Dan’s Space on the Web

I meant to upload this awhile back.

Flavor Wallpaper
APPOWS2010
Box Icons
StupidFireFox
WMP Icon
Messenger Icon

Got myself a shiny new HTC Snap phone. first thing it did was to start shitting SMS’s without my permission.

Fortunately there’s a fix for it (http://www.htc.com/www/SupportViewNews.aspx?dl_id=638&news_id=225), but I didn’t know about it until after some of my friends probably thought that I was desperate for their attention.

Been awhile since I did some desktop stuff.

Wallpaper is a mix between this and this.
Visual Style: Soft7 1.8 for Windows 7
Icons: Vichy

Display board area powered by Rainmeter, displays text from a txt file. It’s meant to be a ToDo list of sorts (only displays one task at a time, I think it’ll help keep me focused and actually get things done). I plan to somehow have it link up with RememberTheMilk.

The new Zune 4.0 software was released recently, and I love it. It looks pretty damn sexy and is very functional (especially the Quickplay and Smart DJ options). However there’s one thing that still pisses me off – the Zune is completely in its own world, despite being from Microsoft.

To point out a few things…

1. the Zune doesn’t work with Windows Media Player. What the heck? This confused the nuts out of me when I first got my Zune. Here I have in my hand, a Microsoft Zune Mp3 Player, and it doesn’t work with Microsoft Windows Media Player? OK… I guess I can live with the fact that I have to get YET another media player onto my desktop. but that’s not the end of it.

2. the Zune software has its own library. WMP and Media Center share their libraries, and in Win 7 they share it with the “global” libraries, but the Zune doesn’t. So now I got to go setting up and managing a separate library. great. Also, I can’t really remember but, I think the Zune library has its own method of managing album art which doesn’t carry outside of the Zune software.

3. Zune software doesn’t send Now Playing information to Live Messenger. ok not so important, but still what the heck. Even iTunes is able to do this. So is winamp. and foobar (with the help of a plugin).
Update: My mistake. this does work now. Not sure why it didn’t work earlier.

These are just small examples of how certain Microsoft products don’t work well with each other. I think it’s a disappointing waste. Another similar situation is with the Xbox and Windows PC. Both are powerful gaming platforms, yet they seem to compete with each other. But that’s a story for another day.

On a more positive note, at least somethings are finally coming together – win 7′s shared libraries, Windows Live Essentials, the Zune HD might be sharing an app store with WiMo, and also has some integration with Xbox Live.

A couple of weeks ago during my block leave after passing out from BMT, I got somewhat bored so decided to do something I’ve been wanting to do since secondary 3 – build a spud cannon.

Why since then? During that year, we were tasked with building a tennis ball launcher as a physics project. Most teams went with the obvious catapult or trebuchet, but my team decided to try something more exotic like an air pressure based system. That’s when we discovered spud cannons, and eventually didn’t just build a tennis ball launcher, but a tennis ball cannon. It made a loud “boom” each time you fired it, and when placed on the floor launched the ball 40+m. Yea, we totally killed the competition. Unfortunately, our teacher wanted to keep our model to show to future students, and since then we’ve been wanting to make another.

Back then, we used the ball-valve approach. Unfortunately, it’s a pain to find a suitable one – the last time we found it in some obscure warehouse around the bukit timah area, not sure how we actually came across the place. In addition, we were told that such valves would cost about 100 bucks, but back then the man was nice enough to give it to us for free since we were just secondary students.

I was originally going to record our steps here, but due to things not going smoothly I didn’t have time to do so and my block leave ended, and now I have to keep it short. If you’re interested in giving it a shot, just search the web – there are plenty of resources. I’ll mainly only be posting not-so-general info.

This time, we went with the more common combustion design. Went down to one of the stores around Clementi Ave 2 and picked up all our PVC piping needs, then picked up a $1 BBQ ignitor from a convenience store.

Some manual labor later, we had our first prototype. However, initial attempts didn’t work. We’re still not too sure why, because if we were to open the combustion chamber and try igniting, we can clearly see the gas igniting out of the chamber (note: don’t point at anything. or anyone). Most likely it was due to a lack of oxygen. We then changed from using WD40 to Adidas body spray (that’s the best thing we got). Still no luck, but we noticed “more explosive action” when testing with chamber open. After letting the chamber air for awhile and wiping it down (WD40 left a lot of liquid around), we tried again.

