Coming Soon: New Album From The Suckers

July 28th, 2010

I’ve been working on this album for a long time (since my last year of school, if you can believe it). It started out with direct-input guitars but I decided I didn’t like the sound and re-recorded with real, live guitar running through an amp into a microphone — something I hadn’t done since Misanthropomorphic. I also went back and re-sequenced the drums because I didn’t like their sound. I had started on vocals in early summer of 2008 (before Carrie came back from Europe when I had the house all to myself), but stopped for a long time with only about a third of the songs complete. I finally got started with the vocal re-recording around late January (starting from scratch), right before we decided to move. So I got over half the vocals laid down in Montana, and have started work on the remainder. I also considered re-doing the bass lines with my new bass (as my old one had started developing tuning problems), but decided to keep those in the interest of ever finishing the record.

The Suckers are a pop-punk band. When I say pop-punk, I mean in the traditional sense: three chords and simple melodies. Influences include The Ramones, Screeching Weasel, The Queers, Teenage Bottlerocket, Teen Idols, and other bands like that. Since I’ve been mixing as I go, I can post a few preview tracks:

  • Bumper Sticker Warrior — A fast, snotty song about people who outwardly appear to care about an issue, but don’t do anything about it.
  • 4 a.m. — A short little song about being unable to sleep.
  • Not Buying In — A song about trying not to be defined by what you don’t have.

I’m actually going to announce a release date ahead of time, in the effort of giving myself some sort of pressure to finish the album and not endlessly tinker with it. Look for it on August 24, 2010.

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Montana, a Fond Farewell

July 20th, 2010

I wanted to start off with my first memory of Montana, but I honestly can’t recall. That’s not to say the state is dull and boring, just that my first imperssion came when I was nine or ten years old, and it wasn’t all that impressive. If it didn’t involve dinosaurs or Ninja Turtles or outer space, I probably wasn’t interested. Back then it was all just forests and mountains and miles of highway from the backseat.

So in all honesty the first thing I remember about Montana is not wanting to move there. I’d lived a decade in Washington, and had friends and family there that I liked. There was snow in the winter and enough heat in the summer to dry off after a run through some sprinklers just by lying on the pavement. What about this remote state (a million miles or more to my preadolescent mind) so excited my parents? I had no say since I was just a kid and half the time I didn’t know that sometimes the things ‘for my own good’ really were.

Thank goodness I moved at a fairly young age. It was harder on my siblings when they changed states while in high school. We easily make friends when we’re not teenagers; as teenagers we find it easier to make enemies. Luckily I was still young enough (and without obvious flaws) to make friends. I did it twice, in fact, since we went first to Billings and only two years later to Corvallis.

Having moved back to Washington, I often consider how things would have been different if I’d never left the state. My two greatest passions sprouted in Montana: computers and music. Who’s to say that things would be the same if I’d gone to Wa-Hi instead of Corvallis High? Obviously I can thank my dad for helping me grow to like technology, but my interest in music may never have taken root without the friends I had in Montana. Without Chris and Josh rocking out to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana, would I have ever taken a keen interest in music, or picked up a guitar, or started learning about music theory? It’s hard to say. Maybe if I’d stayed in Washington, I’d be into music, but I’d have come into it via country and western, instead of rock and punk.

Montana embraced openness like no place I’d ever been. The sky was big and wide, and so was the friendliness. I knew several families who never locked their houses at night. The people there have an independent streak a mile wide and it shows through, in the libertarian sensibilities of the electorate and the bohemian tendencies of the music community. I’d like to think that warmth of the state rubbed off on me, if not some of the conservative political views.

So many things about my life would be different if I’d never lived in Montana. Probably the thing I’m most thankful for is my wife, but the list goes on. I made so many friends there, in high school and at college. Childhood friends and friends made later in life are subtly different. As kids you most often make friends due to convenience of location, or preschool class assignment, or other, more superficial factors. We can’t judge personalities as children. Friendships made later in life tend to stand the test of time, having been made due to strong personalities or shared interests. Most of mine fit the latter categorization. I can remember my childhood friends’ names and one or two quirks of their personalities, but not much else. I have a feeling that forty years from now, I’ll still be able to tell you many of my college friends’ favorite songs.

