Steam, the obnoxious wave of the future when it comes to delivering games, has been asking players to participate in a hardware survey. You can see the 1,000,000+ results tabulated here. You’ll see a profile of what the power-hungry side of the market looks like: Lots of RAM, lots of disk, lots of cycles.

Marketers take note: The amount of installed HD space is far higher than the amount of unused HD space. It’d be a good time to launch those teradrives you’re stockpiling… [Technorati tag: games]

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My daughter’s friend’s Powerbook crashed after she downloaded an episode of “Gilmore Girls.” Now it won’t boot, and reports that there’s nothing on the hard disk. She needs to turn in a paper on the drive on Monday. Any advice? In fact, if you’re in Boston, wanna fix it for her…?

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In this podcast, Kevin Werbach and I are interviewed by Richard Giles about Open Spectrum, i.e., getting the government out of the business of controlling frequencies. I haven’t heard it, but I remember Kevin being very interesting. [Technorati tags: werbach spectrum]

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For months and months I’ve been ignoring the ugly horizontal bars that show up in the box at the top of my archive pages. One crosses out “An Entry from the Archives” and the other runs underneath that text. They don’t show up in Microsoft IE but they do in Firefox and Safari.

Generous reader Miles of TinyApps, a site I never tire of recommending to y’all, scouted out the html code and found the offending lines. Apparently the Style property “text-decoration: none;” renders as blue underlines in Firefox and Safari, although I’m sure it will turn out to have been my fault. Anyway, I’ve removed those lines and am confident that when my archives finish rebuilding — scheduled for Oscar Night 2006 — they will have been shorn of their extraneous blue lines.

Thanks, Miles!

So, of course I got Miles’ advice backwards. Here’s a snippet from an email from him:

You mentioned that the “Style property “text-decoration: none;”
renders as blue underlines in Firefox and Safari”. Actually,
that is the code to get RID of the lines when added to the
A HREF tag [as Miles had indicated -ed.]. Sorry if that was unclear. [It was clear. I wasn’t.- ed.]

It seems the problem was more with Internet Explorer NOT
putting the blue lines in, as the original HTML has no provision
for removing them. “text-decoration:none” needs to be in the
A HREF tag, not in the FONT tags.

And be sure to see Shelley’s comments (in the comments) on how to do this purely through CSS instead of kludging together CSS and font tags….

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RageBoy has discovered that Amazon seems to be rolling out a feature that shows you for any particular book which phrases in it are “statistically improbable.” For example, Chris’ own Gonzo Marketing uses the phrase “public journalism” and “market advocacy.” Obviously those are not phrases unique to Chris’ book, so Amazon is doing some sort of statistical analysis to find phrases that have some prominence within a book and across books. Fascinating.

Unfortunately, apparently you need to be using the Safari browser to see this on Amazon. Or perhaps you need to be taking the same drugs as RB. Either way, get a Mac…before it gets you.

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Bruce Mohl has an excellent article in the Boston Globe today (read it fast before it gets flushed down the archive hole) about Logan Airport’s advanced parking system. It snaps your license plate on the way in, optically decodes it, and watches which floors you enter, so it knows roughly where you’ve parked. Every night, humans snap all the cars, so the computer generates a daily report. Benefits: Signs can direct you to a floor with vacancies, and the 25 people/day who lose their car can be directed to it. (I have never been more than three of those people.)

On the other hand, Logan doesn’t ever get rid of the data and seems to have no concerns about sharing it with the police.

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IBM plans on spending $100M over the next three years on getting linux onto desktops. According to eChannelLine the money will be used to:

…expand Linux support and technology across its Workplace software portfolio, which is used in a server-managed client model.

The investment will be focused on ISV support programs, channel and partner enablement and promotion, research and development, sales and marketing, and various technology and integration centers.

I’m actually surprised they’re not spending more. How much would it be worth to IBM to dethrone Windows? ,

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[Note: Since this damn fool entry is showing up pretty high in Google for some searches, I thought I should preface it with at least a taste of accurate information. If you want MythTv to get output from your cable box, you get yourself an IR Blaster from here. It runs from your serial port to your cable box and emits the same signals that your remote control emits. Then you follow the step by step instructions here. (It didn’t work for me until I went into the BIOS and assigned serial port 1 – my only port – the address and IRQ of serial port 2 (i.e., com1 and com2).) Now onto the stuff I wrote when I knew absolutely nothing, as opposed to now when I have advanced to knowing relatively nothing. – July 20, 2006]

I believe my nephew Greg and I hit the wall last night trying to build a MythTV. MythTV is open source software that turns your PC into Tivo++.

