A few weeks ago we managed to accidentally fill up the HDTiVo. It's a combination of two things. One was that the Home Repair Project From Hell(tm) ate up a lot of free time and TV time decreased in response. The other was that I was deliberately dragging my feet to build up a backlog in case the writer's strike meant no real new TV in January. Unfortunately, I forgot to watch it and so the drive got full. We lost a few shows. None of them are available on iTunes or via the 360 so I turned to . . . alternative means of acquiring them. And as you may know Bob, if you acquire shows via the internet they tend to be in DiVX or XViD format. Historically I've hooked up my laptop via SVideo, but A ) that sucks image-quality-wise (who uses SVideo anymore? OK, other than Nintendo ;-) ) and B ) it's a minor pain in the rear to do. Well, the 360 got a fall update and is supposed to be able to stream DiVX these days, so I thought I'd try that out. As far as I can tell it's a vile canard. There's a new version of Connect360 that supports streaming such files to the 360 so I installed it. Had a couple of go-rounds on making sure that the *Mac* could play the files, then had to reinstall the "Optional Media" download on the 360, but ultimately it all worked out. Or so I thought. Everything worked OK in my tests, but it turned out that I could only play about 3 to 5 minutes of a file and then something on the Mac would crash (either Connect360Helper or ffmpeg) and the 360 would freeze. I found even audio streaming didn't work right Ultimately I rolled Connect360 back to the spring version. Still a recommended product and I'm sure they'll get this sorted eventually, but right now I personally found using Connect360 3.1 is the way to go. OK, I decided, let's try Windows. First in the virtual machine, and then rebooting via Boot Camp into "real Windows" and all the various patching and tweaking that Windows requires. Nothing. It worked for audio, but the 360 kept saying there were no video files on the Windows box. Just in case I wasn't annoyed at Windows I tried to shut down my firewall (Zone Alarm - the built-in Windows firewall isn't trustworthy). Guess what? If you turn off your firewall Windows Media Player automatically and silently disables file sharing. I guess otherwise you might accidentally share a file across the internet. Teh h0rr0rz! Thanks Microsoft for saving me from myself! This is about the point where I said to myself "OK, screw this. I have a Mac Mini sitting around, it might as well sit in the living room. Heck, that would give me some desk space back!" I needed to buy a DVI to HDMI cable, but no big whoop - Amazon sells those. Ideally you want the cord that converts from regular audio mini-jack to optical as well, so you can get digital audio from the Mini. I have one of those already (I used it when the Airport Express was connected to my receiver), so I'm pretty much set. Last night I moved Horton to on top of the TV. It's running Leopard, so it already has Front Row, and all Mac Mini's have an IR port and come with the little Apple remote, so it pretty much just worked out of the box. Or so I thought. First issue was that I had to teach the remote commands to the Harmony 880. I expected the Harmony software to have the Apple commands in the database, but it didn't. Annoying, but solvable with the learning function. The more subtle problem was this: when I turned off the display device connected to Horton, the machine went to sleep. You can wake it up if you hit a Bluetooth mouse or keyboard to wake it, but that's not very useful for the remote situation. Turns out there is freeware called InsomniaX that fixes the problem like a charm. Run it and the Mini stays awake even with the TV off. Front Row is pretty cool, I have to say. The remote is minimalist but you can play pretty much anything that iTunes or Quicktime can play. You can access iPhoto albums, and you can even browse shared content on other Macs. So if I have a video podcast on TinyGod (where I do all my podcast downloading) I can stream it to Horton and play it on my TV with no problem. Oh, and it plays DiVX/XVid files just fine. I don't know that I'll use this a lot, but it's pretty cool. If anybody has any specific questions about how it works let me know.

