I'm a Rubber Band Man

A few days ago I talked about what I had setup to get my Acer Aspire Revo with an Ion 2 GPU to play 1080p reasonably smoothly. The problem is that I watch Anime which often includes muxed-in subtitles that are often stylized, and the folks who do the work are increasingly moving to 10-bit encoding. So on some of the more intense titles my solution wasn't holding up.

One of the reasons I got the Revo was a number of Amazon reviews talking about how easy it was to upgrade. So I got a 2 Gig stick for a bit more than $13, and went to install it tonight. The Revo has a single screw, and then you just pry the side off the box. This left a couple scratches, but nothing too notable.

My first surprise was to look in and see that both Memory slots were already filled. I had thought it had 2 Gig in one slot, and so had only ordered one stick. I figured 3 Gigs was still better than 2, and decided to proceed. Normally you replace memory by flipping off the holds on the side of the stick, tilting the memory toward you, taking it out, placing the new stick in, pushing it back, and locking it in with the holds. When I went to release the holds on the top stick, they literally flew out of the box. With some looking I was able to find one of them, but could find no way to make it attach back to the slot. Without the holds, the memory stick stays at an angle, and you can't access it well (if at all).

I tried a few different things until I finally figured out an answer. Using a rubber band, I wrapped the memory stick still in the box several times, then pushed the new memory stick into place, and then figure-8 loops of the rubber band until it was almost stretched to breaking. Pushed on the side, re-screwed the screw, and sure enough, Windows now sees 3 Gigs of Ram. Of course that still turns out not to be enough to make the extreme cases run smooth, and I'm not sure if more Ram would help at this point, or if I just need to wait until I can find a good price on a Core i5 system with a dedicated Video card. But at least I can feel some pride in making my box work with a little extra ingenuity :-)

Google Glasses - The Last Pair You'll Ever Need?

In all the recent discussion about the glasses Google is working on, I have yet to see the use I fully expect to turn them toward - magnifying the page in front of me.

I would like to think it has, or will, occur to someone that with a decently tuned display you could have the glasses alter the image to take care of the imperfections that you normally need ground lenses to do. Instead the glasses could redisplay the landscape or reading material in front of you in a manner that allows you to effectively have self-correcting glasses. Better, you could have an app that tracks your pupil movement and then can additionally correct if it sees you are squinting all the time, or seem to be getting fatigued.

Given the current price of even "discount" progressive lenses, I could see a VERY hot market for these types of augmented reality/reading glasses.

Dave Winer says River, I think Tumblr

Just read his scripting entry (http://scripting.com/stories/2012/02/24/whatNewsMustDo.html), and am wondering why someone doesn't do this with a Tumblr site already? Twitter doesn't work for this because all you would see is the links to the stories, and you need at least some context around the quotes as well as some mechanism to tie them together.

With Daily Top Photos I was trying to do something similar in that I was trying to show off Photographers as directly as I could while still feeding them the traffic they needed for ads or sales. However most Photography sites seem to be going the opposite direction - I want to make it difficult if not impossible for you to share the image. The number of images on Flickr and SmugMug where there is no public link got to the point where it was more time to share someone else's photo than to just edit one of my own. The recent 500px redesign dropped their Tumblr links as well.

Of course I fully expect to see Tumblr eventually counter this with their own integrated photo hosting service. If Twitter can do TwitPic, it's the least I would expect.

In any event, I am still looking for the site or tool that would let me do an article like this one, and then format it to be shared easily to the other services. I like Tumblr's option to auto-share to Twitter or Facebook, but it isn't "smart" about it. For example - why doesn't it pass the tags I give the article to Twitter as HashTags? And then there's the lack of pushing to Google+. Not to mention that if I want to share further to Reddit or... well, you get the idea :-)

An Open Letter to Time Warner (that no one will read)

I have an email from them telling me to expect an answer in 24-48 hours. It's now been well over 72. Here's my response that I fully expect to hit the bit bucket:

So 72 hours later there has been no answer as to when (if ever) someone will be coming by to bury the cable that was scheduled to be buried on Monday... then Tuesday. I presume we need to just wait for when someone comes over to visit, trips over it, and then I and Time Warner both get sued for the injuries?

While I appreciate that the other options in town suck worse, and so dropping the service would be more cutting my own nose than hurting you in any manner, I have to say that I have a hard time understanding how running a business poorly is better (for you or your customers) than running it well.

I hope for, but do not realistically expect, an answer with a time and date that you might actually honor. Since so far your organization is 0 for 2 on that count, I suppose I really have only myself to blame for anticipating otherwise.

