Gadget Wisdom

It would be very easy if we could blame Geektonic for this. After he featured a MythTV system, we agreed to offer him a profile of our primary MythTV setup. It seemed like a good time to dust the system both inside and out, in preparation for some fresh photos.

We have a dedicated MythTV backend which doubles as a file server. We exercise basic power saving functions on it, including CPU frequency scaling. We discovered some hardware problems during the cleaning process.

There was an odd grinding noise that gradually appeared. Originally, we attributed it to a cable hitting against one of the case fans, but there was no such cable. We used velcro cable ties to bundle our cables together just in case. The server scales the CPU to its normal specs only when it is under load. We’d been having crashes whenever we tried any video transcoding. Finally, we tied these two problems we thought unrelated together. The fan was failing, and could handle cooling, but not when the computer went full throttle, during which it gradually overheated till the built-in BIOS shutdown temperature is reached.

So we ran to the store the next day, bought a new CPU fan, and replaced ours. We’re always nervous about pulling off a long-running CPU fan, as the thermal paste used between the heatsink and the processor can tend to act, as the name paste implies, as a bond that could cause damage if you are not very careful in pulling it up. But there were no problems, and the CPU temperatures returned to normal.

Then, today, half a week later, we received notification of prefailure on one of the drives. As we speak, we’re moving data off of it. It will be removed, lashed to a different system, and a manufacturer low-level test mechanism used to check the drive. Either way, it is still under warranty and could be exchanged for replacement by the manufacturer.

It is said bad luck comes in threes, so we thought this was a perfect time to discuss how you can monitor and protect yourself from hardware failure. We’ll focus on these techniques for Linux users, but the idea applies to all systems.

• S.M.A.R.T.(Self Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Tool) -  A system built into every hard drive that monitors several variables to predict drive failure before it happens.
• Temperature/Fan – There are temperature and fan speed sensors in motherboards that permit monitoring of computers for overheating.

Here are, in our opinion, two very important things you need to enable if you are going to protect your computer. But should be enabled in the motherboard BIOS to start. If your BIOS has a shutdown temperature option, that if reached, will turn the computer off…enable it. Enable SMART reporting as well.

Smartmontools is available in all Linux distributions. Make sure it, or another SMART monitoring tool is enabled and configured to send you an alert if it detects anything. Smartmontools on one of our systems was configured to send an email to the root email account, which was local to the system, and rarely used. Make sure it is sent somewhere you will see it.

For temperature and fans, the standard is LM_Sensors, which may tae some tweaing. Check your estimated CPU temperature in BIOS, then boot and compare it to the one in lm_sensors. If they don’t match, you may need to tweak your settings. Make sure this also generates an alert when it reaches a threshold so you can take action.

We’re a bit mystified as to why features like this aren’t built into Windows, but many manufacturers do offer their own monitoring utilities you can install to monitor vitals. Either way, by setting up your computer early on monitor for these things, you can head off some catastrophic failure. Barring that…backup often.

If you’ve read this blog before, you know we have some very legitimate issues with Apple products, while accepting that they have some useful and popular designs.

The iPad is essentially a giant iPod Touch, with a 10 inch screen, and the ability to run iPhone applications. There are criticisms, many of which are legitimate, but like many things, many wlll accept it because they’ve drank the Apple koolaid and because it has those good features.

Some think it may challenge the Kindle, but while the Kindle certainly has its problems, the iPad uses a conventional LCD screen, which may create readability issues for some over high-contrast E-ink screen of a Kindle or any of its current challengers. As part of the launch, Apple will launch iBook, their own online book store. We look forward to seeing how this plays out.

Can the downsides, and Apple’s unwillingness to respond to public feature requests be overcome by the fact that it is a cool giant iPod Touch with a new E-book service? We’ll wait and see.

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Recently, Geektonic featured a showcase of a MythTV setup. It has inspired us to break out the camera and take some pictures of our own equipment. You’ve already seen some screenshots from our MythTV setup, but coming soon, we’ll be offering some shots and specs on our current equipment setup, as soon as we clean it up.

In the meantime, check out Rothgar’s MythTV setup, courtesy of Geektonic.

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We love the Sansa Clip. We bought a 1GB Clip refurbished a while back, and it replaced a slightly more sophisticated player with video playback capabilities. Sometimes, simplicity is more useful. Now, we’ve replaced our 1GB Sansa Clip with a new Sansa Clip Plus(or Clip+).

