I've been working on the whole HEPC/TVPC thing for a while.. Most of my 'work', of course, has consisted of tons and tons of research and drawings/schematics instead of purchasing/building much of anything.
I finally broke down and built a TV machine last summer.. I mainly used it to play Divx movies--both ones I ripped from my DVDs myself and ones I downloaded from Morpheus.
Remote Control:
I bought an IRman and got it working with Winamp's VidAmp..
At first, I kept no mouse or keyboard on the box. I opted instead to use the remote, TweakUI-configured auto-login, and VNC (from my laptop already wired-up in the living room.
Case:
I tore down a mid-tower case and buffered all of the metal joints with duct tape as I built it back up. This eliminated any inherent case rattle.
I layed the side and reconfigured my entertainment center's shelves to accommodate it.
The case had a interesting configuration of fans (combinations of Thermaltake "smart" fans and things) to try to keep the AthlonXP 1700+ and three Maxtor drives (one 30GB and two 80GB) cool.
What have I learned?
I *have* to have TiVo functionality and soon.
Morpheus/Kazaa and other online sources of movies are dying.
Drives fail quickly if not properly cooled.
Drives tend to fail anyway or have the remote possibility of very quickly losing 100 of your hard-earned movies in the event of failure.
Almost no matter what, a TV PC is going to be too loud to enjoy having in the living room.
What will I do differently next time?
I will build two different boxes--one bare and quiet set-top box or something in the living room and the other a nasty, tricked-out, noisy system to handle all of the grunt-work in another room.
IDE RAID. 'nuff said.
Linux--as much as possible. I will actually make the full effort to get away from Windows and build On-Screen Display menus and things.. One of the bottom lines of my experience is that Windows/FAT32 *kills* drives.
I *have* to have TiVo/PVR/DVB/DVR/VDR functionality.. I could theoretically have one DVB card in the STB to add pause-live-TV functionality. For the setup and recording of other scheduled TV programs and movies, the "big box" in the other room that will have somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 or 5 DVB cards. This is fine for Digital Cable.. If I had a dish, it would likely be very different.
Rip, rip, rip. Get those DVDs archived onto file and quit letting other peoples' copies be sufficient. I really didn't do all *that* bad.. I had ripped somewhere around 60 of the DVDs myself. I've really got to say this--AVI-archived DVDs beats the friggin bug juice out of any multi-DVD player.
Could be a real innovation for small-run custom circuits..
Does that mean that this could be a step toward Desktop Fab ? The part of the article about growing the crystals in a particular fashion sounds hard to automate cheaply.
I thought they had something of a chance about ten to fifteen years ago when I saw an episode of Beyond 2000.. They discussed a method of changing the color of a transparent polymer at the molecular level via laser--in three dimensions. This soooo would be an improvement over CDs. And what's with the spinning!? Solid state needs to be the ultimate goal.
Looks like it's finally three years down the road--according to the article, anyway.. I saw it will be at least five years. Manufacturers are just now getting to the point of making DVD-writing standardized and afforadable.. Sony asks, "Why on Earth would we want something new?"
It looks like one of the biggest fans of Max Headroom might not yet know of the revival on the way.. MaxHeadroom.com is closed as of March, 2002.
Anyone know is email address?
Oh, wait.. Maybe he's still answering the webmaster address.. That appears to be (google) the email address he's been using on the site (according to a quick search).
As soon as I saw Max Headroom on the TechTV commercial announcing the upcoming series, I thought Mascot.
The previous virtual mascot for the channel, Tilde, was female (appealing enough to the first niche gamer-type market ZDTV was shooting for), but she was not good enough. They used on-the-fly 3D graphics based on VR-suit-like encoding, so the movements of the character were not fluid or terribly near accurate.
If Matt Frewer could record new vocals, I don't think anyone would object to a purely-digital Max Headroom. Digital!? But, what about..um..the original..was..good..um..ah.. Oh yeah..they just didn't have the technology to do it in 1985, you know.. psst.. they used a latex mask--it wasn't digital!. Also, surely Mr. Frewer is not doing terribly much since Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Lawnmower Man 2, so he can probably use the money (that is, if a short revival of the original series doesn't load his pockets with royalties).
Oh, and don't watch Lawnmower Man 2...for the love of all that's Holy! Don't watch it!
The "...come on, admit it, how many of us have daydreamed well into our twenties about doing the kinds of things they only comic book heros can do?" reminded me of my favorite passage from fiction..
