Pat’s Blog

O.K., I’ve had my G1 for few days now and have installed some applications for it. Some of the early standouts for me are ShopSavvy, Twidroid(identica and twitter client), Where, Qik, fIRC, ConnectBot, ASTRO, Amazon MP3, Jamendo, Backgrounds, WeatherBug, MetalDetector, Where, AndNav2,TipCalculator and Powermanager. The real standout which is head and shoulders above all others is ShoppSavvy. Basically it lets you scan in the bar code of any item using the camera and then it will go search for the best price either locally or from a web vendor. Absolutely cool. Even iPhone fan boys will get jealous over that. The music store applications for Amazon and Jamendo are both very good. ASTRO is a pretty nice and functional file manager. MetalDetect is very interesting. Somehow the developers have written a metal detector application for Android. I’d love to know how it really works. Where is a very useful as it provides a listing of services (movie times, weather forecast, gas prices, news, traffic reports) for the local area you happen to be in. Qik lets you stream video and have it available from your own page on Qik’s website. AndNav2 is a turn by turn GPS application. Currently it’s not available in Android Market if you’re in the U.S.. I downloaded it directly from it’s website and it seems to be currently setup for European users. This would be great considering the paid GPS navigation app costs $10 a month. Hopefully it will be rolled out to USA users soon. It seems like a really nice application that leverages the openstreetmap project’s work.

So I picked up a slightly used T-mobile G1 phone this week. I’ve been looking to get into the Android pool for some time. The phone was unlocked so I could of went to AT&T if I chose to. The only limitation with using the phone with AT&T is that you won’t get 3G speeds (limited to Edge). I checked the plan prices at AT&T and they only offer the same data plans they have for the iPhone. They won’t let you do pay as you go for the voice plan which I was doing with my old Motorola phone. So with AT&T it costs $70 a month for a voice/data plan. I went to the local T-mobile store and their basic plan is $55 ($29 for voice and $25 for unlimited data). If you have your own device you can do a pay as you go or just sign up for a yearly contract. The advantage of the yearly plan is you won’t get hit with the monthly $5 surcharge (required for pay as you go). The negative with the yearly is that you’ll get hit with a hefty fee ($200) if you leave early. At least you have a choice. Enough with the plans. The phone is great and so far I absolutely love it. HTC just announced 2 new Android phones that T-mobile will be offering very soon. Expect the cost of the G1 to drop below the current $150 price with a two year contract. In fact on Saturday night I was on the T-mobile website and noticed they had the phone listed for $49! The next day it was back up to $149. For $49 the phone is absolute steal. Keep your eyes peeled for that price again. I’ll go into more detail regarding the applications available in coming posts.

I went into the local Sprint store and got to play with a Palm Pre for about 20 minutes. In short it’s a very sweet and functional device. The interface is smooth as silk with a very responsive touch screen. The WebOS operating system is very impressive and will give the iPhone a solid run for it’s money. The phone itself is relatively small but with a big screen covering most of the surface of the phone. There’s a slide out keyboard with pretty small keys. The keyboard is probably the weakest part of the phone. It’s not as nice as the HTC G1’s keyboard but will suffice for simple texting. The real strength of the Palm Pre is the applications. There’s the usual email, web browsing and multimedia apps. They have a custom youtube interface and bunch of streaming video channels specially designed for the Pre. Now from what I’ve read regarding the operating system is that while it’s based on a Linux kernel is mostly closed source. The developer SDK is mostly a big secret at this point with a general roll out in the near future. For me this is a show stopper. I’m leaning towards getting an Android based phone in the near future. Google’s Android OS is much more open with the developer tools readily available for use. Regardless I think the Palm Pre will do very well going head to head with the iPhone. Competition is good and the very least Apple will be forced to improve their products and lower their historically high prices. We have some very interesting times ahead in the smart phone market. The fact that a ton of these products are running Linux under the hood is all the more sweeter.

Showmedo is a great video tutorial website with a concentration in open source topics. Want to watch a video introduction to python programming? Want to learn how to use blender or GIMP? Showmedo is the place to go. I’ve setup a channel for the MythTVCast. I just uploaded a short screencast of our discussion on setting up QAM tv capture cards in MythTV. Going forward we’ll add new screencasts to go along with certain topics we plan on covering. Sometimes a a video tutorial gets the point across much easier than words. We’ll try to keep them relative short (30 minutes or less). If you’re a subject expert in any any F/OSS related topic please consider contributing content to showmedo. It’s a great service.

