Dumping Grounds

In my ongoing quest to add more technical gadgets to my life (and try to save a few bucks, while I am at it) today I signed up for an account with Vonage for my local and long distance phone service. Just like with HDTV (which also saved me money, BTW) here’s my thoughts after about an hour with the new technology.

• Oh my goodness it was easy to set up. I went to their web site, filled out the form, typed in the MAC address from the box, typed in a credit card number, and plugged in the box to my internet, and my phone. Picked up the phone (it uses my normal phone), and had a dial tone. Elapsed time: about 5 minutes.

• I configured the phone to forward calls to my cell phone in the event my network is down. Set up my voice mail. Configured my voice mail to not only send me an e-mail notification, but also to actually attach the WAV file of the message itself to the mail. Elapsed time: about 5 minutes more.

• Placed a call. Voice quality is not 100% as good as a standard land line, but awfully close. (The quality issue could be the fact that I was using a very old standard phone) There is no lag, and the people on the other end seemed to think the quality was fine.

• Received a call. Surprisingly, the incoming call went right through my firewall, which surprised me a bit. I can see how that would work, but I was still surprised.

Highlights: * This is going to save me another $20 a month. * Improved voice mail functionality might actually get me to use it again. I have been totally reliant on my cell phone voice mail. * Unfortunately, one of the phone features I was most looking forward to, the ability to place a call from my portable from anywhere I have an internet connection, is an additional $10/month. Of course, my portable gets it’s own number, it’s own voice mail, and can send and receive calls. In effect, it’s a complete second line.

Big highlight: * If you are interested in trying it (there are no contracts) let me refer you. We will both get free time out of the deal. Send me a private e-mail (matt@dumpinggrounds.com), and I will get you the referral to use when you sign up. The referral code will get you your second month on the service for free.

Well, I have figured out a little more than I had yesterday about HDTV in general, and the Comcast Motorola DCT-6200 Cable box in particular.

• My problem with cutoff picture (where I mentioned that the “Fox” watermark was cut off) is due to the fact that widescreen HDTV content does not display on my standard format 4×3 format television like I expected it to.
  When I displayed HD content it look overly tall, pretty much like I expected it to. However, when I put my TV into widescreen mode, I expected that the entire picture would be reduced and displayed on my screen. Not so.
  The TV adds black bars to the top and bottom to correct the shape of the picture, but does not change the right and left borders at all, leaving some of the picture cut off. Poo. Not particularly noticeable unless there is a watermark along one side.

• Those firewire ports on the back of the unit that I mentioned in my last HD post? They work. Well. I captured full resolution 1080i content this evening (complete with 5.1 AC3 audio) straight to my Mac hard drive. I used the Firewire SDK utilities from the Apple Developer site to accomplish this feat, and VLC to play it back. Given that Steve Jobs announced yesterday that iMovie 5 (to be shipped on Friday) will support recording and playback of HD content, I’m not going to bother to explain how I did it. The technique can be found about 30 different places via a Google search, and may be completely obsoleted in about 48 hours. <grin> I’ll always know I managed to do it the hard way
  Unfortunately, I don’t have quite enough processor to play back 1080i content smoothly, but I’ll have to try again with some 720p stuff.

Yes, using a.Mac account (which allows you to sync multiple Macs remotely) and a few choice Applescripts tied into iCal, you could make just about any Firewire 400-capable Mac (including the new Mac Mini) into a pretty darn functional HD-PVR. Again, I’ll wait on this project until I see what iMovie is capable of.

Don’t worry, although I am a posting maniac tonight, this entry will not be nearly as long as my last on religion.

I received quite a bit of feedback (although for some odd reason, nobody wanted to start a discussion in comments, it was all via e-mail, phone, or in person) both positive and negative, but the positive outnumbered the negative by a wide margin.

Here is a quick listing of some of the questions I received, and some quick answers.

• Do you believe that people like Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus really existed?

For the most part, yes, I do. i think that historical and archeological evidence supports the fact that they did. They are listed in the question in the order in which I am sure they existed.

