08:15
-
It's starting to feel like a third-world country around here. We had a
4.5 hour power outage yesterday, which followed a 5 hour power
outage earlier in the week. The rest of the week, our UPSs were beeping
intermittently, usually several times a day.
During the first
outage, I was surprised when I called 1-800-POWERON. Usually, Duke
Power's automated outage reporting system gives an estimated time for
restoration of power, and until this time that estimate had always been
pessimistic. Usually, for example, they'd estimate two hours and it'd
actually take 45 minutes. This time, they estimated four hours and it
took five. Yesterday, the power failed about 17:15 and 1-800-POWERON
estimated it would be restored by 20:30. The power finally came back on
about 21:45.
In the past, 1-800-POWERON never reported the
problem, but yesterday they claimed it was caused by "severe weather in
the Winston-Salem/Lewisville area." That was disturbing, because there wasn't
any severe weather. It was warm and sunny. Breezy, but that certainly
doesn't count as severe weather. Nothing at all on weather radar.
I'm still cranking away on the new edition of Building the Perfect PC.
Right now, I'm working on the Media Center System chapter. We built
media-center/Home-Theater PCs for the first two editions, but we ended
up never using them, mainly because they focused on recording programs.
We watch so little TV that we had no real use for them. This time,
we're building a media-center system that doesn't even have a tuner
card installed. What's the point? Anyone who wants to record programs
probably already has a TiVo or a PVR box from the cable/satellite
company. Or, as in our case, a DVD recorder.
I note that,
although Windows 7 still includes the media-center functionality in
some versions, dedicated HTPCs with tuner cards are no longer widely
available. When we did the prior edition of the book, they were all
over the place. Every Sunday Supplement had flyers from Best Buy and
others featuring scads of these systems. New Egg had a couple of dozen.
Even Sears sold them. I just checked the Best Buy and Costco websites,
as well as NewEgg, Dell, HP, and others. No one offers PCs with tuner
cards any more.
Which isn't to say there's no use for a true
media-center PC. We're building an audio-video system for our
entertainment center that'll do just about anything related to
audio-video except
record
television. And it'll be quite useful, particularly coupled to a 1080p
HDTV, which'll allow it function as a general-purpose PC as well.
That'll finally give Barbara a den system. I've offered to build her
one several times over the years, but she never wanted to clutter up
her end table with a monitor. Having the TV be her monitor will solve
that problem. I'll still have a small den system of my own, probably
Intel Atom-based, because sometimes when she's watching TV I want to
browse the web or whatever.
We're also replacing the Gaming PC configuration that we did for
each of the first two editions with an "Extreme PC" configuration.
We're not PC gamers, so each time we built one of those configurations
we'd end up converting it to a very fast general-use PC. So this time,
we'll do an extreme PC, which could be configured for gaming, but could
also be configured for other purposes that require very fast
performance, such as a video production system.
11:26
-
I'm definitely a chemistry geek. I love watching videos about
chemistry, even simple stuff that I learned about 40 years ago or more.
Here's a fine example.
Watching this video, I learned something I didn't know. Why the
benzene produced by Michael Faraday nearly 200 years ago was incredibly
pure, actually purer than good laboratory-grade stuff you can buy today.
09:10
- I've been quiet lately because tomorrow is the first deadline for the new edition of Building the Perfect PC.
The milestone is "submission of two significant chapters", and I may
actually meet the deadline. I submitted the draft manuscript for the
Media Center System yesterday, and I'm well along with the manuscript
for the Budget System. The other chapters are in progress as well, but
not as far along.
I haven't actually built any of these systems
yet, because I'm still waiting on parts. Still, things are starting to
come together. A crate of hard drives should be showing up any day now,
and NewEgg tells me that UPS should show up today with the motherboards
and processors for the Budget System (an ASRock motherboard and Athlon
II X2 240 processor) and Appliance System (an Intel Atom D510MO), along
with some optical drives and other minor components. Barbara and I are
heading to Costco this weekend to buy the display for the Media Center
System, a 37" 1080p HDTV.
We're also going to have to buy a new
entertainment center or modify the existing one. That dates from more
than 20 years ago, when it held only a VCR, a 25" television, and some
home audio equipment. Our current 27" Panasonic analog television
barely fits it. I designed it, and a friend built it. It's a stained
wood frame with smoked-glass shelves, one about 4' x 2' a couple inches
off the floor and a second 4' x 2' about 18" off the floor. At one end
of the top shelf is a 15" high 2' x 2' pedestal. For now, I think
I'll just neatly saw off the pedestal.
08:05
-
UPS showed up yesterday, twice, once with a box of motherboards and
optical drives from NewEgg, and the second time with a box of hard
drives. I'm still waiting on cases and memory, but otherwise I'm ready
to roll.
Well, except for a copy of Windows 7. I called the
Wagg-Ed Rapid Response Team to request an eval copy of Windows 7. The
woman who answered the phone took all the information about me and the
book, and said they might be able to send me a copy, and she'd get back
to me. Might be able? Don't they want pretty screenshots of Windows 7
in the book?
