News from Great Castle Wilson

Category: Tech

Anything technology related that isn’t covered by one of the sub categories.

  • 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.

  • 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*.

  • Windows XP. Bah.

    On my Windows box, it runs some funky “welcome screen” thing each time it wakes from the screensaver. I suppose that’s a feature, but what bugs me about it is if I click the “shutdown the computer” button, it says “There are people logged onto this computer. Do you really want to shut down.”

    The thing is, there aren’t “people” logged on. There’s just one, and it’s me. So instead of checking who is logged on, noticing there’s only one, and saying “McQ is logged onto this computer…” so I can shutdown without stress, I end up worrying if someone has rshell’ed in from somewhere and is hacking my machine.

    It’s a perfect example of the design ethic at Microsoft.

  • Random Mac tip for the day

    For some reason, one of the folders inside my Applications folder keeps getting hidden. I’m not sure why this happens, but I suspect it’s a side-effect of updating one of the standard applications that I use.

    In case this happens to you, and you want to make a hidden file visible again, then the simplest way to do it is to do:

    /Developer/Tools/SetFile -a v YourFileOrDirectory

    Obviously, you must have the developer tools installed to have this command available.

  • Writing on the Palm

    Amazingly, it’s possible to post via wi-fi from the Lifedrive. It’s not fun, but it is possible

  • PDAs are dead.

    It happened last week. As of today, no PDAs appear in either the Future Shop, Best Buy, or The Source fliers that came with our local newspaper. There aren’t even any non-phone PDAs on the Future Shop website.

    Weird. I knew it was coming, but I just didn’t notice how fast.