Extra Pepperoni

Being the compulsive sort, it bugged me whenever I missed an episode of a TV show I watched (I used to watch a lot of TV; now not much). Similarly, it bothered me that I didn’t have complete sets of the comics I read — they were both hard to find and expensive, especially since I almost never started at the beginning.

Inspired by Ernie Cline, I’ve recently been watching Airwolf. It hasn’t aged well, and was never great storytelling, but it’s still enjoyable. And it’s nice to see as a coherent whole over weeks, rather than scattered across years with commercial interruptions. I’m in the middle of season 2, and will skip season 4 (I don’t think I ever saw it, fortunately); don’t know about season 3. Perhaps I’ll watch The Fall Guy next!

Nowadays, with the Internet, back issues of comic books are pretty easy to find. I’ve completed a few series that were missing issues, such as Badger crossovers, Dynamo Joe, and Tailgunner Jo. I’d love to collect various other series, but a full run of X-Men would be prohibitive — both in terms of money and time to read them all!

I was pleased to discover Marvel made several of their more popular titles available to GIT, who released them on DVD. Unfortunately, the license was terminated in favor of Marvel’s online service, but some DVDs are still available. James gave me Ghost Rider for my birthday, and despite some aggravations (they photographed the open comic books, so there’s dead space around the corners, and didn’t bother to split left & right pages, so it’s too awkward to read in single-page portrait mode) which make the comic harder to read than it should be, I’m enjoying the old Ghost Rider issues. It’s amazing what a loser Johnny Blaze originally was — he’s an idiot (sloppy writing), a coward, a regretful devil dealer, and not really faster or more skillful than gang members. As time has gone on, and Marvel has super-sized its characters, Ghost Rider and his cycle have gotten faster, stronger, less human, and ironically much more innocent.

A while ago I posted a script for driving HandBrakeCLI. But it was lame that I had two not-quite-identical versions of the script — one for iPhone output and another for Apple TV. At a guess, Brian Beardmore only needed one type. Now that we watch movies on the Apple TV and I watch on the iPhone, it was silly to have two different scripts. So I added simple argument processing.

hb.sh v1.0.3

If there first argument is iphone, then hb.sh optimizes for iPhone. If the argument is appletv or there are no arguments, hb.sh optimizes for Apple TV. It’s very easy to tweak or add your own types — just look for myArgs in the script and add or adjust as desired. I run this script on my Linux server, which has lots of disk space and is generally idle.

On my MacBook Pro, I have a couple aliases to facilitate things. I copy DVD folders to ~/tivo/tivo-inspector/input and run one of these. When done, the script opens up ~/tivo/tivo-inspector/. I move the DVD folders out of input and the processed .m4v video out of output; then I drop the .m4v files onto iTunes’ LIBRARY area (so it doesn’t stop whatever it’s currently playing) and check iPhone videos to sync to the iPhone (the Apple TV has plenty of space, so everything syncs to it). Note that these lines may be too wide to display properly in WordPress — just Copy and Paste, and you’ll get the full text.

alias hbatv="ssh -t inspectore time screen bin/hb.sh appletv; open ~/tivo/tivo-inspector"
alias hbip="ssh  -t inspectore time screen bin/hb.sh iphone;  open ~/tivo/tivo-inspector"

Note that inspectore is the name of my Linux server. This would work just as well with HandBrakeCLI on a Mac “server” — or even Windows, if you set it up to accept remote commands (CygWin, anyone?).

Reminder: You must adjust the inputSearchDir and outputDir paths for the running HandBrakeCLI.

pepper@inspector:~$ egrep tivo bin/hb.sh
inputSearchDir="$HOME/tivo-inspector/input"
outputDir="$HOME/tivo-inspector/output"

In the future version I’d like to support for arbitrary HandBrakeCLI arguments on the hb.sh command line, but I first have to see if HandBrakeCLI can handle gracefully conflicting arguments from built-ins and the command line.