It was just announced that The Sarah Conner Chronicles has been canceled. What a bummer. It seems like a lot of shows I start following are getting canceled. Am I the tv Grim Reaper? Regardless it got me thinking about other great shows that showed a ton of promise but got yanked after their first season. Here’s my top 5 list of shows canceled after their first season:
5 - Kings: this show was a modern re-telling of the King David story from the Bible. It starred Ian McShane of Deadwood fame as the troubled King proceeding King David. In fact this show didn’t even make it past 6 episodes even though the whole first season was filmed. Apparently NBC will show the remaining episodes over the summer. Hardcore cancellation!
4 - Journeyman: starring Kevin McKidd and the lovely Moon Bloodgood. The show had hints of Quantum Leap but much more cooler and serious. This show just oozed in quality. The writing and acting were all top notch. At least we’ll get to see Moon in the upcoming Terminator film.
3- Jericho: told the story of what would happen if the United States had 20 of it’s cities nuked and how people survived in the aftermath. After being canceled there was a huge outpouring from it’s fans. After several tons of peanuts were literally dumped on CBS executives desks they agreed to film and air 7 new episodes to resolve the series. While it was cool that they filmed the final 7 episodes the show could of go on for a long time as the plot dealt with a huge conspiracy theory and the coming of a second American civil war.
2 - The Sarah Conner Chronicles: this showed so much promise in expanding the Terminator universe. In the final episode a 17 year old John Conner is sent into the future along with the mysterious T1001 terminator named Catherine Weaver. Damn you Fox!
1- Space: Above and Beyond was produced by several X-files contributors and told the story of a squad of Marine space pilots fighting a war against an alien race that have destroyed several Earth colonies in the year 2063. While it has some plot holes the show was very entertaining and could of easily gone 5 seasons. Apparently the cost to produce this show was very expensive at the time and the fledgling Fox network couldn’t afford to continue it.

Honorable mention goes to Firefly. While Fox is not alone in canceling great shows in their infancy they seem to do it more often than the other networks. Shame on you Fox!

So Canonical (the company behind) Ubuntu has released its UbuntuOne file backup service. The initial product is basically a Linux version of Dropbox. You have a folder on your machine where you put files that be accessed anywhere over the web. You can give others access to your shared folder via file browser on any platform. I’ve tested it and it works as advertised. You get up 2 gig of online storage for free. Then there’s a paid plan for 10 gig of storage for $10 a month. This is great. Get people to try it for no cost. They can choose to go to a paid plan. In the future Canonical is planning on rolling out more features and services through it. For some reason a lot of bloggers on Planet Ubuntu are complaining that Ubuntu shouldn’t have a pay service. The naysayers general argument is that it “goes against the spirit of Free software”. What utter nonsense. In recent years no other other company has done more for raising the awareness of Linux than Canonical (in it’s sponsorship of Ubuntu). It is in the best interest of the Ubuntu community and the greater Linux community that Canonical is stable AND profitable. Don’t we want Canonical to continue paying developers to improve Ubuntu? Don’t we want those improvements to go upstream to the projects that Ubuntu and ALL Linux distributions rely upon? No one is forcing you to get a paid UbuntuOne plan. If someone does not like it then that’s their choice. Fine, move on. All this gnashing of teeth and negativity towards it is not productive.

Well my cable company provider has finally figured out that I have the DVR HD box and were only charging me for the regular HD box. It only took them close to 2.5 years to figure it out. What tipped them off? I ordered the MLS Direct Kick season ticket package. They must of noticed the discrepancy while setting it up. I hardly used the cable company DVR and I’m a long time MythTV user. I dropped the DVR box off at the cable company and got the regular HD cable box. Good riddance. The kids got a nasty stomach bug a few days ago and have seem to have recovered fine. Unfortunately I’ve come down with it but it seems to be a milder version. So I’m working from home in case I have to run to the toilet. As a result we’ve postponed the family celebration we were going to host for my younger son’s 2nd birthday. I don’t want to get the rest of the family sick.