"
Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherf$$$er in the world. If I moved to a martial arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
Hiro used to feel that way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way this is liberating. Hiro no longer has to worry about trying to be the baddest motherf$$$er in the world. The position is taken. The crowning touch, the one thing that really puts true world-class motherf$$$erdom totally out of reach, of course, is the hydrogen bomb. If it wasn't for the hydrogen bomb, a man could still aspire.... But Raven's nuclear umbrella puts the world title out of reach."
--p.254, Beginning of Chapter 36 of Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
In case you haven't read the book, Raven had a motorcycle with a sidecar. That sidecar had a friggin H-bomb in it that was rigged to go off if Raven's vital signs failed.
Instead of thinking of the universe similar to a kernel of popcorn, I prefer to think of it more as soup.
Popcorn would be the bang and crunch model--that is, if popcorn could crunch back into a kernel again. The individual particles (molecules, atoms, protons/neutrons/electrons, quarks, and so on) could represent super strings, galaxies, solar systems, planets, and such.
In the soup model, the suns are blowing up and retracting all the time, but most everything just swirls and stays very active overall. This seems to more easily conform to the laws of conservation of mass and energy rather than two universe-wide events that keep occuring.
The major whole I see in the soup model is the contstant introduction of energy from the stove. The universe would seem to have a finite amount of energy/matter. We haven't quite figured out gravity, but if the universe has a curved edge due to the general performance of gravity (tendency of seemingly all matter/energy to be attracted to all other matter/energy), energy never really could get an infinite distance from the mean center of the universe. Hence, the universe is curved as Einstein thought at some point because everything just swirls back in due to mutual attraction.
If this becomes the standard behavior for nano machines, then we might not need to build nanos for the purpose of destroying other nanos.. We can just put flash bulbs (conglomeration of LEDs might be even better) near all building entrances and perform a security sweep every X number of hours/days to flush nanos out that might have crept in.. Heck, it might become standard to flash lights all the time. That would be frickin annoying!
Also, humans might need frequent "decontamination" by flashing lights (LEDs have been used for therapeutic benefit in today's technology--one example) into the body and then re-introducing the "good" nanos through a pill.
Now, try it again--only hitting the keys that you have visually checked the locations of.
I was surprised at how high a score I got (touch typing).. I hadn't taken a test since high school. Years of IT/programming work just seem to hone typing skills.
After all, we didn't need to learn how to feel the keys if we still have to look down at a projection to see where on the table to tap. Force feedback is totally necessary for a virtual keyboard.
I won't be satisfied until we're using force fields!
Re:It'd be nice to know the application...
on
Digitizing VGA?
·
· Score: 1
How about VGA-digitizing + KVM + host software + VNC ?
I was looking form a VGA digitization process fairly recently as well..
My concept is that I can remote into any of the machines at my house that I want to, but the access is OS-level (and dependent on video frame buffer in Windows). I wanted to be able to drop into a DOS prompt or go into the BIOS or boot another OS.
If I had a machine (Machine A) that was hooked up to a KVM that was connected to every other machine in the house, an application that could display the screen on the remote machine (Machine B)--this viewing would happen through any TV-input-enabled software, I suppose. Then I could see the mouse and keyboard happenings on Machine B. The biggest problem I found in this concept was the design of an application that would take software-level mouse and keyboard commands sent into Machine A over VNC and converting those into outputs back out through the KVM. If all of that could be solved, the last problem is having a fairly inexpensive KVM that would switch to the different remote PCs with the same keyboard 'output' from Machine A.
My employer's solution involves giving the card its own ethernet connection and IP address. The card then sends and receives data on the machine on top of the PCI bus. You then use special software to access these cards over the network. They called them RIB cards. The problem is that they're way too expensive for a hobbyist to install in every machine.
At some point I saw a serial-based controller card that was installed in the client machine, but I've had a tough time finding those again and they're likely too expensive as well.
Some folks here have mentioned solutions that do what I've proposed through hardware. Again, the problem is cost for hobbyists. I've heard about solutions (and seen on in my company's Data Center) that take Machine A's functions and install them on all the machines that you'd like access to in the form of a card (likely some kind of single-board computer). If the problem could just be solved regarding getting the keyboard and mouse signals back into the KVM from the host computer, then ~$300 worth of equipment could perform the same task as $8000 (Dakota). My research took me to alternative input devices for the disabled. I think that's where the grail lies. Just don't take it beyond the Great Seal;) .
