This week, Paul K2FX holds the usual holliday weekend open forum. Mike N2QDK asks the net if other folks have noticed National Weather Service's All Hazards Weather Radio not SAME-encoding weather watches. Brad KB2CHY and others discuss the recent high wind gusts and associated power outages in the Rochester area.
This week, Paul K2FX takes a trip around the world in 30 minutes, by disucssing everything world-band (shortwave) broadcast radio has to offer.
As the entire Northeastern United States is getting blanketed by upwards of a foot of snow today and tonight, then another 7+ inches from a different storm tomorrow night, my dad made an interesting observation: He's not receiving any Severe Weather Watches via NOAA National Weather Service (NWS) VHF weather radio.
I only realized it after he mentioned it, but even through the ice storm last week and the snow this week, I haven't received any watches or warnings either. However my wife has been thrilled not to be woken up by the shrill alerts.
My dad called the NWS field office in Buffalo, where an unnamed meteorologist told him they were under a directive not to issue watches via the weather radio. We both remember receiving watches during the summer thunderstorm season, but it's been very quiet the past few months. Too quiet.
I emailed Raymond O'Keefe with the NWS Albany field office about this, and confirmed that while they do issue watches via weather service radio (as in, they announce them via voice), they do not SAME encode them. He also said this isn't a new policy for them.
This weekend I will be digging into this issue while digging out from the snow while we impatiently await for our new arrival.
A big bug in Vista Media Center that I have encountered twice in the past two months, which required me to completely wipe and reconfigure my channel list guide and scheduled recordings has been fixed. But only in Windows7, according to mikehayton, a Microsoft MCE Team Member:
"This is a known bug fixed in Win7. At this stage there are not sufficient instances of it reported to warrant backporting the fix (and then doing the full test pass to ensure that in this version of the code that it hasnt broken something else)."
Seriously? Is Microsoft even supporting Windows Vista with bug fixes these days or what? When I purchased Vista Ultimate two months ago, I didn't realize that I was buying into an end-of-life product. (I know, I'm not even supposed to have TV Pack 2008, but it was applied to a fresh Vista install, per Microsoft's instruction to OEM's). But seriously, this really can't bode well for users of Vista hoping for fixes to their documented bugs.
How many other issues will only fixed in Windows7? For me, it doesn't matter... For my last remaining home Windows OS, Media Center, Mac/AppleTV can't come soon enough.
This is just one more, and likely the last, nail in the coffin for Microsoft operating systems for me. Since buying a MacBook last week, I've only needed to boot into XP once, and that was to Remote Desktop into a client's workstation.
EDIT: After a quick Google search, I've eliminated my last reason to boot into XP. Thanks Microsoft!
Full text of the error log, for search engine indexing is below:
It looks like I'll have to add a new tagging keyword for blog posts: Mac.
Last Thursday, after years of frustration with the state of Windows operating systems and the poor build quality and support of laptop hardware, I decided to give Apple a shot.
Increasingly, Windows XP has felt like the wrong tool in my digital photo arsenal. From the lack of real DNG thumbnail and metadata editing in Windows Explorer, to kludgy network fileshare support in Lightroom and iViewMediaPro (now Expression Media), I wanted something new. Something easier. Vista, the current upgrade path offered by Redmond, is what I have been trying out on my Home Theater PC (HTPC) media center. The 10 foot interface in Vista Media Center is arguably the best user interface (UI) Microsoft has ever released, but the desktop feels like a new wrapper on the same old backend that will invariably become more laggy as it ages.
Steve Jobs' strategy of getting iPods and iPhones into the hands of Windows users as an evil gateway drug was a success for me. I'm drinking the Kool-aid, smelling the coffee, or whatever mixed metaphor you want to use. After four days and probably 20 hours of use, I completely get it. OS X's layout is logical, and it makes sense, once you know where to look for stuff, and once you learn the basic operating system and application shortcut keys.
I pitty my wife, pets, friends and family who will now be subjected to those "a-ha" moments and the overall evangelism that will undoubtedly occur over the next few months. I apologize in advance.
Thanks to my MacGeek friends for helping me on this journey, including MrLint and PJP. I'm archiving links to the software tools and general infos which I found most useful, in the hope it will help others along the way:
Paul K2FX talks about RF environmental safety practices.
In 2006, after
five years with my venerable first-generation TiVo (HDR112), the
hard disk died. Thanks to the efforts of the very active TiVo
hacker/cracker community, it would be short work to reinstall the TiVo
operating system to a new disk. But it's been five years, surely there
was a better DVR experience out there. Better graphics and user
interface, multiple tuners, ability to recompress/stream recorded
content on the fly; All things my old TiVo hardware sadly could never do.
