Logitech Closes The Harmony/PS3 Loop

July 6, 2009 Timothy Sanders

Long time readers will know that I am an avid proponent of getting a good universal remote to control your home theater setup. It's a lot better than a basketful of remotes and it's very likely to make a complex setup usable for somebody other than the person who did all the wiring and can say things like "I don't see the confusion. Look, the PS3 is on Component 2 on the video switcher and the audio comes in on the receiver under 'DBS 2'. What's the problem?" and then you get this Penny Arcade cartoon. So anyway, we've had a series of universal remotes for a bajillion years - I wrote a post back in January 2007 when I got my Logitech Harmony 880 remote and it still stands. There's one fly in the ointment. Sony made the ... let's call it "awesome" decision that the PS3 would use Bluetooth for remote controls. Meaning the only remote you could get was Sony and it wouldn't control anything else. Yay. Back last February I discovered that Nyko sold an infrared remote that had a little USB dongle to plug into the PS3. Read more about that here, but the short form is that it was better than nothing but still a flawed operation. As I understand the issue Sony was being buttheaded about licensing any component to use the Bluetooth protocols (at least that is what Logitech said. Sony being arrogant and proprietary? That's unpossible!) Anyway, somebody finally quit playing chicken and Logitech now sells a little gizmo that is an IR receiver and a Bluetooth transmitter. You plug it into the wall, do some simple Bluetooth pairing with the PS3 and hey presto! The Harmony remote can talk to the gizmo (via IR) and the gizmo talks to the PS3 (via Bluetooth). The remote can even turn the PS3 on and off just like a real component. I bought one and it works as advertised. It's a little pricy I suppose, but as things have developed the PS3 has become our primary DVD player as well as Blu-Ray so it is useful to make it work just like everything else. Now the only thing that won't play nice with the Harmony remote is the Wii and nobody cares about that because the Wii has no reasonable video playback use. One drawback to this solution is that gizmo will only work with a Harmony remote (it doesn't come with any remote at all and the Harmony remote gets the codes from the internet software you use to program Harmony gear) so if you wanted to use a Pronto or a Crestron automated system or whatever you'd be out in the cold. In theory if you got ahold of a Harmony remote for a few hours you could teach the commands to any learning IR remote. In my case I have a Harmony already so this works great. I don't foresee wanting something other than Harmony during the PS3 lifecycle and if something odd happens I can always use the "old" Harmony to teach the new hotness what to do.

What's A Few Notches Below "Internet Famous"?

June 29, 2009 Timothy Sanders

One of the topics that I could talk about but is rapidly turning into "old news" is the existence of the Jonathan Coulton concert DVD called Best. Concert. Ever. This is a concert recording of a show he did in San Francisco (with Paul & Storm) back in February 2008. I was aware it was coming out from Coulton's Twitter or RSS feed but I'd seen the show live so I wasn't in a major hurry or anything. Then shortly after it came out I got an email from a friend saying that Karin and I showed up in the audience "several times". So thus reminded I ordered the disc. First off, I recommend the disc naturally. You get an immediate link to download the music tracks and then a few days later you get the DVD/CD combo set. To be honest I haven't taken the CD out - I mean I had the audio files already, but the music tracks are worth having. They may represent things you already had - but it does have the Zen Drum version of Mr. FancyPants which I've been wanting well ... ever since I saw this show in back in February 2008. And the DVD is a lot of fun to watch. I haven't listened to the commentary track yet, but Karin said it was funny. I did watch the regular concert part but I watched it from an unusual perspective: I wanted to know if it would be unhealthy to play the "Every time we see Tim or Karin on-screen we take a drink" drinking game. Now I should note I was not playing said game, I was just checking. For the first third or so I thought "man, people are crazy. I haven't seen either of us at all", then there were some shots. And some more shots. Then I saw a shot from the left wings and I remembered "Oh that's right, that one camera guy really liked that angle and parked over there quite a bit." We quickly went from "this would be a sucky drinking game" to "Well, that song would have been a bit much to be doing to shots" to "No, this would not be a shot-drinking game" to "Oh no, you wouldn't even want to play this game with a mild beer". In short, we turn up a lot in this video. No idea why especially, I suppose just my magnetic personality and charisma carries through .... So if you want to know what I was up to about a year and a half ago, you could do worse than to watch this concert DVD. Which is awesome in its own right, even without the bits featuring me or Karin. You should really go see Coulton live, but this DVD is a good substitute if that's all you can manage.

