Instant Netflix

A couple months ago I restarted my Netflix Subscription because of the ability to acquire instant availability of published TV shows and movies on my Xbox game system.  Unlike a lot of people the only use I have for my Xbox machine is the ability to deliver media from Home Network to our family room TV set.  Now with cable on-demand, cable DVR, DVD movies I also have the ability watch my Media Center video, music and TV recordings I'm adding what can be called Netflix on-demand as well.

To show you just how much Netflix is taking over the market share of the video industry there are so many ways of getting streaming video from Netflix you almost have no excuse not to subscribe to even their most basic subscription plan.  For $8.99 you get all you can eat streaming video plus single DVD Rental each month.  If they're a lot of old shows that you haven't watched you would like to RE watch this is a great vehicle that will allow you to accomplish this task.  So now I have Netflix available to me as a movie rental, which satisfies my need to watch newly released movies, and, instant streaming movies and TV shows instantly from my ex box to my TV or on my computer or from within by media center console.  Now all I need are more hours in the day.  Hey Netflix can you fix that also!

The Netflix Media Center interface has quite a few choices build into it.  Not only do you have Instant Queue, you can also you can add to your DVD Queue, take a look at what you have recently watched, view newly arrived movies and select them for either instant view if that's available or to be placed in your DVD queue, and they have categories that you can browse through and make selections as well. The search function works for movie and TV show titles only, this is something I would like to see changed to also allow you to search by actor and director as well.  I'm sure they'll get there.

So if you have Vista Home Premium or Ultimate this is another great addition to your Media Center application. Enjoy!

June Issue of Laurel Mountain Post is out…

 If you don’t toot your own horn who will?

The new issue of the Laurel Mountain Post is out this week and this issue’s primary theme is on golfing. See my article on golf gadgets on page 26. There are few things listed that aren’t too expensive but the one that caught my eye was the Shadow Caddy. Not too many places where it is available here in the US, it was first introduced in Australia. I can see it having a big splash over here as well.

See the new issue at: http://laurelmountainpost.com/Archives/LMP-May-June-2009.pdf

Hope you enjoy!

November 15 Scott’s beautiful Creation

We recently had the opportunity to build a system for one of our customers that gave us carte blanche on putting it together. The basics, a beautiful Samsung 26 inch screen, a quad-core Extreme processor, and Vista Ultimate tops the list. The only thing that we probably should have done was moved the customer to 64-bit and run up the memory. We were a little worried about driver availability so we hesitated on that one. Scott is going to put together a complete write up on this one on his site and I will update the pointers when he finishes. Scott’s site is: http://cid-c1df53b40a2f504d.spaces.live.com/?mkt=en-US&partner=Live.Spaces.

We put together a little movie on this as well that I will push up to the network when I get a chance as well.

New Windows Live Features!

If you are trying to keep up with the cloud computing onslaught, Microsoft has just release a new product updates that enhance your web interaction dramatically. If you are a media producer, photos, video, or written content, then you will love some of the new interaction within Microsoft’s Live programs. The new download is available for updating your current applications at: http://download.live.com/. I had originally heard about this new update on Windows Weekly, and finally this morning I decided to load it up and give it a little whirl.

They've added some functions for photos and movies in photo gallery and moviemaker. This new moviemaker program is not as extensive as the version that comes with Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate, but the one feature that I do like is its ability to post directly to Microsoft MSN’s Soapbox site. When you tell it to publish all of the information that you need to enter to publish it is presented for you to fill out in a nice dialog box and it very quickly and easily converts in uploads your video content to the site. Once it is there it is very easy to attach the video to your blog and voila! you have your presentation ready and available for all of your readers. Believe me, this is much simpler than the convoluted process you had to go through before. It also appears that if you are using Windows Live Writer, and you use the insert video function, this will also allow you to post the video up to Soapbox or YouTube. You can also connect directly to either your YouTube or Soapbox account to connect videos that you have already uploaded to the site's.