The Plus offers a slightly sturdier construction, the buttons have been reorganized, and one big new feature…a microSDHC slot for expansion. It also contains the features that we loved about the Clip.

• It can play FLAC and OGG files.
• It has good Podcast and Audiobook support.
• The sound quality is good.
• It is REALLY small
• It has a screen, something the Shuffle lacks
• It has a built in FM radio

We commented on the Clip+ when it first came out. Sandisk advertises the expansion slot as a slotMusic slot. slotMusic and slotRadio were Sandisk’s attempt at selling preloaded microSD cards, which we still insist, on the face of it, is not a bad idea, but never took off. Sandisk’s implementation was not quite what we thought would work. We’d like to see an on-demand kiosk that would allow you to buy files, load them onto the little card, and that could be available in airports and music stores.

That aside, the Clip form factor is the perfect size for sticking into a bag. Everyone we’ve shown it to, even iPod lovers, have agreed that if you are looking for a simple, utilitarian, good quality music player, the Clip is superior to the iPod shuffle and to many other players on the market in similiar price ranges. For those who are Linux users, or like a simple interface, the Clip offers easy loading of new music by copying it over a USB cable. The jack built-in is a standard Mini-USB jack, as opposed to any proprietary plug.

It relies on ID3 tagging to allow you to browse for files to play, but offers Playlist(created on your computer not the device, although this may change), and an folder browse mode to allow you to select by the directories you have put on the device. When we bought it, there was already a new firmware we could load on, which gives us hope Sandisk will continue to maintain it. AnythinButiPod has a list of possible firmware improvements.

They also show how you can get a microSD to SD converter to, with a corresponding increase in size, get cheaper SD as opposed to microSD memory for the Clip.

Elsewhere, the Clip V1 has unstable support for the Rockbox alternative music firmware and other versions may come someday.

The only complaint we could see having about it is that it is so small, it is easy to lose. We’ve narrowly avoided misplacing it a few times for that reason. But a device being too portable is the sort of complaint we can live with.

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The Carousel of Progress was created by Disney for the 1964 World’s Fair. It features an animatronic show that shows how the American home has changed over four scenes, the turn of the 20th century, the 20s, the 40s, and finally, the most updated piece…the future. Right now the future was determined in 1994.

In a recent trip to Disney World, surprising as it may seem, the Carousel of Progress, despite its lack of popularity, ranked as one of the more interesting rides. Sometimes, simplicity really does just work. But we want more.

In the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, the ride uses a randomized pattern of movements so the ride is not identical each time. Why can’t all rides be different every time we go through them? Epcot’s Mission: Space offers a more mild version of the ride for people prone to motion-sickness. Why not ten different versions they can rotate through? Even if it doesn’t change for each passenger, the recordings could change once a day, or once an hour.

Systems like this, ones that adapt and offer a variety of options, are present in computer gaming and a variety of other fields. What do you think? What is the future of theme parks?

GeekTonic caught this one before us. We’re big fans of the SiliconDust HDHomerun Dual Tuner. SiliconDust has great support, and is well supported under Linux and Windows.

The HDHomerun streams video, once tuned, over the network to your device. Even without the SiliconDust, we think this is part of the future of video. If this device added a decryption device, it would decode the stream and then stream it unencrypted to the computer, allowing access to all channels.

Hopefully, there aren’t any more restrictions beyond that, and they aren’t forced to limit it to Windows only. We could imagine they’d have trouble convincing Cable Labs that Linux users would honor the broadcast flags, but if it does what we hope it does, we’d have one on pre-order the day they came out.

For a long time, we wavered on the issue of whether to buy an e-book reader. However, after we got a lot of money this holiday season in Amazon gift cards, we wavered and considered reversing ourselves, even though we have major issues with the Kindle.

This holiday season, for the first time, Kindle books outsold traditional books on Amazon, the Kindle itself was the site’s bestselling product.

But even after this, we don’t think the technology is open enough. We didn’t get into music downloading until Amazon released a DRM-free store. It is all about the freedom.

Our latest contemplation, with the delay of purchasing an e-book reader, is to replace our physical classics with free books from the Google Books project, as they are now available in EPUB format, which can be read using the free and open FBReader. What do you think?

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On December 24th, XBMC Version 9.11 was released. It includes a variety of GUI improvements, and playback improvements, including support for RTMP video streams, which is the system that Flash Video players use.

Like Boxee, which is based on it, it doesn’t compile easily under Fedora(our primary operating system), easily, but has wonderful support under Fedora.

