Planet TLLTS

Tik-Tok of Oz (Books of Wonder) by L. Frank Baum

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It was great to be back to reading the Oz series with Avery. The cast of characters this time is fresh with Betsy Bobbin, Hank the Mule, Ozga and the Oogaboo entourage. Even more, we have our favourites Shaggy Man and Tik-Tok returning to round out the group. Ruggedo as the nemesis of the book always makes for good times.

How it started and where the story while it flowed was surprising to the both of us. The flow was great, that it was, and the pace held our attention without fail.

Finally the reason that has been burning in our minds for 8 or so books now is answered! Why Toto does not talk! That alone is worth the read! Oh and don’t forget to catch one of the earliest uses of a wireless phone I’ve ever read in a book. Cool stuff!

Again, I must iterate, this series is awesome. There is so much in here and so much that you can see many genres have borrowed from.



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Yesterday I spent the day at the 2011 NYC Maker Faire on the grounds of the NY Hall of Science in Queens, New York. I’ve seen videos of the Maker Faire in the San Francisco area for years and have been very envious. It looks like a very cool event where people are encouraged to make projects involving technology, art and anything cool and share them with others. There’s a great DIY spirit with a strong emphasis on teaching children to learn science skills and try to apply them to the real world. So me and my 7 year old son jumped into the car for the 2 hour drive into NYC. The very first area we came upon was the young maker’s pavilion. We spent a good hour checking out the tables and the various projects people had set up for the kids. We then checked out the live sized mouse trap. I got the sense the people behind it were performance artists types (tattoos & body piercing in abundance). It was a fun performance that a pretty large crowd of people enjoyed. As we walked into the main area we saw the the huge fire breathing metal dragon sculpture that we’ve seen in videos of the other Maker Faires:

We then checked a lot of the robotics stuff. My son was very excited to try controlling a human sized robot that a local high school team had built and entered into a national robotics competition. There was a ton of good stuff to see. My favourite were the Tesla Coils moving in sync with loud music. The videos of them on youtube don’t do them justice. You need to see them live:

One big negative related to Maker Faire was the overall lack of Linux. A lot of the vendors were espousing “open” like it was the buzzword bingo word of day. Sadly I did not see anyone running Linux in any capacity. I say it was about 90% windows and about 10% OSX. I did see see a ton of Android phones. It kinda irks me that an event about hacking, programming and sharing with a large “open” mindset is pretty oblivious to what F/OSS is all about. I went to one booth where they were doing CAD designs and building sculptures out of laser cut cardboard sheets. I spoke to the woman manning the booth and she told me they were using a program called Autodesk 123D that was “free”. She was emphatic that the designs were “open” and “sharable”. I asked her if it was a cross platform application and she nodded yes. When I got home in the evening I was very disappointed to find out that it’s windows only. Even worse it’s not even open, it’s just shareware. This trend of loosely using the terms “open” & “free” is a bit disturbing. Overall I think Maker Faire is a great event that should be checked out if you’re into technology & science. I just hope that in future events Linux is more prevalent and a more authentic F/OSS mentality takes root. It’s a bit sad when companies use marketing speak just to get into people’s “tech pants”.

My Silicondust HDHomerun Prime finally arrived this past Wednesday. Silicondust had some delays getting this product out the door and having a hurricane blowing up the east coast the same weekend as my shipment moved was not conductive to a quick delivery. The original HDHomerun was a dual unencrypted QAM/over the air digital tv tuner that had two co-axial inputs. It was a very solid device that ran for years on my MythTV system without any issues. The new Silicondust HDHomerun Prime is a cablecard compatible triple digital tuner. It has only one co-axial connection but you can record up to three digital channels at once! The big caveat is that you’ll be able to record encrypted cable channels that have their DRM flag set as “copy-freely”. What’s flagged as copy-freely will vary depending on your cable company. Most cable companies will leave everything as copy-freely with the exception of “premium” movie channels like HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, Starz, etc.. On the extreme negative end is Time Warner (in NYC &other markets) which encrypts all the channels and flags them as “copy-once” or “copy-never” regardless if the channel is “premium” or not. Your best bet is to do a little research to see where on this scale your cable provider lies and make an informed decision. I had a cablecard from RCN sitting on my desk for the last couple of weeks in anticipation of the Prime’s arrival. The cablecard setup process is threefold:
Activation, Pairing, Provisioning

Activation turns on the card. Pairing puts the cablecard as a registered device on the cable provider’s system. Provisioning is where the card is given access to all the content tiers you should be receiving. I’ve heard of lots of horror stories where the cablecard gets stuck in an unusable state somewhere along the setup. When I picked up the card up from RCN they gave me a piece of paper with the card describing the activation process. First call one number which will send a hard reset to all your cable boxes & cablecards. I had my Prime connected and ready to go and called the number. I saw my cable boxes getting reset. The HDHomerun Prime has an embedded webserver which you can access from any web browser. The pages show various status message such as activation, pairing and whether or not any of the tuners are tuned to channels along with signal strength. On one page I saw a message saying to call RCN’s activation number along with information for the card such as Mac address, serial number, device ID, etc.. I called the number and spoke to a service rep. I indicated I had a cablecard activation and mentioned I was using a network attached tv tuner device. I read off three sets of numbers to the rep and she read them back to me. She then put me on hold for about five minutes. After she returned she asked whether or not I could see any channels. The old hdhomerun_config_gui application somewhat works with the Prime. When you start the application you can see the three tuners but you can’t scan and tune them from inside the application. Open up a terminal window and tell the prime to tune to a certain channel:

hdhomerun_config 13104608 set /tuner0/vchannel 446

13104608 is the tuner ID and 446 is the channel I’m tuning to.

