Dual 500 G4 can’t handle HDTV

Posted on 2006-01-25 by frank

I’ve been researching hardware and software for this idea of HDTV through the mac, and thanks to a review of the Elgato EyeTV 500 by the EFF, I fired up my favorite BitTorrent client to receive a five-minute clip of Fellowship of the Rings that they recorded in HD from the WB, may it rest in peace.

There is no way this machine, a dual 500 G4 which was brand new in early 2001, has the guts to play back HDTV streams with high quality. I don’t own the EyeTV software so I didn’t try that, but EVERYONE has VLC, right? So I tried that. It’ll play, the video and audio stay synchronized, and it even looks pretty good during relatively static scenes, but throw in some action or even a quick pan, and the picture gets quite blocky.

After also trying MPlayerOSX to watch the same clip, I’m impressed by how gracefully VLC’s performance degrades: MPlayer lets both the audio and the video get choppy; it was basically un-watchable.

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Time for TV downstairs?

Posted on 2006-01-25 by frank

The set-up in our house is pretty standard, with a main living area that includes kitchen, dining room, and living room, with a separate den area that contains the television and related gadgets. The difference is, that room is upstairs, not even in hearing distance of the kitchen. Andrea recently said she would sometimes like to be able to listen to the television while we’re in here cooking, particularly to catch the local news.

I spent some time researching online and looking at Best Buy and Circuit City, but never came up with anything that looked promising. I know the TVs we’re considering here are under twenty inches, and are likely LCD just to save space, but that makes them expensive, and where are we going to put it, anyway? The most likely location is right here where I’m sitting, but this space is occupied by the computer.

Of course the solution is to make the computer play TV. Why can’t the computer play TV? Seems like a simple-enough task. Luckily it looks like Plextor or Elgato can solve this one for me!

Since our goal is generic TV, the broadcast stations really, in the main living area downstairs, an over-the-air solution should work out just fine. The question now becomes, for 10% more money, should I get the HDTV version? I could dip my feet in to the HDTV waters without shelling out big bucks for a nice big HDTV. Either of these options is less expensive than buying a new LCD TV, which is about all our space down here can accomodate.

It does occur to me, though, what type of antenna would I need and how much does that cost?

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The easy part of hacking my old 1G ipod

Posted on 2006-01-23 by frank

Several months after the first ipod was released on the world by an unsuspecting Apple, whose stock price was at the time teasing the lower teens and sparking talks of a buy-out by various parties, I bought one brand-new on ebay. It’s been a great device until recently! Now, whenever the hard drive spins up, it wheezes the loud hum of an unhappy, dying drive. I don’t suppose I can blaim it; it’s got tough duty in there, crammed in a small case with no room to breath for four years, rattling around in my carry-on luggage through airport after plane flight after airport, enticing Elizabeth with its cute small screen and little buttons and clicky wheel to the point she’s pulled it off the stereo cabinet and on to the hardwood floor at least once.

Yes, letting the music play on the home stereo may require an ipod hack job. Replacing the hard drive sounds easy, in fact the hardest part may be finding a drive that fits. We’ll see. I could always, as Scott suggested, mount the whole thing in an old, unused CD-ROM enclosure and turn it in to a non-portable with a 3.5 inch desktop drive. I wonder what size drive the IDE interface is capable of handling? I bet it would handle a 120, but no bigger than that. After all, Macs of that era didn’t handle drivers larger than 120 on their IDE busses.

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Quick trip to Northern Virginia

Posted on 2006-01-17 by frank

I’m in DC today, waiting a couple of hours for my meetings to start. Once they get going, it looks like they won’t slow down until late in the evening! I’ve run through my slides and my demo a number of times now, and I’ve got them down pretty well. I’m not very sure how much actual presenting I’ll be doing — it looks a lot like I’m here for discussions as well as demonstrations.

Earlier, I stopped in the Apple Store at Pentagon City Mall and took a look at a 20″ Dual Core Intel iMac. It’s a very nice machine! This one doesn’t even have a cracked screen. Scott ordered one the day they were announced, and now unfortunately he has to wait until he gets a good one, because the screen was cracked in transit. Interesting visual effect, but it would probably get old.

I took a couple of snapshots with the Photo Booth software and built-in iSight. Both performed well. The picture seems at first glance to be a lot better than what we get from our old non-integrated iSight. I’ll definitely be asking Santa for one of these or something equivalent; it’s a step in the right direction for Apple! I can’t wait
to see how the laptops perform, and hope the speediness filters back down the line to the iBook, or its Intel Mac equivalent. I don’t think they could call it the iMacBook, could they?

I’m supposed to have a working lunch with some folks at 2 or so, but I was already hungry after getting up at 3:40 AM to catch my 6:30 AM flight out of Columbia. I didn’t want to spoil my late lunch, so I had some really good tabbouleh and a falafel.

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Serendipity is under new ownership

Posted on 2006-01-16 by frank

A while back, I complained about this place not opening until 10:00 AM on the weekdays, effectively killing any chance of establishing a commuter clientele.

Late last week, thanks to the overly-flashy digital sign for the strip mall on Washington Road, Scott, who thinks my blog should have a category just for coffee, learned they’re under new ownership. This morning while driving in to work to finish up a presentation and demo for tomorrow’s business trip, I saw the coffee-loving commuter’s siren: a neon red “Open” sign!

I stopped in, and I have to digress for a minute to tell you that the previous owner once proudly told Andrea she had never even tasted coffee! And she runs a coffee shop? EXCUSE ME?

Anyway, the new owner responded to my question, “Where do you get your espresso beans?” with an enthusiastic description of how he and his wife, who is also the co-owner, had done weeks of research online to find a good roaster, and had samples delivered to their home before the new year, all in preparation for their 1 January acquisition of Serendipity.

Their espresso roast is a tad lighter than Starbucks, a tad less oily than Abbie’s Sumatra, but is both darker and more oily than the Italian espresso roast I just bought from The Coffee Guy. There wasn’t as much crema as I’d like, but I’ll definitely give them a few more chances. At least they actually like and drink coffee!

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