I wouldn’t say it was successful after that, because although we got a couple of success shots, it wasn’t reliable and failed most of the time. The success shots, though, were amazing. With a loud boom and some pyrotechnics show, the potatoes really flew fast and far, but we kinda lost track of them so no distance results. Too bad we didn’t get those shots on camera, too.

I tried further modifying it, namely to improve the ignition module, and I even tried drilling in two screws and hooking up the ignitor’s wires to them. It seemed to worked well – when you clicked the ignitor, you can clearly see the electric spark jumping across the screws in the chamber. However this seemed to have even worse results – it never worked once.

Out of time, I put it down and left it for a couple of weeks, until this weekend. However, there’s this thing about leaving a potato in there – it doesn’t just grow buds, there were friggin’ maggots starting to form and crawl around inside. Fortunately it looks like they just started appearing, and weren’t anywhere close to crawling out of the cannon. Still, it’s probably best to just junk this ~$15 attempt.

I suspect the main problem was that our combustion chamber was not big enough. If you sprayed too much, there wasn’t enough oxygen, and if you sprayed too little, probably not saturated enough to reliably ignite.

MK-II shall be built soon, and hopefully this time we figure out what went wrong.

A week after I first finished setting up the EPG, I noticed that it wasn’t working properly. I’ve been busy since then, but finally got the time to do some maintenance this weekend. I found out that the problem was that my discSvc registry value had changed back to the default value, reason being the disableUpdateDiscSvc entry was missing. After adding the missing DWORD entry and setting it to 1, everything is back to working condition. Tested it a few times by manually asking Media Center to grab the latest guide data, no problems.

Now, over the past few weeks my dad has been following the NBA and recording whatever matches were being broadcast. This ate up disk space, fast. Fortunately, I had already foreseen this problem back when we first put the HTPC to use, and had prepared a nice 1TB NAS (for general backup and archiving, including recorded TV). Trouble is, Media Center doesn’t like letting you add network folders to the More TV Locations list. Initially I tried using the registry hack method, but that didn’t do anything. Then I found this, which involves creating a symbolic link to the network folder and thereby tricking Media Center. Worked like a charm. Only problem now is I still have Media Center recording new shows to the cramp local drive, and I have to manually move recordings over to the NAS. I guess I could try the symbolic link trick, but because my HTPC is a little far from my router, the WiFi connection isn’t the best. I’ve also noticed that sometimes the WiFi doesn’t work at all after resuming from sleep, but I’ve yet to confirm and look into this. Anyway, since the WiFi isn’t stable, I don’t want to risk the recorded TV being lost or corrupted, so I’m leaving it to first record to the local drive.

I’m considering writing a simple add-in that would automatically watch for disk space and move files when needed, or simply provide an interface for the user to manually “move recording to network drive”. Unfortunately, I don’t have time for that right now. Another option I came across is to use Belvedere to automatically monitor the folder and move files once they pop up, but each recorded TV file is usually huge and so takes awhile to move over to the NAS. If I were to let Belvedere do this automatically in the background, there’s the possibility of my dad (or whoever’s using the HTPC) switching it off before the move can complete. And if this keeps occurring then well, the files would never get moved over. I could schedule it to run during the night, but again I have no idea how long it’ll take. Plus we don’t record stuff every day, so on those nights the computer would wake up and sit there for a few hours for nothing. Ideally it should only automatically wake up and do the moving only if there are files and limited space left, and go back to sleep once it is done. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a tool that does this.

Finally got around to finish setting up TVxb with BladeRunner Pro to get EPG data. Seems to work fine, but I will have to continue monitoring it to make sure it automatically stays up to date (depends on whether or not the scheduled task was created with the correct settings). Also, missing some channels – namely the free-to-air ones like channel 5 (including 5HD). Problem is the Starhub portal doesn’t provide guide info for that, so will probably have to try getting from elsewhere.

On the channel changing side, site visitor Paul came across some useful information. This did help get past the remote learning phase, but instead the results were worse – media center was unable to change the channels at all. The IR blaster seems to be sending signals, but the STB is not responding.

Switched to using Composite input from the Starhub HD box. No significant improvements, unfortunately.

The poor quality can be primarily described as having a lot of significant scanlines. I’ll try to upload a screenshot/sample video. Perhaps something to do with the NTSC/PAL settings? I don’t know if Media Center has such settings, though.

Deciding to stay with the current setup, so that we can record other Starhub channels as well. After discussing with my dad, we decided that it’s not as important to be able to watch and record at the same time, as the likelihood of that being required is very low – usually we record stuff only when we’re not around. The chances of there being two programs we really want to watch being shown simultaneously is low. However, this gives rise to a new problem: I can’t get the IR blaster to work reliably.

