HDTV output to a PC is really quite easy if you simply make it a requirement when you are shopping for your TV. Tons of tv's have DVI-D inputs or RGBS on them, and they really arent more expensive than the tv's that don't. Just get one of these, and then, with some tweaking, pretty much any modern video card can be made to drive them. Apps such as powerstrip, et. al. make this pretty simple.
What the article does not tell you is that the decision to include anything OTHER than a firewire input to the D-VHS VCR would have also required a REALTIME HDTV MPEG2 encoder in the VCR. By "the most popular 3 hdtv interconnects" they are probably talking about Component YUV, Component RGB, and DVI-D -- while these are indeed the most popular interconnects, they transport the already uncompressed video stream. To record them in DVHS format you'd have to recompress the video back to MPEG2, and remux the audio (and ensure sync). This alone would have sent the price of the unit skyrocketing. In addition the decision was not stupid, because as of April 1, 2004, cable companies are required to have the firewire transports on their devices, meaning that the decision for a firewire-only vcr would be fairly standards compliant as well as inexpensive.
The nice thing about firewire transporting this is that the video arrives preencoded in a nice transport stream in full quality. The not-nice thing about it is that the FCC is also allowing the firewire to be C5 encrypted. I really really hope someone is working on breaking this one.
You can try EarthLCD to find a replacement panel, or alternatively, you can search ebay for the model number of the panel in your laptop. I have repaired about 5 laptop screens at very reasonable cost by buying panels from ebay.
The firewire ports on cable boxes mandated by the FCC do deliver you an MPEG2-TS data; unfortunately, in most markets, the stream is encrypted on most if not all of the channels. There are several encryptoin methods; the most common algorithm is 5C. The EFF made an appeal to the FCC to require any HDTV content that is broadcast OTA in the same market be transport unencrypted on the cable network, but the appeal was denied.
Even if you get something working now, all they have to do is begin to encrypt the HDTV stream(s) that you can get from the firewire port and then you are fucked again. If you have a really nice cable company, you might be lucky enough to get a decrypted stream; however, the broadcast flag mandate will ensure that this stream either be envrypted or downsampled to no more than 480p if output via some "insecure" medium such as firewire or DVI-D.
The best thing you can do now is to buy an OTA HDTV tuner for your PC. In the future (and to a lesser extent now), you will probably be able to buy some grey-market sort of modifications to cable boxes to enable full-resolution firewire output. In a way, because of this, I'm at least glad the firewire mandate exists - at least it will be a little easier to hack.
Your comment made me a little curious so I looked it up....
The highest capacity machine I could find is the extra-tall Royal Vendors GIII 804 that can hold 804 12 oz cans. Presumably for a machine to ever reacy $1000 you would have to use this specific machine to sell 12oz cans for $1.25 each. Ouch.
My machine by contrast (and before modification) was able to hold 660 12oz cans, and at a more reasonable $0.65ea that would mean the absolute maximum amount of money it would contain is $429. Probably you'd have to refill it after about 1/2 to 2/3 of the cans were gone, so this means a realistic amount of cash to expect in a can vender is about $200.
BTW selling bottled beverages vs canned beverages is not really an argument; cans pack into vending machines more than 2x as efficiently as bottles.
I also figured the maximum amount of money that could ever be contained by my own modified machine. This is 22.5 gallons of kegged beer priced at $1.00/pint = $180 + 6 bins holding a maximum of 330 12oz cans sold for $0.50c each = $165, thus there would be a maximum of $345 in my machine; however the cash is taken out much more often to buy refills.
I have a fear that this magazine will unfortunately be a half-assed regurgitation of other peoples' free how-to's. Like many magazines, they'll probably run a companion website that will provide as much or more value as the print version.
In that light, I am going to go ahead and assume that the Kite Photography article will be about 4 pages of cheap ineffective hacks (somewhat akin to the recent engadget articles). Anyone wanting a serious collection of articles on KAP might consider buying the complete archive of The Aerial Eye, a semiannual publication about KAP that ran for 9 years. It is a fantastic reference for $30.
The machines are capable of accounting, both manually via reading the counters and remotely using a seperate serial interface board connected to a PC or in some cases, even a modem for remote access. I suspect, though that it is not typically recorded by small vending operators.
