For those of you who don’t know, Speakeasy is the best kept secret in broadband access since…well, they are the best thing going by far. Not only do they offer DSL packages that make sense (what is included in the bundles), they offer rock solid service at great prices.  But, even better is that they are based here in the US and you can actually get a real, English speaking person who knows what they are talking about, when you call their tech support department. I have nothing but great things to say about all of the guys I have spoken to and dealt with at Speakeasy.  They are truly a class act.

With that said, I have to say that I am happy and sad at the news this morning that Best Buy has acquired Speakeasy. I received an email that started like this:

I am pleased to announce that Speakeasy has been acquired by Best Buy, an innovative and growing Fortune 100 company and the top consumer electronics retailer in North America. This is a significant milestone for our company as our new relationship will help us realize our goals of becoming the No. 1 provider of voice and data solutions to small businesses. It is important to note that though Speakeasy will now be a wholly owned subsidiary of Best Buy, we will continue to operate as a standalone, independent operating division with headquarters in Seattle.

I am happy for all of the people at Speakeasy and that they have probably been able to put some well deserved cash into their pockets. However, I fear that this may mean that over time, things will change…but, maybe not. So, we will have to see how that goes. For now, congrats to the Speakeasy team and good luck going forward.

[tags]Speakeasy, DSL, Best Buy, Acquisition[/tags]

Ok, so I have not posted here as much as I would like, but I have been doing a little work getting the OTA HDTV going utilizing the 2 USB DViCO HDTV tuners that I purchased a few months back.  I built an array of HD antennas using the included Philips HD antennas that came with the DViCO tuners as well as another I had from the POS ATI HDTV Wonder that I have sitting around.  That worked here in San Francisco a little bit, but the reception was not good enough for Windows MCE to tune them in consistently.

Enter the best HDTV antenna that I have come across. The Radio Shack HD antenna works like a champ.  At this point, I am able to get 95%+ signal on most of the local HD channels but am not able to tune in the KQED channels for some reason (even though they are supposedly located on Sutro Tower as most of the others are). I read the reviews on the Radio Shack site and was impressed. Then I spent a week waiting for one of the stores here in San Francisco to get one in stock. As soon as I plugged it into a one-to-two splitter, and then fed the outputs into the two tuners, I had 100% signal on most of the local HD channels and many other channels that did not have enough signal for MCE to tune in, now had plenty.  Now, if I can just figure out how to get kQED tuned in…better yet, why the hell doesn’t Microsoft make it so that we can use a cable card already to tune in cable supplied HD channels?

[tags]HDTV, MCE, HTPC, Microsoft, DViCO, OTA HD[/tags]

The xBox 360 could be the best thing that Microsoft has ever built.  I don’t want to be one of those Windoze, M$ guys, but sometimes they make it too easy to be that way.  Danielle made herself the best wife ever by purchasing an xBox 360 for her husband this year.  However, things are not like they were in the good ‘ole days of bachelordom and restraint is needed when playing games.  Once I realized that, I decided to hook up the 360 as an MCE Extender on our living room television.  I had built a stand-alone MCE box (P4 Shuttle barebones system) with some good parts (aside from the crappy Shuttle board), but things were just not working out. I simply don’t think the Shuttle’s mobo is up to the task of working as a high-performance video serving system.  So, I decided to give the xBox a try.

Well, it worked like a champ right out of the gates. The 360 is fast, stable and my only complaint (like many others) is that there is no ability to play DVDs from the remote MCE system. I am not sure who the genius behind this was, but it is something that should really be changed ASAP by Microsoft.  It plays live television (ala Tivo) via one of the tuners installed in the mothership MCE box, videos, recorded tv, etc. The only thing it doesn’t do is the DVD action.  The kicker was that the MCE remote I bought for my stand-alone MCE box works on the xBox 360 without doing a thing.

My only advice to Microsoft would be to make some open forums that MCE users and project managers actively participate in on their website. One where users can get honest answers to what will and will not be included in upcoming releases. I know this sounds silly to suggest that MS should tell everyone including their competition what they are planning on doing in the future, but they should not be afraid.  If anything, it will put everyone on notice how serious they are about this home media / home integration stuff.  Plus it will allow them to build the systems as the end-user really wants them to be…that is what this is all about, right?

