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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 and office politics to really hone their skills doing manly, gritty, thought-provoking, analytical, rocket scientist-like work that will separate them from the other mindless office drones they will have to return to later.

The back story; one of the stations I oversee here in the San Francisco market had an apparent failure of one of the IOTs (Inductive Output Tube) which, for those not familiar with TV RF work, is used as the final, high-power amplification device to bring a TV signal to a significant strength in order to survive being shot out of an antenna on the tower and over the air to lots of little rabbit ears across the horizon. Read more »

I remember the day I lost any faith in local or national news. It wasn’t when the Colombia Space Shuttle exploded and CNN put this erroneous ‘factoid’ on the air:

A few years ago I was sitting in a department head meeting when the news director piped up about a story of significant public safety value they had learned and were eager to get it on the air. He was excited about it and was sure it would grab everyone’s attention and blow the competing local newscasts out of the water. The catch was, we were a couple weeks away from the sweeps period and the news department was going to sit on it until the station could use it to get that bump in the ratings they so desperately needed. Furthermore, it wasn’t going to air immediately when the sweeps month began. Read more »

It’s a new year and as of the first of the year every Sally-Shopper and Johnny-Bag-O-Donuts is eligible for their two free coupons good for $40 towards the purchase of a set-top DTV converter box. Too bad it’s $30 short of the retail price of the box when it becomes available in mid February…

Although this program really had elderly and rural Americans in mind, I’ve read comments in blog postings by tech-savvy individuals that now of the program and are jumping on it early before the coupons dry up reasoning that since they have a couple other TVs in the house that aren’t on cable they ‘deserve’ them. Well, to be fair the details of the program are for TVs like that, but the spirit of the program it for the clueless and/or financially disadvantaged. In my opinion, if someone has the financial worthiness and time to log in to a tech blog and comment about how they deserve one or two of these coupons, they are the selfish, uppity assholes this coupon program was not intended for and is the parasitic type of person that undoubtedly needs so many TVs in their mother’s basement because no one wants to be around them and the television is their only friend. Read more »

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. Slide out the old HDD and slide in the new one.

The Sony PS3 HDD uses a SATA 5400RPM drive and it is recommended that you get one that runs at the same speed. Replacing the old HDD is trivial and all you need is a small flat-head screwdriver to pry open the side plastic panel to expose the HDD tray and a #0 Phillip-head driver to remove the retaining screw and the four HDD screws holding it to the tray. Once you have the blue retaining screw out you simply slide the tray forward to un-seat the drive and slide it out, doing the reverse to install the new one. Read more »

Today I made the plunge and finally got off the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray format fence and bought a PS3 system.

There were several reasons for this; first I did NOT buy it because I love Blu-Ray. I like that it has multiple studio and vendor support as well as about 25GB storage per layer, but the hardware for burning those discs is so new it makes the cost of production and third-party devices pretty high. That said, I have been watching Blu-Ray gain progressively more market share and seeing a number of more watch-worthy titles released on that format than HD-DVD. Also, in a less “scientific” approach I noticed a lot more people hanging around and buying from the BD movie shelf than the HD-DVD section at the local Fry’s and the shelf space dedicated to Blu-Ray movies is larger in almost all retail outlets I’ve been in that have them for sale.

One other item of note regarding the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD format war is that Sony already has considerable legs under the BD format with their alternate professional product line of XDCAM. This is also a blue laser format and is aimed at broadcasters and professional videographers. XDCAM has been around since 2003, well before consumer BD and the PS3 came out in , so even if the Blu-Ray consumer format somehow lost steam and died next year, Sony would continue to chug along with broadcasters and “big media” selling the same underlying technology to a different market. Just like they did when Betamax lost the Beta/VHS format war around 1988 and they sold it’s variant “Betacam” and later “Betacam-SP” to the broadcast industry becoming the defacto tape standard which is still in heavy use today. Read more »

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 from Speed Racer, only I’m referring to the original, not the lame Shitwood Hollywood remake.