I have a vending machine to try this on. It is a GIII Royal Vendors unit similar to all machines used by Coca Cola for about the past 10 years (though the faces have changed). First, The tumbler takes a 270 degree turn of the key to unlock. Every time you turn it past a set of pins, you'd have to re-pick the lock. To open this lock, you'd have to pick it proably upwards of 15 times -- Due to the design of the machine, it would be easier to physically pop or drill the cylinder itself. If you just want to steal the money out of it, you can just go through the lexan and use a crowbar to get at the coin changer and overflow box. Accessing the bill changer storage will require the lock to be removed.
Royal Vendors sells high security versions of these machines, though that put a large steel bar over the normal cylinder that can be locked with a padlock. They can also replace the lexan front with sheet steel and add plating around the front door to make it impossible to wedge a pry bar in there easily. My machine has the padlock bar and the side plating, but not the steel front.
Coke machines aren't really worth breaking into for the ~$100 or less that you could get out of them..
GPS provides altitude if you have 4 satellites in view (and most units will continue to make determinations based on the last available altitude if not), so this is not a problem.
Camera orientation can be determined extremely cheaply with a cheap electronic compass in a gimball and (optionally for more precision) a 3 axis accelerometer. The accelerometer can be pretty much the cheapest type available since it doesn't even have to be really precise, it just has to be able to determine the direction of gravity. This is easy to do particularly since the camera should have minimal acceleration during the shutter release. Plus it could also replace the little mercury switches that cameras use to determine portrait/landscape orientation. Spiffy!
They have had the time to add two entire new sections (IT and Politics) to slashdot also without bothering to fix the code that lets you exclude sections from the homepage. If I want to see a bunch of fucking politics, I'll go to a site about politics.
Not to mention that if you update your preferences while you are logged in, it's almost completely impossible to browse to any older stories as the 'older stuff' box is completely gone. You can only see the current day's headlines and search.
These have been at the top of the bugs list for more than a month. It's inexcusable. If you are going to bother to prioritize anything, then at least get your act together and finish what you started.
I used to subscribe to slashdot but bailed after it became apparent that the editors (well many of th editors) care very little for the readers.
Uh? Maybe the same way every other website on Earth implements security on subscription services -- via a login, password, and careful scrutiny to make sure they are not being shared.
Or did I just respond to the lamest troll post in the world?
There are plenty of utilities to rip streaming internet radio already, even from the most DRM-encumbered proprietary sources. Most utalize totalrecorder in conjunction with some window-watching to figure out when the songs change.
iPod by itself won't bypass the queue unless it also has the keywords 'Linux' or 'RSS' in it. Indeed this is some seriously lackluster stuff. It downloads a list of files and adds them to itunes. Presumably it will also sync it over to the iPod as well. An m3u could do the same thing if iTunes would support saving the URL. Still, sometimes simple apps like this can be among the most useful ones. At least they're not charging you $10 for it like most excessively tiny mac utilities.
Well AFAIK, the physical connector is unfortunately neither forwards nor backwards compatible between firewire 800 and firewire 400 although the electrical interface is. Therefore you can plug a firewire 800 device into a firewire 400 port and vice versa provided you have the correct cables (one with a 4 or 6 pin firewire end and another with a 9 pin firewire end)
I have been eyeing the USB VGA adapters, but could not find a good source for them in the US. I also had never found anyone who actually used one firsthand. Can you give me any advice on how it works/where to buy it? I'm looking to add a second (informational) display to my carPC and since it's based on a mini-itx board, expansion is very limited.
Apple ipod drives are 'dumber' than your normal 1" microdrive or 1.6" mini-drive. They lack a lot of the logic IC's and firmware that allows them to be used with standard IDE interfaces. Instead, the ipod controlls the drive electronics directly. This essentially does a few things: 1) it makes the drives cheaper for apple, 2) it makes refurbishing/upgrading/recycling/repairing faulty iPods a lot cheaper since you dont have to replace the drive's control electronics when you replace the drive, and 3) it makes the drives unusable in anything other than an ipod.
While reason #3 is often cited by conspiracy theorists to be some kind of plot to prevent people from canibalizing drives out of the ipod to prevent potential loss of iTunes revenue, it is really only a side effect of reasona #1 and #2. If running full-fledged drives in the iPod were actually cheaper or the same price as running drives with reduced integrated electronics, rest assured Apple would do it. It's got to be a fairly difficult/expensive/unnecessary engineering process to integrate drive electronics into your design simply to keep people from buying your product to take it apart.
