Insteon Home Control, Not

I was all excited when I found Insteon products made by Smarthome. It is basically X-10 improved. It is a powerline system that has two way communication (and other technical improvement). What that means is that when a controller sends a command to a device, it will make sure that the device got it, and you can also find out about the state of each device (lamps, etc). It also has a very nicely priced keypad that you can mount in standard switch boxes. So, what's wrong with it? In short, it will not work with 3 phase electric systems. Most commercial grade building uses 3 phase systems. Our loft building is one. So it just won't work well.

If you have a house, I think this system is great. But for me, we have to go back to either Z-Wave which is radio based, new, and have a very poor and ugly selection of controllers and devices, or Lutron RadioRA. Stay tune.

HDTV - Sony Grand Wega KDF-E50A10 + Comcast Motorola 3412 DVR Box Review

Taking advantage of my moving lofts, I have finally decided to upgrade video equipments. Under the general direction of upgrading to HDTV, I bought the Sony Grand Wega 50 inch LCD rear projection TV KDF-E50A10, and got hooked up to HD and DVR service from Comcast with a Motorola 3412 set top DVR cable box. From a user point of view, I am getting three new things:

1. I get a new 50 inch TV to replace my 10 years old 60 inch rear projection unit. This new TV is much lighter and slimer.
2. I get to watch high def broadcast from my cable service. Each time I see HD broadcast in the stores, they look stunning.
3. I can also hook up my PC to the TV and use it as a very large monitor for casual work and presentation and demostration at home.

The TV

The TV is beautiful, of course. It measures 47 inch x 33 inch x 17 inch (rounded up) in size, and 73 pounds in weight. It managed to fit into my Sienna with the back row folded down and the middle seat pushed all the way forward.

I was choosing between this LCD rear projection and the Samsung DLP projection sets. At the end, I decided to try the newer technology of LCD rear projection. Most review raves about this Sony set. The price is similar, the look is slightly better on the Sony (a personal opinion). However, the Sony does have less features -- notably only one HDMI interface, and no picture in picture support.

It has many inputs, but only one HDMI and only one VGA input. The "PC" input strangely only support a 3.5mm jack as audio input. It will not accept digital sound input. However, the supported video resolution is great. More about using this as a monitor later.

One thing that surpised me is that the TV is not very stable. I have it sitting on top of a nice IKEA TV stand that is on wheels. Because the TV is so thin, it actually wobbles a little if you rock the TV stand back and forth. The custom Sony stands have indentations that mate with the bottom of the TV, and also a safety strap that locks into the back of the TV. The safety strap is not available as an option, unfortunately.

HDTV from Comcast

I used to use Sage TV on my Window 2000 PC as my digital video recorder. It works really well. Since I do not have a capture card in that PC that will capture in High Def, I switched to use the DVR feature on the Comcast cable/DVR box.

The box has a 120 Gig hard drive (hence the model number 3412). HD recording unfortunately takes up a lot of room, and I managed to fill the drive in no time. The software and user interface definitely is not as polished as the Sage TV software. Here are some of the issues:

• It cannot distingish first run vs re-run shows well -- at least on all of the shows on the "Fine Living" channel, which reruns a lot. So I ended up recording lots of duplicate show, which brings me to issue number two:
• The program information display on recorded show is useless. It shows almost no data that is episode specific. This makes looking for duplicated shows impossible.
• If the box loses power, it tends to crash and have problem. You want to "reboot" it by doing a hard power cycle -- unplug, wait 30 secs, plug back in.

There is a lot of information at the wikipedia on the Motorola DVR box.

Using the TV as a monitor for my PC

I hooked up my home theatre PC, which is an old small form factor Shuttle box, to the TV. I used the VGA to VGA connection, although my PC actually has DVI output. I want to save the TV's only HDMI input for other things. I change the PC screen resolution to 1280 x 768. (I have a ATI Radeon 9600 card.) The display is prefectly readable across the room. I can sit 12 feet away from the screen and read the text.

WinDirStat -- Hard Drive Cleanup

I don't know how I missed this one. You know the problem -- no matter how much hard disk space you have, you always ends up with just 1 gig free on it. How do you find out what's taking up all the space? Enter Win Dir Stat -- "WinDirStat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for Microsoft Windows" from their creator. You can check it out here. I particularly like the pacman status display.

Canon Camera AVI File Editing

Besides the Nikon D70, I also uses a Canon SD450 for quick pictures and movie taking. This is a great camera -- compare to my first Canon S100, they have come a very long way. Finally I decided to publish some of the movies that I have taken with this camera. To my surprise, the "AVI" files created by the camera cannot be edited by any software that I have, including the semi-pro software Vegas Video.