I use Handbrake to rip DVDs for my iPhone and Apple TV (and previously for my Treo 650, at much lower quality). It’s excellent, but takes a long time, and slows down the whole system while compressing. My PowerBook G4 wasn’t powerful enough to do H.264 compression in reasonable time, so I got into the habit of ripping the DVDs on the Mac with Mac The Ripper, copying them to the server, converting on the server, and copying back down to the iPhone through iTunes on the laptop. Transferring a full DVD via gigabit Ethernet takes under 10 minutes, which is why we have 3 1/2 gigabit Ethernet switches (8-port, a pair of 5-ports, and the 3 ports built into the Time Capsule) in a 3 1/2 person (2 grown-ups, a 5-year-old, and the cat) home.

Since then I’ve upgraded the laptop and replaced the server, so they’re now both 2.4GHz Core Duos, but I still prefer to avoid the load on my personal machine — especially now that we have an Apple TV, which likes large high-quality video files. The MacBook Pro runs HandBrake.app (Mac GUI), while the server runs HandBrakeCLI (Linux).

HandBrakeCLI is designed to convert individual files and is awkward for converting whole DVDs. Fortunately I found MediaForkCLI-batch.sh, a wrapper which is good at converting all the real titles from one or more DVDs; it automatically ignores short titles such as previews, and titles that have already been transcoded. Unfortunately MediaForkCLI-batch.sh is languishing, and hasn’t been updated for HandBrake v0.92, but it was straightforward to update it to the new syntax.

In the process I made some changes and added an alternate version with different settings optimized for our Apple TV. On the Linux box (named inspector), the scripts are ~/bin/appletv.sh & ~/bin/iphone.sh. I put newly ripped files into ~/tivo-inspector/input/ on inspector, and these scripts rip whatever they find there, generating files in ~/tivo-inspector/output/.

On the MacBook Pro, I keep video files in ~/tivo, and ~/tivo/tivo-inspector is a symbolic link to tivo-inspector on inspector, the server — mounted via AFP. This makes it easy to move files back and forth.

For convenience, I have a couple aliases on the MacBook Pro which log into the Linux machine, start a screen session, and run the appropriate script. This means that if I disconnect the laptop, I can later ssh back into the server and use screen -DR to reconnect to my running conversion session. When the conversion is done, the aliases open the remote folder in the Finder. I move the files back up out of input & output, drop them onto iTunes, and then either Sync the Apple TV (which gets copies of my whole iTunes Library), or sync them to the iPhone.

The scripts are appletv.sh & iphone.sh.

If you use these scripts, you should carefully review the encoding settings. In particular, I encode Apple TV audio to AAC stereo, because our Apple TV is connected to a pair of stereo speakers with a subwoofer; they cannot handle Dolby Pro Logic, which is better for most TVs.

You will also have to update paths in the scripts — to the input and output directories, and to HandBrakeCLI itself — to make them work on your own system.

Here are the aliases in sh/bash format; change the equal signs to spaces for csh/tcsh:

alias appletv="ssh -t inspectore time screen bin/appletv.sh; open ~/tivo/tivo-inspector"
alias  iphone="ssh -t inspectore time screen bin/iphone.sh;  open ~/tivo/tivo-inspector"

Our (cheap) 23″ LCD TV’s composite input gives lousy color. On the other hand, we’ve gotten loud buzzing noises a few times from its HDMI input, so we had our Time Warner (Scientific Atlanta) HD DVR connected to the composite inputs, and dealt with the lousy color and poor brightness. We also paid an additional $20.10/month for the second cable connection and DVR (Time Warner charges $9.95/month more for either HD or non-HD DVR than for a non-DVR cable box [HD or non-HD]). Now I wonder if the problem was with the DVR’s HDMI output all along. Oh, well — it no longer matters.

We do still pay $66.19/month for digital cable service upstairs. This lets Julia watch a couple kids’ shows a day, and Annette & Amy check the Weather Channel. Our (pre-paid) TiVo also records the shows we like, so we can watch upstairs, but we generally watch downstairs. Neither of us knows if we’ll watch more upstairs, or pay a few dollars a month to watch downstairs. It’s an experiment.