I use Windows Live Writer for creating and posting all of my blog entries no matter which site I'm currently posting to. We have added quite a few new features including an edit, preview, source tabs at the bottom of the screen too quickly change your view of the blog you are currently editing. You can turn on word count so that you can get a handle on how verbose you are as you are writing. There are quite a few more features included in the options tool that allows you to control your experience with the application as well.

There is a new toolbar add-on into Internet Explorer that gives you direct access to your Windows Live applications. This gives you direct access to your mail photos and calendar sites as well as quick search, mapping and translation buttons. There are new versions of Messenger and Mail which are quite interesting as well if you use these programs. It's worth a look, and these programs are all free. Can't beat the price!

Intel Project Submission

October 04

Intel Project Submission

Well, we had a busy evening on Thursday and Friday. I helped Scott, Ed and Chris put together video submissions for an Intel contest to show innovative ways of using Intel products by system builders. Scott used an Atom Board in his project. He installed all of his components into a model of the Millennium Falcon. He rigged up the hard drive LEDs so that they flash when the hard drive is being accessed. The left-hand side gunnery bay/observation deck is used as a docking area for the wireless mouse.The large antenna on the top deck is actually a wireless network adapter. The right side is where all of the motherboard connections are.

Ed's creation to the left, beautiful work of art that he created in his woodworking shop.  The top is a sheet of tempered glass so you can look into the system and see the different computer components that he used in the system.  He designed the system as a media center server that is being used for all his digital media functions in the family room.  He is running Microsoft's Media Center and is using the system as a DVR as well.  Looking at the front left you will see an area that houses a disk array that is used for both his programs and storing all of his digital data. The right front side has several components for controlling fan speeds and reporting on different conditions in the box. It also provides different connections for connecting different kinds of devices to the unit. Listen to his video for the full description.

Chris has a unique system as well. The Trogdor the Terminator is Chris's idea of the ultimate game machine.  He has lots of bright lights that will dazzle you when you are looking at the machine.  He had a friend who paints cars, custom paint the outside of the case, he has a side panel etched with a wonderful design. But the truly remarkable addition to his work of art is the addition of a fully functional Atari game machine in the top area of the case. The Atari cartridges are inserted into the top of the case and all of the game connections are located on the front panel during. Be sure to listen to Chris's video to get a full insight into all of the things he has done to his box.

It is great to see the ingenuity of our technicians and their craftsmanship to put together some very unique systems. I wish them all luck with their entries in Intel's builder's contest.

Other Interesting Hobbies...

Kathy and I visited Kecksburg this weekend for their fireman's festival. This is the third annual fireman's festival incorporating a car show and Kecksburg's  number one attraction: The UFO. The fire department had the typical skill and food booths that most fire departments have as well as some booths showing off local vendor's crafts. There was a native American booth (Teepee) with some "Natives" pounding on drums, chanting and dancing, a leather working booth and my brother Ed Appleby and John Stein were there with their club to demonstrate their skill with blacksmithing. They had an area setup above the fire hall with several different crafts being shown including woodworking, rope making and Ed and John were pounding away on metal making all sorts of useful items. My niece, Patricia was also there but I didn't get to see her demonstrate her skill. There was hardly enough room with Ed and John to do their work. I took some pictures of John putting together a flag holder and Ed making a candle stick holder as well. Kathy came away with some booty for their stash and bell from the leather maker as well. She loves to put these on the door handles.

According to an article in Pittsburgh Live this is the first year that the UFO angle is being incorporated with the festival. An interesting cover-up story that has some strange turns. There have been documentaries on this incident on the Sci-Fi Channel, Unsolved Mysteries and soon on the History Channel. The Crash occurred on December 9th, 1965. A lot has been written about this incident but interesting enough I hadn't heard a thing about that I can remember until this past weekend when John told me they were going to have a booth here for the fireman's festival. If you are are interested in these kind of things be sure to take a brief tour of all the articles on the Internet describing the incident. This should get you started.

Chrome! Do we need another Internet Browser?

Google is making a compelling reason for using yet another web browser.  After reading the comic book that is available that describes generally the reason that Google brought out a new browser product makes for a compelling reason to use their program.  The one negative that I've heard so far is that when you save your passwords that you are typing into the system for accessing secure areas, they can be easily viewed in the password area.  They are not encrypted, they're sitting there and standard text format for all the world to view who has access to your desktop system.