After some research, I learnt that the files created by the Canon and other similar cameras are in the Motion JPEG format, or MJPG. They are basically a series of JPEG images stored together to form a movie. This is why such a small device can capture movies -- very little processing is done by the camera. And unfortunately most video editing software does not have the codec built in to handle the MJPG format.

What to do? There are some company that sells codec for MJPG. They include:

• http://www.morgan-multimedia.com/
• http://www.mainconcept.com
• http://www.pegasusimaging.com/picvideomjpeg.htm
• http://www.softpile.com/Multimedia/Video/Review_10792_index.html

Another slightly easier way is to use the current ZoomBrowser (version 5.5) software that came with Canon to first export the movie to a real quicktime MOV format.

Resource

• Video Vegas FAQ
• Canon Digital Photo Forums
• Canon SD450 Support Page

iPod Shuffle

What a day -- iPod Shuffle and mac mini. Wow !! I am glad I waited for the iPod flash player. It is obvious to me, for the price, one will:

• buy two iPod shuffles so that you don't have to wait for the 2 or 4 hours charging time to recharge the player,
• have different color iPod Shuffles so that you can color code your daily music listening mood.

  What do you think?

Time Travel or United Airlines software bug

Today I found a bug on United Airlines Flight status checking software on their website.It is currently 9 am Thursday Dec 9th on the US east coast, which is where this international flight orginated. Look at the status display from their website that I copied below.

The first part of the flight status is correct. The plan left Newark New Jersey already on the morning of the 9th. However look at the third/last segment of the flight : The plane is also IN FLIGHT and it is flying on Dec 10th, in the future, from Narita to Taipei. (It is only 8 pm Dec 9th in Tokyo at this moment).

How is this possible? The third segment shown is actually the plane from the flight the day before. It is flying that segment on the 9th. Because for this schedule there are two planes in the air at each end, the software screwed up and display the wrong date. It needed to show two different flights from Narita Tokyo to Taipei Taiwan, one on the 9th that is IN-FLIGHT, and one on the 10th that has not started.

You can see if this bug happen each day in the morning by checking for flight 853.

Airline	Flight	Departure	Arrival
United	Flight 853 IN FLIGHT Details	Newark, NJ (EWR) Thu, Dec 9 Scheduled:  7:00 AM Actual:   6:54 AM Reason: -- terminal a Gate: 17	San Francisco, CA (SFO) Thu, Dec 9 Scheduled:  10:23 AM Estimated: 10:19 AM Reason: -- terminal 3 concourse f Gate:  73 Baggage claim:  5
	Flight 853 NOT DEPARTED Details	San Francisco, CA (SFO) Thu, Dec 9 Scheduled:  12:55 PM Estimated:   12:55 PM Reason: -- Gate: INTL	Narita, Japan (NRT) Fri, Dec 10 Scheduled:  5:05 PM Estimated: 5:05 PM Reason: -- Gate:  -- Baggage claim:  --
	Flight 853 IN FLIGHT Details	Narita, Japan (NRT) Fri, Dec 10 Scheduled:  7:00 PM Actual:   7:00 PM Reason: Schedule change due to Ramp Service terminal 1 Gate: 31	Taipei, Taiwan (TPE) Fri, Dec 10 Scheduled:  10:10 PM Estimated: 12:00 AM Reason: Schedule change due to Ramp Service Gate:  C4 Baggage claim:  --

Movable Type Error: Wide character in print at $MT/lib/MT/FileMgr/Local.pm line 88

I recently started getting the error Wide character in print at $MT/lib/MT/FileMgr/Local.pm line 88 when I update my blog entries. I get the error when Movabletype try to ping Movabletype.org to tell them there is an update to my blog. I am using Movable Type 2.6.

After Googling around, the only help I can find are all foreign pages. This page in Japanese is particularly useful. You don't have to understand Japanese -- just add the bold lines (the elseif.... part) to your Local.pm file.

If that site is down, here is my version:

    if ($fmgr->is_handle($from)) {
        while (my $len = read $from, my($block), 8192) {
            print FH $block;
            $bytes += $len;
        }

    }

Add this part:

    elsif(utf8::is_utf8($from)) {
             utf8::encode($from);
             print FH $from;
             $bytes = length($from);

} else {
        print FH $from;
        $bytes = length($from);
    }
    close FH;
    umask($old);
    $bytes;

Double check your curly brackets. Email me if you need more help! Backup your file first !!.