It was a complex and difficult decision to leave, but we saw the chance and had to take it. Our move to Washington isn’t necessarily final; we may be back some day. My parents are considering retiring there, and my wife thinks it’s a good place to raise kids. It’s got a lot going for it. In my own biased opinion I think I turned out fine. When I drive to Walla Walla for a visit I have a certain set of nostalgic steps that must be followed. These include stopping for ice cream to help battle the vicious summer heat of eastern Washington, and listening to Tom Petty. In time, I’m sure I’ll cobble together a similar set of rules for going back to Montana.

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Fight or Flight and the Spirit of Compromise

February 8th, 2010

I have never been more disillusioned with the state of American politics. And that’s saying something, considering that I came to political awareness during the Bush years. Those eight years were an era when nothing could be more black and white, when you were either with us or an enemy, when the sky was falling and we needed to be constantly afraid and bellicose, like a terrified and jumpy man holed up with a shotgun through a dark, dense night. And somehow, miraculously, inexplicably, perhaps inevitably, things have gotten worse.

It turned out that the real threat to our livelihood and security didn’t come from without; it came from within. While we were pushing up walls and fences to protect us from the big, scary reality of the rest of the world, we had our backs turned to the real problems and the real threat. Our economy imploded. Jobs started disappearing. Panic set in. These were huge issues, much too large for the average American to even wrap his head around, much less try to solve. Luckily, we had a whole team of experts on our side, people whose jobs it is to deal with crises like ours on a regular basis. We had Congress, and they dropped the ball. Big time.

While I lean to the left and want to blame the right, I can’t because the facts don’t support it. The truth is that everyone screwed up, but the Democrat are much more to blame for our toxic political landscape. It was a Democratic majority in Congress starting in 2006 and through 2008, when things really started to stink. And it’s a Democratic majority right now, when we should be fixing things but are not. Sure, the Republicans share in the blame, but they are not exclusively to blame for events leading up to this crisis. Those of us who lean to the left are going to have to get past this if we want to break this political stalemate.

The problem is that both sides have forgotten how to compromise. As a result, everyone — Tea Party supporters, Socialists, and every shade in between — is going to suffer.

The Republicans have taken the stance that nothing is going to work unless they get their way. Unfortunately, they haven’t been quite clear on what they want. As near as we can tell, they don’t even want the opposite of what the Democrats want; they don’t want anything to happen. To say this is infuriating is an understatement. After all, it was a solid six years of Republican craziness, of Bush Affirmation, that helped get us into this festering abscess of a situation to begin with. Carrying right over from George W., the GOP refuses to learn a lesson and refuses to acknowledge that they had a hand in all this. They would much rather score points with their diminishing base than face the truth. But the GOP has never been good at looking ahead, and they can’t understand that if they don’t do anything now, then they’ll get into office in the future, but they’re going to be dealing with a much worse problem that’s stagnated while they’ve been stalling.

The Democrats, meanwhile, have been the Party of Disappointment. They managed to squander an incredible amount of goodwill starting with Obama’s inauguration. November 2008 put them in charge of a government sourly in need of reform and an ailing America eager for change. Not “change” the campaign slogan buzzword, but real, honest-to-goodness improvement in something, anything. I cannot fathom how they’ve managed to fail so utterly at getting their agenda accomplished, not even token victories. They’ve taken a massive supermajority in the Senate and wasted it, compromising their position until it’s worthless. They lost Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat precisely because they’ve been so impotent this last year. It wasn’t angry Republicans upset about Universal Healthcare or Gay Marriage or one of the other conservative bugaboos that did them in, it was their own base. Their base didn’t care enough to vote, and it cost them. Believe me, it’s going to cost them a lot more this November.

It’s a classic Fight-or-Flight Response from both parties. Here we have this massive source of stress (the Financial Meltdown), and each party is embodying one of the two responses to the detriment of us all. The Republicans have gotten the urge to fight, but they’re misdirecting their aggression. Instead of tackling the problem, the real threat, they’re trying to make the Democrats looks bad. This tactic might help them win an election or two in the future, but it’s only going to wind up hurting them (and, more importantly, the People) more. The Democrats, for their part, are terrified and running away. Not just from the financial and social problems that hint at ruination, but from the Republicans, too. They’re high-tailing it right out of Washington and into early political obsolescence, and they’re so deluded that they can’t comprehend why everyone hates them so much. So they run faster, and the people get angrier.

