Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

I’m at 30,000 feet, typing on my laptop. Thanks to the Connexion service, this Lufthansa flight home has wifi and broadband internet.
Currently I’m talking to by buddy Brian over Google Talk. I’m in the air over Greenland and he’s in Santa Barbara, California. The quality is as good as a phone call.
A year or so ago, I was on a flight with Mira, my youngest daughter. She was upset that she couldn’t get on the web with the laptop. I tried to explain that when flying there was no internet access. I guess the airlines heard her complaints.
“The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” – William Gibson quote

Dear Europe,
I really am an enjoying my time here in Europe. I love Paris and Amsterdam, so much fun to be had.
There are two issues I really need you to focus on:
1) Lack of Air Conditioning – Look, I know it’s an old part of the world, but that’s no excuse for air conditioning to be missing. Restaurants should be air conditioned, especially Argentine steak houses. Convention centers should be air conditioned to avoid me passing out while doing business. Clubs hosting parties should be air conditioned to avoid people clustering at windows to gasp for cool fresh air. Can you give me an ETA on when I should plan to stop sweating everywhere I go?
2) Robbie Williams – Tonight I endured not one, not two, but THREE karaoke versions of Robbie Williams songs. As one of the three Americans in the room, we were the only ones that not only didn’t know the words by heart, didn’t even know who this guy was. Evidently he’s a big singer from England, but honestly, his music is fairly amatuerish compared to that from other current Brit Bands. Please explain Robbie Williams and why he is beloved…
Regards,
-Michael

I’m in Paris, France this week for work. We are having an internal conference before a big broadcasting convention in Amsterdam later this week.
Of course, our hosts are showing us a great time with good food and an amazing tour of the Eiffel Tower.

We were lucky enough to get a special tour of the broadcasting facilities on the top of the Eiffel Tower, well above where normal tourists get to travel. I had seen pictures of the Tower before, but not until you actually see it can you realize how immensely huge it is. To consider that it was built well over one hundred years ago, it is really a fantastic engineering work.
I am enjoying Paris quite a bit between meetings. The pastries are great, walking around is fun, and seeing all the famous locations is mind-blowing.
It’s the little things that impress me, like the fact that French keyboards have a different layout than US keyboards. The wide assortment of channels on the hotel TV reflects the true broadness of the world from French netwroks to Arabic TV to a network aobut US extreme sports to a German channel with softcore porn ads for phone sex.
Last night, we started dinner around 10 PM and didn’t finish well until after 1 AM. The food was tasty, but I’m simply not used to the eating dinner after midnight. If it weren’t for the 8AM start the next day, I would have been out for drinks until the wee hours.

I turned on my computer at home this morning to check email. I’ve been falling behind these days in replies.
“whir”
“click”
“whir”
“click”
The computer won’t boot. It was working fine 8 hours ago.
Most likely the hard drive is failing.
It’s going to be a long Friday.

I enjoy good gyro meat in sandwiches or in a greek salad. There’s a good place near the office (with a surly owner) that makes pretty good stuff. For those that don’t know, gyro meat is cooked on a vertical skewer and cooked with radiated heat. As the meat browns, the outer meat is sliced off and served.
One day, my co-worker Yoshi mentioned that Alton Brown of Good Eats had discussed making gyros. I love Alton Brown and if he said it could be done, then I could do it. Yoshi mentioned that his plan kinda sucked because it wasn’t cooked by the traditional method of a rotisserie. At that point I decided to build my own gyro cooker.

The first thing I had to solve was how to rotate the meat. On ebay I found a motor made for gas BBQs that looked like it would stand up the usage I intended.

The motor came with a long skewer and meat holder. That it much easier to figure out how to hold the meat. Using a pie plate, I fashioned a a grease catcher. The second item I picked up was a simple electric single burner, similiar to what I used when I built a smoker out of a trashcan.
Click MORE to see the full post.