Since we watch most of our “TV” from (ripped) DVDs, and our Time Warner signal is very unreliable, and their service is lousy, I returned the DVR on Saturday. That $20.10/month should pay for a Netflix upgrade and/or several shows from the iTunes Store (no longer the “iTunes Music Store”, I noticed — I wondered how long that would take, but missed the actual switch).

Good candidates for iTunes ducats — (certain to total less the $241.20/year we’d been paying for the downstairs DVR):

• $10: 16 consecutive episodes (4 weeks) of The Daily Show ($2/ea) — we watch it infrequently these days.
• $20: a season of South Park.
• $26: a Torchwood season.
• Doctor Who isn’t available from iTunes, but we can watch it in VLC or upstairs, on cable.
• free: Battlestar Galactica (on cable, upstairs)
• free: The Sarah Jane Adventures (upstairs)
• free: Robot Chicken (downloaded and watched on a laptop)

The TiVo S2 has a built-in web server, and I use tivodecode to extract MPEG video, but it won’t play in QuickTime Player. They do play in the redoubtable VLC, but it’s not quite as polished. This is not presently annoying enough to justify purchase of Toast, which can convert .TiVo files for QuickTime or iPhone, but I am not sure if DRM would be a problem; they don’t provide any detail.

We haven’t yet purchased anything through (or for) the Apple TV yet — perhaps this week we’ll try it.

We got an Apple TV this week, and it’s excellent, although I tripped over some serious network problems (more Mac problems than Apple TV problems, actually).

Compared to our TiVo (upstairs) or our Time Warner Scientific Atlanta HD DVR, the Apple TV is surpringly advanced. The SA box keeps losing signal (probably TWC’s wiring at fault, but they keep not fixing it), and is much larger (and noisier) than the Apple TV; basically it’s a piece of junk, but it’s substantially cheaper than another TiVo. We’ll probably get rid of this DVR and our downstairs cable connection in favor of the Apple TV very soon.

Comparing the Apple TV to the TiVo is more interesting, not least because people have been comparing the two companies for years, and keep demanding that Apple build a TiVo killer (both before and after the Apple TV release). Given how badly cable companies stink, it’s hard to believe Apple should embroil themselves in this mess, but they seem to be doing okay with the iPhone, and phone companies aren’t much better than cable companies. People also want Apple TVs to play DVDs, which is an obvious feature, but would be less profitable for Apple than iTunes Store rentals and purchases. But back to the comparisons.

The SA DVR has exactly one advantage over the TiVo (aside from price): its “Ouija board” — when you need to “type” with a very limited keyboard, the TiVo makes it possible but not easy. The SA box improves the experience dimming (and skipping over) invalid letters (which would spell words that don’t match the list of available shows). The Apple TV, interestingly, has an unimpressive on-screen keyboard and a very limited remote (it’s the same one Macs ship with, meaning 6 buttons: 4 directions, play/pause, and menu/back). But it’s easier to use, because the Apple TV doesn’t lag behind user input as much (it doesn’t have to match input against all possible titles, remember), and tactile response is very good; I only made one typo when entering usernames of several friends, and it was easy to correct, even though Delete is an onscreen selection (no Clear key, as on the TiVo remote).

This brings us to another interesting comparison: the SA box has Internet connectivity (I think it’s channel 996 that shows the current IP), but doesn’t use it for anything except the electronic program guide and purchasing pay-per-view (which we don’t do). The TiVo adds TiVo-to-TiVo transfers of shows (we only have one, so haven’t tried it), scheduling via http://www.tivo.com/tco/, an unsupported web server which allows downloading encrypted/watermarked television shows, and the ability to run applications from a server (either at home or across the Internet). Applications allow you to play music or slide shows from a Mac or Windows PC, or slide shows (from your Picasa or Yahoo Pictures account — but not Flickr, even though Yahoo owns Flickr!). Unfortunately, you cannot combine these applications, so it’s impossible to listen to music while watching a slide show on the TiVo. TiVo has apparently dropped support for third-party development.

