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Why IPTV is bad for the customer

IPTV has been making a lot of news lately with Verizon FiOS being one of the fastest available connections in the US and AT&T subscribing customers like rabbits make babies in spring. But I was thinking about IPTV and why it may not be the best thing for the consumer after all. Just to be clear I am talking about real IPTV and not Hulu, Netflix streaming etc. The IPTV I am talking about is the service you pay for that replaces your traditional satellite and cable connections for viewing TV. Here are a few things you may want to think about before you go ahead and sign up for a IP based TV service.

1. Proprietary set top boxes with a proprietary signal
Unlike “normal” cable and satellite boxes there is no standard for how the content is delivered to your house. Cable uses ATSC/NTSC/QAM etc. and if you didn’t want to use their cable box you can most likely plug your TV right into the wall and pick up at the very least the basic local channels and in my experience most basic cable channels too. Satellite is a bit more of a pickle but they are still regulated by FCC to at least give you a firewire connection upon request so you can use the signal however you want. For the less adventurous you can even buy a Tivo with cable card support and just use that in most cases. IPTV on the other hand uses whatever the provider sees as the best for their needs. Short of a HD PVR from Hauppauge I don’t know if there is any other way to use a separate PVR than what your provider gave you. And if you don’t like it…tough.
2. Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth
How many times have you been angry at your provider for their less than stellar service? I recently upped my internet package up to the fastest my provider can give me and only then did I start to not complain. I still find times that slow down and I just have to make sure I kill any downloads if I am trying to watch Hulu on my TV through Boxee. But what happens when you are always using your internet connection to steam your TV. I guarantee you that video is no small package to send down any pipe. Sure there is a good amount of QOS managing things but I will never accept that you will be able to watch 3+ HD shows in your home and not see your ping go up when a boomer slimes you and your partners in Left 4 Dead and the zombie hoard closes in. And if you think 3+ HD shows is absurd just wait 2 years and come read this again. With cell phones and PSP’s creeping closer to HD resolution I think if you arn’t recording the show you will be watching it on something (even if it is a HD YouTube video). My only question is if TV will be the place that has the most compelling HD content in 2 years.
3. Router choices?
Have you seen the monstrosity box that FiOS installs? Not even including the boxes they have to install in your garage just to get the service into your house. I know you need these things for the connection, but what ever happened to just having a modem you connect your own choice of router to? I bet the first thing “tech” support is going to have you do is disconnect your “non-supported” router and make you use their p.o.s. while they trouble-shoot why your WoW ping is 8 quadrillion. Cable and DSL stop at the modem and that is how I think it should be. I don’t want to use AT&T’s bargain bin wireless chip to stream my HDHR to my kitchen. As a matter of fact, I don’t even want that box taking up a two foot spot on my rack. But without it, there is no service so I can’t get around it.
4. Bundle deals on TV and internet
Ever try to get the U-Verse internet speeds without getting the TV service? How long did it take before the representative on the phone said they had to be sold together? I hope they didn’t keep you on hold for long while they played solitaire. I know Verizon is a bit different and they have select areas that only have the internet service and not TV but everywhere I have check with AT&T it is all or nothing only.
5. Single outage = total outage
In the summer of 2008 my internet connection was down for about a week. My basic cable worked plugged directly into my TV but my modem and set top box would never connect to Time Warner like it was supposed to. I would call every day after work to see what the hold up was and every day they would tell me they are working on the problem. Turn out the outage only lasted about 6 hours but the customer support didn’t read the notes that the problem was fixed and send the updated signal to my modem. I can’t even image going a week without internet or TV. I do have a decent queue of TV shows downloaded and there is always Netflix but I would not be a happy camper with no connection when I got home.

Let me know what you think about IPTV and if you really think it is the right move for the consumer.

Mythtv Log

I decided I needed a better way to keep track of myth MythTV systems I have used in the past, and what I needed to do to get the systems up and running. I started a MythTV Log page that should show up on the left (or the links section depending on my skin). I mainly posted this to help other people that are setting up their own MythTV computers using similar hardware. Check out the hardware I am using, and have used in the past, by looking through the logs.
Let me know if you have any good tips on keeping installation logs organized. I am fairly new to all this.

Video Podcast 01

Go easy on me it was my first time.

I just take a few minutes to explain how the beginning of my year has been so far and what I have been playing around with.

Let me know which you like better…Vidcast or Vodcast. I am kinda leaning toward vodcast.

Zune Originals unboxing(s)

Beth got a Zune last year and when she bought it we decided that we wanted to personalize it with some laser etching. The easiest way we found to get this done was to order a Zune Originals device instead of trying to laser etch it through a third part company. They also have tons of good art on their site so it was easy to find something she liked.
When the Zune came I was very impressed with not only the box and accessory quality but the extra artwork and color coordination with the box and Zune device. Below I just wanted to post some pictures of what is included with a Zune Originals purchase.
I actually have pictures of two Zune Originals unboxings because we sent in the Zune for a battery replacement and apparently they send you a completely new Zune when you need a Zune Original worked on. While it took a little longer to get the replacement, knowing the device was brand new was well worth the wait. It even made me purchase the extended warranty from Microsoft which I rarely do.
The first four pictures are from the second Zune we got.