In the gui you will see a dropdown for the channels on the frequency you just tuned into. Pick one of the channels and hit the view button. VLC should now fire up and display the channel if it’s marked as copy freely. Update: I hear that if you download & compile the latest version of the hdhomerun_config directly from Silicondust it should work without having to do this. The version in the ubuntu repos is older.

I then proceeded to successfully tune in a bunch of different channels. As expected none of the movie channels would tune in. The customer rep then asked me to reboot my tuner to make sure the provisioning remained. I restarted the HDHomerun Prime. One minor issue I encountered is that the Prime has to run with dynamic IP assignment. So I had to turn my router’s dhcpd server. As far as I can tell the prime cannot be setup with static IP. After rebooting the Prime all my channels were still there. So after a 15 minute telephone call with RCN my Prime was working as it should. I then went about setting up the Prime as a capture device in MythTV. If you’re running MythTV 0.24.1 or greater the Prime works out of the box. The setup is pretty straightforward:
HDHomerun Prime Setup in MythTV

The setup in MythTV took about another 15 minutes with the majority of that time waiting for mythfilldatabase to complete the population of the channel listings for the new tuners.

Once the setup was completed I went for the gusto and scheduled 4 simultaneous HD recordings (1 on PVR-1212, 3 on the Prime). While all 4 recordings were going I then went to my family room and watched another HD recording on my Zotac based MythTV frontend. There were no noticeable hiccups, stutters, pixelization or audio out of sync issues. After the recordings finished I then watched all of them and they were perfect. The picture quality is pretty much identical to the cable box.

After a couple days of heavy use I’m very satisfied with the HDHomerun Prime. I’m now able to record a ton of HD content. While I wish Silicondust had released this product sooner you can’t fault them after encountering some manufacturing issues from their factory in China. The product itself is a solid successor to the original HDHomerun.

Sadly it seems Windows Media Center users are encountering a ton of issues with the Prime:
Silicon Dust forum

Whether those issues are DRM related or simply platform stability issues is of little concern to Linux users. They’re in dreamland if they expect patches from Microsoft in a timely manner to help alleviate their woes. They made their bed and they’ll have to sleep in it. Maybe some Windows MCE users will finally smarten up and become Linux/MythTV users? One can only hope they come to their senses.

The last time I relearned HTML was in the HTML 4.01 Transitional days, so I was excited to get my hands on some information to help me play with HTML 5. Let me first say that this book assumes that you have some frame of reference for HTML and is probably better suited for someone with a little familiarity, rather than a complete noob. With that in mind, I thought the book did a great job of covering not only the things that have fallen away from HTML, but the new things in HTML 5 as well. There are *plenty* of examples posted throughout the book to help not only keep you interested, but provide practical code snippets for you to use s well. I think the topic itself is fascinating and this book has quickly become a dog-eared reference for my exploration. In fact, the only real negative that I found is there is a lot of javascript in the book, which probably deserves it’s own book, or at lest it’s own chapter. Either way, I feel this book is well worth the price. It certainly has come in handy for me!

Song of Susannah by Stephen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was very much surprised how easily I got in to and enjoyed almost every page of this book. I was skeptical when he wrote himself into the story but I felt he handled that very well. I was not at all put off him being a very integral part of the story.

The whole interplay between Susannah, Mia, and Detta was great. I thought I would tire of these three characters but King pulled it off, gaining my sympathy for each character’s plight.

One thing that did disappoint me was the serious lack of Jake and Callahan throughout most of the story. They were relegated to the last third and even that was more Susannah and King than these two characters. If anything, the setup to the final book has me eager to jump and and find out what happens with them.

This series has not at all disappointed. One more to go, and I think I will be sad when it is over, just like the end of the Harry Potter series. Perhaps I will read more Stephen King books, especially his book on writing, that I will.



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It has been 6 years or more since I got a really decent Linux laptop, and, after giving my macbook to my daughter for college, it was high time to do so.

I set out browsing the web for the perfect Linux laptop from places like System76 and ZaReason, who have absolutely lovely and brilliant laptops to offer, and then I checked my checkbook. Ugh. So, I decided to go to BestBuy where I have a line of credit and 18 month financing. Thanks economy.

It’s quite possible to buy a really expensive laptop at BestBuy too, but, trying to avoid that I searched around for the best (ie cheapest) decent deal I could find. That happened to be the Gateway NV57H26U. This 15.6″ core i5, 4gb ram, 500gb hdd machine looked to be quite a winner for the paltry sum of $450, especially since any comparable machine was at LEAST $100 more anywhere you looked (even online).