The Apple TV, on the other hand, does this all much better. Out of the box, it comes with a set of high-quality flower photos, which run as a slide show when idle. Music can be a) played from the Apple TV’s hard drive, b) streamed from iTunes on a Mac or PC (controlled from the Apple TV), or c) streamed from within iTunes in AirTunes+ mode — iTunes sends audio and ID3-style metadata including cover art over the network to the Apple TV. In any of these modes, track information is displayed onscreen, and if the Apple TV is left idle, the it starts showing a slide show (ours is photos of Julia, of course); this doesn’t interfere with music playback at all.

Compared to TiVo’s lousy support for Yahoo Photos (!?!) and Picasa (they want you to create your own account and log into it before downloading any photos), the Apple TV supports Flickr and .Mac photos, as well as the owner’s own via iTunes, of course. There is a clear hierarchy of user experience here: no support on SA/TWC; poor slide shows or mediocre media streaming on TiVo; high-quality music and photos on the Apple TV, pre-loaded with nice photos for a superior out-of-box experience.

One of the few things I regret about the Apple TV is that I bought it from Apple; I didn’t get an educational or corporate discount, so I could have gotten it faster for $15 less from Amazon (via Prime), but when I tried to cancel the order at store.apple.com it had already gone through (less than 5 minutes after pressing Submit). This should be the worst problem I have with the new gadget!

Unfortunately, it wasn’t. The Apple TV would not synchronize content from iTunes; I was able to play music through it (AirTunes), but it mostly refused to show up in iTunes’ DEVICES list. I got a warning about port 3689 possibly being blocked by a firewall, which I initially ignored, knowing I had specifically allowed iTunes to connect through Leopard’s “socket firewall”.

pepper@prowler:~$ grep 3689 /etc/services 
daap            3689/udp    # Digital Audio Access Protocol
daap            3689/tcp    # Digital Audio Access Protocol

The second time I got this message, with iTunes’ Preferences claiming the Apple TV was synching even while it wasn’t fully accessible, I did some searching, and found out that indeed several people needed to open up the socket firewall before Apple TV synching would work. I did this, and lo and behold, our Apple TV now has the proper 12gb of video, 51gb of audio, and 3gb of photos it should. It’s bad that iTunes wasn’t properly whitelisted in the firewall, but it’s much worse that people need to turn off a security feature to make the Apple TV work. Fortunately, after I switched the firewall back to “Set access for specific services and applications” (where it should be), the Apple TV continued to appear and synch properly; bug filed with Apple.

That brings up another bug: we have a Gigabit Ethernet network (3.5 switches — 8-port, a couple 5-port, and the 3-port built into our Time Capsule) and an 802.11n network, but unfortunately the wireless doesn’t work right. At 5GHz, I keep losing my connection; at 2.4GHz it stays up everywhere except the guest room (which has no Ethernet), but speeds throughout the apartment are poor and connectivity is less reliable than our 802.11g Airport Extreme network. Since I haven’t fixed this yet, I much prefer to do large transfers over the wired network.

The Apple TV connects to a running copy of iTunes to download content; in my case, most of the connections (once I got past the firewall issue) were to the AirPort IP address, which prevented them from making progress on the 65gb transfer. I had to disable AirPort to force the Apple TV over to the Ethernet connection, which was much faster; after it was done I re-enabled AirPort, but that’s another bug (also reported, and yes, I do have System Preferences set to prefer Ethernet to AirPort).

Our original TiVo (hacked with web & FTP servers, 100mbps Ethernet, and 120gb hard drive) started showing a scrambled image; this has happened three times in the past, each time requiring drive replacement. The process is sufficiently awkward that when I put in the current 120gb drive, I decided to replace the TiVo entirely next time, rather than the drive — with a MythTV or something else.

After TiVo’s current promo, a TiVo Series 2 Dual Tuner (80gb) cost $80, which is entirely reasonable. I’ve been watching mostly ripped DVDs on the iPhone lately, so I was less worried about the fact that S2 and later TiVos encrypt the media files on disk, and were significantly harder to hack.

