean you have four fingers and only one thumb. Fingers are longer and can cover more area, why would you want to use your thumb for all this button pushing? Because your fingers are holding the device. There has to be a better way.

My wife's car has radio controls on the back side of the steering wheel. You cannot see them, but they are easy enough to operate. Of course, there are only a few buttons, not the sixteen zillion there are on these remotes. There has got to be a better way. Maybe somebody will come up with one. Maybe I will. Someday.

Update December 2016 replaced missing pictures.

Home Theater, Part 2

Wife and I went to Wicke's Furniture today and bought a console TV stand. It was almost that quick. It was the first store we stopped in today. We walked through almost the entire store before we came on this piece. It was what we wanted. Color was not too dark, lots of storage, a couple of shelves for the electronic bits, right height, right depth, right length. (The picture shows the console base and the hutch top. We just got the base. We did not get the hutch top.) Price was more than I wanted to spend, but not too much. Anne was ready to buy it, but I said we should think about it for a bit. So we went down the street to visit a couple of other furniture stores. One was selling Amish furniture. They had maybe two dozen pieces scattered around a big showroom. The place was three quarters empty. They had one table that was about the right size. They wanted $700 for it, which, considering it was only approximately what we were looking for, was too much. Another, more conventional furniture store had several consoles, but nothing that was any better than what we had already seen, and everything was more money, not a lot, like one hundred dollars, but enough to make a difference.

Then we went by Costco to look at a couple of other items we had seen earlier. The console I had found was much too dark, almost black. I do not understand black wooden furniture. The mood of the country? Everywhere we went, there was a lot of it, except at the Amish store. The piece that Anne had seen was a buffet and it was too tall. So we have made our reality checks and we are confirmed in out selection. It's lunch time so we stop at the McDonald's in the Costco parking lot. I'm impressed. It is actually a pretty nice place, and clean to boot. I can't remember the last time I saw a fast food restaurant that impressed me. Usually they are so jammed and busy you are lucky if there aren't bodies of the slower customers underfoot.

We go home and pick up the truck. No point in waiting on deliver, there is only one piece and it will fit in the truck easy. We stop by the store and pay for the console and head out to the warehouse. We are sitting at the light to leave the store and I realize I have no idea where the warehouse is. Back to the store to get directions, then downtown to the warehouse. We have to wait about fifteen minutes for the guys at the warehouse to pull our order and deliver it to the dock. It's heavy. I help him slide it across the few feet from the forklift to the edge of the dock and into the back of the pickup. Oops, I've miscalculated. The box too long to fit in the bed with the tailgate closed. I pull the truck up a couple of feet and try to lower the tailgate by myself, but I can't do it. I have to get help.

Loaded up, we head for home. Now we have to get this box out of the truck and into the house. I was thinking that if there were four of us, we could each take a corner and carry it in, but that does not work. We end up balancing the box on a skateboard to get it to the front door. Then three of us carry it inside. This sucker is heavy. Oh, look at that, the weight is posted on the box: 100 kilograms net, 112 kg gross. That's almost 250 pounds! No wonder it feels so blinking heavy.

My crazy neighbor Larry has been buying custom high priced hardwood furniture for his house. Every time he gets a new piece, Wayne (my other neighbor) and I get to help him carry it inside. I swear that each piece he buys is heavier than the last. Now I have the satisfaction of knowing that my furniture weighs as much as his, but only cost one tenth as much. I mean it's all about the weight, isn't it?

So the box is inside the house, we still need to get it into the TV room. Fortunately, it is only a few feet away. We take off the sides and top of the box and slide the console on the box bottom into the TV room. Now we have the final unpacking and setting up to do. There are three doors and the hinges on two have come loose. One of the hinge pins is trying to escape. The doors do not want to line up. The shelf supports do not want to go in their holes. The shelves to not want to sit squarely. There is masking tape on the glass door that has to be razored off and then I remove the adhesive residue with turpentine. A couple of hours of futzing around and things are squared away enough.