Star Wars

These pictures were too good to pass up. I am not a hugh star wars fans but I do like cars. And they defiantly picked some nice cars.
Click for bigger picture


OK, now I am going to bed.

Setting up RSS feeds with Google Reader

This how-to is actually my original intent with the post I just had, but I got carried away explaining what RSS feeds do instead. So here is how you can use Google Reader for your news butler.

First here is what you need:
A Google account. I know you were probably expecting more but that is it. If you are reading this site you already have a computer with a web browser so you are all set to go.

Let’s head over to Google Reader’s website to log in. Look familiar? It should because it is the same login that you use for your Gmail account. Once you are logged in you should see this sidebar. This side bar lets you view all your unread news articles or you can also share items with friends (requires a Gmail account) or put notes on things. Lets not forget this is Google so it tracks what you do. If you click on Trends you can see how many articles you have read, what categories you usually read, and how many items you have shared and starred. To be honest I don’t do much starring because I find it like a inferior bookmarking method and if I find something I like (and want to keep for later) I bookmark it with delicious and move on. You can also browse for stuff to find articles you probably will like and subscribe to them right there. If you want to share articles with fellow Google reader’s you can click the start sharing button and get right to it. Below that is where all your subscriptions show up. You can sort them into relevant folders and go through the articles you want to read in a jiffy.
Here is how mine looks. As you can see on the left I have everything collapsed so that I can just browse all my news by either clicking All items at the top or by each folder. On the right I also turned on collapsed view so that I can read more articles without having to scroll as far. If I find something I like I just click on the headline and the article expands. If I want to read it further or see it at the original site you can just click on the headline in blue. Once I am done with a folder I just click the “Mark all as read” button at the top and that whole folder gets marked and I move on to the next folder.
If you want to share an article you can either click on the share button, share with note, or if you want to share it with someone who doesn’t use Google Reader you can just email it to them right there. It drops a little spot down to write the email and send it all without leaving the reader. Pretty fancy if you ask me.
Last thing you will probably want to know is how to add sites when you are not at Google Reader. All you need to do is look for the RSS link. Usually it will have this icon. All you have to do is click on the logo and any modern browser will ask you what you want to do with the feed. You can simply say “add to Google Reader” and it will take you there with the feed already populated with the latest 10 items. Couldn’t be more simple. Give it a try and subscribe to my blog by clicking the RSS button at the top or click here.
Hope to see you sharing articles in Google Reader.

RSS feeds and you

I have been asked how to set up RSS feeds from many people in the past and usually it is so simple I don’t even think to post about it. But I feel like RSS feeds are finally becoming popular with the average computer user and I wanted to write this to help explain what RSS is and what it does.
What does RSS stand for? RSS is a acronym for Real Simple Syndication.
What does it do? Image you want to read the news. Now imagine it is 1949. What are you going to do? You go out and buy a news paper of course. What if you want local news, world news, and entertainment news on the 21st Academy Awards ceremony. At this point you have to drive around town and pick up at least three papers/magazines and now you need to drive home to read everything to get the content you want. Well what if you had all the papers delivered to your house? That is better right? But what if you had the paper delivered to your house and a butler that took the papers and cut out all the articles you didn’t want and recycled them to save trees? Then he laid out all the articles on your coffee table with your breakfast. That is what RSS feeds do, they are the butlers for our modern news.
Where did RSS feeds come from? In the past companies would use e-mail subscriptions to keep customers up to date on site and company news, and in certain cases e-mail subscriptions are still better, but when you are trying to keep up with site news instantly you can’t be bothered going to your email all the time. Of course some people still do like having their RSS feeds go right to their email inbox and there are plenty of ways to accomplish that as well. As a matter of fact Outlook 2007 even has this feature built in automatically.
Why do you want to use it? Well I don’t really know why YOU want to use it, but I use it to save hours of time when trying to keep up with friends, family, and technology. It also helps when I want to see what is going on at community sites like forums and blog comments. It helps even more when I have a site that doesn’t update often that I want to follow. It is hard to remember to actually go to that site but with RSS feeds the site comes to me.
What should you use for your RSS feeds? To be honest I have tried a lot of different software for my RSS feeds. I started out with RSSOwl, it worked really well but I found it limiting to only have my RSS feeds on one computer. If I wanted to read news at home I would have to remember what I read so I wouldn’t read it twice. I then moved on to Thunderbird Portable because I could keep it on my USB key and take it home with me whenever I wanted to read news at home. This worked well but then I wanted to read my news on my mobile phone and also on Linux/Apple computers. So I started searching for a web based solution that I could read all my news from and read it from any device that has a web browser. I started off with a couple small sites but then found Bloglines. I used Bloglines for quite a while but I had a bit of a falling out when they lost my saved articles and also when I saw this. I have been using Google reader for almost six months now and have been fairly happy with what it has to offer. The mobile version is a bit lacking compared to Bloglines and I have not found a good way to save articles for reading later and for future reference like I used to with Thunderbird and Bloglines. This should not stop you from using it though. Google Reader has lots to offer including integration with Gmail contacts so you can share articles with friends, very easy to use hotkeys, greasemonkey scripts to add functionality not already in Google Reader, and quite a few different ways to set up the view so you can read your articles the way you want to.