I jumped in here with the same attitude until I noticed someone who made reference to a ruling in a federal court specifically GRANTING the use of ISM band devices in situations where private, local, or other non-federal regulation exists (such as in a lease contract). While the dorms/apartments might be owned by the university, they can certainly not regulate the use of the devices unless it's plugged into their own network. So unless you plug it into a campus-provided ethernet outlet, they don't have any say.
The last point of whether or not they can regulate the equipment attached to their network is also debatable. This could be likened to your ISP preventing NAT-based routers from being attached to their network; but at any rate, this is a seperate debate altogether.
How about Erik Andersen, the force behind BusyBox and uClibc? This guy has (nearly) singlehandedly reimplemented linux userland in an insanely efficient manner. There's probably not a single embedded developer/user that doesn't owe him at least a 'thanks, man!'
Yes, exactly. I have done this same shot from a kite. The rig you use is the same as for any other shot, except that you lock it so the camera is pointed straight down (my rig's servo cannot pitch with the heavy fisheye lens on the camera, so I just have a locking pin to hold it in place)
As far as equipment, there are very few small cameras that can take a 180 deg fisheye and not weigh a thousand pounds. Nikon makes a lens, the FC-E8 fisheye converter that can be used with most of the consumer line coolpix cameras. Everyone doing these kite panos that I know of is using the FC-E8. Doing it any other way would be very cost prohibitive (some good fisheye lenses with this FOV run upwards of $5000 and weigh many pounds -- flying them on a kite would be both difficult and extremely risky)
You use a fisheye lens with a 180 or greater FOV hanging from the kite pointing straight down, then you mesh it with a shot of the sky with the same lens pointed straight up. To make the pano, you need some software. I used a copy of Panotools (compiled without the FOV restriction; come sue me ipix) to do the stitching. PTPicker is a free java frontend for panotools or you can also use the excellent PTGui for windows or PTMac for mac which work a bit quicker than the java stuff.
I made one of these panoramas one time over a harbor in Maui, HI. The result is available on this page.
Slashdot Mirror
HDTV output to a PC is really quite easy if you simply make it a requirement when you are shopping for your TV. Tons of tv's have DVI-D inputs or RGBS on them, and they really arent more expensive than the tv's that don't. Just get one of these, and then, with some tweaking, pretty much any modern video card can be made to drive them. Apps such as powerstrip, et. al. make this pretty simple.
What the article does not tell you is that the decision to include anything OTHER than a firewire input to the D-VHS VCR would have also required a REALTIME HDTV MPEG2 encoder in the VCR. By "the most popular 3 hdtv interconnects" they are probably talking about Component YUV, Component RGB, and DVI-D -- while these are indeed the most popular interconnects, they transport the already uncompressed video stream. To record them in DVHS format you'd have to recompress the video back to MPEG2, and remux the audio (and ensure sync). This alone would have sent the price of the unit skyrocketing. In addition the decision was not stupid, because as of April 1, 2004, cable companies are required to have the firewire transports on their devices, meaning that the decision for a firewire-only vcr would be fairly standards compliant as well as inexpensive.
The nice thing about firewire transporting this is that the video arrives preencoded in a nice transport stream in full quality. The not-nice thing about it is that the FCC is also allowing the firewire to be C5 encrypted. I really really hope someone is working on breaking this one.
You can try EarthLCD to find a replacement panel, or alternatively, you can search ebay for the model number of the panel in your laptop. I have repaired about 5 laptop screens at very reasonable cost by buying panels from ebay.
The firewire ports on cable boxes mandated by the FCC do deliver you an MPEG2-TS data; unfortunately, in most markets, the stream is encrypted on most if not all of the channels. There are several encryptoin methods; the most common algorithm is 5C. The EFF made an appeal to the FCC to require any HDTV content that is broadcast OTA in the same market be transport unencrypted on the cable network, but the appeal was denied.
Even if you get something working now, all they have to do is begin to encrypt the HDTV stream(s) that you can get from the firewire port and then you are fucked again. If you have a really nice cable company, you might be lucky enough to get a decrypted stream; however, the broadcast flag mandate will ensure that this stream either be envrypted or downsampled to no more than 480p if output via some "insecure" medium such as firewire or DVI-D.
The best thing you can do now is to buy an OTA HDTV tuner for your PC. In the future (and to a lesser extent now), you will probably be able to buy some grey-market sort of modifications to cable boxes to enable full-resolution firewire output. In a way, because of this, I'm at least glad the firewire mandate exists - at least it will be a little easier to hack.
