A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way

• Cutting the Cord on Cable. Wish I could get there but live HD sports still keeps me stuck to cable/satellite provider. I’ve tried the streaming options and they are weak — poor selection of games/sources (I need ESPN/ABC channels + BTN + Fox Sports channels + upcoming Pac12 network), lots of stutter, not HD content. I will probably be one of the last cable subscribers in the country.
• Men with deep voices lack sperm. I was a tenor in choir.
• Do programming puzzles in interviews work?. I don’t think I’ve ever asked these kinds of questions, or at least not in 20 years.
• Gamification sucks. Respect your users.
• The Verge and The Wirecutter — good tech sites.
• If you are busy, you are doing something wrong.
• 10 new-ish programming languages. WOuld like to learn more about Chapel, haXe, X10, OPA.
• DSLRs are a dying breed. Not another “camera phones are going to win” article, but a smarter take on the mirrorless trend.

I watched bits of LSU/WVU (LSU is my #1), Toledo/Syracuse, ND/Pitt, UW/Cal. But key games I watched yesterday were OSU and USC.

• OSU is in for a tough year. Yes they tackled better yesterday, but it was Colorado. If we give up 17 to Colorado, we will give up 24+ to MSU/Nebraska/Wisconsin, and the OSU offense does not have the firepower to score enough against those teams. I’m glad Braxton and other young players are getting the reps, this is a team for next year.
• USC shot themselves in the foot over and over again, and Erickson was clearly the best coach out there. The ASU offensive game plan and adjustments were very effective and USC could never crack it.

On broader college football issues, if you haven’t already seen the below, read immediately. As money continues to pour into the sport, the issues discussed are going to become more prominent, not less.

• If you haven’t already read the the Quad’s story on college football fan distribution, do so. Excellent explanation of the market facts underpinning realignment chaos.
• Study about poverty and student-athletes. Excellent, record revenues and expenditures in college football, but many players struggle.
• Of course. the Atlantic article on the inherently corrupt economics of college football.

And on a lighter note, Matt Sarz’s TV listings. Finding USC on the Root network last night was tricky.

Following up on my last post about my college football digital media setup, I’ve been playing around with the WatchESPN app and it is not bad, if you are on a supported carrier you can watch reasonable quality video over a wifi connection. I use it at home to keep tabs on a second game while watching a primary game on the TV, but I can use it on any wifi connection anywhere, not just at home. Still waiting for the BTN2GO app that has been promised.

Some people have suggested sites like http://www.bahistv.tk/ for watching feeds. This is one of many sites that attempts to find you a live feed of various sports content. In desperation it might be useful, but the signals are generally standard def and laggy/lossy at that. So it is useful to me in the same way that Skype is useful — if you are making an overseas call, where costs are high and quality is iffy, then Skype is super useful. For domestic calls where the incremental cost of a call is $0 and quality is good, Skype is of little utility. So with these video sites — if I don’t have access the content on a domestic cable/satellite carrier, then it is useful. But will never be my preferred choice because the quality is so poor.

• Poor Halo play prompts stabbing threat. Doesn’t seem unreasonable. I’ve heard campers threatened with worse.
• How Secure Is My Password. No idea how accurate, but fun. 17 thousand years for my typical password.
• Rich on photobooks. I just always use the default in Aperture but perhaps I should branch out.
• AR.Drone. Why don’t I have one of these yet.
• Declining energy quality as recession cause. An interesting way to look at things. Not sure it actually makes sense tho.
• Now you can swap useless Amex reward points for useless Zynga crap.(TechCrunch)
• Snoopy themed Windows tablet. Take that, Apple.
• Spiders on Drugs(Design+Milk). We are asking for some serious payback from spider nation some day.
• Umpteenth article on the death of cable TV(TechCrunch), yawn. Until I can watch HD live sports without stuttering I am captive to cable/dish. Going to be a while.
• Charles on breaking up MSFT. Good as always.
• Habitable planet found?
• Languages you’ve never heard of(Gadgetopia). In the future, we will all have our very own programming language.
• Topologist suggests new form of matter. For most of our history we’ve used the forms of matter that nature gave us. It is interesting to observe and think about what we can create as we gain mastery over atomic organization.
• One man’s indictment of iTunes. The thing is a giant hairball of software.
• Exercise and aging. Crap I need to get after it.
• Show Me What’s Wrong. Super useful.
• User experience of F1 telemetry. Always impressed with the amount of money spent on racing.
• MacPaint and MacDraw source code. Nostalgia.