The most wonderful aspect of XBMC, which carried into Boxee are the plugins. A loyal community of scripters write plugins to pull in video and audio content from a variety of sites. The difference between XBMC and Boxee is that Boxee often gets cooperation from the content providers for their plugins…in fact, this is part of their goals.

So, give it a shot.

GigaOm reported this week that AT&T asked the FCC to eliminate regulatory requirements that it support a landline network and to provide a deadline for phasing it out. Essentially, they want to get out of the landline telephone business. Today, less than 20 percent of Americans rely exclusively on switched-access lines for voice service. So, essentially, they want to stop serving 1 in 5 Americans who haven’t switched.

Now, to some degree what they are asking for makes sense if they wanted to provide the same level of service digitally that they do over the old analog network. During the great Northeast blackout a few years back, the phone was one of the few things that still worked. Would that be the case if there was no copper network? Whatever you can say about copper telephone service…it has become very reliable, and AT&T’s profits from it, while reduced over the last few years, remain significant.

However, AT&T wants the federal government to seize power in this area away from the various state and local regulatory authorities and eliminate state requirements that a carrier serve all people in a geographic area. These are the areas where cellular service is spotty and internet service is nearly impossible to come by. Also, while Emergency 911 services on VoIP services have improved, it is still an issue. Every person should have the right to have a reasonably priced method of communication with the outside world available to them, be it telephone, internet, or a combination thereof.

If AT&T is expecting the government to force the elimination of traditional telephone service like they did analog broadcast television, we would hope the government response is for AT&T to come up with something just as reliable and deployable before any discussion can begin. Trying to make the government do their dirty work for them is ridiculous.

We still keep our landline service, despite dabbling in VoIP and owning cellphones. We have a hard time trusting big corporations, but oddly enough, trusting the telephone company to provide traditional telephone service is something we can do more than trusting the cable company. That is not to say the telephone company thrills us with their service either. It is just harder to mess up a traditional telephone.

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Earlier today, on the MythTV Users list, contributor Robert McNamara announced that he and Doug Vaughan(who wrote JAMU and the TVDB grabber) are working on a new plugin for MythT called MythNetVision.

MythTV has had Internet video plugins before. MythStream was one of the earliest. We never could quite get it to work consistently, and it hasn’t been rewritten for MythUI, and those won’t work under MythTV 0.22. None of these have ever been included as part of the official MythTV package, which this has the potential to be.

From their description, it would have the following features:

• Easy to Extend with Scripts so New Sites can be added. Adding a site would be as simple as parsing an API or site and formatting each item as an RSS article in the output of the script. Parsing happens in the background as long as the frontend is open to keep information current.
• Support both media which is web-only (by spawning a browser directly to the playback link) and downloadable (by threading off a download and playing in the internal player as soon as enough data is buffered). Also supports external players.
• Like other MythTV plugins, completely themeable.
• Compliant with the Terms of Service of the websites it uses and shipped with a number of popular sites already supported. Scripts would only be distributed that were totally compliant, but other scripts could be added separately, outside of the distribution.
• Two parts: An internet video search and an internet video browser.  Plans to include a “tree view” for a site by dumping the video
  RSS feeds for the site into a grabber config file (adding Revision3 as a fully browseable site would be as simple as dropping the RSS feeds
  in the grabber config).
• All existing grabbers return full screen, autoplay results when they are available and the API allows. When not possible, the best possible result is played.
• Downloadable media will be integrated into recordings.

There is a screencast video that can be viewed here. They hope to release by MythTV 0.23, but possibly sooner.

McNamara used the following sites as Examples of sites that should be very easily (and legally) implemented: Comedy Central, The Escapist Magazine, Revision3, Recent Apple Movie Trailers, BBC iPlayer. They’ve already included Youtube, Vimeo, Blip.tv, MTV Video, and TMDB Trailers.

All of them are very interesting. The Escapist just recently unveiled its app in Boxee at the Boxee Beta unveil, for example.

Speaking of Boxee…it has shifted its focus from media stored on a local drive to online content. MythTV has to do the same. It is a DVR software, and should remain so. But with more and more online content becoming available, it needs to address it, and offer ways for that content to become a part of the interface.

MythNetVideo’s design seems to accommodate for that. It launches external programs, or imports video, whichever it can. MythTV doens’t need to be all-encompassing, it can hand off control to other programs. But having that option allows it to be easily extensible, and that is what it needs.