Project Insomnia

Project Insomnia is many things, but in this context it is simply a "braindump" of whatever I happen to be thinking/reading/watching/doing at the moment. Parental guidance suggested.

Sunday, August 31, 2008

The Daily Tweet

  • 11:05 On the road w/Alex & Lani, going to Sac for the day. #
  • 11:51 Traffic sucks. #
  • 13:53 At a Mexican restaurant, the name of which I have already forgotten, in Old Sac waiting to be seated. #
  • 13:58 Ps. It's hot. Really damn hot. #
  • 14:02 There are, however, horses. #
  • 17:23 At Raley Field for the River Cats / Grizzlies game. #
  • 19:54 Grizzlies 7 River Cats 0, bottom 2nd. Ouch. #
  • 20:00 Scenes from AAA baseball: fan offered either a coffee mug or $50 to hit his wife in the face with a pie. He took the cash. #
  • 20:54 15 - 0 Grizzlies, top 5th. Was a no-hitter until a few minutes ago. #
  • 21:57 And the final score is 15 - 0. #
  • 22:24 On the road home. Entertainment was basically a bust but the company was good. #
  • 00:27 Home. Bed. #
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Saturday, August 30, 2008

The Daily Tweet

  • 09:43 Happy Anniversary AVP & Tony from the guy who pressed "Play" on the CD player. #
  • 10:20 It's really disgustingly hot already. A little worried about kitties, though I did check their water bowls before I left for work. #
  • 15:38 Fiddling with Blogger layouts. Trying to go to three columns. #
  • 16:41 Little-Known Facts about Sarah Palin: tinyurl.com/56ofm6 #
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Friday, August 29, 2008

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Thursday, August 28, 2008

The Daily Tweet

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Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Olympic-size DVR storage - an update

Following up on this post from earlier this month, about the trials and tribulations in adding external storage to my DirecTV HD-DVR. I've returned the Buffalo DriveStation unit back to Fry's. We used it with moderate success to buffer two weeks of Olympic events, but the DVR was markedly less stable and there were noticeable gray-screen delays when deleting saved programs or browsing the list. That, combined with DirecTV's lack of support for the eSATA port and anything their customers might want to attach to it, made the decision to return it a pretty easy one.

What would DirecTV have to change in order for me to use external storage on the DVR?
  1. Supporting the port in hardware, by which I mean acknowledging its existence; recommending specific drives and performing compatibility testing.
  2. Supporting it in software, by which I mean not having to reboot the DVR to use external storage; using external storage as additional space for the internal drive and not, as is presently the case, an either-or situation that doesn't transfer saved programs or Prioritizer entres.

For now, I'll stick with the internal drive. The Olympics were really the only situation, aside from our recent three-week vacation, in which we risked running out of space on the internal drive, so I don't anticipate needing more any time soon. If I do, and DirecTV still isn't supporting eSATA, I'll probably investigate an internal upgrade.

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Tuesday, August 26, 2008

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The Nightmare Before Christmas (2-Disc Collector's Edition) review on MousePlanet

Our DVD review of The Nightmare Before Christmas (2-Disc Collector's Edition) is up on MousePlanet today:
Once the actual feature begins, the care with which Disney's artists and technicians did their work in creating this restored and remastered version is plainly evident. The picture is clear, with no pops, scratches, or compression artifacts. In fact, it's crisp enough that you can clearly see minute details like Sally's fluttering eyelashes and the textures on Jack's books about Christmas, and you can easily see characters and objects in dark scenes, such as inside Dr. Finklestein's laboratory. The graininess mentioned in the 2001 review is completely absent. As compared to the earlier DVD release, this remastered transfer is true anamorphic widescreen, meaning that the picture expands to fill the entire screen on widescreen televisions.

The surround sound presentation is equally clear and bright, with good channel separation. Song lyrics—this is, after all, a musical picture—are easy to understand even for me, and I usually have to turn on subtitles when watching musicals.

I want to take a minute to thank MousePlanet's chief copy editor Lani Teshima, who accepted this article at 11:30 pm last night for publish today and got it done.
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Monday, August 25, 2008

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Sunday, August 24, 2008

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Saturday, August 23, 2008

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Friday, August 22, 2008

Iron Chef video game coming to the Nintendo Wii

Iron Chef video game coming to the Nintendo Wii and DS:
Iron Chef America: Supreme Cuisine lets players square off in Kitchen Stadium and battle through a series fast-paced and intense culinary challenges. Each victory advances players closer to a final showdown that will determine who will reign supreme as the next Iron Chef America.
I hope the bonus rounds let you battle it out with the real Iron Chefs. Give me Hiroyuki Sakai and Rokusaburo Michiba any day over these Iron Chef America guys. And don't forget floor reporter Shinichiro Ohta shouting out 'Fukui-san!' every few minutes.