Continue reading “How to make a gyro cooker”

I upgraded to Movable Type 3.2 last night. It seems pretty snazzy at first glance, but I haven’t delved into the cool new features yet. So if you see any issues while wandering about here, please let me know.
After about 10 minutes into the upgrade, my mom was IMing me that my comments weren’t working. I think I’ll start renting her out as a service delivery monitor.

Another football season begins and once again I find myself one of the few NFL Widowers around.

Michele loves her football something fierce. Over the years it’s gotten worse, growing from watching the occasional Sunday game with Cincinatti (her hometown team) to watching Thursday Night Football to this year with her enrollment into fantasy football in July.
Last year for her birthday I bought her a special quilting table and she had it placed in the living room so she could quilt while watching football.
For the Superbowl this year, we bought an HDTV so the game could be as good as possible. Now we have the NFL Network, the DirecTV NFL Sunday Ticket, and even the DirecTV Superfan package for true football otaku that need to watch EIGHT football games SIMULTANEOUSLY.

Currently, she’s Tivoing every possible pre-season NFL game for later viewing.
Some of you think that it would be good to have a wife that is a football fan. I’m a football fan myself and enjoy watching games, but my with, she’s a fanatic.
My main role on Sundays is to keep the children entertained and make runs to 7-Eleven for more soda to fuel her orgy of football channel changing. On the positive side, it leaves me free to play games on Sunday and not hear any complaints.
So on Sundays and Monday nights, think of me and hope for rain delays.

Last night I got one of those phone calls that computer saavy people hate to get. “Honey, I think my computer is broken. Your father is looking at it, but it says something about reformatting a hard drive.”
Yes, my mother’s hard drive was failing. They got me the computer and this morning I took a look. Sure enough, the drive wouldn’t boot or allow itself to be repaired.
I popped it into my computer to look at it and even then I had trouble getting it recognized. When I finally got it mounted I realized it was in sad shape.

The problem was that some of the files were corrupted and others were fine. I was trying to copy files off of the bad hard drive onto a good hard drive. The problem is that with the drag and drop copy feature in XP, if any of the files you requested copied are bad, the whole copy crashes.
This really bummed me out since I was getting very little copying done due to the bad files. I remembered about Xcopy and figured out a way to copy all the files I needed easily.

How to copy directories with bad files and get the good files
Xcopy is used from the command line, so you need to open a command window. Use Run from the Start menu and type ‘cmd’, this should bring up a command line interface. That xcopy link takes you to the full manual on xcopy where you can see all the parameters possible.
Xcopy is pretty straightforward, xcopy sourcedir destinationdir is the normal command. But since you know you are copying possibly bad files you need to set a few parameters. The /c parameter tells xcopy to ignore errors. This is key.
So if you want to copy the files out of a bad My Documents directory to a new drive, you’d do something like this.

xcopy “D:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents” “C:\Saveddata\” -c -s -h -i

This example supposes that the bad drive you are salvaging is the D: drive and the drive you are saving to is C:. You can use tab to autocomplete path names to make sure the path is correct.
Remember, if your directory name or any part of the path has a space in it, you need quotes ( ” ) around the path. If you don’t use quotes you will get an invalid parameter error. You will probably want to save several different directories, depending on where the data is located, so you can open multiple command line windows and run the xcopies simultaneously if you want to not sit and watch.
When xcopy hits a bad file, don’t be suprised if it hangs on the bad file for a minute or two before moving on. Have faith. The xcopy will ignore the errors, because you commanded it to ignore them.
If this isn’t clear to you and there are things you don’t understand about what I wrote above, you probably shouldn’t be trying to save the drive data yourself. Honestly, if you aren’t command line saavy, you run the risk of seriously fucking up your computer with xcopy. Call your best geek pal and offer him or her a six pack to come save your data from /dev/null.
Back to my own experience, I was able to save most of Mom’s files, the only real blow was a corrupted Outlook pst file meaning that some of her email was gone. I picked a new drive at Best Buy and in a few hours, the computer was up and purring with a sparkling new version of her beloved AOL 9.0 running. The OS patching, anti-virus, and anti-spyware are all set to auto-update. Let’s hope for the best.