After installing the new TiVo, we discovered the problem is actually our Time Warner Cable signal again. They’re supposed to be here this week, and hopefully will be able to fix our problem, although we don’t have much confidence. They scramble the analog signal, thus breaking the new TiVo’s signature feature (dual tuners — the second one supports unencrypted analog cable, if we had it).

As it turns out, the new TiVo is a bit faster and much easier to download from; and onscreen UI is more capable and prettier. Unfortunately, it’s also crowded with junk (unwanted features) we cannot remove, but they’re easy enough to skip over and don’t impact the normal TV-watching experience. I’ve downloaded and watched a bunch of music videos, which is nice since MTV doesn’t show music videos any more.

Oh, and getting MPEGs out of the TiVo seems easier too — tyc was problematic, but tivodecode works, so long as I watch in VLC instead of QuickTime Player (which only shows the first frame, while playing back all the audio).

I’ve been waiting for an 80gb+ iPod with a larger screen since the 80gb iPod video came out in October 2005, shortly after I got the 60gb iPod photo — which has been full since then. Today Apple presented me with another dilemma:

• $350 160gb iPod classic
• $400 16gb iPod touch
• $400 8gb iPhone (with 2-year contract)

I ruled the 160gb iPod out because I watch a lot of video (mostly from the TiVo) on the subway, and I really want a better screen than the Treo 650’s 320×320. Both the iPod touch and the iPhone offer 480×320 — so twice as many usable pixels as the 320×240 iPod classic or Treo (movies aren’t square, so 1/4 of the Treo’s pixels are completely unused for video) — with H.264 support. I expect quality to be three times as good as what I currently watch.

Then it was down to the 16gb touch vs. the 8gb iPhone, for the same purchase price. Fortunately, I spend most of my time at home or on campus, where I have 802.11g available — EDGE is useful for lunch and walking between the train and home/office, or road trips (less than once per month). If Rockefeller didn’t own my Treo 650 and pay for Verizon service, I might have gotten the iPhone, but instead I opted for the 16gb iTouch.

Actually, more than dealing with Rockefeller about the phone, it came down to the fact that replacing my iPod is much easier than replacing my Treo — I use Plucker a lot, and Vindigo, Web Confidential, TomTom Navigator & Google Mobile Maps not infrequently. The real flaw with the iPod touch compared to my 60gb iPod is storage capacity, and I’m not willing to wait any more for a super-iPod with the large screen and large hard drive. I don’t know why Apple won’t sell it, but after 2 years it’s time to move on. I still keep my music on home and work systems via rsync, and I just decided to bite the bullet and deal with having a subset of my music when I travel.

The reality is that I will listen to / watch the iPod more than I have been doing, because it’s currently tethered to a Mac in FireWire Disk Mode most of the time, with my Eudora Folder mounted. I can’t take it with me when I walk out without quitting Eudora (which can take a while to close windows and purge the Junk folder), unmounting it from the Desktop, waiting to get the all-clear, and then removing the Dock cable. As a result, I only use the iPod for music when traveling. I briefly tried using a flash drive (first-gen iPod Shuffle) for this purpose, but writing was way too slow.

I’ve been carrying a single Eudora Folder with me since my PowerBook Duo 230 (33MHz, 640×400 greyscale 1992-1994), which I carried around to have a consistent mailbox, even after the keyboard and screen broke (I used it with an external keyboard and monitor). I switched to carrying a Zip disk (and perfected my backup system — Zips were notoriously unreliable), briefly to Orb disks, and back to Zip when it became clear that Orbs were even worse. I switched to a portable 10gb hard drive until I got a 10gb iPod. Now I will have to find a new way to keep track of to-do email — time to try out Eudora 8!

It will be great to escape Apple’s broken Palm HotSync support. iPod touch sync should be much more robust, since it uses different versions of the Mac apps, with the same data formats.

