Sector 930

on December 17, 2009

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In an effort to compete with Google, Microsoft recently released a Bing search application to the Apple App Store. Similarly to Google’s Mobile App, the Bing app provides access to all the Bing features including a voice search. According to Microsoft, Bing is the “Mobile decision engine that is always by your side” and that it should be used for ” quick answers, Web searches, product lookups, and local listings”.

After reading mostly good reviews of Microsoft’s app I was interested to see what all the hullabaloo was about, but I haven’t been able to and there’s a good reason for that. I can’t install the damn thing. Why you ask? It’s because my iPod touch is so ancient it doesn’t have a microphone. Yes that’s right, it won’t install because I failed a mic check. But wait, take a look at Microsoft’s own screenshot below:

Bing Mobile

Yup, you saw that correctly. That’s a search box. Whoever is using this app to find thai restaurants in Boston isn’t speaking into their phone or newer iPod. They’re doing it the old fashioned way. The web 1.0 way. The same antiquated way I would on my iPod touch. They typed it.

What makes matters worse is that Google’s mobile app, which Microsoft is attempting to thrust out of the limelight with Bing, doesn’t have this problem. In the settings section of Google’s app, the option for voice search is grayed out with a message stating that it is not available and the app is still 100% effective. It’s just missing a few bells and whistles.

The question now is why did Microsoft couple the voice technology so closely into their app that it can’t work on the mic-less iPods? It seems once again that Microsoft is striving too hard to battle Google without fully thinking out the solution to the problem. As a direct result, they’ve failed a basic tenet of software engineering: KISS, or “keep it simple, stupid!” and that’s what really grinds my gears.

56 minutes

Published

on December 14, 2009

in 930posts and Fun Stuff

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That’s approximately the length of time Han Solo had to set up the shelter on Hoth before Luke died of hypothermia. Don’t believe me? Well, Wolfie over at Wolf Gnards has done a wee bit of fact finding to come up with that answer:

In a normal environment, a carcass gets cold in 8 to 36 hours losing an average rate of 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit per hour. However, the ice world of Hoth is not an average environment. The Star Wars database lists that Hoth reaches nightly temperatures of -60 F. In a frigid, sub-zero environment, body heat can be lost almost 32 times faster. This means a Tauntaun’s body heat could drop almost 51.2 F every hour. Considering that Han Solo’s Tauntaun died of severe hypothermia even before it was cut open with Luke’s light saber, one could assume it’s core body temperature was already well below normal. The problem for Luke is if the Tauntaun’s body temperature reaches freezing point those once toasty guts, blood, and assorted alien goo, will in fact become a frozen coffin. If the Tauntaun died of cardiac arrest due to hypothermia with an average body temperature of 75 F (23 C), and if Tauntaun blood freezes at 28.4 F (-2 C), then Han has roughly 56 minutes to set up a shelter before Luke once again is in danger of losing his life in the barren wasteland of Hoth.

If you’d like to read the whole article, you can find it here.

They have television over the air now?, Part 2

Published

on December 14, 2009

. 1 Comment

In my previous post, I discussed how to gather the necessary information for installing an over-the-air TV antenna. To sum up, you need to know where the broadcast towers are and what frequency they broadcast on. In my case, I needed a rooftop VHF/UHF combo antenna, and I needed to point it just east of due north.

In this post, I’ll talk about the equipment I bought and how I actually installed it.

I got pretty much everything from RadioShack. I have given RadioShack a lot of shit in the past for being a crappy consumer electronics store, but they were the only store around that had everything I needed, including the antenna and mounting hardware. Home Depot and Lowe’s had none of it.

Equipment

The antenna I decided on was the Antennacraft HBU33. I could have gone with any number of brands, but RadioShack had this one. It is a high-VHF (channels 7-13) and UHF (channels 14 and up) combo antenna, and it’s supposed to have a range of about 60 miles. These specs fit my situation, since I’m about 45 miles away from the towers, and, despite the fact that most channels are on UHF, there are still two on high-VHF.

Depending on your own situation, you might be able to get a UHF-only antenna. They are smaller and supposedly more effective than a combo antenna. Also, if you are close enough to the towers, an indoor antenna is the easiest solution.

I also bought a tripod mount and 5 foot mast, also from RadioShack. There are several options available for mounting the antenna, such as an eave mount or a simpler mount, but a tripod mount was the easiest way to go for my situation.

The rest of the stuff I needed was some coaxial cable, grounding wire, and a grounding block. Luckily, I already had two satellite dishes on my roof with connected coaxial, and the cables already had some grounding wire attached to it.

As I wrote about in my previous post, AntennaWeb told me I would need a pre-amplifier. I decided to go without the pre-amp for now, since the antenna’s supposed range was about 60 miles. (I’ll talk about this more in a future post, but I might install a pre-amp sometime soon.)

After gathering everything together, I was ready to go.