To answer some questions directly that were asked: Streaming or images? Streaming. What color depth? 8 bit will do, but 16 bit would be really nice. What's your budget? $300-500 Geek or User friendly? Geek
I've run into the problem before where IE is broken and I tried going to the Windows Update site using Netscape. It totally didn't work.
So did M$ just blindly block these browsers and not think about the possibility of IE being broken? I don't think so. I think the short answer is that if you can't get to an M$ site due to an M$ issue, then you need to call M$ Tech Support for $25/hr.
This is the way things went when I worked for MSN Tech Support many a year ago.
It looks like several DIY home audio/theater people out there have made home projection systems. The standard source of video appears to be the Sharp 8.4-inch LCD. That will run you ~$300. I did a search on Google for 'LCD 8.4' and had some pretty good luck.
Afraid the Fresnel lens will degrade the quality of the image from your expensive LCD? Try this Bausch & Lomb lens--it appears to be a non-Fresnel, so it doesn't have the lines that could cause some quality loss. You could end up creating a better quality product than a $4000 LCD if this lens works the way I think it does.
Some video source thoughts:
-- 7-inch 16:9 LCD (I don't know where the 7 inches are--I think they're horizontal) being offered to Playstation/PSX owners
-- good source of variety of LCDs?
-- there are several 5-inch TFT NTSC LCDs available for use with the Playstation/PSX (some better than others)
If I weren't able to get good resolution out of the 16:9 version, I'd rather use a VGA LCD at ~$260-350 any day with the NTSC LCD prices Best Buy and Radio Shack charge.
Final thoughts on the dimness issue.. With an LCD, you should be able to remove the reflective backing (ever so carefully, pack a UV-protectant clear sheet of plastic over the back of the device and pump some flourescent, arc, or other bright lighting through it.
Some problems foreseen:
-- may take some experimentation to find the light that irritates the eyes the least
-- may need two settings for day and night
-- be very cautious as not to create a fire hazard
I had been digging on WLAN back when it was just the 2.4GHz option in sight.. The tweaks possible to 2.4GHz w/ directional antennae and what-not to link friends' homes and to possibly go into business in rural communities where DSL/cable aren't yet available were tasty prospects.
Then 5GHz crept up on me a few months ago. I just somehow missed it.
Now I'm just going to keep stringing CAT5 through my apartment when it's needed and wait for the wireless storm to pass and all prices to drop.
My father-in-law used to keep a whistle around and would blow the ear off of any telemarketers.
I think this was probably a little more appropriate back in the day. In the modern day this seems more than slightly harsh due to outsourcing.. These people are crammed in some cube trying to make a living a company a couple-thousand miles away. This solution sounds great.
A little more on the realistic side in my household... A modern solution would be to manually screen the call. If someone sounds like they're giving a sales pitch, then hit a button that sends a signal to the serial port of a *Nix database server (or whatever menial task you have a 486 or low Pentium performing) in the corner house. Said *Nix box would have a 2400baud modem connected the phone line and play a WAV recording of cordless phone static for 30 seconds. Then hang up. If the phone rings again immediately, repeat. Otherwise, the WAV could be your voice giving the legal line of 'take me off your list' repeated again and again so the scruplescrabble of interrupting someone isn't necessary--leave it to the machine to be rude.
Also, I'm not sure if telemarketers typically take numbers off of their lists when they get a disconnected tone. The recording of the 'take me off your list' would be a sure bet.
Another tip, kiddies...remember that telemarketers are forbidden by law to call you after 9PM in your timezone.
Slashdot Mirror
I finally broke down and built a TV machine last summer.. I mainly used it to play Divx movies--both ones I ripped from my DVDs myself and ones I downloaded from Morpheus.
Remote Control:
- I bought an IRman and got it working with Winamp's VidAmp..
- At first, I kept no mouse or keyboard on the box. I opted instead to use the remote,
Case:TweakUI-configured auto-login, and VNC (from my laptop already wired-up in the living room.
This eliminated any inherent case rattle.
to try to keep the AthlonXP 1700+ and three Maxtor drives (one 30GB and two 80GB) cool.
What have I learned?
hard-earned movies in the event of failure.
What will I do differently next time?
nasty, tricked-out, noisy system to handle all of the grunt-work in another room.
