Merry Christmas!

Happy Holidays everyone! I'm packing up to head out to Florida with Mary tomorrow morning. More updates soon... promise!

PS - if you didn't get a christmas card from me - either it's coming, or I don't have your address! Email me and fix that!

Exam update

4 down... one to go. (Way better than one down, 3.6 tomorrow... and I'm outta here).

In all seriousness - just one more take-home exam left, then I'm done for the semester. A week in Hopewell, then Florida for New Years.

What's in a name?

The name of this site comes from the Talking Heads song (Nothing But) Flowers. Now you know.

Here's a link to the song on iTunes.

Merger Maddness

The Wall St. Journal is reporting that Verizon Wireless is considering buying out Sprint PCS now (Vzw and Sprint are the #2 and #3 wireless companies, after ATT/Cingular - and they both use the same CDMA service, whereas Cingular/ATT/T-Mobile use GPS).

It will be interesting to go through the FTC's merger guidelines on this one. Apparently in some rural areas Verizon and Sprint are the only games in town - so I think some of the Sprint service will have to be spun off in those markets. But frankly - I think this one will be good for consumers. Prices for cellular services are affected by competition to be sure - but a big element is the free cellular to cellular calling, which really benefits from the network effect here. The more in-network calling options there are (ie... Verizon customers can now call Sprint customers for free) the less consumers pay.

I also personally stand to gain, I think, as a Verizon customer - because Sprint has the Treo 650 - and I want that phone. Sprint also has better pricing for unlimited data ($15 a month) - hopefully both will come along with the merger.

You can't TiVo with a TiVo?

Now that the rest of the world has stolen TiVo's product (Digital Video Recording set top boxes) and business plan - TiVo is fighting to defend the only thing they have left: their name. Drudge is reporting tonight that TiVo is sending out cease and desist orders to websites that use "TiVo" as a verb. Shades of the "you can't xerox a xerox on a Xerox" ad campaign.

I guess I'm as guilty as anyone for misusing their trademark (note the difference between misusing a trademark and trademark infringement, something I am NOT guilty of...). Unfortunately for them, once a mark suffers "genericide" and becomes the everyday term for something (it almost happened to Xerox) - the mark is (basically) not projectable as a trademark. My sad prediction: 5 years from now, all that will be left of TiVo (the company) will be tivo (the verb). God speed little TiVo.

(Disclosure statement: Ryan has a Motorola 6412 DVR box from his cable company.)

What I'm listening to (while studying)

Check out the Kanye West album on iTunes. This is what I'm listening to, when I'm not scrubbing through estates & trusts or copyright lectures.

(Get to iTunes with this link and I'll get a small commission...)

Fun Christmas Link

Thanks to the time-killers over at bored.com I found this link. Click through and you can create a fun customized Christmas song with a bunch of "zany" parameters. Mary and I had a lot of fun with it yesterday.

Because I just finished my internet law exam and listened to today's engadget PodCast (for those of you who don't know... PodCasts are homemade time-shifted radio shows distributed over the internet) and I'm in a fight-the-copyright-powers-that-be mood - let me suggest you use a streamripping or similar program to capture the audio to an MP3 or ACC file free and clear. For the Mac users I suggest sunflower. Windows users, I suggest you become Mac users.

On another note - I'm going to try playing with adding Google adwords to my site. I've love to hear people's opinions on blog advertising. I'm more curious about how it works than interested in making money (because I know I really won't get a dime).

Jerry Seinfeld called...

...and he wants his idea back.

There is actualy an all cereal restaurant now, called Cereality. Very clever kids... A+.

There's one in Philly near uPenn and one in AZ somewhere. Sign me up for 4.

[we] are apt to forget to remember

But always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us. Today is December 7, 2004.

Music to loose elections by

Apparently America's fattest filmmaker has a "celebrity playlist" on the iTunes music store. It was posted less than a month before before Bush won the election... hmmm. I actually do think it is a coincidence here that Apple iCEO and iTunes Czar Steve Jobs is a big fat contirbutor to the DNC and Michael Moore is a big fat idiot - but I'll let the conspiracy nuts out there take the ball and run with it.

I do have a few musical suggestions for Mike that didn't make the cut for one reason or another: like this or this or maybe these.

(All of these links are to the iTunes store - if you don't have iTunes, I have no idea what will happen. Maybe you will get an error message or slightly less likely, your computer will explode.)

Proof

Day 2: Comcast's Dual-Tuner DVR

Having mapped my remote to do some fun tricks (see note on adding a "30 second skip" button in yesterday's post) and watched HDTV on my Mac via a FireWire cable, it's time for the real prize: recording HD (high def) and SD (standard def... aka, normal TV) on my Mac from the STB (set top box).

More details to follow - but it does work. Using some tools from Apple's FireWire SDK (software developer kit - links to follow), I was able to record what the box is playing over FireWire (including archived shows played from the box's DVR feature) and play them back on my Mac. I'm still waiting on some software to allow me to convert the MPEG2 streams into QuickTime or DV (that requires the QuickTime MPEG2 playback software) - but that'll come soon. I did feel the FCC's copyright wrath a bit - ESPNHD and DiscoveryHD both have the "broadcast flag" enabled - which means you cannot record or play the video through FireWire - more on that later.

It took awhile to decipher the patchwork of instructions - but after I figured it out, it's not so hard. Detailed step by step instructions will follow (and will hopefully not be followed by DMCA "notice and takedown" letters).

Fare use lives on (for now).

Day 1: Comcast's Dual-Tuner DVR

It came, and it's pretty cool. My first impressions are:

1. The new on screen guide is much MUCH better than what Comcast had on their 1-tuner DVRs and regular STBs. I've never used a real TiVo - but I can't imagine it's that much better than this... or at least $300 + another $3/month better (TiVo is $12.95/month vs. Comcast's 9.95, plus TiVo has an up front hardware fee).

2. It gets warm... and kind of smells like something is burning. Hopefully, nothing is.

3. They gave me the wrong remote (the real remote for the 2-tuner box should have some buttons that mine does, for PiP and swapping between the 2 different tuners). Luckily, you can program some of the unused buttons to make up the difference. "Yellow A/Parental Lock" is now 30 second commercial skip. "HD Zoom" is now mute and "TV/VCR" swaps between the two tuners. Instructions do configure your remote can be found here.

4. FireWire works. You might now know it, but the FCC requires cable companies to provide FireWire/IEEE1394 enabled STBs. This is one of them. So far I have been able to connect the box to my Mac and watch what's on TV on my Mac at the same time, using VLC (a video player that plays pretty much EVERYTHING) and a firewire plugin module for it. My next step will be trying to record the video on my Mac, and eventually compress it to be played on a Palm Tungsten E... or Treo 650.

Final Product

There... it's finally finished! Happy Anniversary Mom & Dad! Let me know if you like it (you won't really be able to see any of the detail in the version on the web... because it's such low resolution - but it'll look REALLY cool up close when it's printed at 300 dpi). I need to know what the inside message should say - then off to the printers!

For my readers who aren't here to "proof" this image... it's for my family's X-mass cards this year. It's a mosaic made up of about 5000 family photos and frames from home movies. It's a 60 x 66 grid - with the original photo overlaid on top at 35% opacity - just for better color definition. It look my PowerBook G4 all night to renter this...

Thanks again to the author of MacOSaiX and to the guys at Engadget for the software and the idea.