d00dism

Earlier this week, my El Gato EyeHome arrived. It doesn’t come with any AV cables. So I had to march down to Wallyworld to pick up some cables. Then the fun began.

I had a few choices when it came to cables. There’s composite, S-video, and component video outputs. For audio, there’s component and optical. Now, if I had the right equipment, the right connections would be the component video and the optical audio. Optical audio: isn’t that an oxymoron? I don’t and I need the most flexibility, so I went with the component video and audio. Note that there is no RF coaxial output, so if that’s all your TV has, you may have to route it through a special adapter box or through your VCR.

After all the reviews I read, I expected the most pain-free install ever. It was close, but not quite there. However, I’m not sure I can fault the EyeHome. I’m connecting it through a wireless to ethernet adapter and switch. Upon turning on the EyeHome, it didn’t recognize that my Powermac upstairs had the software installed. Manually putting in its IP didn’t work either. Then I noticed that it had a self-assigned IP address (one starting with 169). Shutting down all the network equipment and starting it again fixed the issue and it’s worked ever since, so I don’t know what the issue really was, but it appears to have been transient.

Once I had that worked out, the Powermac appeared and I started playing. My EyeTV recordings showed up and played perfectly. However, the times listed didn’t seem right. The unit wasn’t setting its own time and date correctly and there is no way to set it manually (that can be counted as a flaw because I can imagine that sometimes the network the EyeHome is on won’t have an NTP server, but I digress).

I tried the rest of the features, save the movie one because I had no movies saved to my hard drive. They all performed as I would hope (except being unable to play iTunes Music Store files, but that’s not their fault). The movie playing function is much more important to me anyway. As a test, I used Handbrake to encode a movie. The first time I used an MPEG4 container with H.264 video and AAC video. It looked and sounded great. However, they didn’t sync up. I’m not sure what the problem was. I re-encoded into an AVI container with MPEG 4 video and MP3 sound. That synced up great. Perhaps the added complexity of AAC caused the sound delay. I’m not sure.

I did run into a problem with certain scenes though. In particular, White Noise has a lot of scenes that are almost all static. Those… scenes… would… skip… a… lot. Fortunately, those scenes were few and far between. All other video was fine as far as I could tell.

Despite some little issues, I feel like the $129 I spent on my EyeHome (refurbished price, brand new currently on sale for $150) was well worth it. At the $200 normal price, I’m a little more hesitant, but that’s just more reason to get one now.

Pros: Handles all kinds of media. Easy setup. Regular firmware updates. Works with EyeTV. Only $150.
Cons: Some initial setup problems. Doesn’t work with iTunes Music Store files. Issues with some intense movie sections. No manual time setting capability.

Twice this week someone I’ve met through the Macworld forums has passed away. I got the email a few days ago from a friend of his. It was by far the saddest piece of news to ever enter my inbox. Chris Breen, who knew him longer than I, has written an excellent forum post about it. Please read it. Chris has far more experience writing and his piece is really touching. One snippet hit me pretty hard.

During one such exchange Grant and I engaged in a heated debate about the benefits of bleu cheese dressing (complete with Grant’s never-fail recipe for same). If you glance at just about any of his posts you’ll see that he continued to integrate a part of his “real” life into many of them–often illustrating a point by talking about how his wife Mo was amazed by some new trick he made his Mac perform or passing along a wholly unrelated tidbit about life in the mythical-sounding Pahrump, Nevada.

I never met Grant. I don’t know what he looked like. I don’t know what kind of car he drove or much about what he did earlier in life. I do know, however, that Grant was a sterling reminder of just how kind, generous, and helpful people can be. Our forums will be poorer without him.

Chris brings up an interesting point that I really didn’t think about too much until I started telling people close to me. Part of dealing with the loss of someone you cared about is communicating what you knew of them to others. It’s a cathartic experience. However, when I explain how I knew Grant, people have so far said something along the lines that I didn’t really know him or that it seems like I knew him. As far as I’m concerned, I knew him. Downplaying the role that he played in his life has made it harder for me deal with it and keeps me from being able to express myself to that person. Maybe they’re trying to make things easier for me by trying to logically argue that I shouldn’t be that sad, maybe convince my brain it’s not that bad to lessen the blow. It’s not really having that effect though. I feel as though they are trivializing my feelings.

