Sheryl and I both grew up with dogs, and we have wanted one of our own for a very long time. Â Now that we are in the new house with plenty of room for a dog and it is getting towards spring, we decided the time was right to get one. Â Sheryl did some research online and we found out that Sheryl’s Den, a dog rescue organization based in West Milford, had a litter of pups that were going to be available soon. Â They had been rescued from a high kill-rate shelter in Kentucky, where the litter had been dropped off with a note saying that they were Black Labrador / Border Collie mix pups. Â After completing the application process and looking at the pictures, we chose one and brought him home today.
Meet Sir Ed!
Sheryl and I spent our honeymoon in New Zealand.  We named our cat Kiwi and wanted to stick with the New Zealand theme when naming the dog, so Sir Ed is named for Sir Edmund “Sir Ed” Hillary, Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, New Zealand native, the first known explorer to reach the summit of Mount Everest.  Sir Edmund, a national hero to the New Zealand people, passed away at the age of 88 while Sheryl and I were on our honeymoon.  The genuine feeling of loss in the country, while sad, was refreshing to see being felt for an explorer and philanthropist rather than an actor or musician as happens in the United States.
Cablevision has announced a new feature that they are calling “PC to TV Media Relay”, the idea of which is to stream the screen contents from a personal computer to a special channel on the customer’s cable box. Â They are planning to get a technical trial going by June of this year. Â From the press release:
Specific examples of the kind of content that consumers currently view on their PC, and will now be viewable on the television include:
• Personal stored media such as photos, home videos and music;
• Internet content including streaming video sites and audio such as Internet radio;
• Some productivity applications including email, documents and spreadsheets;
• And, other Desktop applications such as widgets.
This sounds pretty good, especially since my primary computer is no longer in the same room as the TV. Â This is the first announcement from Cablevision about this technology, so there may still be several changes to it before it sees the light of day as a product. Â Still, I am left wondering about several aspects of the implementation.
Audio? The press release suggests music as being one of the kinds of content which can be enjoyed, yet makes no mention of streaming the audio from the PC to the TV. Â Are people just going to enjoy looking at their music, or will they be able to listen as well? Â I think we have to assume that the audio will also be streamed, so in what format? Â How about bitstreaming digital audio straight through to the home theater receiver connected to the TV?
Control? Being able to view the PC’s screen contents is good, but the release does not say how the computer will be controlled during the remote viewing. Â Having to walk back to the PC from the TV every time you wanted to type a different URL or click onto the next web video would be an inconvenience for some, and a deal breaker for others (like me, whose PC is three sets of stairs above the TV). Â I notice these cable boxes all have USB ports…
Bitrate? The release does not mention any of the details as to the quality of the video streamed from the PC. Â Cablevision’s HD ready cable boxes can output a 1080i signal, so does that mean I will be able to stream full resolution 1920×1080 video from a PC? Â If it’s doing 1080i, what bitrate can the stream support? Â Enough to say, make a Blu-ray playing on the PC watchable on the TV?
Latency? What will the response time be between an image appearing on the PC screen and it being streamed to the TV? Â Will it be fast enough to support gaming for instance? Â I would imaging that the plan is to have the stream be fed from the PC to the cable modem, which would then inject it onto the Coax network for the cable boxes to decode. Â If this is not the case, and there is an intermediate processing step at Cablevision between the cable modem and the cable box, latency could suffer greatly.
Overscan? A lot of televisions do not display the entirety of a video feed, cutting off the edges. Â How is Cablevision going to prevent the UI elements visible around the periphery of the PC screen, such as the start menu and control buttons for maximized windows, from being clipped off the edges of what is visible on TVs with overscan? Â How will that fix be implemented so people using LCD or other TVs that do not overscan do not have black bars around the picture?
Security? Is this designed to be an always-on stream? Â Will there be an indicator on the PC if the TV is currently viewing the stream? Â What kind of system requirements will be necessary to stream a high quality video feed?
The PC to TV Media Relay is many months off from even testing, so hopefully we will get answers to these questions as time goes on.
It does sound very interesting though and I am looking forward to hearing more.
As was previously discussed, the operators of the Shoppes at Union Hill want to bring a Five Guys restaurant to Denville, but require a zoning variance to allow the Five Guys to operate in an area prohibiting fast food restaurants. Â I attended the zoning board meeting tonight in order to give my support for the Five Guys during the public hearing. Â However, the whole Denville Planning Board was not in attendance, and the attorney for the Shoppes at Union Hill requested an adjournment until at time when the Chair would also be available. Â The adjournment request was approved and the meeting is rescheduled for March 3rd at 7:00 pm.