Of course *I* will not run windows, which the machine comes with, so I took it home, held my breath (hey, I can return it right) and stuffed in a Linux Mint 11 dvd. Within 30 minutes I was completely installed and running – AND FAST. Did I mention fast? You wouldn’t believe how fast this laptop feels to me, especially since the last one is sporting a celeron at 1.6ghz. This machine is a quad core 2.3-2.9ghz machine and it absolutely screams. What a nice change of pace. Why, I bet that if it were legal to use handbrake to copy your DVDs you could rip one in about 5 minutes

This thing has a glossy black lid which collects fingerprints just as you would imagine it would. The screen is absolutely HUGE to me at 1366×768, and it is SO BRIGHT that when I am sitting in a dim room, the brightness of the screen drowns out the keyboard lettering so much that I find it hard to type. No I am not a touch typist. Yes, I wish I were. Speaking of the keyboard, it has keys sort of like macbook keys. They are flat, squarish and separated nicely. I find it a pleasure to type on, when I can see it that is. It also sports not only a full size kb, but has enough room to include a full number pad as well. The machine has hdmi out, 3 usb, vga, gigabit ethernet, BGN wireless, webcam, and an sd card reader. It sounds pretty nice as far as laptops go as well. I have tested everything on here and verified it to work with the exception of the hdmi out, the sd card reader and the microphone.

Now on to the problems… Every machine has its quirks and this one is no exception. First up is the keyboard. While it’s nice to use and type on, they made it so that in order to use the function keys as actual function keys, you need to hold down the (Fn) button. If you do not, the keys are mapped to things like media controls, brightness controls, hardware controls and the like. It’s not that big of a deal but I just found it odd that it wasn’t the other way around. The next annoyance is the trackpad. Now it’s a nice looking and feeling trackpad, however, no matter what I do it’s detected as a ps/2 mouse. From my research, this appears to be a current kernel bug, so I am hoping that it’ll be addressed in the near future. I just hate to waste a multitouch trackpad like that. Lastly is the video. The video works fine for the most part. it’s one of those Sandybridge Intel HD 3000 video hardware and I believe support is not entirely all there yet. It does not seem that I have accelerated video, although I am not a gamer and don’t use it anyhow. Other than that it looks clean, crisp and sharp and has no problems keeping up with full motion video that I can see.

What’s Good;
FAST, good looking, FAST, nice kb feel, big bright screen, number pad, inexpensive, FAST.

What’s Not:
The way the function keys are laid out, support for the trackpad and accelerated video, Microsoft tax.

Verdict:
I really like this and you just can’t go wrong for the money, Microsoft tax or not.

Long have I wanted to have a device that would easily tie my Netflix subscription and other streaming internet media to my tv. I have tried lots of nice things, but they all left me wanting something more, that is, until I got a Roku.

I picked up a Roku 2 XD at BestBuy for $79 and figured I would try it out and return it if it wasn’t what I really wanted. To my surprise I really like it!

My first impressions are that it is REALLY small. It literally fits, in its entirety, into the palm of my hand. It’s pretty slick looking for a little black box with a fabric tag sticking out the side. It has the normal input/output ports that you would expect for a device that connects to your tv to have, and, really, nothing else but the remote, which is also quite small.

Once you hook it all up and plug it in, you are greeted by the Roku logo while the system loads, and then you are taken through a series of steps to register your box and your account (free). After that you can start adding channels and enjoying your streaming web content on your tv!

Now the channels on Roku are different than I expected. Each channel is a service. For example, Netflix is a channel and Hulu is a channel and Crackle and Pandora, etc. and the list goes on. I am sure there is something in there for almost everybody. The ones I really enjoy, outside of Netflix, are Crackle, which somehow provides FREE streaming (recent) movies and tv content, Pandora, and Pub-D-Hub, which has all kinds of old movies, shows and cartoons (and even commercials).

The only thing I really do not like is it’s difficult to actually locate the kind of content you are looking for. This is primarily because there is so much available, and, I will have to admit that sometimes it’s fun just searching around.

What’s Good:
Small, Good looking, Quick, Inexpensive, easy to set up and easy to use.

What’s Bad:
Hard to sort through all the content to find exactly what you want.

For those of you who were wondering why you haven’t heard a lot from me in August….

I had just gotten a promotion, which, on the outset sounds good, except it comes with four times the work and responsibilities (maybe 5 times, I haven’t decided yet). The month started out with my 2 cats being sick and everyone trying to get my daughter ready to start college. Shortly thereafter my daughter had a car accident where she was injured and her car was totaled. In amongst going to various doctors and dealing with insurance people, both my wife’s and daughter’s birthdays occurred. Then, while taking my daughter to a doctors appointment I decided that I should finally get off my butt and do my blood work that my doctor has been bugging me for for months/years. The next afternoon I got a call saying I had diabetes. As soon as I settled into the idea of jabbing my fingers several times a day, hurricane Irene slammed into the east coast of the USA, causing torrential rain, wind, tornadoes, power loss and flooding out the area around my apartment complex yet again. Yes, you guessed it, I am ready for September to be a much better month