Here is the problem: you have a DVR/HTPC hooked up to your TV downstairs, but you have other televisions in your house you wish to use to access the HTPC. How do you distribute the Audio/Video signal to these other television sets?

One solution to this problem is Crossbar MediaCaster, which was kindly provided to me for review by SnapStream Media.

The basic idea of this hardware is that you are creating a “private access channel” AKA Avcast® entertainment network, which is then provided content from any device which outputs an RCA signal.

In the box:

• 1 x CableCaster - Establishes the Avcast entertainment network
• 1 x MediaCaster - Provides the content for the Avcast network
• 1 x IRcaster - sends IR signal over the Avcast network
• 1 x IRdetector - receives IR signal
• 1 x Notch filter - filters a channel range to allow Avcast network to utilize a channel
• 2 x Coax Cable - to connect MediaCaster/CableCaster to coax network
• 1 x RCA Cable set - to connect HTPC to MediaCaster

The setup of the system is rather complicated and requires that you both have access to, and know the setup of your home coax system which is already built into the majority of homes built in the past 30 years. If you have cable television, then you most likely have this internal network already set up.

Step 1:

Locate where the cable comes into your house. You need to intercept it where it splits off to go into separate ends of the house.

The CableCaster unit plugs in here. Also you will need A/C power. There is a plug for input - the input cable from your cable provider. Also in between the cable provider and the CableCaster goes the Notch Filter. This device blocks a channel range, so that the CableCaster can broadcast on this channel.

Step 2:

The MediaCaster is then plugged into cable network near or at your HTPC. You will need to have access to the coax network in your home if you don’t already have this near to your HTPC. This part will also need A/C power.

Step 3:

Plug your Audio/Video device (in this case, a DVR running SnapStream BeyondTV). This means you will need to output the video and audio in RCA format - so make sure you have the necessary cables/converters to do this.

Step 4 (optional):

At the remote end, connect the IR Caster and IR Receiver to the coax network. This will allow you to use the IR remote at a remote location to the intended receiver, the signal will be broadcast over the Avcast network to the MediaCaster unit.

In my case, I used the BTC Wireless Remote and Firefly remote, which were both able to reach to my upstairs room and control my PC.

Now that everything is set up, you can see my remote TV with my HTPC desktop running!

I must admit, it was very cool to be operating my HTPC from another room while seeing the content broadcast over a CATV channel. This signal is now available from anywhere in my house - allowing me to enjoy my recorded content over any cable-equipped television set.

There are several large drawbacks or flaws to using this system.

- First, the HTPC must output in 1.33:1 ratio format, meaning if you have your HTPC set up to output to an HDTV in widescreen format (16:9). I could only get my setup to output one or the other, meaning I had to make sure my aspect ration stayed in Standard format.
- Secondly, the notch filter also seemed to filter out content which it should not be filtering. Specifically, my Motorola set top box became useless. On Demand stopped working, as well as HDTV signal quality dropped dramatically - causes dropouts in signal.

These drawbacks really limit how you are able to use this system. In my case my wife really relys on the OnDemand service from Comcast - so this is a deal breaker for me. If your cable TV provider is not comcast, then you might not have this same problem. Also the system is fairly complicated to set up, so it is for advanced users only.

Final verdict:

Product provided by: SnapStream Media
Review date: 5/1/2007

I recently purchased the Cingular 8525 Windows Mobile 5.0 phone. The base applications are alright, but if you really want to use it to it’s full potential there are several “Must have” applications for it. I couldn’t find any sites that had a list like this, so I thought I would put one together.

System Administration

1. PHM Registry editor - (free) - This allows you to edit your registry, along with backing up and restoring it. I would recommend doing a backup as soon as you get your phone in case something goes wrong!

2. .NET VNC Viewer - (free) - Allows you to connect to a PC with VNC Server over the network.

Usability

3. rlToday - (free) - Adds a clock, calendar, and more to your today screen. Fully skinnable to your liking. Also displays registry keys, which then allows you to show if you have new messages or your phone signal.

4. PhoneAlarm - (US$24.95) - Skinnable today screen plugin which shows new messages, voicemails, missed called. Can also control Bluetooth and Wifi. Also allows you to schedule profiles for your phone, which control volume, message alerts and the like. It is great because you can have your phone automatically turn off rings for nighttime, or quickly set to a “Meeting” mode which sets your phone to vibrate.

5. SPB Mobile Shell - (US$29.95) - If you want to forgo designing your plugins to make the today screen a simple information screen (as I have) this this software is a good drop-in replacement. When you wake up your phone, it shows a clock, signal information, mails, weather, and upcoming appointments. It also replaces your normal menu with a “large font” version that makes it easy to navigate with one hand. However, there is a problem with this software. On my Cingular 8525 it causes the phone to freeze frequently, making a soft reset necessary. So, try out the demo before purchasing this software.