It really is a season of anger, isn’t it? Joe Wilson’s outburst last September during President Obama’s Health Care speech wasn’t just the tip of the iceberg, it was the canary in the coal mine. Anger and outrage can do some marvelous things if properly channeled. The Tea Party has molded their anger into something symbolic, if not constructive. Meanwhile, there is no equivalent on the left — getting angry and aggressive is not something liberals are good at. We’re much more likely to be passive aggressive. That means staying home this November and bidding the majorities goodbye. The sad thing is that the Democrats won’t understand why they got voted out of office. They never learn. They’ll think it’s because the American people (the same ones who gave them a massive mandate last November) hate them for their policies and want them to be more like the Republicans. That’s half the truth. We are starting to hate the Democrats, but it’s because they’re doing nothing and making it worthless. Meanwhile, the Republicans are also doing nothing, but they’re convincing people that it’s worthwhile.

Is it too much to ask that somebody, anybody, do something that’s worthwhile?

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NooBrews Episode 1 – Now Available for Viewing

January 14th, 2010

The first episode of NooBrews is available for viewing now. Andy and Nico show you how the first steps toward making some delicious (well, I’m only guessing here, but it looked like they enjoyed their sample) hard apple cider.

As I’ve mentioned before, I made the intro music for the show. I’m going to start working on some other cues — incidental music mostly — and of course an ending theme. Should be lots of fun!

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Home Theater Without Breaking the Bank – Part 2

January 13th, 2010

One Remote to Rule Them All

This is part two of a multi-part story on upgrading my home stereo. Part 1 was about finding the right solution for video playback.

After getting video sorted out, the next step was to find some way to reduce the jumble of remote controls I was currently using. At this point, I had all sorts of crap to remotely control the devices: a wireless keyboard for the HTPC; remotes for the cable box / DVR, the receiver, and the TV, Playstation 3 em Playstation 2 remotes, and Wii remotes. Surely, I could do something to reduce this remote madness?

My first idea was to use the remote that came with my receiver. It could control up to nine devices, and from reading the manual I gathered that it could control many different types. The litmus test would be whether or not my receiver’s remote could control my cable box / DVR. It’s a Pace box, which is one brand I’d never heard of before. I was quite pleased to see the company name even listed in my remote’s manual. It was worth a shot.

One neat thing my receiver does (it’s an Onkyo HT-RC160) is on-screen configuration of remote codes for controlling other devices. That means it displays instructions and the codes themselves right on the TV. It sure beats the heck out of flipping the remote over (to read the instructions) for the first few codes, or (even worse) digging out the manual and looking up the codes. This made it easier to try the codes — there were about ten of them — but it turned out to be for nought, because none of the codes worked. Back to the drawing board.

A couple of years ago I got my dad a Logitech Harmony 659 remote for Christmas. The Harmony series allows you to define ‘activities’ that are essentially macros for the devices it controls. You can define one called “Watch a Movie” that turns on your receiver, TV, and DVD player, and switches everything to the right inputs. This was a great gift because it was something he could tinker with and it would make things a lot easier for my mom, who doesn’t want to deal with all the devices, inputs, and buttons. I thought this might be the perfect solution for my problem.

So I went to Target and made the most impulsive purchase of my home theater-upgrading spree. Luckily, they had one Harmony 620, which is precisely the remote I needed. I could have ordered it online (that’s how I got most of the equipment I needed for this upgrade), but didn’t want to have to wait. It was a Saturday, which meant that the earliest I would have gotten the thing would have been Wednesday. Logitech also sells other Harmony remote models, but anything below the 620 was too little for what I needed and anything above is, frankly, overkill. The Harmony One, for example, costs almost twice as much and all it adds are a touch screen with color and a rechargeable battery. I like the idea of being able to recharge my remote, but it’s not worth the extra $79. I think the color touch screen is essentially a throwaway feature. I like my remote controls to have tactile feedback, and usually touch screens that small are terribly inaccurate. There’s also another model, the Harmony 1100, which is roughly the size of a sheet of paper and is almost entirely touchscreen-based, which means it would be even less useful to me than the Harmony One. I honestly don’t understand why somebody would purchase an accessory for their home theater that potentially costs more than the components themselves!

It was a snap to enter in the codes for all my devices, but I ran into a few snags:

  • My HTPC didn’t have an IR receiver, so I couldn’t control the Harmony with it.
  • The PlayStation 3 uses BlueTooth for its wireless devices, and doesn’t have an IR port, either.
  • The Wii doesn’t support IR.