I think there was a real person in which the character Noah was based, and I think that there is a good bit of evidence for a catastrophic flood at one time in the ancient Middle East. The flood story is presented in the mythos of many, many ancient cultures. The story in Genesis is not the oldest version of the flood story, either. I believe that honor belongs to the ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. The person who survived the great flood in that story is named Utnapishtim, and there are a GREAT number of similarities to the Noah story. For instance:

Tear down the house and build a boat! Abandon wealth and seek living beings! Spurn possessions and keep alive living beings! Make all living beings go up into the boat.
- Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet XI

Sound familiar? How about this?

Make yourself an ark of gopherwood; make it an ark with compartments, and cover it inside and out with pitch… Put an entrance to the ark in its side, make it with bottom, second and third decks.
— Genesis 6:14, 16, Tanakh, The Holy Scriptures

Contrast that with:

I laid out its (interior) structure and drew a picture of it (?).
I provided it with six decks,
thus dividing it into seven (levels).
The inside of it I divided into nine (compartments).

Utanapishtim continues four lines later:

[I poured] three times 3,600 (units of) pitch …into it
- Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet XI

The similarity in structure and vocabulary is striking. I’ll go into more detail later on Noah, but let’s just say that I believe that Noah was based upon a real person. He might not have been named Noah. He might not have been named Utanapishtim, either.

The evidence for Abraham (Ibrahim in most Islamic contexts) is circumstantial, but still somewhat convincing. This has already gotten longer than I intended, but suffice it to say I will return to this subject in my next entry.

In my opinion, the evidence for Moses is even stronger, and it is very difficult to find an individual of any faith that does not acknowledge that Jesus existed. He most certainly did (although, the name Jesus is anglicized). Most, but not all people know that he is a major player in the Koran, as well as the Bible. In general, he is recognized as a prophet and is held in generally high regard by Muslims. Again, a subject for more discussion later.

• How can you say that it is more likely that the Book of Mormon or the Koran were inspired by God, and the Bible isn’t?

Go look again. That’s not what I said. The original Hebrew scriptures may very well have been divinely inspired. I said that the Bible, taken as a whole (and certainly not the English version that we read) is not the literal word of God. The only scripture that I am aware of that any of us may have read the original is the Book of Mormon, as it is the only one originally written in English. Translations are never exact, and when we’re talking about attributing words to a deity, I think that exact is the only standard that works. Call me a stickler.

(Yes, by that standard, the Koran I have read is no more official [as I do not read a single word of arabic], and the fact that the Church of Latter Day Saints has made edits to the Book of Mormon [their own website admits minor changes] makes it suspect too.)

More later.

Yesterday evening, I brought home my new HDTV-capable digital cable box from Comcast. I have not by any means played wit it enough to post a complete review, but I can certainly relate my first impressions.

• The box itself is tremendously higher quality than the standard digital cable box I had. To be fair, my other box was several years old, and newer boxes may be better. The picture quality is better (and not only on the HDTV channels). The HDTV capable box has component video out, S-video out, digital and analog audio out (and it decodes Dolby Digital sound for programs and networks that offer it).

• There is a Firewire port (which I have not been able to test whether or not it is active, I left my cable at work) and two USB ports (which I cannot think of a use for, yet). Hopefully, I can connect my Powerbook to the Firewire port and capture video, as if it were a video camera. (Especially with the new iMovie 5 capable of capturing and editing HD content)

• The picture quality of the HD stations is, as expected, stellar. I had no idea my TV was capable of such a display. However, Comcast seemingly has bandwidth problems in my area, as HD content is subject to pauses, skips, jumps, and a rather amazing selection of hiccups. This is not acceptable, but does not seem to affect the other digital channels.

• Normal format commercials, when displayed on an HDTV channel, are displayed with black bars on the left and right (which, since I have a normal format HDTV, means I have bars around all four sides, and I get a “mini-picture”). But who wants to see commercials anyway? What is more odd is that the left and right edges of these commercials are distinctly NOT vertical. It’s kind of a wavy line that is pretty obvious. I have no idea where the error is (my TV, the cable box, Comcast, or the broadcaster), but again, it only affects normal format broadcasts on a widescreen channel. The picture itself is not wavy, just the black bar. I’ll try to post a digital picture later.