We absolutely will be getting this when it comes out. Allez cuisine!
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Thursday, August 21, 2008

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Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Dog credited with saving kittens

Angel the dog credited with saving kittens:
A two-year-old dog that had been turned over to the Nevada Humane Society's shelter in Reno is being credited with rescuing six abandoned kittens.
[...]
They were walking on the hot day with temperatures in the 90s when the dog became obsessed with something in the bushes. When she refused to move on, Gomez investigated and discovered a box full of 3-week-old orange tabby kittens that were frightened and hungry.

Photos of Angel and the kittens at Reno Gazette-Journal.
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Things I Want To Do On Or Around The Internets

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Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Rachel Maddow to Replace Dan Abrams on MSNBC - TV Decoder Blog - NYTimes.com

Rachel Maddow to Replace Dan Abrams on MSNBC:
Just in time for the closing rush of the presidential election, MSNBC is shaking up its prime-time programming lineup, removing the long-time host –- and one-time general manager of the network — Dan Abrams from his 9 p.m. program and replacing him with Rachel Maddow, who has emerged as a favored political commentator for the all-news cable channel.

The moves, which were confirmed by MSNBC executives Tuesday, are expected to be finalized by Wednesday, with Mr. Abrams’s last program on Thursday. After MSNBC’s extensive coverage of the two political conventions during the next two weeks, Ms. Maddow will begin her program on Sept. 8.

What can I say? I already mentioned how Rachel Maddow is tops in my book (with Keith Olbermann a very close second) so this for me is terrific news.
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24 years later, still not an Olympic event


(From SNL, October 6, 1984)
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Monday, August 18, 2008

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Sunday, August 17, 2008

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Saturday, August 16, 2008

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Friday, August 15, 2008

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Thursday, August 14, 2008

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Wednesday, August 13, 2008

The Obama radio ad you probably haven't heard

From TPM Election Central at Talking Points Memo, originally linked from MaddowOnline:
To our knowledge the Obama campaign didn't release it to the national press, but Team Obama is airing a new radio spot in Wisconsin -- the home of Harley-Davidson -- attacking John McCain over his recent quip at a biker rally that he'd much rather listen to the 'roar of 50,000 Harleys' than the cheering of 200,000 Berliners.

The spot quotes McCain's joke, then calls him a phony for opposing a requirement that the government buy American-made motorbikes. 'But when it comes to his record,' the announcer says, 'American-made motorcycles like Harleys don't matter to John McCain.'


Click below to listen to the ad.

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Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Rachel Maddow everywhere

Rachel Maddow reports from the MSNBC newsroom in New York City, January 3.Rachel Maddow's Life and Career :
Unlike her beautiful, bilious conservative female counterparts or the cocksure boys-on-the-bus analysts, however, Maddow didn't get here by bluster and bravado but with a combination of crisp thinking and galumphing good cheer. Remarkably, this season's discovery isn't a glossy matinee idol or a smooth-talking partisan hack but a PhD Rhodes scholar lesbian policy wonk who started as a prison AIDS activist.
All of which raises a crucial question: does Maddow's unlikely success, reliant on her ability to defy cliche and categorization at every turn, signal a move in punditry away from the thuggish and the angry and toward the lucid and sophisticated? Or has her powerful charisma and canny career management allowed her to break the rules--without actually breaking a mold?


Rachel Maddow is my number-one political news source and has been since she filled in for vacationing Al Franken just as New Orleans was flooding.
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Monday, August 11, 2008

The Daily Tweet

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Sunday, August 10, 2008

The Daily Tweet

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Saturday, August 09, 2008

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Friday, August 08, 2008

Updated network map

Updating this post from earlier this year, here is the current network map done on Gliffy.




Changes/additions from last time:

Total live storage:
DeviceCapacity
BRIE80GB
GJETOST200GB
STILTON500GB
EDAM500GB
GuestRoom (DirecTiVo)500GB
LivingRoom (DirecTiVo)500GB
MOZZARELLA1TB
Total:3.28TB

Not all of this storage is immediately available for arbitrary use, but if I really wanted to I could ftp to either of the DirecTiVo boxes or mount the eSATA box as FireWire on the Mac. Also, somehow the two DirecTiVos don't have cheese names. How did that happen?

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Thursday, August 07, 2008

Olympic-size DVR storage

With the Olympics coming up -- starting tomorrow! -- and now that we can watch them in HD, and NBC's promise of over 1,000 hours of programming, well, I took a look at the storage capacity on my DirecTV HR21-700 HD+DVR. It has an internal 320GB drive, which translates into around 37 hours of HD programming. Obviously that would not be enough to buffer the events we want to watch. The HR21 (and its predecessor, the HR20) have an eSATA port which can be used to add external storage, but it's not actually supported by DirecTV. It's there, and if you can get it to work then great, but they aren't going to help. Luckily the various online communities (notably DBSTalk.com) have stepped up with lots of information and helpful tips, and after a bit of research I decided to give this a try. My main requirement was one terabyte of available storage, and I was also not looking to spend a lot of money. Finally, it had to be something I could buy locally -- unfortunately I started this mini-project too late to try to buy it online.