I’d like to announce the release of the first episode of the MythTVCast. The show will be semi-weekly with each episode about one hour in length. We’ll be covering all facets of MythTV: picking hardware components, picking a MythTV related Linux distribution, setting up peripherals, setting up and using MythTV plugins, exporting recordings to DVDs and other formats, setting up multiple front ends, using media extenders with MythTV, etc.. At some point we may interview prominent members of the MythTV community and even help end users calling in who may have MythTV setup issues. You can download new episodes directly from our website or subscribe via our XML feed. It should be a fun ride. Enjoy!

As part of my MythTV setup I have a QAM capture card for recording unencrypted cable stations. RCN, my current cable provider had a total of 19 HD channels completely open. Mind you these weren’t movie channels but stations most people consider basic cable (CBS, PBS, Discovery, HGTV, Food Network). Literally overnight I could not get signal locks for most of them. Apparently RCN decided to start encrypting everything except the local affiliates of the the network stations (ABC, CW, NBC, CBS, PBS, Fox). This was very disappointing to say the least. Being able to record shows with the QAM capture card enables me to watch one show while another is recording. Reading around the internet I see that RCN has been doing the same thing in all of their markets over the last year or so. A few days after this move I get a card from RCN in the mail saying rates across the board (cable tv, internet, phone) are all going up immediately. This nonsense earns RCN the double turd of the week award. There is another smaller cable provider available in my area who I only used for my internet connection when I first moved into the house. I took a look at their HD offerings and they’re slighter better than RCN. Taking a look at the satellite providers I see that their rates are generally more expensive for the channels I currently get with cable. The biggest negative for satellite is that my QAM card would basically become useless. Satellite TV requires a set top box for every TV connected. The only option for HD capture in MythTV with a satellite box is the Hauppauge PVR-1212 which is currently usable only in the testing branch. I’d immediately jump ship it wasn’t for the fact I just shelled out $79 for the MLS season ticket package that RCN finally starting offering for the first time. I’ll have to wait for soccer season to be over in the Fall before making a move.

Every Easter I bring the wife and kids to visit my parents house on Staten Island for a nice family dinner. The house I grew up in borders a 1 square mile wetlands area that’s owned by NYC. On one side of the street there’s about a 10 foot slope that has some trees growing on it. It levels off and the willow forest begins and goes all the way to the edge of the beach about a mile away. Over the years there have been brush fires every so often that burn out large swats of the area. The NYFD will get called in if it gets bad to make sure the houses are protected. There hasn’t been one of these fires for at least 10 years. We got to my parents house about 12:30 PM and enjoyed our usual visit. About 2:00 PM we could hear the sirens from the fire trucks roaring into the area. Looking out over the area we could see the fires burning in the SW corner. The winds were kicking up mostly blowing towards the beach about 20 miles per hour. In the next 3 hours the fire got steadily worse spreading in all directions. About 4:45 PM a rookie cop came down the street looking pretty flustered and surveyed how close the fire was. For the last 2 hours a steady stream of onlookers started showing up via cars, bicycles and on foot. There must of been over 50 carloads of tourists coming by. This is where things really get bizarre. Some guy starts pounding on our door telling us to get out and evacuate. This guy is not a cop, not a fireman or even a neighbor. My dad who was a fireman for a number of years and law enforcement officer for over 30 years gets in his face and asks him who he is and to see his ID is. The guy looked completely stunned and just walks away. For all he we know he was just trying to make sure everyone was ok but it was a bit of stretch for him to appoint himself fire marshal and start ordering people out of their homes. About 4:45 PM the wall of fire is getting close to the corner house which doesn’t have the street as a buffer on one side. As a precaution me and the wife decide to take the kids out of the house for a bit. Just as we pull off the street 2 fire trucks are backing into my parents street. About 20 minutes later we call my parents and everything is fine. As a precaution the fireman turned on the hoses and watered down the area closest to the street. The fire had burned itself out after this point. In the many years living with my parents I experienced many fires like this in the past. One year the fire was exceptionally bad with a 30 foot wall of flames touching the edge of the buffer. This fire was nowhere as scary but I was amazed how much everyone crapped themselves. Even stranger was the rush of gawkers who showed up. Who the hell decides to take their family to go watch a brush fire on Easter Sunday? A news crew from the local ABC affiliate even showed up. We left my parents house about 7:45 PM and they were still people showing up. Very strange indeed. Some media reports broadcast from my parents street:
ABC video report

Fox video report

CBS video report