However, Google touts the new security functions that are built into the browser that disallows any cross talk of information between tabbed windows or from your local storage sources.  Each tabbed window is maintained as a separate thread which allows the processing of Web-based applications to occur simultaneously without interfering with processes occur in another tab.  You can easily detach a tab to separate a browser window from the current window that it resides in.  If you're doing a lot of research this makes it very easy to display information side by side from two separate tabs at the same time.

The default home page shows the nine most visited websites with thumbnails, in nine most recent book marks, and a quick search far too quickly jump to information pages that you may be looking for.  It allows you to add a quick link bar at the top of the screen for those sites that you want to be able to quickly get to on a daily basis.

Another new feature that I like is the ability to create an application shortcut that you can store on your desktop, quick launch bar or  start menu. (see picture at right).  This will display a very clean interface with only the site application in the window making it appear as though it is a true program application.  This delivers greater screen real estate for that application and make it easier to work with the online application as well.  If you're an avid user of programs like Google's document applications like Blogger, Calendar, Docs, Gmail etc..., You may make great use of this feature.

As in most applications there are many different features that can be accessed through easy to learn keyboard shortcuts.  Be sure to check these out. If you plan use this application it will help you to become more efficient with it.  The address bar that sits atop the normal Google Chrome window simplifies your Internet experience by doubling as a search box.  To open a new tab click on the plus icon next to the last open tab. You can reorder your tabs by clicking and dragging them to a new position and as I have mentioned above, you can't drag that tab completely out of the current window and create a new window for that tab where you drag a drop that tab. Because the tab windows are running as separate threads you have complete crash protection between tabbed window sites. To browse the web without storing a record of the session you can open a window in incognito mode by clicking on the page menu and choosing new incognito window. A new window will open that won't save and information from the Internet session. For more feature information go to Google Chrome's Feature Page.  If you want to download go to Google Chrome's Download Page.

Look for updates as we push this new program to it's limits.

250GB! Come on now Comcast! You had better rethink this!

Comcast is planning on instituting a 250GB limit to the amount of data users can send and receive beginning October 1st. I have received my email from them so we know this is what they are planning to do. Why do I think this is a problem? Let me show you an example of a heavy internet user, me, and how I compare to their model of an average user which they say never even comes close to 10% of the 250GB limit! Really?

Your Monthly Allowance:		250GB
Let's start with my new hobby that I have embraced so grandly. I have gotten a new digital SLR camera that takes pictures at a 10 megapixel resolution. Currently I am only storing in JPEG format but I will be collecting the images in raw soon and this number will increase dramatically. I am taking about 500 pictures per week and storing to my network drive. These images are automatically being transferred for backup to my Amazon S3 off site storage account. This backup is using bandwidth. Average picture size is 2.5mb x 500 x 4 weeks per month.	2.5*500*4=5,000	245GB
Now I am also taking about 1/4 of those pictures and posting them to a gallery account on line so that would use: 2.5 x 125 x 4	2.5*125*4=1,250	243.75
Still have lots of bandwidth. Now, about once a month I am taking some video which probably averages about 2gb per month throughout the year on average. December, April, May and June seems to be the heaviest months. On these months I will take about an hour's worth of video which is equivalent to 5gb. Again, I am backing this up to Amazon S3 and posting most of this to my galleries. Since we are talking about worse case scenarios, this would be about 10gb of data being posted	10GB	233.75
I have started watching a lot of my favorite television shows on HULU because it is simpler and these presentations have fewer and shorter commercial breaks. A typical 1 hour show (40-48 minutes real time) is using about 250mb per show. Let's say that I am watching 5 of these per week. (so what happens in a family of four, with kids that watch 3 hours of TV per day, 7 days per week? 3*7*250*30=157,500. There's a chunk!)	250*5*4=5,000 Or for a typical family that accesses their entertainment around 150GB	83.75

Most other browsing, email and even remote access to work probably wouldn't amount to much. But there are some people using the system rather heavily that I wouldn't call abusive that could come very close to Comcast's cap. Add things like movie downloads, High Definition Movies can be 8GB or more per movie, streaming music from online radio stations, music and podcast downloads from music sources like iTunes, Amazon, Audible and Microsoft Marketplace. The Internet is becoming a big source for our daily entertainment and even though Comcast doesn't think this cap can be reached easily in a true digitally oriented home it can be pretty easy to come close to that cap every month.