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Yes, I know I come across as bitter. But between them and Clear/Clearwire, it just seems like there is no good answer. I know better than to think AT&T or Verizon would do better. My T-Mobile experience has generally been decent, but they don't have a home service. Given that between photo uploads and various downloads and streams I do about 60 gigs a month of traffic, I know I should be happy there is ANY answer for less than $50/month. But the temptation to learn to live without the internet at all is growing daily.

Death by Clearwire

A week later, my Clear account is still showing as active even though I was told it was closed, and it is still showing that it plans to bill me in March. I just spent 30 minutes on the phone where I was told several times that the system can not be overridden, that I should "trust it" that it won't really charge me, and that there's nothing more they can do. When I asked for them to confirm my confirmation numbers they informed me that they can't - those are generated when you cancel and then are no longer available.

I honestly am at a loss here. It sounds like they are saying they are not in control of their own systems, and take no care or responsibility for what their systems may do.

If there is ANY thought in your mind of EVER doing business with these people, PLEASE change your mind!!!

Making the nVidia Ion2 play 1080p smoothly

Mentioned a couple days ago that I had replaced my WDTV streamer with an Acer HTPC. Simply installing CCCP was enough to play most everything I download, but I noticed some of the better anime (almost all 1080 resolution) would play for a bit, then the sound would cut out for a couple seconds, then the sound would come back in for a while, and so on. Given that I watch my anime subtitled, this isn't as distracting as you might think. But it still implied I needed to tweak.

First, semi-obvious option was to go to the MPC-HC player that CCCP installs, and in View->Options->Player check the "Process Priority above normal" option. Since on a "lower end " machine you shouldn't be doing much besides watching the video anyway, this insures that you are getting enough clock time.

Next, less obvious option was to go into the CCCP settings. On the first screen go down to the bottom and click the "LAV Video (CCCP)" option under Alternative H.264 Decoders. This will unselect the default option, and turns on this version of the Codec which features nVidia Hardware Acceleration. IOW, you are choosing a Codec optimized for your Ion chip set and so allows the GPU to take over some of what the CPU might otherwise be tasked with.

Then on the second screen be sure to click the option to Reregister all Filters to make sure that Windows doesn't "forget" to use the LAV codec going forward.

Enjoy!

How my iPad 3 became a Transformer Prime became a Sony Tablet S

Have spent the past month or so rocking an original iPad with a cracked screen that my middle daughter had. She broke it, and since it still worked ok, I gave her my iPad 2. So I knew I wanted to replace it before I ended up hurting my fingers or it finally died completely. It's been showing a tendency to drop out of Safari a lot lately, and I don't think that's just because of the iOS 5 upgrade.

My original thought was an iPad 3. However you'll notice that hasn't even been officially announced yet, and I suspect that it will be a couple months before it is generally available. I am also more than a little concerned that I have heard about a vastly improved screen with possibly only a minimally improved back end. I doubt it will perform worse than an iPad 2, but am also worried that someone at Apple might have taken a Billy Crystal routine too seriously...

Then I was thinking about the Asus Transformer Prime. First Quad-Core tablet and able to upgrade to ICS. A bit concerned about the WiFi and GPS reports, but figured it would be something I could live with. However any place that has them in stock right now is charging $100 or more over the suggested price. Since I knew I was going to also have to replace my downstairs media streamer with a full PC Media center, that put it out of my budget.

Looking around at what I could afford, and what I considered my minimum requirements (9-10 inch screen, Dual Core, 16GB internal) I ended up going with a Sony Tablet S. Like my Streak 7, it is one of the few Android tablets to support a full sized SD card. So I was easily able to get a Class 10 32GB card. The screen is crisp, and the machine is generally responsive. The unique shape works (for me anyway), and it is definitely lighter. Not sure I would have bought one at the original price, but this is another tablet where the market overlooking it means I got a great price. Unlike the Streak, however, Sony is still putting a lot of support behind the tablet. It's even supposed to get an official ICS port in the next month or so. First Android tablet in a while I haven't rooted, but it's also the first one in a while I haven't felt an almost Day 1 need to do so. Not sure how long that will last however :-)

If you are in the market, and need (want) something that you can actually get overnight, I can highly recommend this as a tablet to get you through until this fall when all the big new quad cores should be available and in stock to upgrade to.

One Down, One to Go

Well, am halfway through my conversion ordeal. About noon yesterday the Time Warner folks showed up. Took them about 45 minutes to do the install, which helped me to understand why they couldn't let me do a self-install. They ended up replacing all the connectors, and ran a new line to the house as well as dropping in a DOSCIS 3.0 modem.