Spin – an amazing new short film (via Metafilter)
Trust me, you’ll like it.
Update: The original link is farked, here is an alternate link to watch Spin.

At the office I sometimes have to explain things to people about the way that television works. I’m a television engineer, so it all makes sense to me, but to many it’s a mystery. So today I present:
How TV gets to your house

First, you have to make the leap of faith that television networks make a channel in some way and add in all the programs, promos, and commericals that you love. The signal is feed to a large (usually 30 feel in diameter) dish that shoots the signal up into space. The dish and equipment that shoots the signal into space is called a Earth Station.
Up in outer space is a special communications satellite that orbits 22,300 miles up. To compare, the Shuttle visits the Space Station at about 250 miles. This orbit is called a geosynchronous orbit and is about a tenth of the way to Moon. It’s way the hell out there.
The satellite listens to the Earth Station and immediately rebroadcasts the signal back down toward Earth. This allows many places to all see the same signal.
The local cable company has a smaller receive antenna (usually from 10-20 feet in diameter) that is pointed at the satellite and listens for the TV signal.

The receive antenna pulls down the signal and feeds it into a special receiver called an IRD (Integrated Receiver/Decoder). The IRD is very much like a radio that converts wireless signals into something you can see and hear. The IRD sends the channel to a set of modulators that combines all the other channels that the cable company assembles into a single cable feed.
Television networks all over the country bouncing signals up into space and down to cable companies, allowing them to put the various channels all together in their line up. They take ESPN from Connecticut, and HBO & MTV from New York, and Disney Channel from California and a hundred other channels and modulate them all together into a single feed.

Once the cable company has combined all the channels, they send it down the wires that they hung from telephone poles or put underground in your street.
The cable signal gets split over and over as it branches into various neighborhoods and then into specific houses. Even at your house, the signal is split again to the various rooms you want cable. Each time you split the cable signal you cut the power level down significantly. Many people have crappy pictures from cable TV and it’s often due to low cable signal strength.

To understand what happens in your house, you need to learn a little physics. When you tune an FM radio, you are changing the frequency you are tuning to to change stations. It seems clear that when you go from 93.1 MHz to 103.1 MHz, you are changing stations.
Television works in a similar way. To change stations, you are changing the frequency you are tuning in. A long time ago, the television engineers thought that it might be simpler to give channels numbers instead of frequencies to refer to when tuning. At the time, they only imagined that there might be a dozen or so channels. Channel 1 was reserved for testing and so the first real channel was 2. That’s why Channel 2 is the lowest channel most people are used to.
In cable TV, the amount of bancwidth or space to shove channels is usually between 50 MHz and 800 MHz. Yes, that means that the FM stations are right in the middle of the TV band. But radio bandwidth is so small, it doesn’t take up much space.
Each TV channel takes up around 6 MHz of space, so you can place around 125 channels on a typical analog cable feed. Digital cable systems work differently and I won’t go into it here.
So you can now see that when you change channels, you are actually choosing a different frequency to tune in, just like a radio dial. Old people, like me, can actually remember TVs that tuned with dial like a radio. I doubt my daughters have ever seen a TV with a dial on it.

OK, now that you understand how frequencies map into channels, you can see that a set-top box from the cable company is tuning the channels for you. A cable ready TV is a TV that can tune in the higher channels that only exist in the cable world and not in the over-the-air antenna world.
The cable set-top makes audio and video (or sometimes a Channel 3 signal) that you plug into your your television.
To explain this, I’ve skipped over a lot of details and didn’t get into digital cable, direct to home satellite, HDTV, or many of the other modern methods of television distribution.
I can explain those things if you all are interested, but all of them are variations on the basic idea of television distibution I describe here. Ask away…