Here's the icing on the cake! Comcast is not even going to give you a method of seeing where you are on your usage cap! They leave that up to you. However, if you exceed it they will call you up and tell you that you have exceeded it and if you exceed it again you will be cut off for a year. If this is the only service available to you then this is plain unacceptable! I know that when I signed up for service Comcast was touting unlimited usage. Where has that gone?

Google Docs - A nice alternative word processing, spreadsheet and presentation application

I was a bit skeptical about Google's Google Doc application, but once I began playing with it I found that most of the general functions that I use can be found in these applications. I did bump into their limitations but for something available online in the cloud, these applications can fill a nice niche. Here is quick look at the Google Document Management Screen: Video Overview of the Google Document Mangement Screen. 

In the document management screen (overview of the file functions) you have the ability to download your document in multiple formats including a zipped HTML file, open document, PDF, RTF, Text, and Word format. Managed sharing allows you to set up individuals as collaborators or viewers of your documents and two email those individuals the site location of the document that you are sharing.

The publish command allows you to use this application to store documents that you can later push to your blog site. So you can work on a document and when you have it ready for publication you can then push is quickly and easily to your site. It works great with Google's Blogger and it has connections to other popular sites like Wordpress and LiveJournal. I tried unsuccessfully, albeit with out much real effort to push this up to Microsoft's blog program (which is what I use for my active sites) I will update this as I play with it a little more.

Other document management functions that you can apply from this screen includes Renaming the document, Deleting, Create Folders to manage your documents, and create spreadsheets, word processing documents and presentation files. The presentation program very simple, shareable slides that can be controlled from one machine to multiple connected viewing systems. If you were on the conference call, or speaking with the client, you could direct them very quickly to the document by sending them an e-mail pointer to the presentation document, and you would be able to control the speed of the slide presentation from your screen on theirs.  The one limitation that I found that bothered me, was that I was unable to share are a video from a site other than YouTube. Of course this would be the first connection that they would create since both are properties of Google. Even this has a limitation though, the video image control box will be shown on the slide presentation that you cannot controlled remotely.  This means it you can start the video you will have to have the individuals on the other side click on the play button themselves.  I inserted some links onto the pages and with that I was able to then give the users on the other side of the presentation the ability to jump to another video presentation URL.  So the real limitation here is the inability to control the whole presentation yourself, but, for a free application this is pretty nice.

Some other document control features that you have in this application include: uploading a PowerPoint presentation that would then be converted to this format, you can import individual slides from a PowerPoint file but individual animations are not imported. You can print the presentation, either to paper or to a PDF file, with or without speaker notes, and with a choice of how many slides per page. You can also save the document as a PDF document slide presentation the you can shipped out as well. The Publish button allows you to create a mini presentation module that you can insert into your site as a video module. My Live Writer Program didn't like it though.

I created a document that shows the basic formatting that you can do with a page and describes what you can expect and what the limitations are. You can see this more clearly if you jump to this video. You can see this document as a PDF file by clicking on this link.

I'll talk about the spreadsheet application as I have a chance to spend more time with it.

Intel Modular Server Seminar

This week we held a little introductory seminar using our new Intel Modular Server that we will be putting in place for our own network system. We are really looking forward to having this in place and the response from those IT professionals that attended the seminar solidified our view of just how great this product really is. Ken Lindsay, one of senior network technicians did the presentation and did a wonderful job showing the resiliency of the system. Beyond the redundancy of the  power supplies, motherboard and Raid drive arrays, all of the components interact to take advantage of the modular control interface. Unbelievable control to switch functions within the unit. We demonstrated losing a drive, rebuilding the array, switching your server to a spare server module and the ease of moving functions from one server module to another. If you lose a server module you can be up and running with your spare in less than 10 minutes. Down time is minimized by an unbelievably short time frame.

