JDPFu.com 2025

The long promised blog system upgrade as performed yesterday morning.  From your perspective it mostly looks the same.  From the author and management side, it appears completely different.

What’s new and good?

• The new admin pages look and feel is nice.
• The speed should be improved for users
• RSS feeds – I have more control
• New authoring editor is WYSIWYG – that’s fine when you author in the tool, not so much when you author outside and expect markdown, textile, or some other markup langauge to be available. I haven’t determined how to us those.
• Old articles were easily migrated, but the more parts of  articles aren’t currently being displayed.
• Old article markdown is working, as far as I can tell.
• LiveSearch is broken. 2 hours of searching for a solution was not fruitful.
• Lots of 500 Server Errors have been seen.  More on this later. Seems it is a SQLite3 timeout causing it. A workaround exists.

I’m happy to be on a new blogging platform.

I’m happy to be able to allow other authors a platform to blog. Let me know if you are interested. Any spam-like entries will be dealt with harshly.

I’m happy with the moderation system for comments. It doesn’t seem much different from the old version.

A few months ago, I purchased a Hauppauge 950Q ATSC/ClearQAM USB HiDef recording dohicky. The play was to create a TiVo replacement.

Plans don’t always work out.

Hardware

The Hauppauge 950Q is a TV tuner for over the air HD broadcast TV and a ClearQAM digital cable recorder. It is like a big USB Flash drive in size. So far, I’ve only gotten it to work with either OTA or ClearQAM settings. Switching between these modes appears to require a complete re-configuration of the driver software. It must be connected to a computer to work.

For some unknown reason, the device doesn’t always work. It could be related to my VirtualBox USB settings. I think the trick is to start the Hauppauge software before any VirtualBox VM grabs the USB device. I dunno.

Software

Hauppauge includes Windows software. The provided software isn’t very good, but it does work. Scheduling future recordings is like an old VCR interface except it feels there’s a 90% chance it won’t work. Yo need to set the start-time a minute before a program or you will miss the first minute due to software startup time.

Windows Media Center (Vista-64 version) doesn’t work with ClearQAM devices. I’ve heard there is a fix for $200 from MS.

GB-PVR, another full PVR solution, doesn’t seem to be able to change channels or otherwise control the tuner. Perhaps someone else will solve the issue. Generally, I like this media player and just wish it worked as a media recorder for my device too.

Schedule Data

This is the main issue. Once you have a TiVo you are addicted to scheduling that just follows the TV show to whatever time and channel, and records it. Set it once and it just works. Last time I checked, there was no viable channel lineup manager for ClearQAM. BeyondTV and TitanTV may provide similar capabilities for PC-based PVRs. I dunno.

Recorded File Sized

HiDef content takes a lot of storage in the recorded format. The 950Q records into MPEG2 format, so every hour is about 8GB of storage. 80GB is only 10 hours. Ouch.

Transcoding

I’ve standardized on xvid mpeg4 avi containers for my video collection. The main reasons for this are that xvid:

1. is open source
2. avi is a container that every playback device I own supports (N800, MediaGate, Linux and Windows PCs)
3. I know it well, since using it for the last 8+ years
4. Supports HiDef content
5. Can easily be transcoded to alternate video resolutions.

Transcoding hidef content into mpeg4/xvid should reduce the file from 8GB/hr to about 2-3GB/hr with little impact in quality. At DVD resolutions, 700KB/hr is common. This is good and will playback on a non-hidef player, like a MediaGate MG35.

Next, what is the final solution for good, simple PVR and the 950Q? Watch here.

President Obama calls Kanye a Jackass. Up to this point, I haven’t been very impressed with his administration. Perhaps I’ve been too hard on the man?

Good call, Mr. President

now about that health care plan.

Some of us have older media playback devices, not PCs, but dedicated devices like a MediaGate or MASSCOOL. These devices let you playback TV and Movie files in the popular VOB, MPEG, Divx, xvid formats. Some allow network playback too from SMB shared folders. Nice.

They have issues playing HiDef content. Here’s a solution to that problem.

Sometimes you find a new podcast that you’d like to catch up on and the RSS feed only has the most recent releases. Then you locate a mirror, but the file locations aren’t easily programmed. What do you do?

Rather than re-invent the wheel, I’d like to find a stock monitoring TA program to add to my existing SSG, Toolkit, Manifest-Investing tools.

Here’s a list for further research.

1. MAS
2. QtStalker
3. BeanCounter
4. Collection of Programs
5. GreatCharts
6. Grism

Lots to research.

When you already know a programming language and just need a little hint, Cheat-Sheets are just what you need.

If you need a hint for Linux, Solaris or other OS, check out TechPosters.

According the this article, most of what President Obama desires in a health care plan, seems reasonable. I think he is missing a few major things.

Microsoft screwed their customers by not including a way to use the old menus and, MORE IMPORTANTLY, keyboard accelerators.

I’m curious about my blog readers.

1. How often do you read an article here? Daily? Weekly? Monthly?
2. Do you use an RSS reader to read this blog? I do, BTW.
3. I’m planning a migration to a new blog system. Any feature or content requests? More virtualbox or more cooking?

Please either leave a comment or drop me an email.