The Wii turned out to be a moot point. You pretty much have to get up to get a Wiimote. If you turn on the Wii, you’re going to want to play a game, not watch a movie (Netflix rumors notwithstanding). So I added an activity (‘Play Wii’), and all it can do is turn on the TV and the receiver.

The PS3 presented more of a challenge. There are two items that could have worked here. Nyko makes a PS3 Remote, and Logitech sells a Blutooth->IR adapter. The Nyko device plugs into the PS3 via a USB port, which means it takes up on of the ports and can’t turn the unit on (because it draws its power from USB). The Logitech Harmony adapter actually translates IR commands to BlueTooth (meaning it can turn on the PS3), but it costs almost four times as much as the Nyko remote.

I finally decided to go with the Logitech one, because I wanted to keep a USB port free and for some reason the ability to turn the PS3 off and on was really, really important to me. Sometimes I’m obsessive about this sort of thing, and I decided I wanted as much control over my devices as possible. In hindsight, this purchase may have been the most impulsive one in my home theater-upgrading spree. Nevertheless, I ordered the thing and it worked right away. The most complicated thing I had to do was register it with the PlayStation 3’s OS.

With that problem solved, I turned to the matter of my HTPC. The bulk of my home theater viewing is done on this. I had search for something like this before, but couldn’t really find anything that matched what I wanted to do. Part of the problem is that my playback software of choice is MediaPortal, and lots of remotes didn’t work with it. Ideally, I wanted an IR receiver that could process remote commands and turn them into arbitrary keystrokes.

I don’t know if there’s anything that does precisely that, but I found something that’s close. It’s a PC remote that’s interpreted as a USB keyboard by your computer. I wasn’t 100% sure of what keystrokes the remote buttons translated into, but I saw enough (after doing some Google image searches) to realize that it included the four arrow keys, escape, and enter. These were the necessary keys for navigating the MediaPortal menus. The rest would be window dressing. And — bonus — somebody posted the remote’s codes to the Logitech database, which meant I would only have to do minimal tweaking to get it to work with MediaPortal. Another thing worth mentioning is that the PC remote itself has the ability to control the mouse. Unfortunately, it has its own pad for this and there’s no direct equivalent on the Harmony remote, but I still managed to get it programmed in, thanks to the customizable menus available on the Logitech remote.

Mapping the remote took some effort and a bit of ingenuity on my part. First I had to figure out what keys each of the PC remote’s buttons corresponded to. One approach would have been to open Notepad, press the remote buttons, and see what gets typed. I decided to do it another wayL I used another (unrelated) Logitech program. I sometimes use my HTPC to play emulators for old video game consoles, and had bought a couple of Logitech USB gamepads a while back. They came with a program that allows you to configure them. This program has a ‘record keystroke’ feature which tells you exactly which buttons are being pressed. So I can push each button on the PC remote in turn, and see on screen exactly what keystrokes are sent to the computer. This allowed me to easily map those same commands to the Harmony Remote’s buttons.

Interestingly, the commands I had the most trouble with were the transport buttons: play, pause, and stop. MediaPortal uses the space bar (in line with other media programs like VLC and QuickTime) to pause or play a video. This was not triggered directly by any button on the PC remote. The closest that remote came to pressing spacebar was via a clumsy numlock button, which turned the 0-9 digits into letters (kind of like a telephone pad). It was even worse for the stop functionality, which is triggered in MediaPortal by the ‘b’ key. As far as I could tell, I couldn’t reconfigure MediaPortal’s default controls to match one of the keycodes triggered by the PC remote.

But the remote did have four commands reserved for macros or program launching. It had A, B, C, and D buttons that triggered alt+shift+a, alt+shift+b,… and so on. So I downloaded AutoHotKey onto my HTPC. This is an open-source macro program that allows you to create scripts to control your PC automatically. I created a script that simply presses ‘B’, compiled it to an application (AutoHotKey can do that), created a shortcut to said application, and gave it the trigger alt+shift+a. Now the ‘A’ button on the PC remote (or its equivalent on the Harmony Remote) triggered this macro, which pressed ‘b’ and stopped whatever was playing via MediaPortal. Awesome!

I programmed the other hotkeys to do other things. ‘B’ presses the spacebar, which I assigned to the Harmony Remote’s play and pause buttons. ‘C’ opens MediaPortal itself (in case I boot the PC or otherwise need to run MediaPortal).