We also showed the management module's logging features to track faults and the potential growth path within the product as well. Be sure to contact to register for the next scheduled presentation. 724-838-7526 or email to sales@paconnect.com

3PM Uggg! On our way to Baltimore.

Nick and I got an early morning start yesterday to attend a Northern Video Show in Baltimore. We took the Route 30 Route to Breezewood, only encountered one deer that we saw, and followed the TOMTOM pretty accurately right into the Show Site north of Baltimore in 3.5 hour quick romp. The traffic was not bad and we ended up being the first to sign in and were able to have our discussion on the pros and cons of each service plan that we are considering for our service support software. I think that we have a clear winner but that is not what I plan on talking about right now.

I attended the refresher course on IP Networking while Nick attended the Avermedia and Azelea Networks presentations. the IP refresh was a good overview, didn't contain too much that I didn't already know, but it doesn't hurt to be reminded what is what and how things work. Will see if it gets me to a point where I might crack one of my many books on IP Technology to expand on it again. Nick said that the Avermedia presentation was interesting but he didn't get too much more out of it except contact information for their field support people which can always be useful. They gave us some hints on how to get the PTZ Sony IP camera integrated with their software that we are going to try and that would be really a good outcome of this show. Nick was really impressed with Azelea's Mesh Technology product. This is a product that lends itself for wiring campus wide areas to the Internet. The types of organizations that this works well for include municipalities for giving their police and emergency personnel remote access back into the city systems, setting up general campus or municipal access to the Internet, (they have done large areas in China for the Olympics, construction sites for local area communication, wireless broadband, video surveillance and other applications. In smaller setups like hotels this would give property-wide access to Internet access as well as employee communication within the property area as well. Some neat potential there.

We had broke for lunch and some face time with the vendors in their booths. I attended the ACTI presentation while Nick went to the ARM Electronics presentation. Again the biggest benefit was the contacts, we now have access to the main ARM support guy and I got together with the primary support tech with ACTI. The ACTI presentation discussed megapixel IP Camera technology and the different technologies used for encoding the video and the benefits and problems with the use of each one. Very good discussion of where the digital video technology is right now and where it is going in the near future. It gave me some insights into what to look for, how to size systems correctly and what we need to control when it comes to client expectations.

Nick's Arm presentation led him into some discussion about the problems we have had with night vision video capturing and we now have some solution paths to follow. Another product that I found at the Vendor Booths was from a company called Videolarm who claim to be the first manufacturer of video housings in the market. They have a fully adjustable Infrared Illuminator that might help us out in some of these low light areas. Distance adjustable from 100-660 feet, five year warranty and an adjustable beam angle of 30, 40 and 60 degrees. There other products are also highly ruggedized as well.

D-Link was also highly promoted by Northern especially in the IP video slide presentation. I have brought back some of their information as well. For the most part there wasn't too much being shown by the vendors when it came to lenses and such except by ARM. I think Nick got a good bit of insight with that. All in all this was a good conference to attend that gave us support for what we already know, reinforced that we are on the right track and gave us the contact that will help us on into the future.

ZDNet article on the memory usage by different Browser Programs

See the article here: http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=2024

Interesting to see how during the day your system can be bogged down more and more by simply using your browser. Think about your system having only 512mb of memory or less and you are using IE7. You can easily see what the consequences are.

Reposting New Intel Modular Server Project

Here is the new slide presentation with narration that I did last week from Intel's PowerPoint Slide Package. It came together pretty will I think.

ims project wmv2

Wiimote repurposed for multi-point interactive white

Jude just came back from the WIU vendor show in one of the interesting things that he came back with was a demonstration of using the Wiimote as a multipoint interactive whiteboard.  The link I will give you is from engadget and has it pretty neat video showing how works.  I think I'd love to have one of these right at my desk and have it pointing onto my desk surface.

