News from Great Castle Wilson

Author: adminmcq

  • “Macs rule!” or “Honey, where’s the remote?”

    As you know, I got an EyeTV Hybrid, and I’m very happy with it. One of the nice things about the device is that you can control it with your Apple remote, if you attach it to a Mac that includes one. Unfortunately, I’m using the EyeTV with the PowerMac in my basement, which does not.

    So the obvious next question is, how could I remote control the EyeTV. (Because you know, it’s not a real TV until it has a remote control. :-))

    First off, the EyeTV appears to have an IR receiver built into it, so I tried a couple of the universal remotes I had around the house, but didn’t get any reaction.

    I then considered just buying a remote. The Elgato site identifies several commercial Mac remotes that will work with the EyeTV, but even I could figure out that buying one doesn’t make sense: it’s not like I’m actually going to use it, I just want to be able to claim that I could.

    Then it came to me: Salling Clicker!

    Salling Clicker is a software package that allows you to remote control almost anything on your Mac (or PC) using a bluetooth cell phone or PDA. I’ve been running it on my laptop for quite a while. It’s a convenient way to make sure that I always have a presentation remote with me, since I know I’ll be carrying my cell phone.

    There was only one problem: The G5 doesn’t have a bluetooth interface either.

    Now, I still had a D-Link USB bluetooth transceiver from back in the days when I used to use my PC for something other than game playing. I remembered from the last time I plugged it into the PC that it needed a very specific driver to work, so I went to the D-Link site, only to find out that there was no Mac driver. Hm… Oh well, I plugged it in anyway and, as I should have guessed, the Mac recognized it immediately.

    The rest of the story is short: installed Salling Clicker, paired my phone with the Mac, discovered that Clicker already knew how to control the EyeTV (woot!), and happily spent the rest of the night clicking through the channels.

  • EyeTV Hybrid

    I decided to purchase an EyeTV Hybrid. I was frustrated with the quality of the TV listings software I was using and, from all accounts, the EyeTV software is the best thing you can get on the Mac. I wasn’t able to find the device at any local retailers (of course, *sigh*) so I ordered one from CDW.ca. This took quite a bit longer than I expected, but it finally showed up today and I just hooked it up.

    It’s an interesting beast. It uses software decoding, so (unfortunately) it uses significantly more CPU than the old one. On my G5, that works out to be about 25% when just streaming live TV and close to 95% when recording. Note: 95% is fine; max load is 200% on a dual CPU box.

    The good news is that the picture quality is significantly better than the old myTV.PVR box (including de-interlacing on the fly, *woot!*), and the software works. Here’s the proverbial “picture worth a thousand”:

    The even better news is that, even though EyeTV does not directly support Canadian TV listings, Guillaume Boudreau’s EyeTV EPG Proxy worked perfectly me. One caveat: Setting up the virtual host to fake out data.titantv.com convinced Great Castle Wilson that it’s name was “localhost”. It took me a while to figure how to fix that, but it’s all good now.

  • All is confusion.

    If you notice, any random behavior on any of the Great Castle Wilson sites, please let me know. I am doing some er… odd things to my machine (like upgrading from PHP4 to PHP5), in order to get some new software running on it.

    More details once I get it all going…

  • Star Wars and inspiration

    While waiting for the rest of my family to awaken this morning, I happened upon Star Wars episode 3 showing on one of the pay tv stations. I find it interesting that even though I wasn’t happy with the way episodes 1..3 went, I still find the strength of the myth to be extremely compelling.

    Is it possible that the Star Wars mythos transcends the marketing that brought it into being? Outside of the mainstream religions, what stories are known by as many people, the world over, as Star Wars is? There have been literally hundreds of books written in and about the Star Wars universe. It’s touched every media that mankind has invented. I wonder if, when whatever species succeeds humanity on this planet searches the archeological record of this time period, they will assume that SW was a religion? Heck, maybe it is, I don’t know.

    I do know that, whenever I watch a Star Wars movie, I get inspired. Sometimes I write music; sometimes I write more of my own fiction; whatever happens, I think about my place in the world, and whether I’m on the side of light or of dark.

    Ya, I know, that’s pretty corny, but people get inspiration from some pretty strange places, and I bet even post-JarJar there are a lot of people out there who feel the same way.

    “May the force…” (you know the rest (/em winks))

  • I didn’t like the Battlestar Galactica season opener.

    [Update: After Ken’s ever so subtle hint, I feel compelled to warn you that this article contains numerous spoilers. Sorry, Ken.]

    Who thought it was a good idea to wreck every interesting character?