The most fun I had was programming the ‘D’ hotkey. I ran into a problem that I still haven’t been able to solve, but have developed a band-aid workaround. Sometimes, when I turn on the HTPC, it ‘forgets’ that it’s plugged into my TV via HDMI and no signal is sent. Luckily, I have another output from the HTPC to the TV via a VGA (or D-Sub) connector, and this one is never forgotten. So if I turn on the HTPC and for some reason it doesn’t know about the DVI port connected to the TV, I can use the VGA port and switch the monitors. But boy, what a pain! I wound up creating another AutoHotKey script that switches to the desktop, right-click it, chooses ‘Display Properties’, and tabs/toggles its way through the display dialog, changing over to the DVI output and applying the changes. It works like magic! If I turn on the HTPC and don’t get any video, I simply press the ‘D’ hotkey on the Harmony remote (which has been programmed into the customizable menu as ‘Fix Displays’), and everything is fixed!

I also programmed some other stuff into the Harmony remote’s custom menus. There are mouse control command, ctrl+esc for showing the start menu, Windows Key-D for showing the desktop, alt-tab for switching programs, and tab for configuring dialog boxes. The remote also had commands for my laptop (which came with an IR remote control) and a digital photo frame my parents had given my wife and me for our wedding. True, I don’t do much to control the frame, but it’s reassuring to know that I have the power.

This was the last step, and now I’m in complete control. Every command is at my fingertips. I had a total of nine devices and eight activities. I have One Remote to Rule Them All. I’m almost drunk off my own power. Too bad I can’t convince my wife to use the remote to control the PC (getting that to work I viewed as my crowning achievement) — she still uses the wireless keyboard.

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Home Theater Without Breaking the Bank – Part 1

January 11th, 2010

A few months ago my home theater suffered a nearly-fatal blow: my receiver died. I was obligated to remove it and put in an old friend to hold down the fort until I could replace my fallen soldier. A couple of weeks ago I finally got a replacement, and started the process of planning, configuring, and upgrading my home theater. This weekend I put in the final piece of the puzzle, and can now say that I have a home theater to be proud of. And the best part is that I didn’t have to pay through the nose to get something I’m proud of. Until very recently, I worried I would have to build a whole new HTPC. Thankfully, a solution arose in the most unlikely of places.

With all of that work (some might even call it fun) out of the way, I can around to describing the thing, and hopefully sharing some tips so that others attempting something similar to what I did can get it done without quite as much hassle. This subject is kind of hard for me to write about, for two opposing reasons. The reason I am apt to write this all down is because I love technical things, and I especially love stereo (and home theater setup). However, I’m wary about writing about it because when I see others do so it often feels to me almost like bragging, as in, “look at how much neat stuff I have!” I realize that the fault probably lies with me and the way I perceive people talking about this stuff, but at the same time it makes me want to avoid that sort of thing, so I’ll try. I want to make this about the technology, not how much it costs. That’s why I’m focusing on the “without breaking the bank” part.

I’m going to divide this up into several articles, because I could write quite a lot about it. This first part will be about the solution I went with on my HTPC, and my search for a video player. I will also cover my remote control configuration and receiver setup later.

Part 1: Finding a Video Player

One of my chief goals was to find a way to play HD video without having to go too far out of my way. I knew this was likely to be a tough nut to crack. None of my computers are what you would call cutting-edge. I’m a web programmer, so I don’t really have to have a beefy CPU for compiling, and I’m not some knee-jerk gamer who dumps cash on the biggest, meanest graphics card. That means I’m never on the cutting edge of hardware: I wouldn’t utilize the bleeding edge anyway. At the same time, I realize that HD video is permeating many parts of our lives and it’s just going to become more prevalent, so I wanted to focus on future-proofing (or at least future-preparing) my setup.

My home theater is a modest Compaq box I got when I was in college and switched majors to Computer Science about five years ago. It has an AMD Athalon x64 processor, 2GB of RAM, and a decent video card I got a couple of years later (I think it’s an nVidia GeForce 7000 series card, and I know it has 128 MB RAM). I’ve got it hooked up to my receiver via a DVI-to-HDMI adapter and digital coaxial output. It can show 1080p (and that’s the way it runs), but I knew that it would take a miracle to get actual 1080p video running on it.

