Category: Weblog

This is the computer in our kitchen. It is a hacked Virgin computer from the dot-boom era.
It’s slowing dying and I plan to replace it. The computer is easy to build, but a simple 10″ LCD monitor is tough to find.
15″ LCDs are easy to find, but 10″ LCDs are quite hard to find for a reasonable ( <$200 ) price. Any suggestions?

What I see first thing Monday morning at my desk:

It’s going to be a long week.
Update: People, that’s the unread messages AFTER spam filtering.

A couple weeks ago, my good friend Len had his yearly Crawfish Boil. I’ve written about it in the past.
This year I brought my video camera and was able to record what really goes on.
I now present The Truth about Crawfish Boils (1 MB wmv).

This made me laugh this morning.
Loyal Cruft reader Ben told me about a great article on Dr. Pepper, the Lando Calrissian of sodas. Thanks Ben!
Alex, another Loyal Cruft reader, passes on a link about business jargon. Sadly, I hear this crap all day long…

Anonyblog is back after some password issues and my derelict stewardship of the site.
I was surprised at dinner last with Len & Monique that the upcoming XXX movie wasn’t staring Vin Diesel. Ice Cube in the new XXX. I’m so there.
Lastly, in a bid to adopt a dog from a rescue group, my wife Michele aka Scarymommy, posted photos of our house on her weblog. You can see Cruft Manor in all it’s glory. Of course, Mr. P, will have some issue with this…
And in World of Warcraft:

My alchemy skill roxxors.

The blogging Meetup for Los Angeles is this Saturday night at the Farmer’s Market at 7PM.
C’mon on out and drink with your fellow bloggers.
I’ll bring a few of the limited edition Cruftbox openers to give away.

You know what’s funny?
Getting new business cards a month ago, handing them out to many people, and being told today that the email address is wrong.
And not just wrong as in typo/misspelling, wrong in as another person’s address all together.
Poor Mr. P has been getting my emails and having no idea why.

Today is a big day in the Pusateri household. Michele and I have discussed this quite a bit and come to the decision for me to leave the world of television and move into working full time on my real passion, Datafloss.

You gotta do what you love, and I love this new opportunity.
Some may say I’m crazy to give up the executive pay, first class travel, and a corner office, but they simple don’t know the world-changing and paradigm-shifting power of Datafloss.
Life will be different for the family as we enter ‘start-up mode’ and I finish up the first round of financing that’s been going on in the background for a couple months now.
Cruftbox will remain as my private voice on the net, but look for my new professional voice at Datafloss!

Most mobile phone carriers offer camera phones as one of the new features to induce people to upgrade and commit to even longer contracts. Obviously camera phones have great appeal to many people for a variety of uses. From a mobile phone, one can send these images off to email addresses and other mobile phones via the MMS feature. MMS stands for Multimedia Messaging Service, which is a fancy way of saying a way to send images, sounds, and text.
While some phones can now handle true email, almost every cameraphone has MMS capability built-in. On paper this sounds great, using MMS to send photos from your phone to the phones of your friends and family. Unfortunately this is not the case.
MMS works well within a carrier, so I can send MMS messages with photos to other T-Mobile users (like my wife 🙂 ), hell we can even record audio clips into the phone and send them along with the photo for a fully multimedia message. It’s funny and useful. More than once I’ve shopping and sent a picture to my wife for the go ahead on a purchase. We envision our daughters doing the same thing in the future as they get older.
Imagine this conversation:
Me: Hey Zoe, what’s up?
Zoe: I’m just hanging with Emily.
Me: Oh really, where at?
Zoe: Um, err, at the library, yeah, we’re at the library.
Me: Really, sure you’re not at the mall drooling over boys?
Zoe: Dad!
Me: Well if you are at the library send me a picture of some books.
Zoe: Dad!?1!! You don’t trust me?
Me: Humor your dear old father…
Zoe: [a photo of Zoe giving the finger arrives]
In another spectacular failure of American telecom policy, almost no major wireless carrier allows MMS traffic from outside their network. The glaring example of the ‘marketplace deciding’ technology issues make the American mobile phone scene dead last in the industrial world.
Here’s how US MMS policies don’t work. My phone is on T-Mobile. I want to send a camphone picture to my brother who has a Verizon phone. If I send him an MMS message of a photo, Verizon intentionally strips the photo from the message before relaying it to him. I have the same problem sending MMS messages to every other wireless carrier.
The carriers will tell you send the MMS messages to an email address that is invariably something like [yourphonenumer]@[yourwirelesscarrier].com. I have tested this extensively and it does not work from phone to phone. The carriers think that if they erect these information blockades, they will force you to get your friends and family to switch to the same carrier. Just like their position on number portability, they are wrong. If they opened MMS capability, it would be an advantage to use them instead of other carriers that block the MMS messages.
Have no fear; help has arrived in the form of PixToPix.com. The kind people at PixToPix.com offer a free service to serve as a middleman for cameraphone pictures. If you sign up with PixToPix and give then the vital info about your phone, you get a [yourusername]@pixtopix.com email address. When you give that email address to your friends and family, they can send MMS messages from their phones to that address and PixToPix will convert and relay them to your phone. The service even works with emailing images from a computer directly without using a phone.
I’ve tested it and it works well. If you send a MMS picture to cruftbox@pixtopix.com, it will pop up on my mobile phone. Now my brother and I can exchange photos even though T-Mobile and Verizon don’t want us to. 🙂
The system even addresses privacy issues. If somehow people start sending photos I don’t like, I can drop my current Pixtopix address and get another. Much better than having to change your phone number.
Looking toward the future, imagine an interface with Flickr or Textamerica where you could subscribe to pool image feeds and have them sent to your phone. Or parsing the Yahoo News Top Photos RSS feed and getting a daily dump of interesting photos. Or getting a regular photo sent to you from a nannycam. The possibilities go on and on.
Give it a try, I would bet that a high percentage of loyal Cruft readers have camera phones.
The service works for most major US and Canadian wireless carriers, but if you have one of the remaining small local ones, you may be out of luck.

Feel the power of the Dark Side

I don’t often talk about my work here on Cruft. While I find professional television and computer technology a fascinating career, many are more interested in my adventures in my kitchen instead.
Here’s a little tidbit to show you how my somewhat irreverant style surfaces in my professional life.
One of the trade magazines I read is TV Technology, a fairly good source for news and opinions. My favorite column is by The Masked Engineer, a TV engineer that hides behind a psuedonym while he/she writes about the FCC, industry players, and other TV trends in a humorous way.
In a column last year, The Masked Engineer wrote about cabling in facility. His/her viewpoint was so far out of whack with reality that I was forced to reply. I sent in my rebuttal soon after and was suprised to find it in the current issue.
(Loyal Cruft readers might recognize the use of photos and humor to make my points)

Of course, the Masked Engineer and Belden are full of crap in their idea that reasonable tie-wraps can hurt the signal quality. Belden is the same company that once advocated running SDI video over Cat 5 cable. If anything would be bad for signal quality it woud be running CCIR 601 over unshielded cable designed for ethernet.
We’ve had a fully SDI plant for ten years now, with tie wraps, and without any troubles with cabling. By far our biggest signal troubles are with RS-232/422 cabling long lengths and patchbay jack failure, neither of which have anything to do with tie wraps.
Perhaps we’ll have an Indiana Jones style showdown at NAB…