On-Screen Display menus and things.. One of the bottom lines of my experience is that Windows/FAT32
*kills* drives.
have one DVB card in the
STB to add pause-live-TV functionality. For the setup and recording of other scheduled TV programs and movies, the "big box" in the other room that will have somewhere in the
neighborhood of 4 or 5 DVB cards. This is fine for Digital Cable.. If I had a dish, it would
likely be very different.
I really didn't do all *that* bad.. I had ripped somewhere around 60 of the DVDs myself.
I've really got to say this--AVI-archived DVDs beats the friggin bug juice out of any multi-DVD player.
Here are some more related links..
LinuxDVB
VDR
Using Google to calculate Tooth Decay.
Does that mean that this could be a step toward Desktop Fab ? The part of the article about growing the crystals in a particular fashion sounds hard to automate cheaply.
I thought they had something of a chance about ten to fifteen years ago when I saw an episode of Beyond 2000.. They discussed a method of changing the color of a transparent polymer at the molecular level via laser--in three dimensions. This soooo would be an improvement over CDs. And what's with the spinning!? Solid state needs to be the ultimate goal.
Looks like it's finally three years down the road--according to the article, anyway.. I saw it will be at least five years. Manufacturers are just now getting to the point of making DVD-writing standardized and afforadable.. Sony asks, "Why on Earth would we want something new?"
Anyone know is email address?
Oh, wait.. Maybe he's still answering the webmaster address.. That appears to be (google) the email address he's been using on the site (according to a quick search).
The previous virtual mascot for the channel, Tilde, was female (appealing enough to the first niche gamer-type market ZDTV was shooting for), but she was not good enough. They used on-the-fly 3D graphics based on VR-suit-like encoding, so the movements of the character were not fluid or terribly near accurate.
If Matt Frewer could record new vocals, I don't think anyone would object to a purely-digital Max Headroom. Digital!? But, what about..um..the original..was..good..um..ah.. Oh yeah..they just didn't have the technology to do it in 1985, you know.. psst.. they used a latex mask--it wasn't digital!. Also, surely Mr. Frewer is not doing terribly much since Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Lawnmower Man 2, so he can probably use the money (that is, if a short revival of the original series doesn't load his pockets with royalties).
Oh, and don't watch Lawnmower Man 2...for the love of all that's Holy! Don't watch it!
In case you haven't read the book, Raven had a motorcycle with a sidecar. That sidecar had a friggin H-bomb in it that was rigged to go off if Raven's vital signs failed.
In my (slashdot allocated, that is.. not mine) journal.
Popcorn would be the bang and crunch model--that is, if popcorn could crunch back into a kernel again. The individual particles (molecules, atoms, protons/neutrons/electrons, quarks, and so on) could represent super strings, galaxies, solar systems, planets, and such.
In the soup model, the suns are blowing up and retracting all the time, but most everything just swirls and stays very active overall. This seems to more easily conform to the laws of conservation of mass and energy rather than two universe-wide events that keep occuring.
The major whole I see in the soup model is the contstant introduction of energy from the stove. The universe would seem to have a finite amount of energy/matter. We haven't quite figured out gravity, but if the universe has a curved edge due to the general performance of gravity (tendency of seemingly all matter/energy to be attracted to all other matter/energy), energy never really could get an infinite distance from the mean center of the universe. Hence, the universe is curved as Einstein thought at some point because everything just swirls back in due to mutual attraction.
Good place to start if looking into nanotubes--for fun or profit!
Also, humans might need frequent "decontamination" by flashing lights (LEDs have been used for therapeutic benefit in today's technology--one example) into the body and then re-introducing the "good" nanos through a pill.
Diamond Age Summary
Diamond Age Review and audio sample
Ars Technica take on the subject
http://www.typingtest.com
Now, try it again--only hitting the keys that you have visually checked the locations of.
I was surprised at how high a score I got (touch typing).. I hadn't taken a test since high school. Years of IT/programming work just seem to hone typing skills.
I won't be satisfied until we're using force fields!
I was looking form a VGA digitization process fairly recently as well..
My concept is that I can remote into any of the machines at my house that I want to, but the access is OS-level (and dependent on video frame buffer in Windows). I wanted to be able to drop into a DOS prompt or go into the BIOS or boot another OS.