KnoppMyth — MythTV that can run from a CD — didn’t run because it didn’t recognize the Linksys card in the computer. So then we spent the usual comical four hours trying to get to it to recognize the spare hard drive I’d installed. Ironically, the HD came out of our Tivo when I’d upgraded it. There’s something funky about how Tivo formats its drives, though. Plus it helps if you notice in the KnoppMyth documentation where it says that the HD has to be the first drive in the system.

We (by which I mean Greg) then got the MythTV installed on the HD and booted the machine. We got a lovely graphical UI, but no TV. That’s ok. We expected to have to spend another few hours poking around; the problem seems to be that mySQL isn’t starting up properly.

But then I had an enormous D’oh Moment.

MythTV requires you to put a card into your machine that handles the video in and out. I installed a standard Hauppauge 250, so that shouldn’t be a problem. (“Shouldn’t be a problem” in linux-talk means that it requires only one Linux Day to get up and running, where a Linux Day equals 8 hours of hacking by someone who knows linux inside out (Greg), 12 hours of “helpful suggestions” from a Windows user, and two pizzas.) No, the D’oh Moment came when I realized that MythTV is TiVo for the bottom 125 channels that come through your cable and only if all those channels are unencoded. Our cable TV provider, RCN, starts the premimum channels at 165, and they’re all encoded.

TiVo gets around this in a kludgy way by having you stick some IR-emitting plastic thingies in front of the IR receiver in your cable box. So, when TV wants to record the new episode of The O.C., it changes channels on the cable box by flashing the same IR signals you would have sent manually with the remote. MythTV takes the signal before it goes into your cable box because it has no way of changing channels on your cable box.

So, if we were able to get our MythTV working, we would still need our TiVo to record premium programs, such as The Sopranos and the commercial-free version of Police Academy VI.

Damn! MythTV is such a cool idea! Especially in light of the FCC’s Broadcast Flag requirement. (Support the EFF!) [Technorati tags: mythtv tivo broadcast flag eff]

Refer to the comments to this post to see how wrong I am.

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Steve Johnson, one of my favorite writers, has a piece in the NYTimes about software that collaborates in the thinking process. He elaborates in his blog, complete with screen captures of DevonThink at work. The software does a semantic analysis of what Steve’s written and his research notes. Now if only I had ten years’ worth of research notes stored in my computer! (Maybe Steve would let me borrow his.)

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In anticipation of Tivo’s presenting ads while we fast forward, I’m looking into building (or buying?) a MythTV, an open source project that turns a linux box into a Tivo++. We love Tivo, but MythTV looks much better. (We’re also going to try to buy our next TV before the Broadcast Flag goes into effect in July 1, 2005.)

I find myself amazingly confused, however. For example, the EFF says that PC TV tuners will record HDTV off of over-the-air broadcasts but not off of cable boxes. That sounds crazy…crazy like the FCC. (Tivo also doesn’t record HDTV, except through some deal with DirecTV.) Will going the MythTV route lock me out of recording HDTV if and when commercial recorders enable it? Will the free source of programming information, zap2it.com, continue as free or is there a reasonable likelihood that we’ll be locked out of access? Does someone sell ready-to-run MythTV boxes? Alternatively, since it seems that there’s a CD with linux and MythTV sw ready-to-install, is there a list of exactly the right hw I can just go out and buy without having to make choices beyond how large a hard drive and whether I want a white or black case? (MySetTopBox is pretty good at this.) Just a few of a zillion questions. And I won’t be starting this immediately since I have been unable to extirpate entirely my sense of priorities.

Some initial links:
MythTV home
Screenshots – mmmm!
Documentation
PVR Blog (personal vido recorder)
PVRBlog’s MythTV how-to
MySetTopBox
Knoppmyth– MythTV on a CD
Support the EFF!

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