Arafat and the wired world

This is amazing -- I am listening to the Bush press conference, a reporter told him that "Arafat just died, what is your reaction". The president does not know about the death yet. Did the reporter got it from his blackberry? CNN.com does not have this information either as of right now. The news said simply said that he is in a coma. Is this reporter wrong?

Next Cell Phone

As you know, I have been using Sony Ericcson cellphones for a while, my current is a Z600 that I bought in Hong Kong. It is a good phone, but a little bulky. The software is so-so. Propriety connector for power and especially the headphone makes it a pain to use. My first love is still my old Nokia 8890 -- a well design, cool looking, easy to use, GSM world phone. I have been looking at the new Nokia series 60 Symbian phones. I was looking forward to the new clamshell 6260, but this 6260review changed my mind. I was hoping that the Nokia 6670 is better. review here. Unfortunately it seems that the 6260 is not that great either, being a minor upgrade from the 6600. The phone to have, then is the new Nokia 6630. This is a 3G phone with a 1.3 meg camera, MMC card, etc. See the review here.

Add Bookmark Here

I upgraded Firefox to version 1.0PR. The old 9.x version had a security hole I heard. The bad news is that the Tabbrowser preferences extensions has not been updated. The good news is I found a Add bookmark here extension. Now I get one of the nicest UI feature of Opera working in Firefox -- This feature let you navigate, using the bookmark drop down menu, to the place where you want to add the bookmark, and a "add bookmark here" selection is available right there. This is much more intuitive. Try it. You'll see what I mean.

Auto Reply

How many times have you posted something to an email list, and get back 8 or 9 I am out of the office emails from auto-reply messages from subscribers to the list? Problem with this?

• It reveals the subscriber's email address
• It clutter up email traffic

Is it difficult to setup auto-responder (assuming 90% is using Exchange) to only send out of office auto reply to non email list emails? I see a good after market product potential here. Or, if you have a simple solution, let me know!

Open Sourcing Java

Should java be open sourced? There are many arguments for either direction. One thing to note, however, is that the Java language and the API is used to build other application. It is the foundation of software, very much like Microsoft Windows. There cannot, and should not, be derived and incompatible versions of the language and the API. Without a standard and defined foundation, nothing can be built from it.

To PDA or not PDA

I am constantly reviewing whether I can use a PDA or not. I have owned enough of them. Currently I have a cool TH55 Clie from Sony. It has wifi, beautiful screen, etc. But I am a heavy cellphone and laptop user. Do I really use the PDA that much? today I was playing with Avantgo. It is especially powerful with the wifi connection. I can get into a Starbucks, and sync up and get local movies, weather and other info.

Robot Kit

The net is buzzing about this $1400 robot from Japan. Make the robosapian a bargain at $100.

DNS and DHCP for Home Network

This article describes dnsmasq, a very small linux service that let you control DNS and DHCP in a small network. You no longer have to suffer bad support and control for DNS and DHCP on your home Linksys/SMC/... router.

IBM Thankpad X40 vs X31

From Gizmodo comes a link to a review of the new IBM X40 thinkpad. I love my own X31 which I got beginning of this year. Is the X40 better? Yes. But why do they leave out a firewired port? What we need are two, powered USB 2.0 ports and a powered firewire port. I don't need a PCMCIA slot.

Add to My Yahoo

I just noticed that My Yahoo now offers a news aggregation/reader service. You can add this blog to your my yahoo and keep up to date with what's going on. try it!.

Smart Card Reader for PCs

Like it or not, the next big PC "drive slot" on the box will be a Smart Card reader. Currently we started to see digital media reader slot built into PC cases: readers for Compact flash cards and SD card and memory stick. For example, the new systems from Shuttle, the small form factor PC maker, has them. It only make sense. Take the CF card from your camera, plug into the PC, and download or view pictures immediately. But looking way forward (oh, say, 2005), PC maker need to start bundling some form of Smart Card reading into the PC case, so that we can do secure PKI based online transactions. The Hong Kong Postal service is starting the service. The Asian contries have much higher chances of succeeding on implementing smart card ID based online transaction because they already have or likely to implement national ID cards using Smart Card technology. Putting that fact together with the fact that most of these PC components are made in Asia, why won't we start seeing that here in the States?

Blogging from my clie wirelessly,in Frankfurt

This isjust too cool !

Blogging from Starbucks in Frankfurt

It works ! I am sitting in a Starbucks in Frankfurt, logged onto my American t-mobile wifi account. Since I have a monthly wifi add-on plan with t-mobile, I get unlimited wifi access in Europe as well. Global access is here. Hurrah !!For more info, see my original attempt earlier this month.