About a year and a half ago, I decided to use MediaPortal as the media library/playback app. I also looked at XBMC, but at the time it was too buggy to consider. There are yet other options, but MediaPortal is the one I settled on because of how configurable it is, and how suited it is to what I need (playback of video on Windows shares, and occasional music, too). I could have gone with a whole different Operating System, but settled on Windows XP as it is stable and lean compared to Vista. I considered Linux briefly, but decided that my hardware requirements would make getting it to work into a chore instead of a hobby. Things may have changed in the last eighteen months, but I’ve kind of settled upon Windows for now.

720p video worked right out the door via MediaPortal. I’m not 100% certain, but I’m confident that it wouldn’t play smoothly on this box without a little something called DVXA. DXVA is a Microsoft API that uses your graphics card to help decode demanding video (like H.264-encoded stuff, which is primarily what HD video uses these days). My confirmation of this is that the 720p video doesn’t run smoothly on this box in VLC, which as far as I know doesn’t use hardware acceleration at all.

1080p video flat out didn’t work. I figured it wouldn’t on this box. Betting on a long shot, I gave it a try anyway using both MediaPortal (which crashed) and Media Player Classic Home Cinema, which also uses DXVA but probably doesn’t have as much overhead as MediaPortal. No luck with either, which is exactly what I expected.

I decided to try out my laptop. It was marketed and sold as a ‘media center laptop.’ I got this one about two and a half years ago to replace an aging Dell Latitudes I’d inherited from my father. It came with Vista Home Premium (which I replaced with Business). It’s got a speedier CPU: a Core 2 Duo. It’s also got 4GB of RAM and an 8000-series GeForce. I figured this should be more than enough to play 1080p video.

Wrong! VLC couldn’t hack it. It looked like VLC didn’t even use use both cores while decompressing. I tried MPC HC and it sort of worked after I tweaked the settings. Some 1080p video, like animation, would play just fine. The beefiest files I threw at it worked, too. But other 1080p files which should have required less decoding muscle were stuttering and had terrible lip synch. In all other respects, the laptop would have been a golden solution: it had an HDMI output which carried both HD video and sound, and I had a free port on my receiver and a decent-sized cable. I finally managed to configure MPC HC to send the digital audio straight out over the HDMI instead of decoding it stereo, so I had 5.1 surround, too. But when I sat down to do a test run, it still had some problems. Video would stutter and lip synch would often drift, sometimes being correct and other times being just enough off to be frustrating.

At this point, I thought maybe my network was to blame. My server is downstairs in the basement. I had first tried a pair of Ethernet-over-power (also known as Powerlink) bridges, but I think my house’s wiring is too old and noisy to privde reliable throughput. It couldn’t even deliver reduced-size DVD rips from the server. I upgraded to a wireless bridge with 802.11n, and this was at least able to deliver a 4GB DVD rip in the time it took to watch it. I figured maybe my laptop was decoding video just fine, but not receiving content quickly enough. A quick copy of a 6.5 GB, hour-long 1080p video took about 43 minutes, which should have been enough to do it. But I tried watching the copied video direct from my hard drive, and it was still displaying the same behavior.

This is when things started to veer of into crazy land. I tried my wife’s PC, which is in the same room as the TV and has a slightly beefier processor and a much beefier graphics card than my laptop. It could play some video my laptop couldn’t, but bizarrely it couldn’t handle the video my laptop could.. At this point, I considered either building a new, extremely beefy HTPC or dropping some cash to run an HDMI cable the approximately 25 feet that would be necessary to connect my wife’s PC to the TV. Neither of these were ideal solutions, because I’d have to test a new 1080p video on both machines and screw around with display settings.

Strangely enough, my first-generation Intel iMac (just a Core Duo, not a Core 2) could play the same video my wife’s much newer PC could and could almost play the video that worked on my laptop — in VLC, no less. I had no idea why.

At this point I tried a couple of Linux LiveCDs on my laptop, figuring that Vista’s overhead may have been the problem, but ran into hardware configuration problems. This would also have required even more work than mentioned above. To watch 1080p video, I’d have to reboot with the LiveCD or install in onto my hard drive.

Is it clear I was close to madness at this point? Why could my 3.5 year-old iMac play most HD video just fine, while my newer laptop and my wife’s computer could only handle some of it? Why was MPC HC behaving so differently on different boxes when it was configured the same?

The solution came in the form of XBMC. I downloaded it on a whim, just to test it out. Not only could it play all my 1080p content at full resolution, but it could also do crazy things like fullscreen overlays and subtitles (just moving the mouse was enough to make playback jittery in MPC HC)! I even got it configured to output 5.1 digital audio without too much fiddling. So far, it’s played everything I’ve thrown at it.