Given that it was alternating raining and just cloudy yesterday I suppose I'm not too surprised they didn't bury the new line. It is running through several of our bushes, and as a bright orange color is more than a little distracting. I suppose that is another call I will have to make next week to make sure someone is planning to come back and bury it.

The modem itself looks like someone told Time Warner that the "distressed look" is in. While the LCD display panel and the lights are ok, the black covering looks like it had been beaten and cut up in a turf war. I can only hope that doesn't mean I can expect it to go out soon. SpeedTest results aren't bad, although they are significantly less than the promised speeds of 20 with bursts up to 30 (best SpeedTest result so far is a 14). However sustained throughput is between 3-4 times faster than Clear meaning I can actually steam a 720p video with minimal hiccups. DLs aren't much worse than waiting through a commercial break, and there was none of the usual 0.5 speeds at night I had to get used to with Clear (can you say oversubscribed service?). Also had a little fun getting it to work with my home network. The installers were nice enough to make sure the included WiFi was not turned on (which would have caused major interference), but the modem comes set at 192.168.0.1 as the default, which was the same as my Linksys Router. Modem also comes with DHCP set to on, so the ultimate solution was to drop the Static IP on my one system, and then set the Linksys to 192.168.10.1 so that everything on "my" side of the connection is in a different sub-network.

Part of the upgrade yesterday was also setting up a new Acer AspireRevo AR3700-U3002 to replace the WDTV HD Live downstairs. I actually had to convince my wife it was a real computer since it's so small and quiet. But it did mean I can finally have the 4TB drive downstairs again (the last WDTV firmware upgrade caused their units to stop talking to the drive and I tried both I have), as well as support the 10-bit MP4 codec that is the latest in the fansub community. Have to say that Nisemonogatari looks great on a 42 inch 1080p screen.

Just to let you know the latest :-)

Double Plus Ungood Day

Today is the day that I am trying to get my Time Warner Road Runner service installed, and my Clear service cancelled. That's not how it was supposed to be, but that is how it is.

The Clear saga started several months ago when they began throttling service on the tower I use. Given the company's situation I am not surprised that they are oversubscribed, but am infuriated that they try to say they only throttle people who have "excessive use" when neighbors who I unfortunately convinced to use Clear and hardly use the internet at all are also throttled during prime time.

In any event, my two year contract was up in mid-February, and having just made our last payment I thought I could cancel. Silly, silly me. Called the first time yesterday and due to "extraordinary call volume" (which they've had every time I've ever called) I was on hold for 10 minutes and finally had to drop off since I had a meeting to go to. So tried again at lunch, and after about 20 minutes of being routed through a couple levels of trying to convince me to change my mind, they were just about to cancel the account - then noticed that the last day was 2/18 not 2/16. Now, they agreed that I didn't owe them another payment, and so it's not like they were going to make more by making me wait a day. However their rules are their rules, and if I insisted on cancelling yesterday there would be a $150 early termination fee.

So I was already planning to call Clear after Time Warner installed my new service. But my install window was from 8-10am, and at 10:15 am there was still no installer or call. So I now have to call into Time Warner. Where they do something that drives me crazy about Clear as well. They ask you for the account information to be typed in before they connect you to an agent, and then the first thing the agent does is ask for THE EXACT SAME INFORMATION I JUST TYPED IN. But the brokeness doesn't end there. After a few minutes of checking they agreed that they had missed the window. And so they said they would automatically put me on my next window later today. IOW, promise we will show up in a 2 hours window but if you are lucky they will show up sometime during a 12 hour window. Worse, it turns out that the folks you call at Time Warner can't see if the dispatcher has made any notes about problems, and can't directly connect you to anyone to check.

Decide to try my luck at Clear again, they get me through the first level, put me on hold, then tell me they can't process my cancellation until their west coast office opens at 9am Pacific. Of course there's no reason to tell me that until they've spent several minutes on the first level.

At the moment I am having to access the world through my T-Mobile 4G data plan.

Will I finally get Time Warner service? Don't Know. Will I ever officially cancel my Clear service? Don't Know. For Clear I can at least cancel the card they charge, but I would prefer not to do that.

I have investigated other choices, but the only other wired provider is AT&T, and having used Dish satellite ISP service I know that both the speeds and the customer service are as bad or worse.

For all the talk about setting up a Mesh Network for privacy, I don't think that's going to be the big selling point. I think the big selling point is that you wouldn't have to deal with a Broken Customer Service interface.

Pity T-Mobile doesn't offer a $100/month truly unlimited 4G plan. The way things are going today I would be sorely tempted...

I hope your day is going better!