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Paul's Time Sink

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XM on DIRECTV

Paul Westbrook | 07 October, 2005 15:34

Logo XmradioStarting on November 15th, DIRECTV will replace their MusicChoice channels with XM music channels.  This is great, as I have not been very impressed with the current music channels on DIRECTV.

It appears that DIRECTV has a server of music where each of the tracks have been tagged with a bunch of categories.  Then for each channel, the server randomly picks each track. With XM, the music programming is a lot better.

Unfortunately, it looks like U-POP is not being carried.  I wonder if this is because U-POP is a WorldSpace Satellite channel.  Also I wonder which 50 channels will be available for Total Choice subscribers. U-POP is is part of the Total Choice Plus and Total Choice Premier lineups.

[via Engadget]

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Yet more strange http access

Paul Westbrook | 07 October, 2005 06:33

I just looked in my logs and I noticed a series of http request that take the url, and append "/text/javascript".  It appears that the Ocelli web crawler is attempting to download pages that are javascript pages.  I don't know what type of web server would change the format of the resulting page just by appending a mime type to the url.

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GPL software in TV

Paul Westbrook | 06 October, 2005 15:32

This is pretty cool.  I just looked through the documentation that came with the Sony 34" HDTV (KD-34XBR960) that we just bought.  One of the documents is titled:

Required Public Statement for GPL/LGPL licensed Software Used in This Television

It looks like the TV is running linux, and used the MontaVista Linux Kernel.  All of this software that they use is available on their linux web site.

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Voice recognition

Paul Westbrook | 06 October, 2005 10:55

When I worked at Apple, I worked on the speech recognition software that was part of the Mac OS.  I never really did use it at home, as the recognition was never all that good, and you needed a noise cancellation microphone.  Also the size of the dictionary of the recognized words was pretty small.

I have just started playing with the voice calling on the Motorola E815, and I am extremely impressed.  I was assuming that I would have to record a voice utterance for each phone number that I would want to dial with my phone, but that is not the case. 

I accidentally pushed the button on my headset while I was driving, and I heard a voice that stated "Say a command".  It looks like you can say commands like:

"Call <person name>"

This is pretty cool, especially since it went through the whole address book to determine the dictionary list that can be spoken.  It looks like this phone is using speech recognition technology from VoiceSignal.
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Saving money with hybrids

Paul Westbrook | 02 October, 2005 12:55

I have been wondering if hybrids really save any money.  The last time that I filled my tank, I calculated that I got 25 mile/gallon on my 93 Nissan Sentra, and that in city driving, with me driving aggressively with the flow of traffic.  I am sure that I could easily get 30 miles a gallon in city driving.

A bureau cheif for the Wall Street Journal did the calculations, and determined that you will not be able to recover the extra cost of the hybrid in gas savings or in government subsidies. 

I would claim if you want to save money and save gas, you should buy a older 4 cylinder engine.  If you did that, you could uses some of the money that you saved, and add the extra features that you would get factory installed in the newer cars.

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Using two Harmony remotes

Paul Westbrook | 02 October, 2005 11:52

We got a new TV, so I wanted to reprogram our Harmony Remotes.  I logged onto the web site and made the changes, and then updated the Harmony 880 remote.  Everything worked fine, so then I updated the Harmony 688 remote.

At that point I noticed that the keys that I had mapped to the Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down keys, did work.  It looks like this was caused because the Harmony 880 has ˆ and ˇ keys, while the Harmony 688 has 'Pg -' and 'Pg +' buttons.  When you connect to a remote that has doesn't have a key, the you configuration loses the settings for those keys.  So then when you connect back to the remote that has those keys, the settings are gone.

You would think that the settings on the web site would contain all of the remote key mappings, regardless if the last connected remote actually had the keys

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WDS

Paul Westbrook | 02 October, 2005 11:38

This weekend we set up our new TV, and while we were doing this we decided to get rid of the tower that contained most of our AV equipment.  I use to keep  our Apple AirPort Extreme on top of the tower, and used it to extend the range of our wireless network.  It had been connected to the wired network.

It was necessary for me to find a different place for the base station, that is out of reach of the kids hands.  The only other place is on top of armoire, but there isn't a network drop there.  I decided to set it up using WDS.  It was a little tricky, as the main base station is a Linksys WRT54GS.
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