The only problem I’ve seen is in some 1080 buffering issues. I think I know why. Today’s video codecs don’t encode information at the same bitrate all the time. A file has an average bitrate, which can roughly be calculated by dividing its size by its length. But the bitrate varies considerably. From 1:00:00 1:01:00, for example, it might play at 2 Mb / sec, but from 1:01:00 to 1:02:00, it might play at 3 Mb / sec or more. A smart codec squeezes as much extraneous data out of a scene as it can. This is easy in scenes with little motion. But a scene with a lot of action might have a much higher instantaneous bitrate. So even though my wireless N network can download the whole video in less time than is required to play it, it could be that certain parts have such a high bitrate that they can’t be played at my network’s transmission speed, while most of the rest of the video falls well below the average.

There’s not much I can do about this, aside from ‘pre-buffering’ HD video by copying it to the laptop first. I can’t lay cable in my house because it’s rented. My wife wouldn’t approve of stringing long ethernet cables down the stairs, either. Maybe there’s an option to increase XBMC’s video buffer. It definitely seems smarter than, for example, Amazon’s video-on-demand buffer or YouTube, but it’s hard to gauge these things. I might wind up getting a big hard drive exclusively for my HD content, attached to the network upstairs. Maybe I’ll look into a NAS solution.

So, here’s an overview of what I use the computers for:

  • HTPC Box — SD video, DVD rips, HD video up to 720p. Also, I run various emulators off it, and play music from my server. This is all done via MediaPortal. Video is via HDMI out, audio is via digital coax up to 5.1 surround.
  • Laptop — 1080p video played in XBMC. Video and audio via HDMI, up to 5.1 surround.

Not so complicated when it’s put that simply. The best part is that I didn’t have to build (and pay for) a new computer just to get full HD playback. The only drawback is that I can’t do anything else (like browse the web) on that laptop. I’ve still got the old Dell Latitude, so I could do it that way, but usually if I’m watching 1080p video, it’s got my full attention.

For Part II, I’ll go through what it took to get everything controlled by one remote.

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New Track – NooBrews Theme

December 4th, 2009

I’ve gotten my feet wet in the scoring field, and I have to say I like it.

Last night I finished the final version of the introductory theme for a FenixTV web show, NooBrews. I put up a page with all sorts of information. You can also download it there.

And of course, it’s available under a Creative Commons license. Because that’s how much I rock.

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Music Section is Live

October 23rd, 2009

After months of having a tantalizing-looking ‘Music’ link in this site’s main navigation but no payoff after the click, I’m happy to tell the world that the music section is live. There isn’t too much up now, aside from some free MP3s and an archive of music news, but there will be more content when I have more time. I would like to include some info about the lovely Why?-Fi Studio and how I record a song, but those will require a lot of work. I also plan to have an ‘upcoming albums’ section, but that might be unrealistic, as I would feel obligated to give all the projects I’m working on actual deadlines, then would feel the need to meet those deadlines. You see my dilemma.

Someday I’ll have an online store. The plan includes physical copies of CDs as well as digital downloads, initially in mp3 but probably in FLAC eventually. What’s going to be neat is that the digital downloads will feature a ‘Pay What You Like’ option (yeah, yeah, “Simpsons Radiohead did it”), which will go all the way down to free if that’s what people want to pay. I’m having a little trouble with the logistics of the whole project because I would like to include cover songs (I’ve recorded a lot of cover songs, my Christmas albums are almost all covers, and even The Suckers recorded a full-album cover of the Ramones’ first record), but I have to deal with the nasty reality of licensing, which looks to be as much negative fun as making the songs in the first place was. So the covers are going to have a minimum price so I don’t wind up losing money on the venture.

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Ben Folds: Missoula, MT

October 22nd, 2009

Holy cow! What a show. The opening act was awesome, and the piano man himself did not disappoint. Carrie and I bought some ear plugs (after the hearing damage we got from the Dragonforce concert in the spring), but we didn’t even need them, which was a nice change. I’m getting old enough that I can’t afford to damage my hearing anymore if I want to continue to make and enjoy music. My dad and my sister went to the concert in Bellingham two days before we did, so we kind of knew what to expect, but it was still an awesome time. They also missed out on the opening act — Kate Miller-Heidke, who blew us away, and whose album is currently sitting pretty in Australia.