OK I am sure I will buy one of these when I can because, well, I am a classic early adopter and will get sucked in. But as mentioned at All Things D, why will GoogleTV be any different than any of the other failed tv/internet merged products?

I can already watch tons of movies today or lots of crappy web content on my Comcast box, my Tivo box, my AppleTV box. But none of these let me break free of the Comcast/media chokehold and let me watch the really critical content — HD sports (particularly college football), HD first-run top-100 popular drama/comedy series from ABC/CBS/NBC/FOX/UPN/TNT/etc. Google announcements with Logitech and Sony are meaningless — Logitech will make pretty much anything and Sony hasn’t been relevant since about 1979. Now if this box came with an announcement of content availability from ESPN and from 4-5 major networks then it might be exciting. But I can’t see why these networks and Comcast would let that happen without being forced.

But I am sure I will buy one anyway…

While in Ohio, we are living without a cable or satellite feed. We do have an IP connection and so are playing around with how to watch ABC/NBC/CBS/ESPN content.

Attempt 1 is Slingbox+SlingCatcher. Slingbox in Bellevue, kicking the s-video output from our Tivo up to the net. Then Slingcatcher box here attached to TV. We have 6mbit upload speeds in Bellevue and ~6mbit download here. I chose s-video as a way to minimize the data rate and I wonder if I should have chosen composite video. Because the quality basically sucks. Audio is ok but video is pretty blurry and almost unwatchable. This is clearly never going to be a mainstream solution.

Attempt 2 is downloads direct to the AppleTV from the iTunes store. But totally fails on network tv, the selection is abysmal. and no live sports.

Attempt 3 is bittorrent+handbrake+itunes and playback from an appletv attached to the tv. OK this provides good quality results but a) no live content like football games, and b) is uber-geeky. I can manage this collection of software but no one else wants to take the time to do so. But I can batch up jobs and get a little done every night.

So we have a clunky way to get non-live network shows. But still no great solution for live sports — ESPN, etc. ESPN360 is just barely ok and I guess I can hook the Mac up to the tv. Wish I could get it on other boxes that I am willing to leave hooked up fulltime to tv — mactv, game console, etc.

Will you see all 120 teams play in 2009? : Fanblogs College Football Blog. I’ve been wondering about this as a goal as well — just seeing a quarter of play from each team. Over 14 weeks of regular season, this is just seeing 4+ games a weekend IF you can magically pick all the games that cover all the teams. Going to need to pay careful attention to the Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday night games to pick up all the lesser programs.

This weekend alone I will aspire to see parts of

• South Carolina/NC State
• Utah/Utah State
• Oregon/Boise State
• Minnesota/Syracuse
• Ohio State/Navy
• Georgia/Ok State
• SJSU/USC
• Missouri/Illinois
• Oklahoma/BYU
• Alabama/VT
• Maryland/Cal
• LSU/UW
• Colorado State/UC
• Cincy/Rutgers
• Miami FL/FSU

OK I probably won’t get all but that would be 30 teams right there. Of course the only somewhat obscure programs would be Utah State, SJSU, and Colorado State.

Perhaps my goal should be to just see the BCS teams — that is 66 teams, a very doable goal. And probably less painful than having to watch lower-division Sunbelt conference teams.

I’m having problems getting a clean Comcast signal to one room in my house. Used to work fine but at about the time of the digital transition, the signal started to fail. Comcast can see and query the cablecard but we can’t get any channel signals through. All the coax and cat5 cabling in our house goes back to a central wiring closet; the ethernet network in the room in question works fine at 1 gigabit but for some reason the coax/cable network fails.

Why does the protocol/modulation scheme for cable fail? Why can the device be addressed and queried but we can’t see channels? Why do they need to put a signal amplifier on the line — i never need to do this for ethernet? Is comcast still using some analog scheme to send the signals across? This just seems odd and ridiculously archaic. And the crazy pairing nonsense for cablecards with all kinds of identifiers needed to be traded back and forth — it makes DHCP and mac addresses look positively simple.

I know I could go read about 64QAM and 256QAM and Cablelabs and all kinds of other stuff to get all smartened up about this but I am frankly tired of dealing with it. I’ve been ignoring the verizon fios offering in our neighborhood but if it would let me junk the coax and move to all cat5/ip i might consider….