    • Adama? — losing his grip
    • Baltar? — getting a conscience(!)
    • Apollo? — a fat slob
    • Starbuck? — turning into a Cylon sympathizer
    • Colonel Tigh? — an absolute raving psycho
    • Laura Roslin? — shot. (ok, I’ll give you that one; I saw her in the trailer for next week’s episode, so…)

    Man, I smell a Matrix sequel!

    Even the g.d. cylons have gone nuts. Guys, I get it: Cylons are starting to behave like people. Did you think we wanted to see that? Ask yourself this: If you blur every distinction in the damn series, what are you left with? My guess: Another generic “rebels versus the empire” story.

    And for the record, “stepping over the line” into suicide bombing as a fucking plot device is so absolutely unfeeling that I was speechless when I saw it. Who do these morons think they are?

    Bah!

  • Maybe Microsoft isn’t going to win, after all.

    Take a look at this chart (sorry about the size, that what it takes to get it to fit):

    That’s the breakdown of the browser hits on my server over the last five days. Now given that I know *I* use Safari to visit the site, I find it interesting that Firefox (65%) is way ahead of Safari (26%), and IE is getting only 4% (best case just over 8%, even if all the “Unknowns” were IE). I wouldn’t bet the farm on the veracity of this data, and certainly wouldn’t attempt to generalize this further, but it’s still interesting.

  • TV Listings on the Mac

    Hey, I found a Mac application to read Canadian XMLTV data from Zap2it. It’s called MacProgramGuide. Here’s a shot of the GUI:

    It’s sparse, but good enough. It supports scheduling via eyetv2, but not, of course, via the software that came with my myTV.PVR box. *sigh*.

  • The Gallery is popular.

    I have never worried about who wanders around my website before. It’s not topical enough for most people to be interested, and I just assumed I didn’t get much traffic.

    For grins last night, I decided I would start running some traffic measurements on the server. There weren’t many surprises, except for the number of hits that I get from the various crawlers out there (Google, Yahoo, MSNBot, etc.).

    One thing that I did find odd though, was that last night, between 10:00 and 11:30, I had three separate, theoretically non-bot, IPs hit on the photo gallery site. I almost never update that site, and almost all of the content is password protected anyway. One of them was probably me, since I was clicking around while testing the web stats software, but who were the other two? Weird.

  • Software music studios, Logic and UI Design

    Back in the good ol’ days when I used a PC to make music, Cubase was my tool of choice. When I got my G5, I tried running the Mac version, but for me at least, Cubase on the Macintosh is just too frustrating. Crashes, incompatibilities, the need to have a USB dongle, bah! The last time I rebuilt my hard drive, I didn’t re-install Cubase, and I don’t miss it.

    In fact, I have been using Reason 3.0 for most of the music I’ve made lately. As an all-in-one software studio, it’s almost everything you need. Even though it doesn’t support software plug-ins, what’s there really is quite inspiring. The Combinator, in particular, has made a huge difference in the scope of things you can do with it. Unfortunately, if you want to mix in recorded sound (like a cello ;-)) Reason just won’t cut it. There’s just no way to reasonably (sic) get digital audio tracks into it.

    So the obvious thing to do on a Mac is to try Garage Band. As I found, GB actually works quite well. It’s surprisingly powerful, for an essentially free piece of software, with features like commercial-grade software instruments, multi-track recording, the ability to freeze tracks — they call it “locking” –, and pitch correction. It also has an easy to use GUI, with “Mac-like” simplicity at first glance, but lots of flexibility/capability when you need it. I’m sure I could use Garage Band as my main DAW, but it’s missing a few features (like, score creation) that I occasionally need.

    In the Macintosh world, the next step up from Garage Band is Logic Express. I had some cash to blow on tech toys (since I just sold my old PowerBook) so I picked up a copy. After playing with it for a day, I can say that it seems like it is what I was looking for, but man what an arcane GUI.

    Now, I’m sure there are Logic-heads out there who will tell me that it’s the “one GUI to rule them all”, but it’s obvious that the Apple GUI designers lost the battle when they tried to bring that we-bought-the-company app into the fold. I’m heading out for dinner, so I don’t have time to do a full rant about it, but the capsule summary is “This one makes Cubase look easy to use.” ’nuff said.

  • Welcome, Planet OTI

    Apparently, I’ve been picked up by the Planet OTI — it looks like Planet OTI is gone now too — feed aggregator.

    To any new readers this drags in: Welcome.

    I must say though, this is a personal blog, and I expect most people will find that it has an extremely poor s2n ratio for anyone who isn’t one of my relatives, or otherwise interested in my home life. 🙂

    In any case, I welcome comments from one and all. Akismet is my friend, but I do have moderation-on-first-post turned on, so there may be a delay before your words show up.