Fnord.

If you travel or interact with people in other timezone, immediately check out and bookmark http://everytimezone.com/:

Simple, visual and effective. Highly recommended.

For a while now, we’ve been using our iMac as a television, video chat box, movie screen and bittorrent server. (If you are hooked on a Canadian sitcom, bittorent is your best solution). Netflix streaming is especially good, and even the Vancouver Olympics worked reasonably well.

(As an aside, I hope it’s ok to be jealous of Anna. She’s growing up with free video chats with grandparents, and iPhones. Add flying cars, and the Jetsons will be old news to this generation.)

Last night I was reading the Ars Technica iPad review; another device I plan to get when I can convince Chris. Smack dab on page ten was news of iPad/iPhone software that, for $5, lets you view live or recorded TV on your handheld!

Damn!

What’s more, the hardware required (Elgato eyeTV One) is under a hundred bucks!

You also need an HDTV antenna, under $40, and the iPhone software. Voila, free-ish TV!

I had a gift certificate for $100 for Amazon, so this’ll be a present for Chris the PBS addict.

Caveats:

• Free channels are limited, and I don’t know if the tuner will work with cable or satellite.
• I suspect that we’ll watch most of the shows on the iMac; the iPhone screen is too small to really enjoy it.
• This may induce you to purchase an iPad as a better viewing device. This is My Evil Plan ™.
• Video files burn serious disk space. Might need a cheap USB drive to store them.
• Unlike bittorrent, these recordings have the advertisements, sigh. Worth a google to see if I can find a solution for that.

On the plus side, one more reason to not bother buying a television.

PS I had some images to spice up this post, but WordPress is being problematic at the moment, will revise and add them later once I solve the problem.

PPS Sorted. Missing php libraries.

Way back at UNM, I worked on the problem of audio positioning via convolutions and HRTFs, using wavelets. The results weren’t as hoped (details here, the filters didn’t compress well at all), but I keep an eye out for the state of the art. I just found SweetSpotter, an unfortunately-Windows-only thesis project of amazing promise.

It ups the ante of audio positioning by using your webcam to see where you are, and adjusting the filtering in realtime to correct.

That is, to use the proper technical adjective, fucking amazing.

Sebastian Merchel did the work. I am impressed. As soon as the borked webcam on my MacBook gets fixed, I’ll see if I can run this in VMWare or VirtualBox.

My trusty Linksys/Cisco RV042 has decided to crap out. Monit has been sending alerts for the past few days, but tracking it down was proving difficult since it mostly happened during the day. Yesterday I was home in the afternoon to sign for a package and managed to catch the failure in person.

First hint – server and access point lose ethernet link:

That should never happen. Ever. Indicates hardware failure…

Wander over and the router is just showing the yellow failure LED:

I did some research and the RV042 is still the best model for what I want: months of uptime, good firewalling, PPTP VPN, 55Mbit WAN->LAN, done. I really considered the RVL200, but in the end it was too late to cancel the Amazon order.

Anyway, replacement arrives tomorrow, please bear with us until then, as we’ll have continuing intermittent outages.

PS The failing unit is on a UPS, and has an Ethernet surge suppressor on it, though it could be the power supply itself. Very odd.

Update 3/20/10: Router replaced last night. Should be smooth running from here out! Replacement was quite easy due to the ability of the RV042 to save and load a settings file via the browser. The only glitch was the U-verse modem must have the router in its ‘DMZ Plus’ mode, and that’s keyed to MAC address, so I had to cable into the u-verse and configure that. Ten minutes start to finish.

Via Lifehacker:

That, my friends, is a ‘QR code‘ generated by this site. All this one encodes is the URL ‘fnord.phfactor.net’. You can also make one with text, phone number or SMS (text message.)

On the iPhone, I’m using the QuickMark app to decode ‘em, which seems to work pretty well and also does old-school barcodes.

Pointless? Check this usage out, and be sure and watch the linked video.

There are some other uses as well. You’ve got roughly 7KB of data, depending on encoding and error correction. Amazing times we live in, eh?