When it comes to getting news I can’t imagine life without my news butler. Because I got so long winded in this article I am going to follow it up with another article on how to set up RSS feeds with Google Reader.

Error with CIFS on shutdown in Linux

I kept getting this error with Linux Mint and my NAS. When I shutdown I got an error saying:

CIFS VFS server not responding

and the system would hang before shutting down and sometimes not shutdown at all. Of course with so many people using Linux the problem was only a Google search away.
I found that the problem is because Linux Mint would turn off the network connection before it would unmount the mounted volumes I had. It does this for security reasons because if you have system folders or home folders mapped to network shares it needs to have those system folders until it is done shutting down. Of course you would still run into problems when the network connection is killed but I don’t program so I am sure there are other reasons why it is done this way.
Anyway, a good solution is to have the drives unmounted earlier in the shutdown process. To do this we are going to make symbolic links to the script that unmount the volumes for us and then just put that in the folder that is processed earlier during shutdown and reboot. I found bits and pieces on how to do this in the Ubuntu forums but I found a good blog with all this info in one place here. here.
The code you need to run to make the symbolic links is here.
ln -s /etc/init.d/umountnfs.sh /etc/rc0.d/K15umountnfs.sh
ln -s /etc/init.d/umountnfs.sh /etc/rc6.d/K15umountnfs.sh
Here is a quick explanation of what this does from the other blog I found.

This will create two symbolic links to the umountnfs.sh script, one in runlevel 0 (shutdown) and one in runlevel 6 (reboot). The links have a “K” prefix to let the init system know that the script should be called with “stop” as an argument, and they have a priority of 15 to ensure that they are run before avahi-daemon and dhcdbd are stopped

OK that fix didn’t work. I finally found a solution that really works. Do this in a terminal instead.
cd /etc/rc6.d
ls -la

You will see two files S31umountnfs.sh and S15wpa-ifupdown.sh. The number still represents the order at which the script runs. All you need to do is change when the umountnfs.sh script runs. Do that by typing in:
sudo mv S31umountnfs.sh S14umountnfs.sh
You will need to run the command one more time in the /etc/rc0.d folder too.
Now my shutdown doesn’t hang anymore on unmounting the CIFS mounts.
I hope this helps.

Pineapple Express Blu-ray extras

Beth got Pineapple Express from Netflix this week and while I think the movie is funny it is not for everyone. That of course is not why I am writing this post. When I put in the Blu-ray disk I noticed something very unusual on my PS3. There was a bubble under the game section like I had downloaded something and it was waiting to install. Sure enough the extra was a Pineapple Express wallpaper for the PS3 that was stored on the disk. I of course “installed” it and the wallpaper changed to a background that was way better than the Pineapple Express wallpaper available in the PlayStation store.
My question is, does anyone know how to extract the picture from the Blu-ray disk or how to save just the image to the hard drive instead of having to install it on the PS3? I would like to have the picture on my computer but I don’t have a Blu-ray player on my computer and couldn’t find a way to explore the pictures on the disk.
If you know how to do it please just leave a comment. Oh and by the way, the deleted scenes aren’t that great. I haven’t watched the extended version but please let me know if you did.

Excel Board Games

A few weeks ago I thought to myself. “Hey self, wouldn’t it be awesome if you could program Monopoly into a Excel spreadsheet?” I let the thought echo for about 2 weeks before I actually wrote anything down and started figuring out how I could make this a reality. But then I had an even better thought to myself. “Hey self, don’t you think someone else probably had this idea and actually acted on it before you?” I didn’t let this thought echo as long as the first, about 30 minutes, before a Google search found exactly what I was looking for. Turns out someone not only made Monopoly but there is also games like collect 4, Sudoku, and Othello.
While the games don’t work in Open Office, at least not the ones I tested, they seemed to have no problems in Office 2007 even though they were obviously made in earlier versions of Microsoft Office.
I attached some of the games I liked to this post. You will have to enable macros for them to work and I take no responsibility if the person who programed the game hid a few billion virus downloaders in the VBA macros.
Click here for the download excel-board-games
Enjoy!