Now there is the matter of stringing the cables. Verizon came by yesterday and hooked up their HD-DVR. The brought some really nice cables, but they are really overkill for what we are doing, and we are really cramped for space, so I pull them out. The Panasonic home theater system has a disk carousel, so the box is really deep. It barely fits inside the console. I am worried that I will have to cut a hole in the back panel to accommodate the plugs from the various cables. It's a tight fit, but we manage. Finally get all the cables sorted out, push the console back closer to the wall, and set the BRAND NEW MONSTER TV on top. Hook up the cables and we are good to go.

Oh wait, how do you turn it on? We have three remote controls. It takes us 30 minutes to sort out what buttons we need to push to get the sound from the new Verizon DVR to the Panasonic sound system. We spend the next hour pushing buttons, changing channels, seeing what God hath wrought. The family finally settles down to watch a comedy and I go to the kitchen to get something to eat. I am not in there for fifteen minutes before my youngest comes to report that the DVR is sparking. I go look. Screen is black. I kill the power and go back to my bowl of cereal. Whatever is wrong is going to have to wait until tomorrow.

Update December 2016 replaced missing pictures.

Home Theater

After years of no cable and nothing but CRT televisions, I finally broke down and joined the rest of America in our headlong plunge into digital nirvana. Comcast is the local cable company and I had never heard anything good about them. You give them a hunnert bucks a month and they give you lousy service and pump a zillion channels of advertisements into your home. That did not sound like a very good deal to me. Last year Verizon, the local phone company installed fiber optic cables in my neighborhood. This year they are offering digital TV. I am not sure what is was that caused me to finally buy into this. Perhaps it is because I dislike going anywhere, and TV brings the world to me without my having to suffer through all the hassles and inconvenience of actually travelling. Perhaps because it is Christmas and I was feeling generous. In any case, I called Verizon and ordered their digital TV service. Last weekend, the wife and I went to Costco and looked at the big TV's. They had a bunch: plasma and LCD flat screens and some DLP rear projection units. On that day the LCD's looked better than the plasma, they were also cheaper. I did notice that there was some lagging in some of the action images, but I figured it was something I could live with. I took some notes and later on settled on either a 42" or 47" Vizio LCD. Friday I took the boys with me to go buy one of these two televisions. Instead, they gravitate to the plasma units. They do not seem to suffer from lagging like the LCD units, and the picture seems better. They have a nice Panasonic unit that has a $300 instant rebate, which makes it only $50 more than the larger Vizio unit I was considering. It is not 1080p compatible, it only has a horizontal resolution of 1300 and some odd pixels, but I think that will be enough for now. The way electronics is evolving it may be obsolete in five or ten years. I bought a Panasonic home theater sound system to go with it. They had a Sony unit that was a little cheaper, but I thought that by buying the same brand, they (the television and the sound system) might play together better. So far the only glitch is that I need an HDMI cable, which was not included with either unit. Freddie's (the local super market) had one for $60. I passed. Newegg has them for $6. But I will wait on that until Verizon shows up to do their installation, which is supposed to happen Thursday. So I bought the TV and sound system and the boys and I carted them home. I let the boys unload and set it all up, which they were very happy to do. And we watched movies and the boys played video games all weekend. I watched four movies this weekend, and three of them I had seen before. It was really a big improvement over watching shows on the old TV. And the old CRT is no slouch. It is a 36" monster. It will probably be in our basement forever. No one is going to want to carry it out. I think it weighs close to 300 pounds. Bringing this big screen TV home has created another problem and that is how are we going to arrange the TV room to accommodate it? The wardrobe has been forced against the window, not that the window was ever used, but it is still a little tacky. I am going to have to buy a new piece of furniture to support the TV and all its' ancillary equipment. And it is going to have to be a decent piece of furniture which means it will probably cost upwards of $300. Oh well, what else is money for?