Your comment made me a little curious so I looked it up....
The highest capacity machine I could find is the extra-tall Royal Vendors GIII 804 that can hold 804 12 oz cans. Presumably for a machine to ever reacy $1000 you would have to use this specific machine to sell 12oz cans for $1.25 each. Ouch.
My machine by contrast (and before modification) was able to hold 660 12oz cans, and at a more reasonable $0.65ea that would mean the absolute maximum amount of money it would contain is $429. Probably you'd have to refill it after about 1/2 to 2/3 of the cans were gone, so this means a realistic amount of cash to expect in a can vender is about $200.
BTW selling bottled beverages vs canned beverages is not really an argument; cans pack into vending machines more than 2x as efficiently as bottles.
I also figured the maximum amount of money that could ever be contained by my own modified machine. This is 22.5 gallons of kegged beer priced at $1.00/pint = $180 + 6 bins holding a maximum of 330 12oz cans sold for $0.50c each = $165, thus there would be a maximum of $345 in my machine; however the cash is taken out much more often to buy refills.
I have a fear that this magazine will unfortunately be a half-assed regurgitation of other peoples' free how-to's. Like many magazines, they'll probably run a companion website that will provide as much or more value as the print version.
In that light, I am going to go ahead and assume that the Kite Photography article will be about 4 pages of cheap ineffective hacks (somewhat akin to the recent engadget articles). Anyone wanting a serious collection of articles on KAP might consider buying the complete archive of The Aerial Eye, a semiannual publication about KAP that ran for 9 years. It is a fantastic reference for $30.
180 robberies are a tricky way to make $900.
The machines are capable of accounting, both manually via reading the counters and remotely using a seperate serial interface board connected to a PC or in some cases, even a modem for remote access. I suspect, though that it is not typically recorded by small vending operators.
You did realize that I built an entire microcontroller-based computer from scratch to allow the machine to meter and vend kegged beer, right?
Well as of yesterday the debian maintainer hasn't released a build of 1.0PR so... :)
I have a vending machine to try this on. It is a GIII Royal Vendors unit similar to all machines used by Coca Cola for about the past 10 years (though the faces have changed). First, The tumbler takes a 270 degree turn of the key to unlock. Every time you turn it past a set of pins, you'd have to re-pick the lock. To open this lock, you'd have to pick it proably upwards of 15 times -- Due to the design of the machine, it would be easier to physically pop or drill the cylinder itself. If you just want to steal the money out of it, you can just go through the lexan and use a crowbar to get at the coin changer and overflow box. Accessing the bill changer storage will require the lock to be removed.
Royal Vendors sells high security versions of these machines, though that put a large steel bar over the normal cylinder that can be locked with a padlock. They can also replace the lexan front with sheet steel and add plating around the front door to make it impossible to wedge a pry bar in there easily. My machine has the padlock bar and the side plating, but not the steel front.
Coke machines aren't really worth breaking into for the ~$100 or less that you could get out of them..
GPS provides altitude if you have 4 satellites in view (and most units will continue to make determinations based on the last available altitude if not), so this is not a problem.
Camera orientation can be determined extremely cheaply with a cheap electronic compass in a gimball and (optionally for more precision) a 3 axis accelerometer. The accelerometer can be pretty much the cheapest type available since it doesn't even have to be really precise, it just has to be able to determine the direction of gravity. This is easy to do particularly since the camera should have minimal acceleration during the shutter release. Plus it could also replace the little mercury switches that cameras use to determine portrait/landscape orientation. Spiffy!
They have had the time to add two entire new sections (IT and Politics) to slashdot also without bothering to fix the code that lets you exclude sections from the homepage. If I want to see a bunch of fucking politics, I'll go to a site about politics.
Not to mention that if you update your preferences while you are logged in, it's almost completely impossible to browse to any older stories as the 'older stuff' box is completely gone. You can only see the current day's headlines and search.
These have been at the top of the bugs list for more than a month. It's inexcusable. If you are going to bother to prioritize anything, then at least get your act together and finish what you started.
I used to subscribe to slashdot but bailed after it became apparent that the editors (well many of th editors) care very little for the readers.
There are a lot of shoutcast streams that are 192Kb/s or higher. These might be worth saving, I guess..
Uh? Maybe the same way every other website on Earth implements security on subscription services -- via a login, password, and careful scrutiny to make sure they are not being shared.
Or did I just respond to the lamest troll post in the world?