I checked NewEgg, and found that the price of
Windows has increased dramatically. Let's see. How likely am I to pay
$180 for a full copy of Windows 7 Home just so that I can do Microsoft
a favor by including screen shots of their product? Or even $100 for an
OEM copy? Hint: This is one of those Chance Brothers questions. Slim, Fat,
and No.
As usual, we were early adopters of that trend. We also had a
full-time Internet connection, a wired home network, and Wi-Fi before
even most businesses had those. I probably still have some LANTastic
network cards and an 802.11b WAP around here somewhere.
We cut
back to basic cable on 25 January 2005, and we've never looked back. We
get the local channels, the Time-Warner cable news/weather channel, a
couple of commercial-ridden superstations and cable channels like
National Geo, and a bunch of useless home shopping channels. All we
care about are the local channels and news/weather.
When we made
the change, our cable bill dropped to $6.66/month. I think it's
increased since then to about twice that, which is pretty outrageous.
Once I get the HDTV installed, I'll probably connect an antenna (or
even rabbit ears) and we'll drop cable TV service entirely.
I
suspect cable cutting is going to blossom over the next few years.
Right now, sports is the real reason so many people pay
outrageously high cable/satellite TV service bills. People like us, who
watch mostly movies and television series, have better and less
expensive alternatives. In effect, people who don't watch much sports
are subsidizing those who do. In five years, I wouldn't be
surprised to see cable/satellite TV penetration drop into the 50%
range, if not lower. Even sports fans may begin to question paying a
$100/month or higher cable bill just to watch sports. That'll have a
big impact, not just on cable/satellite providers, but on the sports
industry and the broadcast networks. And the marginal cable channels,
which is to say most of them, are going to suffer very badly.
10:18
- We made a Costco run yesterday and came back with an HDTV.
Before
we left, I visited the Costco web site because I wanted to note the
details on the Vizio VL370M HDTV I planned to buy. It was no longer on
the site. Hmm. I wondered if they'd discontinued that model and, if so,
if the local Costco would still have them in stock, if they ever had
had them. Just in case, I decided I'd better look at some other models
to see if they had the connectors I wanted and so forth.
The
only thing I pay any attention to in Consumer Reports is reliability
ratings. According to CR, basically all the Japanese brand names plus
Samsung have equal (and very high) reliability. I wouldn't buy a Sony
product on principle, but other than that it didn't make much
difference to me if it was a Panasonic or a Sharp or a Toshiba or
whatever.
When we got to Costco, we found they indeed did have
the Vizio VL370M in stock for $530, which was $60 cheaper than the
lowest price I found from web retailers. Barbara and I had actually
loaded one into my cart when a guy walked up to me and said he'd buy a
different brand if he were me. He'd had bad experiences with two Vizio
models dying young and said the repair guy he talked to said that he
saw more Vizios than any other make. I always take such information for
what it's worth, but I did start looking at some other makes.
We
ended up buying a 42" Sharp unit for $600. It had better specs than the
37" Visio and four HDMI connectors instead of three. The image on the
display unit looked very good, better than the Vizio. Of course, who
knows what the settings were on the different units, but good enough is
good enough. Barbara was happy with it, so we brought one home. The
standard warranty was one year, which Costco extends doubles to two
years and AmEx extends by a year, for a total of three years. CR says
that failures almost all occur well within that time, and a unit that
lasts one year will likely last many years, so we were happy.
When
we got home, I edited the TV stand with a cross-cut saw to remove the
second story shelf, put the HDTV in place, connected the cable TV RF
cable and the DVD player, and fired it up. It works fine.
We're
still puzzling out the cable TV channels. When we fired up the TV it
did a channel scan. As expected, it found the 25 or so analog channels
that our basic cable service provides. But it also found 30+ digital
channels that I had no idea were on the wire.
The analog
channels show up, all in 4:3 aspect ratio, with the expected channel
numbers, but with a "-0" appended. So, for example, WXII (the local NBC
affiliate) shows up as channel 11-0, and the Time-Warner News 14
channel shows up as channel 14-0. But the digital channel numbers are
confusing. As I scrolled up through the available channels, the first
digital one I encountered is 78-1, which is the local CBS affiliate in
16:9 aspect ratio. Channel 78-2 is a supplementary digital-only channel
for the local CBS affiliate that shows weather constantly, but in 4:3
aspect ratio. Channel 78-3 is the local Fox affiliate in 16:9. Channels
78-4 and 78-5 are blank, but 78-6 is PBS MX (4:3) and 78-7 is PBS Ex
(4:3). And so on.
I figured this stuff must be mapped somewhere,
but it apparently isn't. Barbara got out a channel guide that TWC had
sent us, but it didn't list those channels. I checked the TWC web site
for Winston-Salem. It doesn't list them, either. Nor do the websites
for the individual affiliates.
Oh, well. I'm not going to spend
much time worrying about it. Even the 16:9 channels are standard
definition. They look fine, but I'm sure broadcast HDTV will look a lot
better. We're pretty close to Sauratown Mountain, where all the
affiliates have their antennae, so I suspect if we drop cable TV
service entirely we can pull in better signals with just rabbit ears.
