Category: Geek

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Feed the (HD) Beast

David Pogue at the New York Times, quoting from his surprise encounter with a rare non-clueless Best Buy employee:

Q: Is there a lot of consumer confusion about HDTV?

A: Oh, man, you have no idea. People come in here absolutely clueless. Or furious, because they bought an HDTV set, got it home, and discovered that the picture doesn’t look anything like it did here in the store. Because they don’t realize they need a high-def *signal* to feed that set. For example, they need to replace their cable boxes with digital ones, or put a high-def antenna on the roof.

I admit that we fell into something like this trap when going HD a few months ago. We knew we would need to feed it HD signal for best results, but weren’t prepared for how much worse traditional signal would look. But apparently not everyone notices. Or who notice but don’t care:

[D.P. adds: According to a study by the Leichtman Research Group, 50 percent of HDTV owners aren’t actually watching any high-def shows on them… but 25 percent of them *think* they are.]

Yikes.

Music: Nellie McKay :: Testify
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Time Capsule

18 months ago, I bought an Infrant ReadyNAS to store MP3s and our home backups. It’s been all peaches, and we’ve been using SuperDuper for backup against it with no issues.

When Leopard came out, thought we’d switch to Time Machine for backup… only to discover that Time Machine doesn’t support backups to network shares — unless those shares are on Mac (HFS+) volumes. The ReadyNAS does do AFP, but the ReadyNAS itself is Linux-based, and its internal filesystem is ext-something.

This sucks. Without simple, any-OS network backups, you’re forced to attach a physical disk to each machine you want to back up — unless you’ve got OS X Server running somewhere in the house (and thus have some networked HFS+ volumes to back up to).

Found a hack on the Infrant forums to force Time Machine to see a ReadyNAS share as a supported volume:

sudo defaults write com.apple.systempreferences \
TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Timecapsule It works! Time Machine has been backing up to a partition on the ReadyNAS for a few weeks now. But I haven’t had occassion to try and restore from it yet, and don’t completely trust it. Apple’s introduction of Time Capsule seems like the perfect answer, and is dirt cheap for what you get (remember it doubles as an AirPort base station and print server).

But I resent that it’s required. Daring Fireball has essentially the same gripe. I already have an excellent networked storage unit. I shouldn’t have to buy Apple hardware to accomplish this. Apple needs to step forward and support TM backups to any network volume. Time Machine shouldn’t be a gateway drug sucking you into the Apple Store.

Of course, no law prevents me from continuing to use SuperDuper. But TM feels so good…

Music: Alton and the Flames :: Tuff
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MacHeist

Whoa: 11 great Mac apps ($368.75 worth) for $49 – can’t beat that with a stick. Heck, I’ve already spent more than $100 on a few of these over the past couple of years.

Macheist

It gets better: 25% of the proceeds go to charity. Some of the software licenses won’t be released until certain quotas have been met – all that remains to be unlocked at this point is Pixelmator (I already own that one, but let’s work together and complete the set). Run, don’t walk.

Music: Bob Dylan :: Love Minus Zero-No Limit
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Laptop. With Leopard.

Miles Laptop Came home from work tonight and Miles had something to show me. “I made a laptop!” I thought he was joking. Then I saw it. By gum, he did make a laptop. With number keys going right on up to 20. And no spacebar. But a laptop, nonetheless. And then it dawned on me… but I had to ask, to be sure. “Miles, does your laptop just have a picture of a leopard on screen, or is it running Leopard?” “It’s running Leopard!” Dang. Complete with a mouse. And a mousepad. A mousepad named Ziggy.

The other new addition to our house tonight — a hand-made picket sign with giant letters: “THE END OF THE WORLD!” This because the other day he whined that it was the end of the world when I told him he had to stop work on the beach hut he was building in a friend’s back yard. I told him he ought to make a sign saying that, so he could march it around downtown. So he did.

See also: The Laptop Club (8-year-olds draw their dream computers).