The only disappointment I felt was after it was over, and I realized he would not be playing “Fred Jones, Part II.” That’s another beautiful song I wanted to hear.

The opening act was amazing. It was just Kate and her husband, Keir Nuttall. We bought their CD, but it definitely had a fuller sound than the live act. Their performance had a great feeling of intimacy: just a guy with a guitar and a gal singing. And what a voice! She did all sorts of operatic vocal acrobatics. There’s a little bit of that on the album, but in concert you could definitely tell that she’s had some classical training. The intimacy was mostly missing from the CD, but I need to give it a few more listens to evaluate it fully. It’s a fun listen and I’m not saying I dislike it, just that the contrast between the live performance and the studio recording are quite marked and unexpected.

Photos

These kind of suck, because the lighting was bad, I didn’t want to use the flash that much, and I didn’t want to get closer to the stage.

Ticket envelope.
Full-Size (2048×1536)		 Ben Folds at piano.
Full-Size (2048×1536)		 Ben and fan.
Full-Size (2048×1536)
Ben Folds at piano.
Full-Size (2048×1536)

Setlist

  1. Free Coffee
  2. Annie Waits
  3. Sentimental Guy
  4. Eddit Walker
  5. Effington — “This song was written on a stage in Normal, Illinois. That’s why it pretty much has one chord.”
  6. Jesusland
  7. The Luckiest — This song was by special request from someone else, and I really enjoyed it because it’s my and Carrie’s wedding song.
  8. Song for the Dumped — Ben told the story of how he learned a complicated-sounding lick at the piano when he was a kid, and was trying to work it into a song. On the tour van, he was working on “One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces” when Darren Jessee asked to see it, said it was rubbish, and scribbled out the lyrics to “Song for the Dumped”, which Ben was able to integrate the piano lick into.
  9. Gone
  10. Picture Window — One of the two Nick Hornby collaborations he played.
  11. Levi Johnston’s Blues — After this one, he was going to play another one, but decided it wasn’t ready, said the song “wasn’t under copyright yet”, and tossed the sheet of paper (presumably with the lyrics) into the audience.
  12. You Don’t Know Me — Kate Miller-Heidke performed Regina Spektor’s part, and Keir Nuttall accompanied on acoustic guitar. She added a nice, operatic touch to the part.
  13. Kate
  14. Still Fighting It
  15. You to Thank
  16. Landed
  17. Dr. Yang — Ben said that some people describe this song as “snarky.” That’s a word he prefer to leave the lexicon. Along with “OMG.” After this song, he asked if there was any song that anyone wanted to hear, and of course everybody shouted out a different name.
  18. Hiro’s Song — He went to get a Cajón for this one, which he played instead of the piano.
  19. Zak and Sara
  20. Bitches Ain’t Shit — He had a guy from the audience come up to sing the second verse. He first tried to get the audience to sing it, but that didn’t work out.
  21. Army — We kind of failed at the horn part.
  22. Rock This Bitch — Elaborations on the theme of a girl named Suzy who had a birthday.
  23. Gracie
  24. Not the Same — With some awesome conducting for the ‘drunken chorus.’
  25. And of course, the obligatory encore break…
  26. Evaporated — I was psyched for this one, as I think it’s very beautiful. The a capella version is also pretty.
  27. Rockin’ the Suburbs

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If It’s Too Good to Be True…

October 16th, 2009

Eating lunch today, I found my yogurt flavor is “Blackberry and Açaí.” Not knowing what the hell açaí is, I looked it up on Wikipedia. It’s a berry, but also a big dietary supplement component. According to the article:

“Marketers of these products… make unverified claims that açaí provides increased energy levels, improved sexual performance, improved digestion, detoxification, high fiber content, improved skin appearance, improved heart health, improved sleep, and reduction of cholesterol levels.”

Yeah … That sounds legit. It also whitens your teeth and makes people like you by altering your pheromones! People who sell this stuff prey upon people, but they quickly run into a problem: as soon as their product becomes the next big thing, others decide to hop on the bandwagon and start hawking the crap, too. Pretty soon, they have to keep adding supposed health benefits to ‘get ahead’ of the other guys, and you wind up with a list so long it puts snake oil salesmen to shame. I’m pretty sure most reasonable people can smell the bull, but obviously enough people are wooed by all the promises to keep some of these shysters in business.

It was a pretty tasty cup of yogurt. Still, it was surprising to see some Google Ads-worthy product featured on a big-league company like Yoplait’s product.

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