Following the adjournment, I did have a chance to speak with the manager of the Shoppes at Union Hill and the Five Guys franchisee who would be opening the Denville location.  While they had originally been planning for an opening around May 1, 2010 this zoning delay pushes things back slightly, but they are still confident that an early summer opening is possible.  The franchisee is well versed with operating a Five Guys restaurant… the locations in Parsippany, Madison, and Wayne are also his.  After meeting with these two gentlemen, I am confident that the Five Guys in Denville would be a success, and plan on coming out on March 3rd to voice my thoughts at the public hearing.  You should too!
NJ.com is reporting that the owners of the Shoppes at Union Hill on Route 10 in Denville have requested a zoning variance from the town in order to allow a Five Guys burger restaurant to open. Â The variance request is because fast food restaurants are banned in the area.
Awesome! Â The Shoppes at Union Hill are only about a 10 minute drive for me, and while my arteries may not appreciate it, the Five Guys burgers and fries are delicious. Â In fact, Five Guys is Zagat rated, these are not fast food burgers. Â I have enjoyed their Hoboken and Parsippany locations many times, and having one closer would be nice.
I do not consider Five Guys a fast food restaurant. Â You order your food, sit down, enjoy some free peanuts, and they prepare it fresh to order. Â The quality of food and decor is at or above the level of the Qdoba or Panera Bread that are already in the Shoppes. Â If you haven’t been to a Five Guys before, you could check out the one in Parsippany at 1103 U.S. 46 for lunch today and see for yourself.
If you also think that Five Guys would make a good addition to Denville, please come to the Zoning Board meeting at 7pm tonight and express your opinions during the public hearing.
My personal computer has an Intel SSD for the boot drive (C:) and a RAID5 array for data storage (D:). Â Because D: is a RAID5 array, it is fault tolerant. Â If one of the three drives fails, I can replace it without losing any data. Â C: is just a single drive, so if it failed the data would be lost. Â To prevent this, I had configured the Windows 7 backup utility to save a system image of the C: drive to D: each night.
This worked fine for a while until I started getting notification that my backup had failed. Â Checking the Application log I saw that Windows Backup was throwing the following error each time it tried to run.
The backup was not successful. The error is: The backup storage location is invalid. You cannot use a volume that is included in the backup as a storage location. (0x80780040).
I went back into the Windows Backup configuration and found that I was no longer able to select the D: drive as the save location for the system image! Â After doing some research, I found that when saving a system image, Windows Backup will include all drives that have system files including any programs which are installed as a service.
I then remembered that I had recently installed the Folding@Home SMP client as a service with the files stored on the D: drive of my PC. Â This was the problem. Â I uninstalled the F@H service and then moved the files to the C: drive and reinstalled the MPICH client (install.bat) and the F@H service.
Once that was done, I was able to choose the D: drive as the system image storage location again, and my backups have been going through each night without error.
If you are getting this error and don’t remember installing a service to the storage location, you can manually check where each service is starting from.  Start regedit and browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services.  Check the ImagePath value of each subkey; this is the location of the file that is run for each service.  If any of the ImagePath keys point to your storage location, the backup will not go through until they are removed or reconfigured.
I had some business to take care of on the New Jersey state websites today, but have been unable to for a while, as both http://www.state.nj.us and http://www.nj.gov are down! Â The two domains point to the same IP address, 199.20.64.195, which is unresponsive at this point.
Looks like someone dropped the ball down in Trenton!
Update: New Jersey’s websites are back up again. Â I have contacted the New Jersey Office of Information Technology for comment on the outage and will post any response.
If you are familiar with the ATI Radeon 5970, you know it is a powerful video card, and very large. Â I was not sure that it would fit in my Antec CA900 case, but I was pleased to find that it does (with a little rearranging of components).
Back in May, I purchased a Magellan Maestro 4370 to use as my primary GPS in the car. The 4370 has a nice high resolution display, does a good job planning and optimizing multi-stop trips, supports Navteq’s real time TMC traffic, and has a nice quick processor to keep recalculations fast and usable. When it is working, it is the best GPS that I have yet used… When it is working.