Music: The Fall :: Bingo Master
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reCAPTCHA

Fascinating project. The idea is that optical character recognition processes in place at the world’s largest book digitization projects naturally make lots of mistakes, and encounter plenty of computer-unrecognizable words – especially with older books or books printed with messier inks or using less-precise fonts. Rather than having staffers laboriously read every word of every book just to correct the clinkers, reCAPTCHA puts the hive mind to work, every time a member of the public solves a captcha.

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

I’m going to replace a few captchas I’ve got in place at the J-School with reCAPTCHAs. I’d been meaning to add audio accessibility to them anyway, and reCAPTCHA has an audio option built in. Being able to contribute to book digitization is delicious gravy.

Update: Adding this video thanks to Jeremy:

Music: Gary Wright :: Our Love Is Alive
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Gutting a Display

Sdisplay-Repair5 Amy uses a 17″ Studio Display attached to a Mac Mini. Recently she found the top half of her screen going dim (pretty much unusable for photography work), and the power light flashing in a two-short, one-long pattern. Goog took me to a page on the Studio Display Backlight Problem. Looks we had a dying power inverter, right from the textbook. Ordered a replacement from MoniServ, which arrived a few days later.

After dinner tonight, Miles and I dove into the repair (he got to work the allan wrenches and screwdriver, and to unplug/re-plug the connectors). “This could go one of two ways: Either it’ll work perfectly and Mommy will consider us both heroes, or will fail miserably and we’ll get an earful about how nothing in this world has lasting value anymore.” Took our time with it, and the whole process turned out to be very easy – done in half an hour.

Monitor’s like new again. We’re heroes!

Music: Brian Eno :: Sky Saw
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Oobox

David Pogue, in the NY Times:

These are all actual Web sites that have hit the Web in the last year or so: Doostang. Wufoo. Bliin. Thoof. Bebo. Meebo. Meemo. Kudit. Raketu. Etelos. Iyogi. Oyogi. Qoop. Fark. Kijiji. Zixxo. Zoogmo.

And these are names coughed up the Domain and Company Name Ideas Generator:

Cojigo. Roombee. Kwiboo. Trundu. Oobox. Ceelox. Myndo. Ababoo. Vible. Yambo. Eizu. Twimba. Yanoodle.

So… are startups today really using a randomizing algorithm to poot forth their brand identities? Or are humans sitting around board room tables coming up with names that only end up sounding randomly generated? Either way, these name forms are only memorable when they’re alone in the field, like Google. When there are dozens of them, all recognizability is lost.

Music: William Parker :: In Case of Accident [Live]
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You Got Beacon’d

Felt like I needed to do something different last Saturday. Didn’t want to work on the house, didn’t want to work on the computer, too cold for hiking… decided to make a double batch of beef stew. Decided to save it to my “recipe box,” which required setting up an Epicurious account. Little did I know that a few minutes later, half the people I know would know that I was a new Epicurious user, via Facebook.

Beacon

Been hearing a lot about Facebook’s Beacon functionality over the past week, but it felt utterly yicky to get Beacon’d myself. Not that my chosen beef stew recipe was any great secret, but didn’t expect that a simple account signup was world news.

If I had known that Epicurious was one of Facebook’s 44 Beacon partners, I probably wouldn’t have done it. If there was an interface cue warning me about it, I probably looked past it. We’re so used to whipping quickly through such mundane tasks that we don’t exactly read our EULAs or every word on every page we visit. And Beacon is apparently even more insidious than it appears on the surface:

According to the researcher, Facebook’s Beacon tracked the activities of users even if they had logged off from Facebook and had declined the option of having their activities on other sites broadcast back to their friends.

Controversy over Beacon is swelling by the minute, but apparently Facebook isn’t alone in the practice. There may be a silver lining to the mess:

The controversy raised by the social networking site’s use of the Beacon technology has helped drag into the open the widespread but hitherto largely hidden problem of online consumer-tracking and information-sharing, according to privacy advocates. “This Facebook debacle is in one way very good, because it shows people just what is happening,” said Pam Dixon executive director of the World Privacy Forum. “There are other sites and other places where very similar data arrangements exist, but it is all happening under the radar and people simply don’t realize it.”

I feel gross all over. But the beef stew came out great.

Update: Facebook caves, will allow users to turn off Beacon.

Music: William Parker :: Long Hidden, Pt. 3