I was surprised to notice that the iPod touch’s home screen looks different than the iPhone’s — the touch uses a Leopard-style shelf, while the iPhone’s is Dashboard-inspired. Likely this will be resolved in the next iPhone update. It’s somewhat more puzzling that the iPhone supports Audible formats 1, 2, & 3, while all current iPods support formats 2, 3, & 4

Time-Warner Cable was here again today. They have called at least half a dozen times since their last visit in May, twice to confirm appointments we hadn’t made, several times during dinner to schedule appointments (the last time he was unable to actually schedule the appointment, though, as his computer wasn’t working), and consistently failed to make promised follow-up calls.

Today they just showed up and buzzed, without the automated appointment-confirmation call yesterday — fortunately we were around. When they arrived, we couldn’t get channels 3, 6, 8, or 10 on either TV.

They ran new wire from Song (next door) over the building and back down, separating us from a neighbor who was apparently on the same coax. When they left, our upstairs (non-HD) TV & TiVo seemed fine, but our downstairs TV was still showing video artifacts and occasionally buzzing loudly, although we were at least getting picture on all channels. Apparently the run is so long they need an amplifier, but didn’t have one. So tomorrow someone should be back to install an amplifier (supposed to take 10 minutes), which should fix our downstairs reception. We’ll see if this also raises the signal:noise threshold, which the phone rep I spoke to said was a hard rule, but both field technicians have said was meaningless.

We had a couple Time Warner DVRs. One Scientific Atlanta 8000 (non-HD) DVR upstairs on a Sony CRT (mostly watched by Julia these days), and an Scientific Atlanta 8300 HD DVR on our (lemon) Sceptre 23″ 720p LCD TV.

They crash periodically, and Time Warner tells us just to reboot them and not worry about it. They are both inferior in numerous ways to our TiVo Series 1 (which is TiVo’s original model — so much for learning from the competition!). In early April, they both started failing to tune channels, and crashing a lot. We called Time Warner, they sent someone out, he “replaced a splitter” and left. A few days later we had more problems, so a second tech came out, “replaced a splitter” and yelled at Amy about a cabling problem to the TV (nothing to do with the issue, but it apparently caused him to waste some time). He left, but the problems stayed. In particular, a couple days later we got channel 1, but not 2-9 or 81 — I didn’t check beyond that.

Last week, I called Time Warner. The nice lady on the phone told me about channel 996, which provides status info on the DVR (including MAC, IP, and signal strength). She explained that my 33 “Reverse RF” (upstream?) dBmV (signal:noise) value was out of tolerance (35-65), and this was definitely the problem. So she sent someone on Tuesday to fix it. She also said “I’ll put that number in the case notes, so they won’t have any choice but to fix it.” Foreshadowing! She also mentioned that since this was the third call they were supposed to send a foreman, but they did not.

Tired of not being able to get video onto my TiVo, I also asked to have our non-HD DVR replaced with a plain (digital) cable box, so I could reinstall our old TiVo S1. The TiVo has an upgraded hard drive, 10/100 Ethernet, and web server; so I can extract TV shows, convert to MPEG, and watch them on my Treo (it makes my 2-hour-daily subway commute go much faster). Unfortunately, this wasn’t something that could be scheduled with the repair, so it was set for Thursday, at a $30 charge (it would have cost me $10 each way to get a cab to their storefront). Weak!

Tuesday, the repair tech came, disconnected a splitter (the same one that had been replaced by each of the previous techs, I presume, but he wouldn’t say), and (with me) climbed up to the roof tracing out the cable. We then went into Song next door (the cable comes up from their yard, but it’s behind a fence — awkward! He re-crimped a few cable ends.

I asked about the signal strength (now up to 37 instead of 33, but still obviously not very good on either TV). The HD DVR crashed “tuning” to channel 7 (the 5th time Tuesday), so he replaced it (which I was expecting). He insisted that the signal:noise number was meaningless (several times), and we got all the channels, so he left. A half-hour later, Amy was tuning through the channels, and some weren’t coming in again. At least the new DVR didn’t crash on bad channels, just showed black. Talk about lowered expectations!