In June, the traffic stopped working and I ended up having to call Magellan for a warranty repair. This went pretty uneventfully, I called into the tech support number, was connected to some overseas outsourced technician, went over and over the problem for an hour and finally they set up an RMA and shipped out a refurbished unit to me. Once I got the refurb device, I reactivated my traffic subscription, imported my address book and other settings, and was back on the road.
All went well until this Tuesday. While driving around using the GPS as I normally do, the refurb 4370 popped itself out of the windshield mount and dropped onto my passenger seat. I figured that I had just not snapped it in properly, so I picked it up to remount it. At that point, I noticed the device was amazingly hot, and that a huge lump had grown out of the back of the unit! The GPS had popped out of the mount because the giant lump no longer allowed it to fit. I unplugged the GPS from the charger for a while and it cooled down, but would no longer turn on. Plugging the charger back in would allow it to turn on, but it would quickly become very hot again. Seems to me that the battery shorted out.
Once fully cooled, the lump shrunk somewhat, but it is still quite noticable and prevents the GPS from being snapped into its mount. This marker should be laying perfectly flat on the back of the unit, but as you can see, it is not.
Badly Swollen Magellan Maestro 4370
Anyway, so now the fun has begun. Last night I called their technical support department and spent an hour describing the problem.
It really shouldn’t have taken an hour but the technician I spoke with, “Justin”, did not have a native grasp of English. I understand that companies try to save money by sending support calls overseas. A company could also save money using outdated documents as toilet paper, but that does not mean it is a good idea. When sent overseas, what would be a twenty minute dialog with a support agent possessing a native grasp of English turns into an hour long ordeal filled by constant repetition. It is a negative experience for the user both in the difficulty expressing the problem to the agent, having to ask “Do you understand?” after every sentence, as well as the amount of time required. I digress…
I was told that they were issuing an RMA and that I would receive an email in about 15 minutes. Magellan has my account information on file and had previously emailed me, so I figured there would be no problems, but I was wrong. The email never showed up, so this morning I tried to contact Magellan again to see what was up, but apparently Magellan has other plans today:
No Phone Support – Magellan’s contact page lists their US phone technical support hours as 6:00 am to 5:00 pm Pacific Time Monday – Friday. However, all calls are currently being played the message “No one is available to take your call at this time. Please try again later. Goodbye” and being hung up on. It is currently 8:00 am Pacific on a Thursday. Nice.
No Email Support – Magellan’s contact page also provides a link to this form for emailing a technical support request. Sounds good, right? No, not really. The form does not work in any browser I have tried (Firefox 3, IE7 and IE8, Opera and Safari). You fill out your problem, dutifully describing the issue, click submit… and are just dropped back at the beginning page of the form again. No “Thank you for your request” confirmation displayed on screen, no confirmation sent to the email address you provided. I have never received a response from the info entered on this form (even back with my problem in June) so it seems to not work at all.
With the two primary contact methods out of service, customers including myself are simply screwed. There is no other way on Magellan’s website to get help, so who knows how long it will take to get this unit fixed. Magellan will certainly be the last brand I consider the next time I purcahse a GPS unit.
A while back, I picked up a Hanns-G HG281D 28″ LCD monitor. The monitor does not have the best black levels or viewing angle consistency, but the picture quality is not bad, and generally I would say that it offers a great value for the price. There was one annoyance though… when hooked to an NVidia 8800GT via a DVI to HDMI cable (the monitor only has HDMI and VGA inputs), the monitor would never enter sleep mode. It didn’t matter if my other monitors had turned off due to an idle timeout or if the computer was off, the HG281D would just stay on and display a cable disconnected message.
I did some research online and found the issue is related to a misinterpretation of the monitor’s capabilities as reported to the video card via EDID. To override the data as read via EDID and force the NVidia driver to use sleep mode on the display, it just takes a few quick entries to the Windows registry. Since these updates need to be made every time the video driver is updated (as I did to version 190.62 today, prompting this post), I put them in a .reg file for easy access.
Double click on the file to add the information to the registry.
Restart, enjoy!
This should work on all versions of the HG281D and GeForce drivers for Windows Vista and Windows 7, but if it doesn’t, leave a comment and let me know.