[tags]xBox, xBox 360, MCE, Extender, Media PC, Media Center[/tags]

Okay, I knew I should have done this BEFORE I drove to the Radio Shack store on Polk. See, there is a store on Lombard that is very close to my crib, but the online deal said that the Polk store was the only one that had the best reviewed HDTV antenna. So, I drive down there, get the splitters, cable, connectors and such and then ask the girl that works there if she can find the model I was looking for. I was good enough to write down all of the model numbers for the items I wanted on a sticky note. Of course, she said, I don’t think we have that, but let me check. She goes downstairs, comes back a minute later and says, “Yeah, we are out of that one right now. But, one is on order and we should have it on Friday.”

My bad.

This just proves, that no matter how much homework you do online, you still have to call to make sure that a store actually has what their online deal says they have on hand. Something about the computer not updating every day was muttered by the girl that worked there.  I didn’t even respond.

[tags]HDTV, Antenna, Radio Shack[/tags]

I just put a USA Spec iPod interface into Danielle’s 2001 Jeep Grand Cherokee. I really have to start taking pictures and adding them here. Suffice it to say that there was no adapter needed in addition to the USA Spec kit. The beautiful part was that it took me all of about 20 minutes to install it and Armor All the dash before and after I replaced the stereo.  If you are looking for instructions on how to remove the stereo in a 2001 Jeep Grand Cherokee (dash removal) here you go.  It worked right out of the box. The nice part about the USA Spec kit is that it charges the iPod as well as allows you to control it with the factory CD changer controls on the factory stereo.  I put one into my Tahoe a few months ago and the installation was just as easy and works just as well in that vehicle.

[tags]iPod, iPod Interface, Stereo, Auto, Audio[/tags]

For as long as I can remember I have always wanted to have a couple of arcade style video games in my house. Of course, many of the ballers on MTV Cribs share my passion. But, what do you do if your Sega arcade game breaks? There is only one person that I have heard of that can repair the actual logic boards that these machines use. Ken Westerfield worked for Sega for something like 18 years, and as far as I know, he is the only guy in the United States that can fix these things the right way. So, if you are looking to fix your sega arcade game, you will want to give Ken a call.

[tags]Sega, Repair, Arcade, Games[/tags]

As if it should come as a surprise, Microsoft is apparently interested in putting one of their Operating Systems on the OLPC (aka One Laptop Per Child) computers.  At the NetEvents conference in Hong Kong this past weekend, Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of OLPC, said:

I have known [Microsoft chairman] Bill Gates his entire adult life. We talk, we meet one-on-one, we discuss this project.

Well, duh. Of course Microsoft and Bill Gates are going to want to get in front of a computer using audience as early as they can.  As much as I hate it, why the heck not. Maybe this will finally put an end to that stupid fruit company’s users battle agains the Microsoft tyranny.  Let’s all just become robots shall we?

[tags]OLPC, Microsoft, Apple, Laptops, Computer[/tags]

Stay tuned boys and girls for a review of my two new DViCO Fusion HDTV5 USB HDTV tuners that arrived last night.  I don’t have much time today to mess with these and the machines that they will be installed on, but I did have time to get one setup on my main Media Center Edition box. All I can say is, THANK GOD, someone has put some time and effort into software and drivers. Per the full-color glossy manual that comes with the HDTV5 USB tuners, I went to the DViCO website to download the latest software pack for the USB Gold tuners.  I installed the software first, was prompted to reboot and plugged in the tuner when windows came back up. The computer recognized the new software and two times I told Windows where to find the drivers, per the manual.  Done. I fired up the software and it autoscanned 44 channels (~32 DTV/HDTV channels here in San Francisco).  When it was done with the auto-scan it tuned in channel 2 in HD. I can honestly say, none of the ATI based NTSC or HD tuners I have went that smoothly when I installed them.  I have not fired up MCE yet as I want to get the antenna situation addressed BEFORE I let MCE know I have the HD tuners installed. I will use the DViCO software to do that as it is quite nice.  BTW, the OG “stick” antenna that comes with it outperforms the ATI/Philips HDTV antenna that came with my ATI HDTV Wonder and these tuners (Snapstream.com included them as a “freebie”)…funny.