Internet Applications

6. Opera Mobile - (US$24, Demo available) - This mobile browser kicks Pocket Internet Explorer’s ass. Opera Mobile has single column rendering, javascript support, and more, all of which PIE lacks.

7. Google Maps Mobile - (free) - This mapping software kicks ass. You can get directions, display a road or aerial map, search for businesses, show traffic, connect your GPS, and more. All for one low cost price.

8. Microsoft Live Search for Mobile - (free) - A really nice mobile suite. Give you one hand access to a Category search (for example: restaurants, shopping, transportation, etc.), mapping (road or aerial), directions, and more. GPS access is also included. Live Search has a slight edge over Google Maps Mobile. It has the ability to go full screen, and also includes a nicer interface to the keys on the phone, allowing better one handed map browsing.

9. Boopsie - (free) - This little known application is one of the best things since sliced bread. If you are a nerd like me, sometimes you have contests with your friends to see who can look up a movie name, or who was that guy in some movie, or where in the world is Estonia. Using this software, you launch the program, select your search category, such as Wikipedia, IMDB, Amazon, Dictionary.com and many more, and start typing your search term. As you are typing, it will narrow down the words so as soon as there is one entry left, you hit enter and it will bring up the page on that term. It is a really fast way to search for any kind of information you can think of. Highly recommended.

Multimedia

10. Orb.com - (free) - First you install Orb to your home PC. Then you poke holes through your firewall to allow access to your digital media. Then you access the Orb portal at mycast.orb.com. You can stream any media you want off of your home PC, and onto your mobile device. This includes LIVE TV if you have a tuner card in your PC. The only tricky part is that you need to use a web browser to access your media, so it is not exactly easy to access your content if you have a large library.

Bonus - if you have a Wii, Orb has customized their portal to work with Wii. It will play your local content over the Internet Channel using a flash applet. It plays all of your music (with album art) and also video and Live TV.

11. PocketPlayer - (US$19.95, Demo Available) - This is the best music player I’ve found for Windows Mobile. It has “iPod” like menus which allow you to scroll through your music on your memory card. But, unlike what the iPod is capable of doing, it has many other functions. You can add Podcasts, which it will download and stream over your net connection, it will play some video (mostly WMV, it is not a great video player, see the next item) and also play music over uPnP so you can play music off of your Orb server, for example.

12. CorePlayer - (US$19.95) - This media player is not free, but it is hands down the best video player for Windows Media. It supports a lot of codecs, including H.264 (AVC), MKV, MPEG-1, MPEG-4 part 2 (ASP), DivX, XviD, WMV, MJPEG, Matroska, TS, PS, 3GPP, MOV, AVI, MPEG-4, NSV. It also plays audio files, but it does not seem to have a library function and I found PocketPlayer to be superior in this regard. I’ve heard that you can use TCPMP (which is no longer seems to be in development and who’s website is currently down) plus a few plugins, but I found this media player to be much better and worth it for the time you would have spent.

Games

13. ScummVM - (free) - The SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) Engine runs classic games such as Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max, and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Since these games are not made for high resolution, they are perfect for the QVGA resolution of a Windows Mobile screen.

14. Pocket UFO - (free) - PocketUFO is a “pixel perfect” remake of the game X-COM UFO Defense (X-COM Enemy Unknown), which is one of the best games of all time. Like SCUMMVM, these games were not meant for the high resolution screens of today, but translate perfectly to the PocketPC.

Windows Desktop

15. ActiveSync - (free) - You probably already have this installed if you have a Windows Mobile device but I thought that this list would be incomplete without it.

16. ThemeGenCE - (free) - This is a little complicated to use but you can really cusomize your Windows Mobile theme. It allows you to grab the current screen from your device, and completely customize the colors and background for free. There is a tutorial for ThemeGenCE which describes how to use it a bit better if you are lost.

17. GetPDAScreen - (free) - Allows you to take screen captures from your PocketPC to a PC connected via ActiveSync.

Looking for some small 16 by 16 icons for your website or other application? So was I. Here is what I’ve found:

• bulletmadness - large general use list, some brand specific
• urlgreyhot - (cool star trek reference) - a few mini and brand specific
• famfamfam - the motherload of small icons
• sweetie - pretty large icon set
• favicon.fr - its in french but easy enough to understand, and lots of icons here.
• paul armstrong designs - gallery2 icon set

Here is my contribution, a MySpace icon.

