HDHomeRun for Media Center

As I have mentioned before, I am looking to cancel our cable TV service.  This weekend I purchased a HDHomeRun Dual network tuner.  The HDHomeRun is an ATSC and QAM tuner that you connect to your network.  You are able to access the tuners with any Mac, PC or linux computer on the network.

I installed it in our attic, where our networking panel is, and the installation was very easy.  All I had to do was connect the antenna cables and connect the tuner to the network.  When I installed the software on one of my computers, I was able to scan for channels and make sure that the antenna was pointed in the right direction.

I was then able to install the tuner software on our Windows 7 Media Center.  The tuners were instantly recognized, and the Microsoft's program guide had all of the data for those channels.  The quality of video is very good.  I can tell that the video is not as compressed as it is through Comcast.

Android Apps

This post has a good list of Android applications. I think that ecosystem of Android application is really doing well.

Here is a list of the third party Android applicaitons that I have installed:

• Amazon


• Backgrounds


• Bank of America


• Barcode Scanner


• CNET Scan & Shop


• Evernote


• Jewels


• Last.fm


• LastPass


• Listen


• Movies


• OneTouch Timer Free


• Pandora


• PhoneFlicks


• Remember The Milk


• Seesmic


• Shazam


• SqueezeControl


• SqueezeDroid


• TripIt


• TuneWiki


• Ultimate Stopwatch


• WordPress


• Yelp

Setting up D-Link DAP-2553

Our Airport base stations were starting to die.  Every once in a while, the basestations would still broadcast the SSID, and wireless devices could still connect to them but wouldn't transmit any data to our wired network.  Since this was happening to both our Airport Express and Airport Extreme base stations, I assume that there was something, either on the wired network, or some RF interference that was causing them to lock up.

I took this opportunity to upgrade to a 802.11n base station, so I bought the D-Link DAP-2553.  This was one of the few dual-band, non-router, base stations.  Once I set it up,  things have been working a lot better than they were with the Apple base stations.

Avast! antivirus and HP Time Machine support

A while ago HP added Time Machine support to their MediaSmart servers.  I have mentioned previous problems getting Time Machine to back up to the server.  Since I had to restore the server, I had to re-setup the Time Machine drive.

This time I was having a hard time creating a volume large enough to back up all of my data.  The disc image creation would fail and state that there wasn't enough space on the server, even though that there was plenty.

In this post I mentioned that I was trying to uninstall Avast! antivirus and see what would happen.  It looks like Avast! was preventing me from creating a disc image large enough.  I believe that the scan was causing the reads to time out on the Mac, so the process just stopped.

Removing Avast! Antivirus from Window Home Server

I was having a problem creating some large disk images on my Windows Home Server from my Mac.  I thought that the Avast! antivirus could be causing some problems with this.  So I decided to try uninstalling it, and seeing if I could create the files.  Unfortunately, attempting to uninstall it from the Add-in screen of the Windows Home Server or from the Add/Remove Programs from the Control panel failed.

This post has a some steps that worked for me to uninstall Avast! antivirus.  It looks like the disk image creation is also working better without Avast!, so I probably will not reinstall it.

Sending links via Gmail using Chrome

This page has a javascript that makes it easy to send the url for the current page in Chrome as an email using Gmail.

I did have to modify it to make it work for my Google Apps for Your Domain account.  I just had to modify

mail.google.com/mail/

with

mail.google.com/a/{your domain}/

[via Lifehacker]

Music format support on Nintendo DSi

Today I bought a new microSD card for my phone.  My son also wanted a SD card for his Nintendo DSi.  He wanted to use it to put music on for playback.  So I figured that I would give him the 2GB card that was I was using in my phone.

When I copied some mp3 files to an SD card, and they were not playable.  It looks like the Nintendo DSi only plays AAC files.  On their web page they link to the Nero software where they sell it for $6.  You can do the same thing for free with iTunes.