Installation

You can choose to do this later on, but I assembled my antenna first. Mine mostly involved snapping the elements into place.

For installing everything, I got Joe to help me out, since at the time he did that kind of thing for a living.

The first thing we did was bolt the legs of the tripod to the roof. The tripod came with all the necessary hardware. It also came with sticky putty pads to put on the bottom of the feet. These ensure that a good seal is made around the bolts so as to prevent your roof from leaking.

After securing the tripod, the next step was to place the mast into the tripod. The mast rests on an L-plate at the bottom of the tripod and is secured by bolts. (I would take pictures, but it’s December and I’m not getting on my roof.) After that we attached the antenna to the mast using the supplied U bolt.

Since these long range TV antennas are highly directional, it was important that we pointed the thing in the right direction. With the help of Joe’s iPhone and the signal strength meter he borrowed from work, we got it where it needed to be.

At this point, everything was in place, and the last thing to do was connect the antenna to my house’s coaxial network. I grabbed the coaxial off of the satellite dishes and connected it to the supplied 300-ohm to 75-ohm impedance matching transformer.

An important step we made sure not to overlook is to properly ground the connection. A grounding wire needs to be run from the base of the antenna mast to a grounding rod. Also, the coaxial coming from the antenna needs to be attached to a grounding block, which is then attached to the grounding rod using more grounding wire. We did all this, and it should prevent a lightning strike from taking out my TV.

Since I use a cable modem for my internet needs, there was already a feed coming into the coaxial network. For now, I just wanted one room to receive the antenna feed. After some trial and error, we found which cable to connect to.

Then we went inside, used my TV’s built-in tuner to scan for available signals, and sat back and enjoyed HD over-the-air TV, FOR FREE.

Tune in next time, and I’ll wrap up with a discussion of the results, along with ideas for future improvements.

100 posts!

Published

on December 14, 2009

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Nobody noticed it, but the previous post, my first antenna post, was post #100. Much like our 1st birthday, this is a significant milestone for us. We toil day in and day out to provide all five of you with about six little nuggets of useless crap per month.

Congratulations Sector 930!

Also, there is no longer an “older posts” link on the homepage. I don’t know what that’s about.

They have television over the air now?

Published

on November 20, 2009

. 5 Comments

In this age of fiber optics, premium cable channels, and satellite TV, a lot of people have forgotten that there exist television stations that broadcast their content. You know, over the air. As in, they transmit electromagnetic waves through the air from a big tower. No cables required.

There is one important reason to be interested in this new-fangled wireless transmission: it’s free. What’s that? It’s ad-supported? Millions and millions of cable subscribers willingly sit through advertisements and they PAY for the privilege. It’s time to wake up America. You are getting screwed. Seriously. And somehow all these people have been convinced that cable television is a UTILITY, that is, something they can’t live without.

So in my personal quest to improve my life (i.e., watch less TV) AND stick it to The Man, I have been cable-less for just shy of one year. It’s probably one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I save over $60/month and I get more done around the house. I have since replaced television with Hulu and the Roku player.

As great as Hulu and Netflix are, though, a few things were still missing: the occasional sporting event, the local news (whatever that’s worth), and of course, Sesame Street. So a couple of weeks ago, I finally turned off the Roku (so much for getting things done!) and installed an over-the-air TV antenna.

Gathering intel

I had been sitting on this project ever since I dropped cable, so I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. A while back I did some Googling and stumbled across the site AntennaWeb. There, you can type in your address and get a list of broadcast stations are near you, what RF channel they’re on, how far away they are, and what direction they’re in. The site will also tell you what kind of antenna you will need to pick up each station. Since I live about 45 miles away from the DC area broadcast towers, indoor rabbit ears weren’t going to cut it. Plugging my address into the FCC’s DTV Reception Maps page confirmed this.

Here are the results from AntennaWeb for my address:

antennaweb

Because the digital transition finally went through on June 12, virtually all major broadcast stations require the use of an ATSC tuner to be able to view. Modern TVs have these, but the old tube TVs don’t. This is the reason a lot of old people need one of those converter boxes.

Notice that I didn’t say you need an HD or a digital antenna. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN HD/DIGITAL ANTENNA. AN ANTENNA IS JUST A BIG PIECE OF ALUMINUM.

If you look at the chart, you’ll see the column “RF Channel”. This tells you which frequency each of the station broadcasts on. Channels 2-6 are the VHF low-band, channels 7-13 are the VHF high-band, and channels 14 and up are the UHF band. Look at these when choosing an antenna. Many stations in the US have switched to UHF, which means you might be able to get an antenna specifically designed for that band. Unfortunately, I have to use a combo antenna just to accommodate two stations.

The other “Channel” column tells you the channel that the station will use on your TV. Thanks to PSIP, stations can be broadcast on one RF channel but displayed on your TV on another channel.

The next step was to figure out how big of an antenna I needed, which depended on the stations’ power output and distance. According to AntennaWeb, I was going to need a large directional antenna with a pre-amplifier.