There are plenty of utilities to rip streaming internet radio already, even from the most DRM-encumbered proprietary sources. Most utalize totalrecorder in conjunction with some window-watching to figure out when the songs change.
iPod by itself won't bypass the queue unless it also has the keywords 'Linux' or 'RSS' in it. Indeed this is some seriously lackluster stuff. It downloads a list of files and adds them to itunes. Presumably it will also sync it over to the iPod as well. An m3u could do the same thing if iTunes would support saving the URL. Still, sometimes simple apps like this can be among the most useful ones. At least they're not charging you $10 for it like most excessively tiny mac utilities.
IPC changed names and expanded their product line thoroughly. They are the ones behind the software reviewed here, actually.
http://www.thinsoftinc.com/
Well AFAIK, the physical connector is unfortunately neither forwards nor backwards compatible between firewire 800 and firewire 400 although the electrical interface is. Therefore you can plug a firewire 800 device into a firewire 400 port and vice versa provided you have the correct cables (one with a 4 or 6 pin firewire end and another with a 9 pin firewire end)
I have been eyeing the USB VGA adapters, but could not find a good source for them in the US. I also had never found anyone who actually used one firsthand. Can you give me any advice on how it works/where to buy it? I'm looking to add a second (informational) display to my carPC and since it's based on a mini-itx board, expansion is very limited.
Thanks!
Apple ipod drives are 'dumber' than your normal 1" microdrive or 1.6" mini-drive. They lack a lot of the logic IC's and firmware that allows them to be used with standard IDE interfaces. Instead, the ipod controlls the drive electronics directly. This essentially does a few things: 1) it makes the drives cheaper for apple, 2) it makes refurbishing/upgrading/recycling/repairing faulty iPods a lot cheaper since you dont have to replace the drive's control electronics when you replace the drive, and 3) it makes the drives unusable in anything other than an ipod.
While reason #3 is often cited by conspiracy theorists to be some kind of plot to prevent people from canibalizing drives out of the ipod to prevent potential loss of iTunes revenue, it is really only a side effect of reasona #1 and #2. If running full-fledged drives in the iPod were actually cheaper or the same price as running drives with reduced integrated electronics, rest assured Apple would do it. It's got to be a fairly difficult/expensive/unnecessary engineering process to integrate drive electronics into your design simply to keep people from buying your product to take it apart.
Capsela! And on the upside everything you built would look exactly like a space station or unmanned submarine!
I jumped in here with the same attitude until I noticed someone who made reference to a ruling in a federal court specifically GRANTING the use of ISM band devices in situations where private, local, or other non-federal regulation exists (such as in a lease contract). While the dorms/apartments might be owned by the university, they can certainly not regulate the use of the devices unless it's plugged into their own network. So unless you plug it into a campus-provided ethernet outlet, they don't have any say.
The last point of whether or not they can regulate the equipment attached to their network is also debatable. This could be likened to your ISP preventing NAT-based routers from being attached to their network; but at any rate, this is a seperate debate altogether.
How about Erik Andersen, the force behind BusyBox and uClibc? This guy has (nearly) singlehandedly reimplemented linux userland in an insanely efficient manner. There's probably not a single embedded developer/user that doesn't owe him at least a 'thanks, man!'
Yes, exactly. I have done this same shot from a kite. The rig you use is the same as for any other shot, except that you lock it so the camera is pointed straight down (my rig's servo cannot pitch with the heavy fisheye lens on the camera, so I just have a locking pin to hold it in place)
As far as equipment, there are very few small cameras that can take a 180 deg fisheye and not weigh a thousand pounds. Nikon makes a lens, the FC-E8 fisheye converter that can be used with most of the consumer line coolpix cameras. Everyone doing these kite panos that I know of is using the FC-E8. Doing it any other way would be very cost prohibitive (some good fisheye lenses with this FOV run upwards of $5000 and weigh many pounds -- flying them on a kite would be both difficult and extremely risky)
You use a fisheye lens with a 180 or greater FOV hanging from the kite pointing straight down, then you mesh it with a shot of the sky with the same lens pointed straight up. To make the pano, you need some software. I used a copy of Panotools (compiled without the FOV restriction; come sue me ipix) to do the stitching. PTPicker is a free java frontend for panotools or you can also use the excellent PTGui for windows or PTMac for mac which work a bit quicker than the java stuff.
I made one of these panoramas one time over a harbor in Maui, HI. The result is available on this page.