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Tags: MacMini, MediaCenter, Connect360, InsomniaX

Reporters are funny people. At least, some of the New York Times reporters are. Their story on the strike was the most dispiriting and inaccurate that I read. But it also contained one of my favorite phrases of the month.“All the trappings of a union protest were there… …But instead of hard hats and work boots, those at the barricades wore arty glasses and fancy scarves.”Oh my God. Arty glasses and fancy scarves. That is so cute! My head is aflame with images of writers in ruffled collars, silk pantaloons and ribbons upon their buckled shoes. A towering powdered wig upon David Fury’s head, and Drew Goddard in his yellow stockings (cross-gartered, needless to say). Such popinjays, we! The entire writers’ guild as Leslie Howard in The Scarlet Pimpernel. Delicious.

Whedonesque : Comments on 14650 : More Joss Strike Talk. I'm a little late to blogging this particular party, but this is a worthwhile read. As everyone's favorite TV shows trickle to a halt it's easy to start being annoyed at the writer's strike, but we all need to recall they are striking for real issues, and they deserve support. Even if it means the TiVo's cupboard runs bare.

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Tags: WGA, strike, JossWhedon

Is it too early to introduce the LOLTree meme? 'Cause our orange tree has made a few failures. Witness: (I put some nicer shots of lemons and oranges from our trees on Flickr. The lemon tree in particular is going gangbusters for something that was just planted this year! We've had the orange tree ever since we moved in but it looks a lot better now that it's had some maintenance done by a knowledgeable person. Turns out the tree had grown too dense, and that's why it was getting all fungal and icky.)

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Tags: Tree, Photos, Orange, Lemon

So we have this room in our house that we call the "Family Room". For those of you who have visited Casa de Sanders that's the room with the back patio door. It's open to our dining room and kitchen but it's sunken down a step. Truthfully it's a room where the all the extra furniture went when we moved in and it's sort of just been like that. Recently we decided to clean it up, decide what we wanted in that room and lay it out accordingly. Additionally it needed repainting after the new windows were installed because of the work on the new patio door. We've always kept the Christmas tree in there and so suddenly in November repainting that room turned into a deadline - either paint it before Thanksgiving or leave it sort of sad looking until 2008. So we decided to tackle it next. This turned into the Home Repair Project From Hell(tm) project that I mentioned in my Weekend Off post. So let's follow along the whole logic train, shall we?

1. We want to repaint the walls. Also after some discussion we gave away the old entertainment center, TV, and futon that were in the Family Room.
2. We take all of the nutcrackers, DVDs, CDs, old game consoles, and boardgames out of the room. This lets us start moving furniture around.
3. The cats sometimes pee on the carpet, and they've always done it by the entertainment center, in multiple houses. We're hoping losing the entertainment center loses the "pee here" connection. Karin rents a steam cleaner and spends a Saturday scrubbing the crap (well the pee, to be literal) out of the carpet.
4. Once the furniture is out of the room we remember that the walls look stupid because there's this wood paneling with no baseboard whatsoever, just a stupid air gap between the paneling and the carpet. We had pretty much hidden this fact by placing stuff along all the walls.
5. Discover there's some truly heinous things done around the power sockets and the trim. This was covered up when we bought the house by installing huge bulky 2x3 outlet blocks to cover up the poor holes that don't match the faceplate. Start building up wood putty to cover up the mess.
6. We went out to buy baseboard. When we return . . . .
7. We realize that the cats have peed on the carpet WHILE we were shopping for baseboard. Decide, somewhat painfully, that the carpet has to go.
8. Pull up the carpet, revealing some fairly nasty tile underneath. Spend a day pulling it up, removing tack boards, staples, etcera.
9. Go to the store and buy a metric ton of adhesive vinyl floor tiles. Also some miscellaneous tools - a chalk line for marking the center of the room, a miter box for cutting the baseboard.
10. Decide to paint the walls before installing the new floor. Paint the wall section (leaving the wood paneling for later since it is the trim color).
11. Take up the "safe" painters tape from around the walls and realize that it pulls up the paint from the ceiling in big strips (sigh)
12. Go buy paint to paint the ceiling.
13. Paint the ceiling.
14. Install the new floor tiles.
15. Realize we need to have trim around the fireplace edge as well. Go buy some MORE trim.
16. Install the baseboard, learning how to do so as we go. (This is the part where we bought the nail gun.)
17. Paint the effing trim and paneling, finally.
18. Touch up where touch up are needed and finally set up the Christmas tree.
19. Move in the chair as well as the cabinets and bookcases that remain in the room.