[tags]HDTV, DViCO, ATI, MCE, Media Center, Tuner[/tags]

It is about time…at least I am sure Danielle feels that way. I am putting the D-Link DI-514 up on the blocks or available to anyone who wants it really. It is a wireless router that has served us over the past few years. It was a cheap purchase in order to get wireless internet access in the house when my Linksys WAP 11 decided it did not want to let me get into the config. I plugged the WAP 11 back in today, because the DI-514 was giving me grief for the past week, and it works perfectly. The WAP 11, while a little dated, is a great platform for two reasons: One, it is simply an Access Point so there is not a ton of technology and things to break inside of it. Two, it has awesome range and the ability to easily add some high gain antennas if I need to. I thought about adding an antenna to the DI-514, but the antenna port does not have a threaded connector. The antenna that comes with it constantly falls off because there are no threads on the router’s antenna port. I am not sure what the hell that is all about, but it is annoying as hell to say the least.

So, if anyone has a need for a wireless router, give me a holla y’all, and I will hook you up if I still have it.

[tags]Wireless, WiFi, D-Link, Linksys, Product Review[/tags]

I feel people’s pain a lot when it comes to computer problems.  Most days, I take it for granted that I happen to be technically inclined. Even when I am using a machine that I have never used or seen before, I am not afraid to just dive in there and attempt to figure out how to make it work.  I have always been that way.  But, after this weekend and after talking on the phone with a friend a few minutes ago, I was reminded that most people really are at the mercy of their personal computers.  I was attending a party this weekend when a good friend of my in-laws, and a super nice person, told me that she wanted to pay me to do some consulting. I told her there was no need to pay me and asked her what she needed help with. She told me that she wanted to pay me to make her labels for her family Christmas card.  I had to really try hard not to laugh out loud and in her face….because she was dead serious. To her, this was a monumental task. To me, it was less than monkey work. I would consider “building a website” monkey work that any jackass could do. This wasn’t even on the map.

So, I paused, asked her what program she had her contacts in.  She told me that she didn’t have them in the computer yet, they were all on paper.  I told her that she was really capable of doing this herself and that I would be happy to walk her through mail merging them in Word or something after she had all of the contacts put into digital format. She came back by telling me that this was part of what she wanted to pay me to do. Sigh.  If I were 10 years old, this would be a great way to make a couple of bucks. At 35, it was bordering on insulting, and that is probably because this is one of the nicest people that I have met via my wife’s family.  It was really funny.  It ended with me telling her that Kinko’s could probably do this for her very quickly and inexpensively.

But, back to the laptop issue. Ken just called and told me that he was getting a message on his laptop screen saying, “Operating system not found.”  He, like me, gets pretty frustrated pretty quickly with things sometimes.  Often, in his case, it is due to his computer(s).  This is not a particularly good message, indicating that there could simply be a problem with the MBR (Master Boot Record) on the drive, or worse, his drive could be smoked.  I told him that we probably had a 99% chance recovering the data on the drive regardless of the situation. But, that it is not something we are going to be able to just flip a switch and fix.  He was saying things like, “Yeah, but I need to use this thing today / right now.”  While I can understand his frustration, I seldom understand why people get so pissed off about things like this frequently, yet don’t have any backups or duplication of their data. If the data is mission critical and it updates daily then you better replicate it or back it up daily.  Then, the worst case is that you lose a one day’s work.  But, more than anything is the legions of people that use their laptops as their main computer…with no backups.  Regardless of the form factor the computer comes in, a laptop is still a piece of sensitive electronics. Micro electronic devices don’t like to be banged around.  Translation, don’t use your laptop as your main data center of your critical information, unless you are super-dilligent about backing that data up daily. And, even then, I would not choose to do it that way unless I absolutely had to.  There are too many options these days to remotely log into your main machine at the office or at home to have to deal with nonsense like this. But, for whatever reason, people just don’t want to believe that their computer is going to take a dump. So, do yourself a favor if you are one of these people:

1. Back up your data daily
2. Learn to use the “Briefcase” if you use Windows to sync your data between your laptop and your main computer
3. Check into technologies like Remote Desktop
4. Back up your data daily

[tags]Computers, Data, Backup, Drive Failure, MBR[/tags]