Broadcast television engineering related tech topics, rants and motorcycles!
I’ve been a business user of BlackBerry phones for a few years now and, although I won’t get into a rant about which phone is the best phone to buy, I will say that in having these devices foisted upon me by my oh-so-wise-and-indefatigable employers I have found them capable e-mail devices and decent phones, […]
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 […]
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, […]
For those of you that recognize the ‘Heathkit’ reference you get a cookie. Well done. Unlike the Heathkits of yore I”m using some nice, mostly modern test gear here and servicing a fairly modern transmitter (circa 1998). This is one of those occasions where broadcast engineers get to leave the desk, the whiny news department […]
One of the cool features of the PS3 is that it is a serious computing device and Sony provided the option to easily upgrade its hard drive as well as install an alternate OS. So I did both. By far, the easiest HDD upgrade known to man (presently). Simply remove a panel and a screw. […]
I heard a story about a guy, not me mind you, that wanted to mod his PSP to a “homebrew” firmware which would allow him to run far more software than the lame games that were made solely for the platform. We’ll call this dashing and daring fellow “Mr. X” – kinda like Racer X […]
I have heard of this custom, free firmware called DD-WRT for a while now, but I needed to purchase a compatible router that would accept the replacement software and the one that was recommended the most by others was the Linksys WRT54GL. It also was one of the most trivial to perform the upgrade. Right […]
Since a new tower had been erected in 1997 with HDTV in mind, it already featured a broadband RFS panel antenna used to broadcast the analog channel 29 and was capable of accommodating the future DTV channel on UHF 15. The trick after expanding the building and installing the HDTV transmitter was to combine the […]