It took me a while to document all this with photos. Somewhere during this I got the new camera - a Canon Digital Rebel XTi, and I've had some exercises with figuring out how to use it. Plus I'm using new software (Aperture) for photo managment and editing, so I'm having to figure it out as well. Lots of new stuff to learn all at once and lots of little ratholes I can go down and waste time figuring out tricks. Here are some old shots (not with the Rebel) showing aspects of the original room. These are nominally pictures of the cats, but they are all I have prior to the great carpet ripping up. If you look closely at the wall, you can see where there's a gap between the carpet and the wood paneling. Also the carpet is just butted up against the fireplace with no trim whatsoever. More of the carpet and you can see the step in the distance - there was some trim there, but it was pretty small and not really baseboard - it was "door and window trim". Ye gods - this is terrible. This one shows off the original patio door as well. Love that aluminum frame! Now at this point in my photo-essay I started using the Rebel, plus taking particular shots of the work. Then, we ripped up the carpet and I realized I should try to get some intermediate shots. Here's the tile floor we found under the carpet. Notice how the panel/floor gap is even worse now without the carpet. Here's a corner of the room after we've painted the wall, but not the trim. You can see the wood putty - and especially the part where I've only built up the putty to the socket. This one annoyed me especially. The 2x3 outlet box covering these outlets was two-prong only. I thought the outlet wasn't grounded and was surprised to find it unplugged and was covering up a perfectly good grounded outlet pair. It was there because the hole cut in the paneling was way too wide. There was a piece of plywood covering that up and that looked stupid, so the bigger outlet box covered it. Now we get to the good pictures, the post work set. Here's a closeup of the floor with the new "peel and stick" tiles installed. I spent most of Thanksgiving morning installing these. Here's the attractive new baseboard at the step down, with hand model Heisenberg, who loves the camera. Here's the fireplace with the new trim as well as some of the paneling. Hand model Schrödinger is ignoring me and the camera because that is how she rolls. Plus she was hungry. Here's the corner at more of a step back, so you can see the wall and the paneling. And here's the final shot with the whole room. You can see our tree, the new patio door and everything except for the fact that the ceiling got painted.

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Tags: FamilyRoom, HomeRepair, DigitalRebelXTi

Pierre slid through the slush, skimming the edge of the transition from milky ice to water. The cold made his bones ache despite his genetically altered thick layers of blubber. His parents would be furious when he came home after curfew, but he couldn't resist being here at this moment; when the Dark Side faced away from the Sun and interstellar light struck Europa, the stars shining blurrily through the ice. Pierre could see stars better on a viewscreen at home, but it just wasn't the same. When humans engineered Homo Delphinidae to live on Europa they gave them excellent low light vision and if he squinted Pierre could just barely see the pinpricks of light diffused through the icy shell. See the stars with his own eyes, nothing but the ice between him and the realms he longed to explore. He'd tried to explain this to his parents, but it only enraged them. The Delfins were the forefront of space exploration once, humanity's audacious step forward. The Delfin colony was created in test tubes and Europa was colonized, Delfins swimming the water that lay deep under the ice. From Talos City they mined the riches of Jupiter orbit, running telepresence waldos that were practical with communications lags of seconds instead of hours. But Delfins could never visit space as they needed kilos of water to breathe and live. For generations Talos was the forefront of space exploration but now humanity spread beyond Jupiter, led by graceful long-limbed ZeeGees who lived their whole life in spaceships and habitats. Pierre sighed before turning towards home. He'd endure the yelling before falling to sleep where he'd fitfully dream of exploring the stars, of traveling farther than any other human be they Normal, Delfin, or ZeeGee.

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Tags: Fiction, ThingAWeek, EndpointEuropa