Broadcast television engineering related tech topics, rants and outright pontifications.
Scott Adams wanted to make a topical comic about the recent iPhone 4G drama that’s been all the buzz recently and realized that his normal outlet (a newspaper) has a propagation delay of about a month. “I worried that the story would become stale before my comics would work through the pipeline.” His only option [...]
I was recently talking with a sales rep I deal with and we got on the topic of the aging TV engineering workforce. He told me a rather depressing story about a recent SBE chapter meeting in his area where one of the old timers started poking fun at a couple younger members who were [...]
I’m sure I mentioned before that I really like gadgets and a few months back I bought an eeePC 1000HA for under $400. This is one of the very first Netbooks to have the Atom processor and a 160GB hard drive instead of the paltry 4GB flash drives in the early models. I really wasn’t [...]
About a month ago I was selected to download MediaMall‘s PlayOn Media Server and try their beta version of software that bridges content from several Internet video provider sites to a TV. In reality it requires a few more components along with the software to make it work, such as a PC to run the [...]
I thought I had a good thing going for the past few years by having my websites hosted by 1AND1. Unfortunately, over the past month 1AND1 has been having serious reliability issues and my sites have been inaccessible for days(!) at a time. Calls to the tech help line were anything but helpful. They only [...]
As broadcasters continue to face eroding audiences, lousy programming, declining ratings, a lackluster fall line-up and pending changes in FCC rules regarding ‘localism‘; here comes another punch in the gut. Joss Whedon of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Firefly and the Serenity movie fame created a three part mini-musical (!) video netcast called “Dr. Horrible” that [...]
Not yet. And after the latest debacle with the June 18th firmware, maybe not ever. My old, original xbox softmodded to run XBMC is still more polished and faster than this little guy, despite the glowing reviews I read which led me to purchase the Popcorn Hour NMT in the first place. As everyone knows, [...]
I just tried to log into my Comcast webmail and was greeted by the following at the Comcast.net main URL: It looks like KRYOGENIKS EBK and DEFIANT are looking for credit on this hack. Thankfully I have ‘NoScript‘ installed as a plugin for my Firefox browser to minimize the exposure I would get when something [...]
A writer’s strike, shitty programming and the Internet. Oh my! Viewer’s are leaving appointment television by the droves and broadcasters are scrambling to do something, anything to keep them firmly planted on the couch during prime time. I’ve covered the topic of declining viewers in the past, but the trend in hemorrhaging viewership of major [...]
For those that don’t know, COMDEX was a computer centric convention that ran in Las Vegas from 1979 to 2003 before lagging attendance from competing conventions and the convergence of consumer electronic devices ultimately made it uninteresting and killed it off. Back in November of 2007 Avid, currently facing too much competition from Final Cut [...]