Oh, and the phone rep (when I scheduled the appointments) had promised me a credit for a month of interrupted service, but instead we got a bill for the full monthly rate. Amy called and the rep mumbled something about billing cycles, but the bill was dated several days after I was told the credit had been applied. Something to worry about next month…

Tuesday night we got a call from a Time Warner, asking if we were satisfied. NO Could they send a tech during the Thursday window, when I would be home? No. The TWC rep would call back, because he couldn’t get a foreman that soon. We’ll see how (if) they handle it. We currently have some channels, but not others.

It’s enough to make us want to switch to RCN or DirecTV.

The pathetic irony here is that our problems have been a walk in the park compared to Alex’s tale of woe. He spent months helping TWC figure out why their CableCards didn’t work, but they didn’t have any good ones to give him, so left him with incompatible CableCards. Last we heard, he thought they might have been fixed remotely, but wasn’t willing to reboot to test this theory.

PS-An oddity is that downloding tystreams from the TiVo is slower than it used to be — long pauses when nothing downloads, and generally just slower than it should be. I thought it was due to being uplinked through an AirPort Extreme via WDS, but connecting my PBG4 directly to the TiVo via an old 100mbps hub didn’t help; something with the ancient TiVo, I guess.

Update: Our phone service was screwed up Wednesday. After several calls with Verizon (where they told us it was an inside problem, and that we should get a new phone, and that they would come Monday to fix it, but expected to charge us $90 to fix an inside wiring problem), someone showed up unexpected Friday morning and replaced an outside cable. Aside from the unpleasant similarities between Verizon and Time Warner, I’m convinced that the TWC repair tech caused the phone problem when he was tracing the coax up and down the outside of our building.

Friday night I got 2 750gb hard drives for the Power Mac G5 I brought home from work. I was very impressed by the elegance of its hard drive bays (which have since been replaced by carriers in the Mac Pro), and it’s much faster than anything else in our house (until Amy gets her MacBook tomorrow — that might be faster), so I’m doing a little iMovie work on it.

I’ve installed Leopard Server several times already, having some trouble with networking/naming, largely around the fact that the Power Mac has an internal hostname & IP, an external hostname & IP, and a DNS hostname for the external IP which didn’t agree. Mac OS X Server is picky about hostnames & IPs, and ironically this weekend I found and fixed a similar problem on my PMG4, which dates back to when it became the production (www|mail).reppep.com (shortly after 10.4.0 [Server] was released); I noticed the old name kept showing up in odd places, and now I know why. changeip is your friend.

I just checked, and I have sent 24 messages to Apple since Friday night; probably 1/4 are updates for existing reports. Most of them are about very small points.

The new box will be a Leopard Server testbed until it’s released, and then the production (www|mail).reppep.com, with much more disk capacity and general “oomph”.

For the stuff I had planned a week ago, I’ve done most of it, but the TiVo isn’t connected yet (it’s sitting under a table waiting for me to take the time, but the APExpress is ready to go); Amy’s MacBook arrives tomorrow, and I just sent my original MacBook Pro to Apple to get its backlight fixed and perhaps battery replaced; once it’s back I am considering sending the new 23″ CD in to have its backlight replaced, as it’s got an annoying flicker in the lower right quadrant.

The rest is done; I can now post images to Julia’s site at 100mbps from my PowerBook, rather than AirPort speeds, and I am considering moving the GE switch to the inside, since that would let the PowerBook run at full speed (and most bulk transfers are betweeen it and the server), and obviously the front side of the network is throttled by our 3mbps/768kbps DSL circuit. But it requires me to use different names for everything to get top speed and bring an old 100mbps switch back online, so I’m not hurrying to implement. I can see the GE is working, though — I just moved a 1.35gb iMovie project from the PMG5 to the PMG4, and it peaked at 300mbps, averaging half that. After I invert the network I’ll see if the PBG4 can do faster transfers than the PMG4.

I decided to hold onto the Dell PC, since nobody else wants it and it’s a fine machine for XP or Linux; I’ll just leave it in a corner until I come up with a worthwhile use for it.

It’s very nice to have an iPod on the stereo again.

I was discussing this week’s plans for computer rearrangements with Amy, and was amazed when I listed them all. Most of these will happen this week.