Check out Clicky web stats. After you register, you add a piece of code to the bottom of your page and start collecting your stats. It’s really easy to set up, and the stats you get in return are awesome. You can see your stats by visitor, search term, page, etc. It is very clearly shown, and not as hard to figure out as some of the other webstats programs which really bog you down in data that you don’t need. I hate to say it, but it looks a lot nicer than Google Analytics. It is currently free - although I don’t see how they turn a profit at this point (it is in beta still) so I would look for either a pay service in the future, or maybe ad supported.

Check it out and see what you think! This stats service is great for simple blogs and other sites which do not require complicated ad and click tracking.

I was looking for some software to save (rip) an ISO file from a CD drive that you have. This is great for making backups, or if you access a CD often, it can help you in that you will not have to insert the CD every time your program runs. Also it speeds up your “CD” access.

I had found this a while ago but I had a hard time finding it again, so I thought I would add an entry for future reference.

It is called ISO Recorder by Alex Feinman, there are versions for XP, 2003, and Vista (32 and 64 bit versions for all).

It adds an entry to your explorer menu in Windows XP - explorer integration is nice! Just right click and it presents you with the choice to “Create image from CD”. From there, just tell it where to save the ISO, and it does its thing, and a few minutes later you have your fresh ISO sitting on your HD.

Teaming this up with Microsoft’s free Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel and you can then mount this ISO image as a static hard drive. Point any software requiring you to insert a CD before running to that drive letter, and it will run as the CD is inserted.

A pay commercial version software which does the same thing, a little easier than the above, is called Alcohol 120%. I haven’t used it personally but I hear it works great as well.

powered by performancing firefox

Clean Archives Plugin by Shawn Grimes is a great, simple plugin to do your archives with. It has an easy to modify template so you can really make it look at easy as you want. It works well on my Wordpress 2 installation and can be viewed here.

You have to check out the Envive E-Center Pro [eHomeUpgrade] home theater machine. It comes with Windows XP Media Center Edition (Vista Ultimate Ready) but I would rather throw Beyond TV on this puppy.

Check out these beefy stats…

E-Center Pro Features:

• Intel Viiv Certified Platform utilizing Intel Core 2 Duo Processors
• Up to 8GB DDR2 @ 677MHz or 4GB of DDR2 @ 800MHz Memory
• Windows Media Center 2005, Vista Ultimate Ready
• Also available with EnviveOS
• 2 NTSC Tuners and 2 ATSC Tuners under MCE 2005
• 4 NTSC Tuners and 4 ATSC Tuners under EnviveOS*
• 500GB to 4.5TB (6 x 750GB SATAII) of Storage, RAID Optional
• DVI/HDMI Video Output with HDCP Support, Optional
• Dolby Home Theater Certified High Definition Audio featuring 7.1 Audio Output with SPDIF
• Dual Layer DVD+/- RW Standard, Blu-ray Disc Drive optional, HD-DVD drive Available Late Q4 ‘06
• Rack mounting Kit, Optional
• Gigabit (10/100/1000 Mbits/sec) LAN powered by Intel, Additional NIC is Optional.
• Built in VFD and IR receiver

Envive is taking preorder 9/20/2006 (tomorrow) - so go get one if you can afford it, lucky you!

E-Center Pro Preorders [Envive]

Related: does anyone know what EnviveOS is?

If you need to find a string in a file, you would typically use:
grep -H "string to find" filename.ext
However, grep doesn’t handle a large number of files well. If you specify grep "string" * or even grep "string" `find ./`you may find yourself facing this error:
bash: /bin/grep: Argument list too long
If you need to search for a string in a lot of files then you can use a simple bash script to do the searching for you.

In this sample, I am looking for a string “sample string” in a directory named “./sample/”:
for i in `find ./sample/`; do grep -H "sample string" $i; done
This uses the find command to do the searching. It actually returns a list of filenames, which we can then grep one-by-one. The -H option tells grep to let us know the filename it found the string in so we can go right into that file to find the location of it.

I am using the Visual.Syntax code highlighting plugin by Matthew Delmarter. There were some code highlighter plugins out there, but they were all pretty complicated and the output was fancier - a little too fancy. I wanted something simple to copy/paste from and Visual.Syntax won the day for me. iG:Syntax Hiliter is a close second and I may still use it some day. It does neat things like line numbering and highlighting for a large amount of languages; but I did not find it as simple to use as Visual.Syntax. In case you were wondering, both of them work with Wordpress 2.x.

Considering that I plan on using a lot code on this site, I put a lot of thought into the best fonts to use for readability. I ended up going by a programmers font guide from Mr. Lowing. The code highlights on these pages use the following fonts (in order of preference/availability): Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, Lucida Console, Consolas, Courier, monospace.

The result is below:
<?php
if ( ! validate_username($user_login) ) {
$errors['user_login'] = __('This is what the code looks like highlighted');
$user_login = ";
}
?>

If everything went right, it should look like one of the following:

If you do not have one of those fonts, you should still see a monospaced font.