Thanksgiving with Wassermans and friends

Real Thanksgiving we spent with Rob & Lee, Mark & Miriam and friends.  Here are a couple of photos courtesy of Mark.  As always a good time was had with plenty of food and friendship.

Pre Thanksgiving in Charlotte & we adopt Titan

BB & I went down to visit family in Charlotte and have a pre Thanksgiving Thanksgiving.  Had a great time.

While there we stayed at E lake cottage.  It's just charming.  I took a few photos.


The other big news is that J let us adopt Titan, one of her Aussies.  Great dog.  Here are some photos.

Synergy

One of the issues I've been unhappy about with the TV is that I needed to have a separate keyboard for the computer TV.  A bit of searching found Synergy.  It provides a facility to remote the keyboard and mouse for a machine.  For my purposes it's just what's wanted so that I can control the TV computer from my laptop.  Now if disk prices would just come down I'd be done with the Fire Comcast TV project.

Comcast fired!

Verizon was by yesterday and installed fiber.  The Internet is definitely faster, although not dramatically so.  I did have to reconfigure some of the house network.  The router I'd been using to run DHCP had a reservation feature that allowed me to assign static IPs.  I needed these to support some of applications I run across the local net.  The Verizon provided router, a generally much more advanced device, doesn't have an explicit static reserved IP feature.  It does seem to create the same effect by always using the same IP for a given MAC address.  The net was that I had to do a bit of reconfiguration of some software that for whatever reason needed a real IP instead of a host name.

With everything running again properly, I called Comcast to terminate the remaining service.  There was some entirely needless fuss and bother over verifying my identity.  It seems that calling from the registered phone number, identifying the account holder, and verifying the address isn't enough.  We finally got past that and Comcast service is now terminated.

We are still having a bit of issue with the USB disk drive I'm using to hold downloaded media.  From time to time it gratuitously dismounts.  That's a bit frustrating when watching something.  I'd like to replace it with a 2TB internal drive but sadly drive prices have skyrocketed with the flooding in Asia.  I'll put up with the dismounts until prices return to a sane level then replace it.

Bottom line now, though, is that I no longer pay for TV, have cut my Internet bill by 1/3, and my phone bill to 1/8 of what it was.  Well worth the couple of hundred I spent on equipment!

Fall bike ride with BB

On this lovely warm fall day BB and I took a 10 mile bike ride.  We went to Wayside Inn by way of Rt 20.  We'll probably not use that route again as Rt 20 is busy and noisy even on Sundays.  Wayside was, as always, nice but we decided not to stop as neither of us were tired or thirsty.  The fall colors were very good even after last weeks heavy snow.  There is still a fair number of downed trees and debris on roads and sidewalks.  Even so, the ride was outstanding.  Here are some photos:

BB and I went for a short bike ride today.  The plan was to bike over to Wayside Inn and stop for a mulled cider.  We got to the inn OK but, sadly, no cider and thus no mulled cider.  We stopped at the mill and I took some photos.  Here's the story:

Bike ride to 9 acre corner

Between the weather, girls weekend away, and a back issue we've not been biking for a bit.  But today with bright sunny sky we rode to 9 Acre Corner and the farm stand.  It was good to be out again.  We had to detour a few times as the storm damage is still being cleared.  While we didn't get to much damage, just one tree dropped a large limb, nearby areas were really hit.  Otherwise, it was a great ride on a brisk fall day with Monday's heavy wet snow gone.

20111030 Snow Storm

We survived the snow storm with no issues save a single large tree limb; no power loss though internet was down for a bit.  Ten miles west of here things were very bad with over 20" of heavy wet snow.  Out by heather they had up to 30"!  She lost power and borrowed our generator to run the sump pumps etc.  Fortunately their electricity was only down for a couple of days.  I'm now a firm believer in generators.

Recent bike rides - 50+ miles - with BB

BB and I did a lot of biking, over 50 miles, over the Columbus Day holiday.

Thursday and Friday we went down to the Cape and used the last two days of our reservation at Seashore Park Inn.  I upgraded the room so we'd have a king size bed and a bit more space with a small living room.  Much nicer!  Seashore Park is an OK place to stay and the price was right.