I started with a Western Digital My Book Home Edition ($279.99 list, $199.99 at Fry's). It was the most attractive and least expensive of the available options. Unfortunately, and if I'd read all of the eSATA threads on DBSTalk.com I'd have known this, the My Book series are for some reason not compatible with DVRs. Specifically on the HR21, booting with the unit attached gets to the second screen of the six-screen boot process and then goes into an infinite reboot.

Next, I tried a Seagate FreeAgent Pro ($259.99 list, $237.49 with a white sticker at Fry's). I went with this one when the WD didn't work because I was looking for another "known" brand name. Unfortunately, again, not supported. On the HR21, booting with this unit attached gets to the third of six boot screens and then hangs.

After returning the Seagate unit, I found a Buffalo DriveStation Combo 4 ($229.99 at Fry's, around the same on PriceGrabber). This is the least attractive of the three--it looks like nothing more than a Radio Shack project box--but its form factor is such that it can be tucked into the stereo cabinet out of sight. I unplugged the DVR, connected the eSATA unit and powered the DVR back on. And it worked! The DVR got through all six boot screens and came up normally. As expected, there were no saved recordings or Prioritizer entries--they don't move over from the primary drive--so the available space reads as "100%". 1TB should give me around 110-120 hours of HD recording.

The one remaining sticking point is that existing saved programs and Prioritizer entries are not copied to the external drive, but remain intact and inaccessible on the primary internal drive as long as the external drive is connected; and the only way to switch between internal and external drives is to completely power off the DVR and connect/disconnect the external drive before powering the DVR back on. It should be possible to simply copy the contents of the internal drive to the external bit-for-bit and in fact at least one third-party DirecTV upgrade vendor offers a copy service for an extra $59 when buying a new drive. If they can do it, I'm sure I can do it, but doing it would involve delicately easing the DirecTV DVR out of the stack and opening it up and I'm not sure I want to go that far right now.

So, to summarize:

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Wednesday, August 06, 2008

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Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Wanted: Logo artist

I'm starting a new Web site and need a logo. If you're any good at that sort of thing and are interested, please email me.
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Monday, August 04, 2008

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Sunday, August 03, 2008

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Saturday, August 02, 2008

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Friday, August 01, 2008

Travelers' Laptops May Be Detained At Border

The DHS laptop policy is not new (I mentioned it back in April as we prepared to go on our cruise) but for the first time, the actual policy has been published. See links in the articles I've excerpted below for details.

Travelers' Laptops May Be Detained At Border -- Washington Post

Federal agents may take a traveler's laptop computer or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.

Also, officials may share copies of the laptop's contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption or other reasons, according to the policies, dated July 16 and issued by two DHS agencies, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Homeland Security: We can seize laptops for an indefinite period -- CNet News.com

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has concocted a remarkable new policy: It reserves the right to seize for an indefinite period of time laptops taken across the border. A pair of DHS policies from last month say that customs agents can routinely--as a matter of course--seize, make copies of, and "analyze the information transported by any individual attempting to enter, re-enter, depart, pass through, or reside in the United States." (See policy No. 1 and No. 2.)

DHS claims the border search of electronic information is useful to detect terrorists, drug smugglers, and people violating "copyright or trademark laws." (Readers: Are you sure your iPod and laptop have absolutely no illicitly downloaded songs? You might be guilty of a felony.) This is a disturbing new policy, and should convince anyone taking a laptop across a border to use encryption to thwart DHS snoops. Encrypt your laptop, with full disk encryption if possible, and power it down before you go through customs.


Crossing Borders with Laptops and PDAs -- Bruce Schneier
Last month a US court ruled that border agents can search your laptop, or any other electronic device, when you're entering the country. They can take your computer and download its entire contents, or keep it for several days. Customs and Border Patrol has not published any rules regarding this practice, and I and others have written a letter to Congress urging it to investigate and regulate this practice.
But the US is not alone. British customs agents search laptops for pornography. And there are reports on the internet of this sort of thing happening at other borders, too. You might not like it, but it's a fact. So how do you protect yourself?
Encrypting your entire hard drive, something you should certainly do for security in case your computer is lost or stolen, won't work here. The border agent is likely to start this whole process with a "please type in your password". Of course you can refuse, but the agent can search you further, detain you longer, refuse you entry into the country and otherwise ruin your day.

There seem to be two common ways around this: encrypt the drive (and disguise the encryption) or use network storage. It seems to me that while encryption is less reliant on external factors -- what kind of Internet connection can you get overseas to upload your confidential files before returning home? -- it also would tend to draw more suspicion from CBP if there is any evidence of encryption.

For our cruise, I cleaned all confidential files and data off my laptop before we left, since I was only bringing it to download photos from our cameras and not to do any actual work. If you need to travel out of the country for work and don't want -- or corporate policy forbids -- nosy CBP officials pawing through your confidential data, give serious thought to how you're going to handle the border crossing. And do it before you leave.
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