LED billboard, crashed and showing the Windows desktop. Lots of these kind of displays now.

Looking south to HK island proper

Working on the designs over an extended breakfast, Bjorn doing the rockstar pose.

Old clocktower on the waterfront.

Last but not least, I was in the fitting room at the tailor, which is fun because all the walls are covered with pictures and letters from famous clients. I took a bad picture of this one because in-law Heidi is a huge fan:

Yep, that's Bjork.

Looks to have been taken backstage, probably when she came through on tour. Cool, eh?

Some miscellaneous snaps and commentary as I regroup at home and work:

Nathan Road, Kowloon side, posing with a mug for a PB coffeehouse

A wedding party at the waterfront. Surreal.

Waterfront and ferry terminal.

Arts and culture building on the waterfront.

More waterfront.

I had some work-in-progress pictures to add, but I need to figure out how to pixellate out the details first.

Hong Kong is a really cool place. Go if you get the chance.

One of our vendors there took us to a very good Korean BBQ dinner. The stack of raw beef they bring out is kind of daunting:

and the array of tasty bits and sauces:

I strongly suspect that I gained some weight this trip. Lots of great food every day!

I just got back from a week in Hong Kong and wanted to write a few notes before my memory fades.

1. As previously noted, get a PCCW SIM card at the airport for use with phone and WiFi. I forgot my old one, didn’t get one at the airport and never did manage to buy one. None of the four 7-11’s I checked had them in stock for some reason.
2. Sam’s Tailor still rocks. I got a blue sportjacket, a couple of shirts and two pairs of pants. And two ties. I am now set for dress clothes.
3. I took my Yes Inca as my sole watch, and as expected it was excellent for the purpose. Dual timezones let me know when to video chat with home, the 24-hour display was nice perspective for the jetlag, and it went well with casual and sporty clothes. Not to mention it was good to wear to all of the meetings.
4. After reading this post, I went across the bay to Liii Liii Couture and am having a couple of pairs of shoes made for me. The guys there are very nice, and very accommodating. I have different sized and shaped feet, we discovered after tracing and measuring the hoofs, so I’m intensely curious to see how shoes made to fit will work. They are making pairs with more padding and high instep, so I am hopeful that these’ll last me long enough to make up for the high cost. I’ve wasted money on several pairs of dress and semi-dress shoes that don’t last.
5. We stayed in the Kowloon Hotel this time, and while it’s OK I’d recommend the Imperial Hotel instead.
6. The already-awesome Octopus card (busses, subway, trams and vending machines) now works some Starbucks locations, so be sure to buy one at the airport. These days, you can even buy an Octopus chip built into a watch! Very cool.
7. We flew Cathay Pacific again, the same 881/882 flights, but the experience wasn’t as good. Flights were completely full, and they now charge $100 per leg for exit row (WTF?!), so I was crammed both times. More room than American carriers, but still coach. Note that:
   1. their video systems are fantastic, which helps, but you need the airline adapter if you want to use your own headphones.
   2. Coach seats have a power jack behind the tray, but it’s HK/UK style plug only.
   3. They limit carry-on bags to a super light 15 pounds, so pack light. Or be prepared to be forced to check.
   4. I paid the $100 for exit row on my return leg, and when I moved up my departure a day they refused to give me exit row or refund my money. Needless to say, I was and am quite pissed about this, especially on a 13-hour flight. Very shitty of them.

I’ll be posting pictures later.

A lot of people criticize Apple for its prices, but I have to say in response that taking the time to polish all the edges and simplify really helps. Consider this: I have had a few Bluetooth mice over the years, from Microsoft, Logitech and Apple. The latest Apple mouse is the only one where today it warned me that the batteries are low:

It’s a little thing, but for once I know to go get batteries, before the mouse just stops working.

It’s a nice mouse even without that feature, but taking a little bit of time to add software and hardware for voltage monitoring, it’s just easier to have and use.

In really high-end watches, the inner bits are polished and finished by hand to astounding degrees, even the parts that will only ever be seen by a watchmaker doing the service. Perfection is it’s own reward sometimes.