From 20111005 Bike cape

The Cape has some great biking.  Thursday we did 20+ miles on the Cape Cod Rail Trail.  It was VERY windy so we decided to bike N against the wind out so we'd have it at our backs when returning.  It turned out well since after 20 miles we were both fairly tired.  Here's our route.

From 20111005 Bike cape

Friday we biked out to the Salt Marsh park.  The path through the salt marsh is rolling and twisty.  Rather more fun to ride that the straight flat rail trail.  The old coast guard rescue station is at the end of the path and a nice place to stop.  On the way back we rode up to Arnolds Clam Shack.  Great food!  I had the lobster bisque.  We stopped on the way home for ice cream.  Here's the route.

From 20111005 Bike cape

Here are a bunch of pictures from these rides.



Saturday we decided to bike to the farm store at Nine Acre Corner.  That ride is about 14 or 15 miles.  The store is a nice place to stop with picnic benches and tents.  Here's our route and some pictures from the ride.  BB rode her Rock Hopper finally.  It's MUCH lighter and a generally better bike than she's been riding.

From 201110 Bike 9 acre

Sunday we decided to ride the rail trail from Bedford to Lexington.  This was the site of our very first bike ride together.  Memory serves we rode a total of 3 miles or so.  Sunday we zipped down to Lexington (about 4 miles), walked around a bit, then rode back.  We were both looking for a fairly short ride as 3 back to back days of biking had us both a bit leg weary.  Monday we decided to do that ride again stopping in Lexington for lunch.  Interestingly, BB remarked that 4 miles is not much of a ride! Here's the route and some photos from those rides.

From 201110 Bike Lexington

Between all the rides we did 50 plus miles over 5 days.  Not much, I suppose, by some standards but fun for us.

Fire Comcast TV ... They are fired!!

I've been working for some while to get rid of Comcast TV service.  For the last month or so we've not used any Comcast content so today I canceled the TV service and returned their equipment.  Of course Comcast in their infinite but bone headed wisdom decided to increase the cost of the remaining service $10/month!  That's a great incentive to continue to do business with them ... NOT.

In a related development, Verizon is working at the end of the street so there is some hope that broadband will soon be available.  Given that Verizon cost is comparable and included phone service Comcast is going to get fired completely.

I got an email from an old friend about my Fire Comcast system and sent the following reply.  It sums up things fairly well.

The answer to all questions is 'it depends.'  I built my system on old used gear of one sort or another on a 100 Mbps network.  By splitting the recording and playback functions I was able to use older/slower gear.  It's certainly possible to build a single PC system but I'd be concerned about cost.  Here's the current state:

• Tuner - HD Homerun dual tuner ($94) -Takes the digitization load off the DVR.

• Antenna ($0) - Made several from internet plans.  The fractal antenna works as well as anything else.

• TV DVR - MythTV running on 3 Ghz P4 with 1.5GB memory & 360 GB of old IDE drives ($70 for box, power supply, motherboard & memory, $0 for disk drives salvaged from old machines).  This box is ONLY responsible for recording OTA from the HD Homerun and playing back to another machine driving the TV.  There are some issues when recording two shows while playing back a third.  Most likely it's either a processor or disk issue.  There are a number of fixes the cheapest of which is to setup a cron job to move the recordings to the playback machine overnight ($0).

• TV computer - Intell Core 2 DUO, 2.4 GHz, 3 GB main memory, 2 sata disk drives ($90), chassis and power supply ($70), 1 TB USB ($99).  This machine drives the TV and downloads NZB content.  I overspent on it as I was anxious to get the whole system up and fire Comcast ($90/month) so the extra expense seemed justified.  I run XBMC as the principal video display software with extensions to playback MythTV recordings (loose commercial skip so I just skip forward 30 seconds to get past commercials).  I run Sabnzbd for NZB content download and store it in the XBMC directories.  I also setup a bunch of desktop launchers for major networks and a web page with show links.  This allows watching current shows on the show sites.  We don't much use these.  I use vobcopy on this machine to copy DVDs for backup and later viewing.  We get DVDs via netflixs and from the library.  I use an XVGA interface to the TV since the TV has a conformal display mode better than HDMI (machine doesn't have an HDMI output).  This box is overkill to drive the TV (previously I'd used a P3 laptop).  I use it because of the XVGA resolution compatibility with the TV.