Quick Note for iPhone Upgraders

June 25, 2009 Timothy Sanders

Here's a quick tip for people who are upgrading their iPhone: when you restore from backup it doesn't restore your Keychain so you need to re-enter all of your passwords. You may say "Well, duh Tim! Everyone figures that out fairly quickly!" And yes, you probably put your email and your WiFi passwords back in fairly quickly. If you use MobileMe though, it might not occur to you to go re-enter that password. If you don't then the the iPhone just silently stops syncing. Eventually this will cause you a problem if you think that entering appointments on your phone puts them on your main calendars. Once you get into the proper screen you'll see that the Password field says "Required" instead of a series of dots, but Calendar or Contacts will NEVER say "Hey, you know we haven't been able to sync for the last week."

Wait, Where Were We Again?

June 22, 2009 Timothy Sanders

Blog posts! We should have some blog posts! I hear the desperate wheeze of the iron lung that is keeping this sucker running, so maybe I should make some content! I think there's been so much recently that I may need to declare "blog bankruptcy". You know when you read those stories about people just throwing away all their unread email and sending out a big "Sorry, please try again" email to the people they care about? I feel that way about blog topics. Did I ever discuss redoing my desk layout? I don't think I did. I got rid of the two dead soldier tower computers sitting under my desk and much more importantly got all of the cables off the floor. I mounted a pair of powerstrips under the desk and cable tied all of the wires along the frame of the desk itself. Now the only computer items that touch the floor are the Mac Pro itself and the UPS (oh, and the subwoofer for the speakers). It looks a lot better and I think the improved airflow means the computer is running better. It also means there's no rat's nest of cables that can't be cleaned and thus attracts big tumbleweeds of cat hair. I installed a keyboard drawer so I can have almost the entire expanse of desk free for materials, and I got a laptop stand so my laptop screen can sit up at the height of my monitors. Lastly I ran a LED "light rope" along the underside of my windowsill so at night I can have a bias light behind the monitors for reduced eyestrain. Did I just start off by saying "here's a topic I'm not going to blog about" and then blog it? I think I may have. Well, since we're here, if you're a Mac user and you have both a laptop and desktop machine you may want to look into a piece of software called Teleport. What it does is it lets you move your mouse to the edge of a screen and then onto another computer. While your mouse is away the keyboard controls goes with it. So I have my laptop on the stand to the left of my monitors and I can just sweep the mouse across all three displays. I can now use the laptop to VPN into another machine, or run tail -f commands or whatever, while I use the main screens for work. It's pretty slick. I also tend to leave email running on my laptop which means I can look at mails on that screen while I'm looking at code maximized on my main displays.

A Second Zany Week!

June 20, 2009 Timothy Sanders

Life continues to be a bit hectic, so blog posts continue to be sparse. A lot has happened lately and I suppose I could blather on quite a bit about WWDC or MaxFunCon, and i got a iPhone 3GS yesterday so that could merit some discussion. (I've been running the 3.0 software for about a week and a half now - I installed the GM partway through WWDC.) But instead I'll talk about something else altogether different! Unheralded by me after all my ranting and complaining we really did shut off analog NTSC broadcasts on June 12th. I wasn't even in town when it happened. So far so good, but then something not-so-good happened. ABC (KGO-7 out of San Francisco) for some crazy reason decided to move their digital off whatever good UHF frequency they had back to VHF 7. Which can't quite reach my rooftop antenna. And SHAZAM! ABC disappeared from our digital lineup. The last episode of Pushing Daisies was unwatchable. Now in all fairness my antenna is supposed to be UHF-only, although it pulls in some VHF frequencies. NBC 11 from San Jose broadcasts in VHF, but they are so close they come in anyway, even though the antenna is directional and pointed away from them. But I had forgotten that KGO was going to do this so I was caught off guard when they disappeared. Now I could no doubt buy a VHF antenna, get somebody to go up there and put the antenna on the mast and splice the two signals and so forth. End result though is that I'd probably be paying several hundred dollars in order go get a single channel. It just doesn't make economic sense, even if I do have to buy the last season of Lost from iTunes. (That's what I did for the last episode of Pushing Daisies.) There's some talk about KGO being on their "Auxilliary Antenna" for another month and then something ELSE going on until October. As I understand it Sutro Tower (where all the SF stations broadcast from) is a crazy hodgepodge of temporary stuff while they were broadcasting both analog and digital and I think now they are taking all of the analog "hacks" down. We almost get KGO now, so if the main antenna does something better then maybe it will work once the maintenance finishes. Still I thought it was humorous that the HD reception got worse as soon as they shut down analog broadcasting. How did that help again?