A few years back, I used the original Samsung Blackjack and loved it. The Epix is the spiritual “Blackjack 3”, retaining the portrait alignment, non-rotating screen above an awesome non-sliding physical keyboard, while stepping up to a modern architecture running WM6.1 Pro. I call the keyboard awesome because the tactile response and guaranteed button activation simply put the keyboard on my non-Samsung smartphones to shame. You really can type without looking or having to worry if it registered a button you had pressed or not.
The Epix is about the same size as the Blackjack with an extended battery installed.  Speaking of which, the Epix’s battery is the same model as the extended battery that shipped with the Blackjack… so I’ve already got a spare battery and charger, sweet!
Thanks to user trashcan at XDA forums, Windows Mobile 6.5 made its way to the Samsung Epix. The ROM is based on the 23017 build of Windows Mobile 6.5.
The new OS really makes the Epix shine. Finger scrolling is supported everywhere, largely eliminating the need for the stylus. Every part of he new UI is fluid and responsive on the Epix hardware. The new lock screen is quite nice and the device does not wake up when doing alerts that do not write to the screen, so the needs for S2U2 are largely eliminated.
There is quite a bit of new software included in the build. Least of which, the upcoming Marketplace (think Apple App Store for WinMo) is currently represented by a stub application that opens the web browser to a ‘Coming Soon’ page. The new My Phone software is available in the ROM and works perfectly with the Beta of the service to sync all of the data on the device with the My Phone website. Microsoft Tag is included to read special high capacity color barcode images via the camera and direct the device to an appropriate website or service. It works very quickly and well, I was quite impressed (see the demo in the video). Most usefully, Internet Explorer is updated and now supports finger scrolling, easily zooming in and out, a good full screen display, etc.
Here is a video demonstrating the new user interface and other features of 6.5 on the Epix.
Cablevision prepping PC to TV Media Relay
Cablevision has announced a new feature that they are calling “PC to TV Media Relay”, the idea of which is to stream the screen contents from a personal computer to a special channel on the customer’s cable box. Â They are planning to get a technical trial going by June of this year. Â From the press release:
This sounds pretty good, especially since my primary computer is no longer in the same room as the TV. Â This is the first announcement from Cablevision about this technology, so there may still be several changes to it before it sees the light of day as a product. Â Still, I am left wondering about several aspects of the implementation.
Audio? The press release suggests music as being one of the kinds of content which can be enjoyed, yet makes no mention of streaming the audio from the PC to the TV. Â Are people just going to enjoy looking at their music, or will they be able to listen as well? Â I think we have to assume that the audio will also be streamed, so in what format? Â How about bitstreaming digital audio straight through to the home theater receiver connected to the TV?
Control? Being able to view the PC’s screen contents is good, but the release does not say how the computer will be controlled during the remote viewing. Â Having to walk back to the PC from the TV every time you wanted to type a different URL or click onto the next web video would be an inconvenience for some, and a deal breaker for others (like me, whose PC is three sets of stairs above the TV). Â I notice these cable boxes all have USB ports…
Bitrate? The release does not mention any of the details as to the quality of the video streamed from the PC. Â Cablevision’s HD ready cable boxes can output a 1080i signal, so does that mean I will be able to stream full resolution 1920×1080 video from a PC? Â If it’s doing 1080i, what bitrate can the stream support? Â Enough to say, make a Blu-ray playing on the PC watchable on the TV?
Latency? What will the response time be between an image appearing on the PC screen and it being streamed to the TV? Â Will it be fast enough to support gaming for instance? Â I would imaging that the plan is to have the stream be fed from the PC to the cable modem, which would then inject it onto the Coax network for the cable boxes to decode. Â If this is not the case, and there is an intermediate processing step at Cablevision between the cable modem and the cable box, latency could suffer greatly.
Overscan? A lot of televisions do not display the entirety of a video feed, cutting off the edges. Â How is Cablevision going to prevent the UI elements visible around the periphery of the PC screen, such as the start menu and control buttons for maximized windows, from being clipped off the edges of what is visible on TVs with overscan? Â How will that fix be implemented so people using LCD or other TVs that do not overscan do not have black bars around the picture?
Security? Is this designed to be an always-on stream? Â Will there be an indicator on the PC if the TV is currently viewing the stream? Â What kind of system requirements will be necessary to stream a high quality video feed?
The PC to TV Media Relay is many months off from even testing, so hopefully we will get answers to these questions as time goes on.
It does sound very interesting though and I am looking forward to hearing more.
More Info