All in all the system works well.  All of the hardware is used/salvage (exception is 1TB USB disk & HD Homerun).  Most was bought on Craigs list. There's much to recommend partitioning functions across a network.  With complete P4 systems going for anywhere from $30 to $70 I suspect that this configuration could be replicated for about 2/3 of what I spent.

A couple of pieces of advice.  

• Get a good solid TV interface early in the process.  The laptop I used to drive the TV originally had plenty of power but couldn't drive the TV at HDMI or better resolution.  Check your TV docs to see what inputs it has at what resolutions.  If you've got a HDMI 720 or better D shell input you'll likely be satisfied with the video quality for TV (most hi def TV is actually 720p/i) but may have issues with DVDs.  Above 1080 it's all VERY GOOD.

• I tried several OTA TV DVR software packages.  MythTV is the pick of the litter.  Plan on installing it several/many times as you sort through the configuration issues.  There's lots of docs available but be aware that there have been several versions and the docs while giving useful clues are not reliably current, often contradictory, often confusing, often incomplete, etc.  That said, the clue you need to configure is out there somewhere you just need to be patient, keep looking, and be willing to do things over and over again until you get it sorted.

• I prefer XBMC over MythTV as a viewing interface but it's only a preference.  Several factors drove my choice.  XBMC has a good mouse interface and the new Logitech wireless mouse has good range, is cheap, and works well.  I also wanted a keyboard/mouse interface on the TV system so it is usable for other purposes.  If you are going to use MythTV as the viewing interface you'll probably want a remote as it is oriented that way.

• There is much good information on YouTube.  Look at it BEFORE you get started.  That said, don't believe everything you see.

• Start with what you have by way of hardware.  When you run into issues then you can direct your spend at the real problem.  My original configuration was a P3 laptop with a broken keyboard and a 486 doing OTA recording.  It actually worked surprisingly well.

• Experiment a bit with NZB before getting over involved with DVR recording.  Checkout NZB.su.  Likewise, experiment with the network TV show sites before getting over involved with DVR recording.  Hulu is good.  There is a LOT of recorded content available and you may not want/need to do as much DVR recording as you think.  

Good luck with it.  Let me know how you do.
Regards,
Richard

Bike rides with BB

BB and I went biking this weekend.  We  took a short ride Saturday and a longer ride Sunday out to Nine Acre Corner and stopped at Verrill Farm for some cold drinks.  Now that we're able to ride farther we should be able to bike to local destinations and back.  Here is a sort of video of this weekend's ride.

Afternoon in Wells, Me

One of the people BB works with has a home in Wells, Me.  She invited the office up for a party.  It's a 2 hour drive for us but was a lovely day and great time.  We walked out to the ocean and enjoyed the view.  Here are a couple of photos.

Messing around with Kdenlive

I've  been playing a bit with Kdenlive (nonlinear video editor).  My initial impressions were rather mixed since it had a tendency to crash.  However, once I discovered its preferred work flow it is actually fairly usable.  I took the flip video I made of our ride the other day and made a sort of stop motion video by speeding it up by a factor of 4 and sampling every 60th frame.



Clearly a home movie, but interesting none the less.

Bike ride with BB - Around the neighborhood

BB and I went for a nice bike ride around the neighborhood.  I tried the video camera mounted on top of my helmet.  Actually worked OK.  I took the following stills from the video.

Bike ride with BB - Wayside Inn loop

BB and I went for a bike ride.  About 11 miles in 70 minutes.  We tried a new route down to Wayside Inn and then back to the Assabet.  Nice route but traffic was a bit of an issue particularly with idiots that think it's OK to pass on blind curves and hills into oncoming traffic.  Still it was a nice day and we had a good ride.

Tried mounting the flip video camera on my helmet.  The video seems much more stable.  Unfortunately, I didn't have it reasonably pointed so the video was mostly pavement.  I'll adjust the mount and we'll see what happens.

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

Here's the route.

Phone madness

We lost phone service (Verizon) during Irene Saturday August 27th.  It's now 11 days on and still no phone service.  I've tried to work with Verizon but it's been an unbelievably bad experience.