• The HDTV box has the exact same, equally crappy on screen display when you change channels. You still cannot turn it off.

• My television’s picture in picture feature does not work when I am using the component (HDTV box) or S-Video (TiVo) inputs.

• For the first time, I am tempted to run not only my audio, but also my picture through my tuner. It will greatly simplify the process of switching from cable to TiVo and back. I used to watch everything through my TiVo… but with picture quality like this? No more.

• The quality of my TiVo display is dramatically improved when using S-video in and out (not an option I had with my other cable box). But not nearly as good as without having the TiVo in line.

• It’s not just the clarity that is better on HDTV broadcasts. HD seems to have a much wider color spectrum, giving you a more contrasty iamge, with more realistic colors.

• There is nothing in the world keeping me from TiVo-ing an HDTV channel, although the playback will, of course, be normal TiVo quality. I have done it, and it works great. As a matter of fact, it does actually look better than recording standard channels. Higher quality input leads to higher quality recordings… duh.

• There really needs to be some agreement on what format people are going to broadcast in. Some commercials are widescreen, some are not. Some shows are widescreen, some are not. Doesn’t sound like a big deal until you realize how much picture (in some cases) is being cut off. I just saw a commercial for “Coach Carter” where the title of the film was only half visible on the final screen of the commercial. I watched the last few minutes of the conclusion of “The Rebel Billionaire” (oh, shut up, I was looking at the island scenery in HD) and the watermark in the lower right was so cut off, I could only see the “F” in “Fox.” It ran WAY off the right side of the screen.

In summary, the box is cool, it ups the quality of my TiVo recording dramatically, and the HD picture is incredible. There are some glitches, and there are not enough HD channels. In particular, I’d love to see SciFi, History Channel, and TLC in HD. For only $5 a month, it’ll be worth it just to watch sports, and the occasional Fox broadcast (can anyone say “24″) that has full support for HD and 5.1 Dolby Digital surround.

Four stars (out of five). Room for improvement.

I was utterly stumped by an odd happening today, and to my surprise, everyone I asked was having the same problem. Stuffit Expander was taking an extremely long time to launch, and appeared to hang. If you let it bounce in the dock for long enough (sometimes as long as 3-5 minutes) it would eventually launch.

Turns out that the culprit was the “Automatic Version Check” feature, and the application was attempting to phone home. Well, Allume had their servers that respond to these checks go down recently, and as far as I can tell, they have not come back up.

The solution is to disconnect from the internet, launch Stuffit Expander (which should launch quickly with no connection to the internet), and immediately go to the preferences panel (which is among the most poorly designed I have ever seen on the Mac) find the Version Checking Panel, and turn it off.

Allume, formerly Aladdin, is one of the very sad stories of the Macintosh software development world. Stuffit was one of the original “must have” applications on the Macintosh, written by boy genius Raymond Lau. I honestly don’t know if Lau has anything to do with Allume nowadays, and honestly, I don’t want to know. For the last several years, each revision of this program has become slower, more bloated with useless features, less stable, and more annoying. There is simply no reason to use the .SIT format anymore. .ZIP support is built into Panther, and it’s transparent. This ridiculously badly programmed version check is simply the last straw. It’s time for Stuffit to simply go away.

Other, more cheerful (but mostly useless) tips

Tired of the “Welcome to Darwin!” when you launch the Terminal?

Edit /etc/motd to change the message of the day. Changing this file will require you to authenticate. If you don’t know how to find /etc/motd, or how to edit a file as root, then you probably don’t need to be editing your message of the day, sorry.

Want to change your Mac screen to a black and white negative image?

Press Control-Option-Command-8. Press it again to change it back. No, I do not know why you would want to do such a thing.

Have an internal drive with a faulty system that crashes?

Connect an external drive, and hold the option key while restarting your Mac. You will get a startup menu that allows you to select which drive you would like to boot from.

Hopefully, with today’s announcement of the Mac Mini some more folks will be buying Macs, and can use these tips. If anyone posts a question, I’ll do my best to find an answer.