If I had a machine (Machine A) that was hooked up to a KVM that was connected to every other machine in the house, an application that could display the screen on the remote machine (Machine B)--this viewing would happen through any TV-input-enabled software, I suppose. Then I could see the mouse and keyboard happenings on Machine B. The biggest problem I found in this concept was the design of an application that would take software-level mouse and keyboard commands sent into Machine A over VNC and converting those into outputs back out through the KVM. If all of that could be solved, the last problem is having a fairly inexpensive KVM that would switch to the different remote PCs with the same keyboard 'output' from Machine A.
My employer's solution involves giving the card its own ethernet connection and IP address. The card then sends and receives data on the machine on top of the PCI bus. You then use special software to access these cards over the network. They called them RIB cards. The problem is that they're way too expensive for a hobbyist to install in every machine.
At some point I saw a serial-based controller card that was installed in the client machine, but I've had a tough time finding those again and they're likely too expensive as well.
Some folks here have mentioned solutions that do what I've proposed through hardware. Again, the problem is cost for hobbyists. I've heard about solutions (and seen on in my company's Data Center) that take Machine A's functions and install them on all the machines that you'd like access to in the form of a card (likely some kind of single-board computer). If the problem could just be solved regarding getting the keyboard and mouse signals back into the KVM from the host computer, then ~$300 worth of equipment could perform the same task as $8000 (Dakota). My research took me to alternative input devices for the disabled. I think that's where the grail lies. Just don't take it beyond the Great Seal ;) .
To answer some questions directly that were asked:
Streaming or images? Streaming.
What color depth? 8 bit will do, but 16 bit would be really nice.
What's your budget? $300-500
Geek or User friendly? Geek
I've run into the problem before where IE is broken and I tried going to the Windows Update site using Netscape. It totally didn't work.
So did M$ just blindly block these browsers and not think about the possibility of IE being broken? I don't think so. I think the short answer is that if you can't get to an M$ site due to an M$ issue, then you need to call M$ Tech Support for $25/hr.
This is the way things went when I worked for MSN Tech Support many a year ago.
Afraid the Fresnel lens will degrade the quality of the image from your expensive LCD? Try this Bausch & Lomb lens--it appears to be a non-Fresnel, so it doesn't have the lines that could cause some quality loss. You could end up creating a better quality product than a $4000 LCD if this lens works the way I think it does.
Some video source thoughts:
-- 7-inch 16:9 LCD (I don't know where the 7 inches are--I think they're horizontal) being offered to Playstation/PSX owners
-- good source of variety of LCDs?
-- there are several 5-inch TFT NTSC LCDs available for use with the Playstation/PSX (some better than others)
If I weren't able to get good resolution out of the 16:9 version, I'd rather use a VGA LCD at ~$260-350 any day with the NTSC LCD prices Best Buy and Radio Shack charge.
Final thoughts on the dimness issue.. With an LCD, you should be able to remove the reflective backing (ever so carefully, pack a UV-protectant clear sheet of plastic over the back of the device and pump some flourescent, arc, or other bright lighting through it.
Some problems foreseen:
-- may take some experimentation to find the light that irritates the eyes the least
-- may need two settings for day and night
-- be very cautious as not to create a fire hazard
Then 5GHz crept up on me a few months ago. I just somehow missed it.
Now I'm just going to keep stringing CAT5 through my apartment when it's needed and wait for the wireless storm to pass and all prices to drop.
I think this was probably a little more appropriate back in the day. In the modern day this seems more than slightly harsh due to outsourcing.. These people are crammed in some cube trying to make a living a company a couple-thousand miles away. This solution sounds great.
A little more on the realistic side in my household... A modern solution would be to manually screen the call. If someone sounds like they're giving a sales pitch, then hit a button that sends a signal to the serial port of a *Nix database server (or whatever menial task you have a 486 or low Pentium performing) in the corner house. Said *Nix box would have a 2400baud modem connected the phone line and play a WAV recording of cordless phone static for 30 seconds. Then hang up. If the phone rings again immediately, repeat. Otherwise, the WAV could be your voice giving the legal line of 'take me off your list' repeated again and again so the scruplescrabble of interrupting someone isn't necessary--leave it to the machine to be rude.
Also, I'm not sure if telemarketers typically take numbers off of their lists when they get a disconnected tone. The recording of the 'take me off your list' would be a sure bet.
Another tip, kiddies...remember that telemarketers are forbidden by law to call you after 9PM in your timezone.