First off, Vista Media Center is unable to recognize the Starhub HD box remote, and I can’t seem to get it to learn – it keeps telling me to press-hold-release button ‘1’, and never moves on. I decided to work around this by telling VMC that the box doesn’t have a remote, but it doesn’t change the channels properly 100% of the time. What happens is that the numbers being sent gets recognized extra times. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered it sending the recognizing numbers altogether. I’ve noticed that this seems to happen more (if not only) with certain numbers. In my case, the number 6 (ie. if I try to change to channel 6, about 40% of the time it changes to 66 instead). This of course is unacceptable because that means we may end up recording the wrong channel, so more investigation is required here.

Settings I’m using: Cable, comes with Set-top Box, No Remote, requires to press “Enter” or “OK” before changing channels, StarHub, code: (the first one) I think it is C19…something, speed: slow.

Come to think of it, when testing the speed, Fast/Medium may have worked. They worked sometimes, and other times I had the “duplicate numbers” problem. I forgot to notice whether or not that happened for all channels, or only certain numbers. If it was only certain numbers, perhaps the IR blaster is sending the wrong signal for those numbers, and the problem has nothing to do with the speed.

HTPC Quick Specs:
Intel Pentium 4 CPU 2.80GHz
2x512MB PC3200 DDR RAM
Microsoft Windows Vista (6.0) Ultimate Edition Service Pack 1 (Build 6001)
Shuttle FB71x

[Full Specs]

Tested sleeping with hybrid sleep enabled and Media Center running. No problems. Not sure what happened the last time.

Waited 5 minutes after recording ended, did not go back to sleep.

Switched BIOS settings to S1&S3, works fine.

Noticed that when there’s a scheduled recording, it sometimes either doesn’t go to proper S3 sleep, or maybe it just takes a long time. so far 2 out of 3 times it didn’t go to S3 even after a couple of minutes (but display was turned off), and once it went to S3 after about a minute. Will have to test this further. On further thoughts, those 2/3 times were when I had a scheduled recording to start in about 5 minutes. Perhaps this forced the PC into Away Mode instead of sleep. Should check what the timing is for “wake computer x minutes before” (is there such an option?).

Seems to be working fine now. Did two scheduled recording tests. Went to S3 sleep, automatically woke up, recorded, and went back to sleep. The main problem was the “when sharing media, allow computer to go to Away Mode” power option. Changed it to “allow computer to sleep”.

Parents came home and they usually use the TV for the rest of the night, so I can’t work on improving the TV input quality.

Instead, am remoting in from my laptop and setting other stuff up: WebGuide and EPG.

WebGuide installed successfully, and I’m able to access the web interface fine. Can play recordings from there, but it’s a little slower than simply opening the files directly. This is probably since I have my recordings stored on a NAS, and so it’s clearly less efficient to do NAS –> ShuttleBox (my Media PC) – WebGuide –> WafflesSeven (my Laptop), as opposed to NAS –> WafflesSeven.

Since EPG for Singapore is not available through VMC, I have to use TVxb instead, in conjunction with BladeRunner Pro . Halfway through this – currently have both installed, am TVxb seems to have successfully downloaded EPG data for Starhub channels.

Next up:

1. Improve Live/Recorded TV Quality (from yesterday)
   • Check if it’s signal quality issue (including analog vs. digital) by switching to composite video input from STB (ie. see how cable channels look like)
2. Continue setting up EPG
   • am on the step of “Granting permission to write into the BladeRunner GuideData, Native, and QuickGuide folders.”
3. Ensure EPG works with WebGuide
4. Continue testing WebGuide, figure out how to watch Live TV (so far I can’t find the option for this. Suspecting that I need to have EPG data)

[Click Here HTPC Specs]

I’ve been using Windows Live Writer to manage my posts. It’s great.

Lightweight enough for me to launch at will, and plays well with WordPress (and many other CMS/blogs, apparently). It’s so much faster than having to log in to the usual web interface, especially when just updating a draft (which can be saved locally or on the web).

Also, the editor is sweet. It’s able to mimic what the post will look like, so you don’t have to keep hitting Preview. It’s also a lot more robust, providing easier hyperlinking, adding images (which can do minor image edditing too), text formatting etc.

You can also set post metadata such as categories (syncs up with what you have on the server), tags, date right from here. and when you’re all done just hit Publish. Like I’m going to do now.