After a few nights of research and an install of MythTV on a spare PC,
and after dismissing BeyondTV, I was shocked when I read about Windows
XP Media Center Edition.
10' interface, driven by a remote control?!? DVR functionality built
on top of a Windows XP operating system! Now we're talking!
Two years later, I decided to finally upgrade to Vista, not for the
(terrible) desktop user interface, but for the very elegant Media
Center features. More importantly, the ability to receive the
non-encrypted digital signals that Time Warner Cable sends for free to
its customers, also known as clear QAM. Of course, installing the Vista 2008 TV Pack (Fiji) broke Orb and DVRMSToolbox, but hopefully they will update their software.
Sometime during the spring of 2001, the way I viewed TV changed. I was an early adopter of TiVo. A HDR112, open box special from Best Buy, to be exact. It was only a 14 hour unit (out of the box), but that would soon be expanded to over 120 hours through various hardware and software hacks, provided by the very active cracker community. It even got network/LAN connectivity, allowing Maureen or I to schedule recordings via an embedded webserver, and additional RAM for its internal guide database (making the user interface much faster).
All was well until around the fall of 2006, when the hard drive died. I could have fixed it after a few hours of troubleshooting and hard drive swapping, but wanted to see what my options were on the Microsoft side of things. I was reading good things about XP Media Center Edition, and combining my home Windows server and DVR into one device would be very convenient.
After a few demos from local friends, I was convinced Windows XP Media Center 2005 Edition was up to the task. I just needed to find the right hardware. I didn't want a noisy beige box in my A/V rack! After a few months of research, I
settled on what seemed like a good ballance between price, performance, style/fit-and-finish, and quiet:
What I already had on hand:
The rest of this still needs to be written...
My computer and technology milestones are usually imprinted on my brain by the
purchase of a new hard drive. For geeks that have what I call the
"Archivist Gene" (like myself) tend to be digital packrats. We file,
store, organize, and keep safe from entropy information because we can.
In
the case of the lossless live music guys (etree.org, Furthur), we, or at
least I, felt a
cultural and historical obligation of preserving digital audio.
Geographic redundancy just happened to be a happy happenstance. But
that's offtopic.
I vividly recall the family's first computer, some 8088 clone, and it's fantastic 20MB harddisk, circa 1988. I think the pricetag was still on the bottom of the drive, $350.
I can remember the joy of having a separate 6GB D:\ drive on my FTP server, sparkle.etree.org, dedicated to sharing only SHN files, back around 1998 or so. I could literally hosts five or six shows at a time!
When hard disks broke the $1/GB barrier around the end of 2002, I can remember telling non-geek friends what an important milestone it was. I remember getting the phonecall from a buddy in spring 2005 telling me to get my ass over to CompUSA because they had 400GB Seagate drives for $150 without a mail-in rebate. Walking out of a store with over 1TB under your arm was a big deal!
Testing... eventually this will be a home weather station and APRS digipeater located in Long Beach, Long Island, New York. This will be a battery backed up solution, hopefully 100% solar-powered.
Hopefully this station will be online spring 2009.
Home weather station located in Deer Park, NY, reporting via the Internet to CWOP/APRS-IS as N2QDK-4, and via the web as weather.dipino.com and Weather Underground as KNYDEERP3.
Testing... eventually this will be a weather station and digipeater will be located somewhere in the Adirondack Park of New York State.
The primary goal for this digipeater is to provide APRS coverage to the High Peaks region, which currently is a huge hole for APRS. Secondarily, transmitting weather information four times an hour to the amateur radio and meteorological communities from a remote location, from which weather reporting is traditionally difficult (mountaintop).
I am currently looking for a high elevation secure location to site this station. It will be 100% solar-powered.
Tentative online date is spring 2009.
As Richard Garriott W5KWQ starts to go through his checklists and rounding up his stuff after a week aboard the International Space Station (ISS), he's still finding time to make contacts and send down the occasional slow scan TV (SSTV) images.
He's really been a fantastic ambassador for amateur radio and space tourism.
Here's a collection of the sights and sounds I've collected during todays passes.
I talked to Richard again during the 12:40 UTC pass, here's the audio (all 19 seconds of it). This time around, he said my full callsign, so I have confirmation it's correct in his logbook.
Below is additional audio I recieved from Richard Garriott aboard the International Space Station (ISS) from today, 21 Oct 2008, while passing over the East Coast of the United States.
I'm new to satellite work, but is it considered bad form to call a bird twice in the same pass? Or each pass? I'd love to hear from the ham community on this.
21 Oct 2008 12:40 UTC
21 Oct 2008 11:06 UTC