I do feel like I missed the opportunity to get to know him though. He had a huge impact on my life and I never so much as talked to him on the phone. Our interactions were limited to postings in the forums, private messages, and email. When I got to the forums, Grant had a large number of posts. I want to say the most, but back in the days of the Gabbery forums some people pumped their posts counts with one word entries. Grant didn’t. He spent much of his time scouring the forums for people to help and learning new knowledge to spread later. I couldn’t help but respect him and his astounding patience. He knew how to cool down a situation and deal with even the most abrasive poster. When I overstepped my bounds, Grant would call me on it.

When it came time to make the OS X Forum FAQ, Grant jumped right in, writing a guide to maintenance utilities, which I will be preserving on this website for posterity. As time wore on, my youthful enthusiasm helped me outpace him and my post count became #1. I even reached 10,000 posts. Grant only reached 9,548 posts, never breaking the five digit barrier. Also worth noting is that he posted enough to earn the coveted title of Forum God. If anyone deserved that title, he did.

He succumbed to leukemia Wednesday evening in a hospice in Nevada. There will not be a funeral. He’ll be cremated and his ashes spread at sea (a man after my own heart). His wife asked that no flowers, etc. be sent and instead that donations be made in his name to the hospice. If you knew Grant or my description of him moved you in any way, please contribute.

Nathan Adelson Hospice
4141 Swenson St.
Las Vegas NV 89119

You can even donate online.

Make sure you take MIT’s survey for blog authors.

Anyone that’s been a member of Macworld’s forums for a significant amount of time may remember the “Gabbery” forums. They were a haven of off-topic conversation with its own unique flavor. It ultimately had to come to an end. That story is for another time though.

One of the leading contributors was a member named Passenger. He was passionate and believed in what he said. That’s a rare trait now. When the “Gabbery” forums were disbanded, one of the members, Kahloz, started a new forum at his own website. Passenger made the migration with a few others. For months (or a year, I can’t remember), we talked about all topics, routinely getting on one another’s nerves.

There were times that I hated Passenger’s guts, but I always had to respect him. Eventually, the new community disbanded (history repeating I suspect) and most of us went our separate ways. Then the other day, Stryder, whom participated in the Kahloz forums, contacted me the other day. I was rather surprised as we never really personally spoke. It turned out that Passenger had passed away (see also Kahloz’s entry).

Pass and I hadn’t debated in a very long time, but I’ll still miss the guy. I hope he finds peace wherever he is.

I don’t normally encourage people to get involved with causes, but I feel this one is vital. Don’t let Ground Zero become a political war ground. The memorial should be for and about the victims, not some politically correct quest for international popularity.

I’ve been working my butt off the last few days creating an online petition system for takebackthememorial.org

The World Trade Center Memorial Cultural Complex will be an imposing edifice wedged in the place where the Twin Towers once stood. It will serve as the primary “gateway” to the underground area where the names of the lost are chiseled into concrete. The organizers of its principal tenant, the International Freedom Center (IFC), have stated that they intend to take us on “a journey through the history of freedom” - but do not be fooled into thinking that their idea of freedom is the same as that of those Marines. To the IFC’s organizers, it is not only history’s triumphs that illuminate, but also its failures. The public will have come to see 9/11 but will be given a high-tech, multimedia tutorial about man’s inhumanity to man, from Native American genocide to the lynchings and cross-burnings of the Jim Crow South, from the Third Reich’s Final Solution to the Soviet gulags and beyond. This is a history all should know and learn, but dispensing it over the ashes of Ground Zero is like creating a Museum of Tolerance over the sunken graves of the USS Arizona.

OpinionJournal: The Great Ground Zero Heist

Everyone rolled their eyes when serial dickhead Bill Maher suggested that we build a “Why They Hate Us” pavilion at ground zero… but don’t blink: it’s happening.

Go sign the petition, if this sickens you.

We, the undersigned, believe that the World Trade Center Memorial should stand as a solemn remembrance of those who died on September 11th, 2001, and not as a journey of history’s “failures” or as a debate about domestic and foreign policy in the post-9/11 world. Political discussions have no place at the World Trade Center September 11th memorial, and the International Freedom Center honors no one by making excuses for the perpetrators of this heinous crime. The memorial should be about what happened that day, about the brave heroes who risked their lives so selflessly, and about the innocent lives that were lost- nothing more.

TakeBackTheMemorial.org: Petition

[via Tempus Fugit]