In a future post, I will cover the other phases of this project: selecting the equipment, installing everything, and admiring the results. As they say in the industry, tune in next time!

A Tale of Two Gos

Published

on November 11, 2009

in 930posts and The more you know...

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In case you haven’t noticed, the tech and programming worlds are abuzz about Google’s newly announced programming language, Go. It’s a systems programming language that’s been billed as simple, fast, safe, concurrent and best of all open source. There is just one minor problem. They’ve already received an informal cease and desist.

Yes, that’s right. Go hasn’t even been out to the public for more than a day and there’s already someone taking credit for it. Unlike the absurd claim that was just made against Steve Jobs and Sarah Jessica Parker, this one may actually have some credence. A user calling himself fmmcabe created issue #9 on the Go google code page in which he says:

I have been working on a programming language, also called Go, for the last 10 years. There have
been papers published on this and I have a book.

I would appreciate it if google changed the name of this language; as I do not want to have to
change my language!

A quick google search brought up his book, “Lets Go!” on the self publishing site, Lulu and a perusal of the ACM digital library brings up several hits as well including “Go! for multi-threaded deliberative agents”.

The biggest issue at hand seems to be the semantics between the two names. Google’s new language is named Go whereas McCabe’s is a more emphatic Go!. Go is already a fairly common word and I can attest to the difficulties of using it as a parameter within a Google search. Even a day after the announcement, a quick search for ‘go programming language’ returns hits entirely about Google’s Go including a rudimentary wikipedia article. With the immense popularity of Google, I can easily see McCabe’s language (which is already obscure) being pushed even further into the depths of the internet.

I’m not surprised that Google didn’t know about the previous usage of the name, but I hope Google follows their corporate motto of “Don’t be evil” and let McCabe be the sole user of Go. I’ll even suggest that they fall back on GoLang. Not only is it the official url, but it allows them to retain all the quirky uses of go within their language (ex goroutines ) and puts them in league with another concurrent language, ErLang. Problem solved.

Setting up POP3 for Google Apps from GMail

Published

on October 19, 2009

in 930posts and Tips and Tutorials

. 3 Comments

So, you’ve got a few secondary GMail accounts as part of the Google Apps suite and you want a way to consolidate your email under one account. Currently, there are only 2 ways to do this with GMail: forwarding and POP3. Forwarding is the easiest way to solve this problem, but requires you to log into each of your accounts and configure them so that they forward all their emails to your primary account. It’s not a bad solution, but what happens on the off chance you change your primary address. Well, you’d have to log back in and change all of the forwarding addresses. A much better way would be to configure your primary GMail address to periodically check each of the accounts and download any mail directly. This is where POP3 comes in.

1 ) Log into your Google Apps mail account (mail.your-domain.com)
2 ) Navigate to settings and in the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” section enable POP3
3 ) Log out of your Google Apps mail account
4 ) Log into your main email address
5 ) Head to the “Accounts and Import” section of GMail’s settings
6 ) Scroll down to the “Check Mail Using POP3″ section and click “Add POP3 email account”.
7 ) In the subsequent dialog box, enter your google apps email account (you@your-domain.com) and click next
8 ) In the next window, fill out the following fields accordingly:
Username: you@your-domain.com
Password: password for you@your-domain.com
Pop server: pop.gmail.com (NOT mail.your-domain.com This is where I kept having problems)
Port: 995
I’d also recommend checking “Always use secure connection” and “Label incoming messages” along with using your-domain as a label. After that, hit next and everything should be all set to go.
Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like when I set up pop3 for my Sector930 account:

I Want You… But All Your Money Will Do Instead

Published

on October 15, 2009

. 2 Comments

The other night I was doing what I always do at home, which was sitting at a computer. You might think that the 8-9 hours at work that I spend sitting in front of a computer would be enough (it’s not). There is plenty of shit to do around the house, but none of that is as important as keeping my Google Reader unread items count below 10.

While sitting in front of this computer, my mind wandered. I suddenly had one of those “huh” moments that should have occurred to me sooner, but didn’t.

I have 2 brothers. Should one or both of them have children, I will Uncle Sam. This is a total disaster.

I do not want to be Uncle Sam. Uncle Sam is the drunken uncle that goes into his nieces’ and nephew’s rooms while they sleep and takes 50% of what is in their piggy banks. He uses that money to pay back the giant loans that he couldn’t afford. What was he doing with that money? Buying shiny toys for his house. Giving it away to people who didn’t give anything back. Was he saving it or investing it in anything that would produce a return? Nope.

Uncle Sam reminds me of Huckleberry Finn’s dad, who was a drunk, suddenly became “born again” and promised to do good, then quickly reverted back to being a drunkard.

But I digress. Maybe the name Uncle Samuel won’t have such a connotation.

The Faux Staff Meeting — How I got Fauxed

Published

Charlie

on October 5, 2009