• 8/27 tried to call Verizon - all circuits busy
• 8/27 tried again to call Verizon - all circuits busy
• 8/27 tried for third time to call Verizon - all circuits busy
• 9/1 Comcast back - tried 6 different Telephone numbers from Verizon phone book and Verizon web site.  Five had message "this number is not in service."  One had message "this mailbox is full."
• 9/5 called 1-800 VERIZON.  After IVR was connected to a non-working number.
• 9/5 called 1-800 VERIZON.  Spoke with repair service.  They said service would return by 8 PM.  Asked for credit.  Was told could only be issued from date service outage was reported!  Tried to reason with agent.  Didn't work.  Got routed to customer billing.  30 minutes later hung up.
• 9/6 called 1-800 VERIZON.  After IVR was connected to a non-working number.
• 9/6 called 1-800 VERIZON.  After IVR connected to billing.  System hung up.
• 9/6 called 1-800 VERIZON.  After IVR connected to billing.  System hung up.
• 9/6 called 1-800 VERIZON - all circuits busy
• 9/6 called 1-800 VERIZON - all circuits busy
• 9/6 called 1-800 VERIZON - all circuits busy
• 9/6 called 1-800 VERIZON - all circuits busy
  Addenda
• 9/6 phone service restored at 4 PM.  Message from Verizon says problem fixed last Sunday around 10 AM.  As of this AM I had no dial tone.  Given choice to speak to representative.  Dragged through IVR knothole and placed on hold at 4:06.  Decided to wait on hold with speaker phone to deal with bill.
  
  Got connected to agent at 4:35.  Adjusted bill ($90 in credits).  Explained my experience and cautioned that I and our neighbors were re-evaluating doing business with Verizon.

Have decided to switch phone companies.  Will try to work with Comcast, though it pains me greatly.  Sadly, trying to call Comcast has been a bit of a challenge.  Six attempts with NO success.  Get message "We are unable to process your call at this time."

I've decided to call the security company and see if they can work with with a cell connection.

Bike ride with BB - Great Meadows Reserve

BB and I rode down to the Great Meadow National Wildlife Reserve on the Sudbury River.  It was a great day and a good ride.  Here are some photos and a vid.



Video

Bike Ride With BB

BB and I went on a bike ride a week ago and I took a video using the new Flip camera.  I was delayed in posting it as the video was long, the entire ride, and I needed to learn how to edit in Ubuntu Kdenlive.  I've managed to get something together after a number of false starts.  Here's the results.

Irene - We have electricity and HOT SHOWERS

Irene is now almost truly gone - electricity came back on Wednesday around 11 PM.  Took a few minutes  to shut down the generator and connect things to NSTAR power.  Surprisingly, hot water came up in around 30 minutes so I enjoyed a nice long hot shower.  Life is good.

Plan for the day is to finish the storm cleanup and start washing the decks so they can be stained.

Addenda: Still no phone service.  Tried to call Verizon on cell.  Got several "not in service" and "all line busy" numbers.  This raises SERIOUS issues concerning leaving Comcast internet.  Finally got through to an automated system that said Friday by 11 PM.  My guess is that it's a local CO power issue as that's consistent with power to the rest of Sudbury.

Irene - Day 5, still no electricity

Well Ollie, this is a fine mess you've got us in!


Good news, Nstar now projects we'll have power by 10 PM Friday.  Bad news, 10 PM Friday 2.5 days from now.  I suppose I shouldn't complain as the generator is holding up OK.  I'll need to go out today and buy batteries and a couple of bottles of gas for the lantern.  Otherwise we're faring reasonably OK, though I'm desperate for a hot shower.

The whole experience has me thinking about what is really important WRT electricity other than having it obviously.  Refrigeration is at the top of the list, though news is up there as well.  I'm also a bit more aware of the much slower pace of life no electricity sets.  Many things take longer and are far less convenient.

Of course there is the issue of what I'd do if something like this happened in the winter.  While we have gas heat without electricity to run the pumps, blowers, and computers that distribute the heat we'd have no heat.  I think I'll look into what would be required to power that part of the house.