Category Archives: pvr

misc, Molly, pvr, software

Sunday Meanderings for the Terminally Insane

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It must be Sunday – it seems that every Sunday the blogger interface drops the top menu bar and reverts to a font calculated to make me blinder than I already am. But I am fooling the gremlins of software! I can type blind just as badly as the next person.

Today was one of those days that the thermometer says one thing, but the body says another. The thermometer said 40, but the wind chill said 10. Needless to say, walking into the breeze during the stroll Molly, L, and I took in the park early in the afternoon was a biting experience. According to the friendly (but seldom correct) weather people, the next week is supposed to be cool to cold out here on the plains. In a rarity, it is supposed to be cooler out here that in the foothills and Denver. Sometimes we get all the luck. Still no snow or other moisture out here either.

After our walk, I played car repairman on L’s vehicle. Her windshield washer had stopped spraying. Given that she is up in the mountains with all the snow up there, it is important that the washer work. Colorado uses magnesium chloride in place of salt as a deicer on the roads, which is ecologically friendly, but leaves a slush that is about like light crude oil in color and viscosity. Thus, whenever a truck runs by, you need to have working washers or be prepared to drive blind. Back to the topic at hand, taking the molding plastic off and un-kinking the hose fixed it all. Evidently it got kinked when they removed and replaced it to put in the new windshield this summer and it had finally closed off under the heat-cold cycle of winter. Routed it through the groves in the molding as designed and all should now work fine. I will undoubtedly hear about it if it doesn’t.

Other than that, I have been battling a sinus headache all day. That alone makes me think that the aforementioned weather people might have it right. Big changes in air pressure and I can almost guarantee my sinuses are going to hurt. There must be somewhere where the air pressure is constant year round.

(I must have gotten to them with all my typos – the blogger interface just popped back to normal and the font is big enough for me to actually see. Just goes to show that even software programs can only take so much!)

I got a chance to test some of my home-brew software in the thrown together PVR today. You remember it was my current obsession as discussed here . So I used it to record the play-off games today with my automatic ad removal engine in running in real time. It only crashed and burned a couple of times, so it is getting closer to being usable. Still needs a lot of code cleaning and optimizing since it can pull a machine with dual 3GHz processors right down to it’s knees, utilizing both CPU cores to 100% for periods. (Are you bored enough with this techno babble yet?) Here’s a picture of the system in operation as I compose this post with the game playback marked in red.

L got headed off back to the mountains earlier in the evening, so Molly is lying in her bed moping. Molly will mope for about 16 hours, then return to her normal bouncy self. The only hope of early recovery is the sighting of a squirrel in the yard. It’s amazing how dogs are observant enough to sense when one they love is getting ready to leave. Within an hour or so of L’s planned departure, Molly starts laying on the floor at L’s feet and watching L with sadness in her eyes. Then she gravitates to the garage door and watches as the people go back and forth. Then, when L leaves, she immediately heads to her bed and lays there, looking like the world has come to an end. So I leave you with this picture of Molly moping in her laundry room bed.

pvr, software, writer's challenge

Writer’s Challenge Response

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Mama Kat ‘s been at it again with a new Writer’s Challenge . This one was a bit tough for me to respond to because some of it is ground I already covered here and some of it … So here it all is in the form of a Q and A session.

4.) Tell us about your pet! If you have a weird infatuation with your dog or cat we want to hear about it (or if they just plain drive you crazy)…but please don’t compare them to children. It’s just not the same.

If you want to hear about the dogs of our married life, go here . It was a topic a bit ago.

3.) Who was your first bloggy friend? How did you find each other? Do you still correspond?

Given that I am prehistoric in computer years, my first online friends predate blogs and even the existence of the internet as we know it. I don’t know that there was a first that I can single out, but there is a group of people from that time were dedicated sounding boards and late night talkers.

We met via various BBS’s from technical and management discussion issues. Many of the acquaintances made then survived the development of the internet and changes in our various life directions. It was interesting to see discussions move from BBSes to email to the predecessors of chat rooms to … The dynamics changed at each stage and the people involved changed as well since we were all growing up and having families and … Not all that different than what happens today as people shift from chat to blog to twitter to skype to vlog to …

I still occasionally talk to some of them (now more than 20 years later), but the conversations have tapered off as we all headed of in different directions – personally, professionally, and geographically. One is a professor at Harvey Mudd College, another is a teacher at an Indian reservation college, one died, another went insane, …

You didn’t ask about the real nut cases met via the internet. One of the more outstanding oddballs used to wear a loaded sidearm into the server room, run a porno empire’s servers as his second job, had a duly certified art school that he owned and ran (specializing is certain types of art if you get my drift), and registered really odd domains just so he could make puns on the names. Other than that he was a pretty normal nerd. I still get a note from him every couple of years now. [As an example, he once registered the domain evil.com just so he could claim to be the root of all evil (root@evil.com) *AND* he put it as the logo on his business cards.]

2.) Ask a loved one to use 6 descriptive words to describe you and report your findings. How well do they know you?

Given that L is under the weather, the words would probably have been “go away and let me be”, which doesn’t say a lot about how well she knows me. After 30+ years of marriage and close to 40 years of knowing each other, we probably know each other as well as two individuals can know each other. As my mother put it a few years ago when we had been married for longer than I lived with her and dad – “You’ve had him longer than I did; any thing you don’t like is your problem now.”

1.) Describe your latest obsession.

I’ve been looking at memory models and their interaction with digital TV. This is brought on by the PVR craze typified by Tivo and others. Some of my earlier work work before Tivo existed was in the development of context sensitive search relevance and how it applied to digital TV guides. Now you can build your own digital TV with your own program guides with  about $20 of hardware from EBay and some programming elbow grease on top of Open Source software.

Why is this my obsession of the week? Because you can do a great amount with very little and the problems all are amenable to solution by divide and conquer – i.e. you don’t have to have a blinding flash of insight to see a solution, just break the problem into pieces and solve each piece in a workman like way. It means one can get enjoyment without delaying gratification for long periods. But there are also places where a flash of insight could change the whole view of how to approach the problem. So you get the quickies and the long term rewards as well.