"While certainly there's been no shortage of Wiimote hacks, the number of genuinely useful ones has been considerably more limited. It looks like you can now add one more to that list, however, as Johnny Chung Lee (he of the Wiimote finger-tracking hack) has now upped the usefulness even further with a makeshift multi-point interactive whiteboard. There's a bit more involved with this one than just a Wiimote, however -- namely, an IR-emitting pen (or two), which the Wiimote tracks while relaying all the necessary information back to a PC. That, as the video after the break shows, allows you to turn any surface into a multi-point whiteboard with the use of a projector, or turn any LCD screen into a touchscreen, of sorts. Best of all, Johnny has kindly provided the necessary software free of charge, so hit up the read link below if you want to give it a shot."

wiimote projector whiteboard

Johnny Chung Lee Project - Wii Johnny is a Graduate PhD student at CMU and has several other projects that he has posted to this site using the Wiimote for other tracking experiments. The 3-D is pretty neat as well. He has a blog at: http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/  called procrastineering. Enjoy!

Up and Coming - Microsoft's Hyper-V for Windows Server 2008

Last Wednesday's release candidate is termed a Feature-Complete Beta of its Hyper-V virtualization technology, which is an add-on to Windows Server 2008.  A release candidate is a final beta before the code is considered finished.  Microsoft said it was on track to ship Hyper-V by August. The code is available on Microsoft's Web site.

In this newest beta, Microsoft has added support for new guest operating systems that can run on top of Hyper-V: Windows Server 2003 SP2, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1, Windows Vista SP1 (x86), and Windows XP SP3 (x86).

The company also said users can install the Hyper-V Manager snap-in to the Microsoft Management Console on Vista SP1 (x86 and x64). The snap-in allows for remote management of Hyper-V.

Jeff Woolsey, senior program manager on the Microsoft virtualization team, says the three most common roles virtualized among early adopters are IIS, application server and Terminal Services, and that the four most deployed Microsoft applications are SQL Server 2005 and 2008, Exchange Server and Forefront. He said more than half are running an antivirus/security application, nearly 50% are running a backup appliance, and approximately 75% are running Hyper-V with some attached storage.

On another note, Microsoft acquired desktop virtualization vendor Kidaro. Kidaro offers management technology aimed at making it easier for enterprises to deploy, use and manage virtual PCs. The platform comprises several components including a client that handles encryption and firewall security and integrates the virtual machine applications into the end-user computer. The management server assigns configurations and security policies for users and compiles information about clients for monitoring and auditing.

Microsoft expects that the software will help accelerate migration to Windows Vista because it can minimize compatibility issues between applications and the OS. In addition, the software makes the use of virtualization less noticeable to end users, which should also speed adoption, Microsoft said.

For more information follow these links:

• Microsoft releases feature-complete Hyper-V beta
• Windows Server 2008 Virtualization and Consolidation
• Hyper-V Leaves Linux Out In The Cold
• The Roadmap to Virtual Infrastructure: Practical Implementation Strategies (White Paper prepared by IBM)
• Cost Effective Analysis of Scaling with Virtualization (White Paper prepared by Coyote Point Systems)
• Disaster Recovery and Virtualization (White Paper prepared by Ixilix discussing using Virtualization as part of your disaster Recovery Plan)

Crash! You never think it can happen to you...

This past weekend I have some strange things occur with my system that I attributed to some Microsoft updates that had come down from on high, but as it turns out it probably was my hard drive failing.  On Tuesday it finally gave up the ghost, and totally crapped out.  Over the last few days I have let the guys try to resurrect my drive but to no avail.  So I've been working with my desktop from home running completely within terminal server and it really hasn't been a bad experience except that I'm down to one monitor now instead of two.  Using terminal server, I don't see how I can have two monitors up and running to show me two sessions at once.

Once again the new drive installed an up and running it will be hard to run might primary applications for research in communicating with my customers on the machine and still run terminal server for all my legacy applications.  That really seemed to work very well and I kept the speed up the cause I had fewer applications running locally and within the terminal server window I was using the memory from the server rather than on my local machine.  It's just like having two computers on my desk which helps me to expand my capabilities and increase the responsiveness of both systems.  So next week I'll run it through that scenario and I'll report back on how well it works.