Here is Mr. X’s story:

“I wanted to breathe new life into my languishing and dust-laden PSP. I liked the device’s potential, but the dull games don’t really appeal to me and I wanted to use it as a portable web browser, instead of lugging a laptop around the house. Since a keyboard would make it more functional I looked to see if one was available. Unfortunately, the only production keyboard was just an abandoned concept back in early 2005! Read more »

For the old…. err.. “seasoned” television viewer that doesn’t understand what a “Tivo” is and still tunes in to re-runs of Matlock (after adding more tin foil to the rabbit ears), a few items just popped up on my radar I thought I would forward to everyone.

First is a website discussing the digital transition which I stumbled upon completely by accident, not because it was being promoted by broadcasters (go figure):

http://keepmytv.com/

Second is a new $40-coupon-targeted converter box finally out in the wild and you can read bout it here:

BTW, Gizmodo is a crass tech site so if reading profanity hurts your eyes don’t click the link…
Read more »

After working all night at one of my employer’s analog transmitter sites, I had arranged to catch a flight out of the Burbank (Bob Hope) airport early that same morning.

Luckily I was flying United today and not American Airlines, because their aircraft had crapped out and was screwing up everyone’s schedule (of course) and all the people connecting to that aircraft thereafter.

One of the people screwed by American was the redoubtable R Lee Ermey. There was “the Gunny”, chatting with fans in the terminal while his traveling crew was working to see if the aircraft would ever leave or if they could get their luggage and find another flight.

Now you may think that an ex-Army infantry paratrooper wouldn’t get along with any Marine, but every serviceman knows that we all fight for the same country and principles. The inter-service rivalry is a form of healthy competition to push yourself a little harder in order to be better than “those dumb Jarheads”, “those lazy flyboys” or those “Dumb Ass Tankers”. And the occasional bar room brawl in town helps keep the fires of competition stoked and burning strong!

While we were both waiting I had the chance to say hello and get a photo taken with him. I can honestly say that he is a great, stand-up guy. He was very friendly to everyone that pestered him (myself included) and was very happy to avail himself for the brief fan photo session.

I asked him about his show on the History channel called “Mail Call” and he mentioned that it’s been renamed to “Trigger Time”. I’ve been looking for a show of that name, but I can’t seem to find it… Looks like it’s still called “Mail Call”.

After I got back home I learned that he has his own web site (should’ve known) and has some fun things for sale. I couldn’t resist getting the signed copy of “Full Metal Jacket” and an outtake DVD from his “Mail Call” series. The outtake DVD is great! You can see he is having a blast doing the show. It lasts about an hour and you get to see the Gunny at his salty best!

If you work in a medium to large office you probably have several of those posters glamorizing “Teamwork”, “Courage” or “Fortitude” with a single, stirring image and a slogan to drive it all home like “Because it is in your destiny for greatness!”, “You are part of machine working for the greater good of mankind” or “Stay focused and productive or be replaced”.

I’ve always looked at those as rather simplistic surrogates for actual motivation that employees need to get from their co-workers and management. I’ve wondered if everyone else working at these places gets the same amount of humor, snickers and eye-rolling out of them that I do.

It also makes me wonder why (if a poster with a slogan can motivate the staff) did the company hire such apathetic, easily manipulated people? Surely the people these posters have an effect on must be Star Wars Stormtrooper candidates (“These are not the droids you’re looking for”).

Well, even if the management working at these companies doesn’t have a sense of humor, there is a company that does and you can make your own posters that will probably be more appreciated by your peers than the canned slogans “they” would order out of a catalog. The company is called Despair.com. They have a great sense of humor about the whole corporate poster shenanigans and you can even CREATE YOUR OWN! How cool is that?  Well, they aren’t poster sized, but it’s still pretty darn cool.

Wait! Before you jump there, check out a few custom examples…

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 out of the box the stock WRT54GL is a decent router so I ran it briefly to see what features it had and I felt there were just enough to make it worthwhile, but why settle for OK when I could install DD-WRT and wind up with so many additional features? The answer, of course, is ‘I won’t settle for OK’. Read more »