Calacanis: Apple to release networked HDTVs – Nate Lanxon, MP3 & Digital Music Editor – Technology Blog at CNET.co.uk. — this would be good. The current state of the world where you have to buy some separate box and whack it into your media center to get IP-delivered content is just not going to succeed, the mainstream isn’t going to go thru this brain damage. The IP receiver has to be built into the TV or the media receiver or some other piece that people understand and know they need.

Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen – Logitech Harmony One Remote Control Review. — Nice review of this remote.  It is a pretty good universal remote and I am also pretty happy with.  The one huge problem is lack of bluetooth support to control a PS3 as a DVD player.  But overall a pretty good experience.

• Mitsubishi Ultra Thin Frame Premium Flat Panel TV with Integrated Sound Projector » Coolest Gadgets — cool. I have a discrete sound projector in one room and have been happy with. this is a great way to get surround sound with minimal fuss.
• At the other end of the price spectrum, the Li’l Guppie Multi-tool. I am not sure I actually get much value out of multi-tools but they look cool.
• Realtime power use monitor — this actually seems pretty useful.

Football: Big Ten Announces TV Plans for First Four Weekends of 2008 Home Schedule – The Ohio State Buckeyes Official Athletics Site – OhioStateBuckeyes.com — here you go. I expect to be at the USC game.

I’m going to convert sometime in the next 6 months to an HDMI receiver I think — here are some Sony units — CrunchGear » Archive » Sony is adding three ES receivers to its 2008 line-up — I am wondering if I have to convert my current TV as well — it doesn’t have HDMI input, only component — will these receivers convert HDMI in to RGB? Need to learn more about the technical and DRM aspects of this.

Logitech > Remotes > Universal Remotes > Harmony® One Advanced Universal Remote — I’m pretty happy with this remote. I’ve used Harmonys in the past and they were easy to config but I found them to be finicky in actual use. This one tho seems to be much more reliable — when I tell it to turn on my Tivo, AVR, and monitor all at once, it does it quickly without a hiccup.

Comcast HD Quality Reduction: Details, Screenshots – AVS Forum — wow, comcast cheating on HD. add this to their “traffic shaping” and gosh they don’t seem super customer friendly

Danny Glasser: The Road to HD: QAM to the rescue? — Danny is concocting the most complicated Rube Golbergian system possible to try to watch HD. Good luck! I might suggest just buying a TivoHD box and slipping a cablecard in it, you will have immediate HD football goodness.

• Switch Between Your Gmail Accounts — hmm this has been an impediment to spawning more accounts
• Paypal toolbar gens one-off credit card numbers — always liked the one-off credit card idea; at one point some ecommerce sites didn’t deal well with
• Generate blogrolls from google reader — need to reinstate my blogroll someday
• See if your windows box has stealth connections to the net — i’m clean
• Use Colr.org to plan out a color scheme — love color scheme tools
• AnyTV player – tried this one, actually seems to kind of work
• Visual exploration of medical terms — didn’t learn anything new but maybe useful
• Photomatix for HDR photography

Pioneer’s Kuro Plasma Will Deliver Absolute Black — Contrast Ratio Is ‘Officially Irrelevant’ | Gadget Lab from Wired.com — I’d like this, I hate the grayish emissions from most of my screens.

Too bad for them that their black has already been trumped — new “blackest” material — “You could think of a material that basically collects all the light that falls into it” — oh my gosh we are manufacturing black holes now, I knew this nanotech stuff was dangerous.

Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen – Long Term Viability of AppleTV — I wonder about this too.  It seems like there are a kajillion boxes (for instance XStreamHD) and offerings (for instance Amazon Unbox) in this space. My gut tells me that this kind of service is going to get rolled into every settop box, dvd player, game console, just like DVR capability is getting rolled in. The need for a separate box is not apparent to me. I think this dynamic is going to kill off DVD players and their hidef ilk as well.

To my eyes, the game was actually painful to watch in HD — I was watching Q13 FOX on Comcast. You could detect noticeable interframe jitter, it was particularly noticeable when the camera panned down the field, the white yard stripes would show a lot of jumping. I don’t notice this on most ESPN football broadcasts — is this because ESPN is 720p whereas Fox is 1080i? I don’t know for sure but it was painful, and not just because the Buckeyes were stumbling.