1. I’m getting a Mac Pro at work; it has shipped and should be in soon.
2. I got the (very nice) 23″ Apple display already; I’ll connect it as soon as I get the Mac Pro.
3. I’ll bring my current PMG5 home; it will become a Leopard testbed, and after Leopard’s release will become www.reppep.com.
4. The PMG5 has a 17″ Apple LCD with ADC connector, which will come home with it (I don’t have anything else at work with an ADC connector, and nobody wants a 4-year-old 17″ display).
5. I bought a 20″ LCD at work a few months ago, but the ATI video card Apple shipped with the PMG5 can’t drive it and a 17″ display properly. I got a replacement card, thinking it was defective, but the (expensive) replacement part had the exact same problem, so it’s a design flaw with that model. I brought the 20″ display home and brought my own personal 19″ display to work. I will bring the 20″ back to work.
6. I will bring the 19″ LCD back home (I’ll miss the pixels for iPhoto, but otherwise it’s fine).
7. Amy now suddenly needs a new computer (preferably one which can run Windows), and our finances have just gotten tight again, so I have deferred my purchase, and instead bought her a MacBook, which should arrive this week.
8. At work, I have an original MacBook Pro which I use for a) ssh, b) Safari, c) Leopard testing, & d) Parallels/VMware hosting & testing. I’ll bring my own PBG4 in for ssh & Safari, do Parallels/VMware on the new Mac Pro, and move Leopard testing to the PMG5 at home.
9. I’ll bring the MBP home, where it will be much faster than the PBG4.
10. I’m replacing our 100mbit switch (the old gigabit switch died a year ago) with a new 8-port gigabit switch — for $35 ($50 before rebate!!!).
11. I’m running Ethernet to the loft where my desk and printer are; this will free up an AirPort Base Station currently connecting the printer to our home LAN via WDS.
12. I will replace our upstairs DVR with our hacked Series 1 TiVo, so I can once again extract video to watch on the subway with TCPMP; I will use the newly-freed-up ABS to connect the TiVo’s Ethernet.
13. My 60gb iPod photo should be back soon, so I’ll be moving my Eudora Folder (email) back off the old 10gb (which was mine, then Amy’s, then attached to the stereo to share).

Then later this month, we’ll pack up our offices and move everything to the Super-Tent. I’ll be moving the Mac Pro and PBG4 w/ 2 displays, and getting rid of my Sun Blade 100, Dell Windows PC, & Microway Linux PC — replacing them with VMs on the Mac Pro.

Thanks to Sci Fi for bringing the new Doctor Who series across the Atlantic.

• It’s on its 3rd hard drive (this one is 120gb, but I was unable to find 5400rpm).
• It has a 100mbit Ethernet TurboNet card (previously I had an old-skool 10mbit TiVoNet card).
• It is accessible (on our private home network) via telnet, tivoftp (normal Linux filesystems, not MFS filesystems), and HTTP (TiVoWeb 1.0, with MFSStream v.98).

We watch all our TV on the PowerBook (TiVo2Go only supports Windows as of January 18th, 2005). Unfortunately there are several issues with sucking video off the TiVo onto a PowerBook. TiVo tools seem to be most advanced on Windows, where there are several slick tools for decoding, transcoding, and streaming. Next is Linux, and least-advanced are the Mac OS X tools.

I use MFSStream (a plug-in for TiVoWeb 1.0) to download .ty files through Safari, and tyc (which usually works, but not always) to strip the extra TiVo data and convert them to MPEG2, viewable in QuickTime (with the MPEG2 plug-in) or VLC. I’d like to upgrade to TiVoWeb 1.2.1, but haven’t found a compatible MFSStream module.

Unfortunately, MFSStream generates bogus content-length headers for recordings over 2gb (feature movies). Both curl (latest version, from fink) & wget can ignore content-length, but the human-visible URLs in MFSStream aren’t usable. My current workaround is to click on the link in Safari, which produces a 0-byte .ty file in the Downloads window. Control-clicking on the empty file in this window provides a Copy Address command, which can then be fetched with something like “curl --ignore-content-length -O http://tivo:2000/longpath.ty “.