Only took 12 months for the keyboard scrolling interrupt bug to finally get what was coming to it. At least 7 geeks world wide rejoice now that they can scroll complex long vertical pages in Safari with their key repeat set to overdrive. Actually, i’m sure a few non-geeks with older machines are probably thinking ‘hmm this seems a little faster’ too.

Either way, I’m glad it’s fixed, it was really annoying me forever.

Update: So it seems to be fixed on both my Mac Intel Mini and my G5 Tower, but oddly still not fixed on my brand new MacbookPro. All I have to say is…REALLY? Really…i mean seriously really?

Watching my G5 scroll faster than my i7 is just disturbing.

DSL Reports Speedtest

So got my new 35/35 service running and apparently we’re getting close to the maximum upload. Verizon had called me on the upgrade date and told me that I would only get 29mbit upload because the ONT at the house wasn’t capable of more. He offered to send a tech out to replace it, so I said “sure”. The tech came out today and basically said he wasn’t aware of any speed difference on the other ONT’s. He called his boss and he said the guy I talked to was misinformed because the 611/612 ONT’s are all pretty much the same (just different port configuration and MOCA support) and won’t go any faster than my 610.

The second thing he said was they only guarantee 75% of the claimed speed (which is 26.25mbit) so there really isn’t much of an option at this point. I guess I’ll be satisfied for now, but I’m a bit miffed that they said they could fix it and now they can’t or won’t now.

I just wished the sales/service people who called you would actually not make promises they can’t keep. I think they continue to have a shortage of highly qualified guys.
I tried to do some searching for the AFC AccessMax SFH ONT 610X specifications, but I couldn’t find any useful data.

My old gallery of my FIOS Installation in case anyone is interested.

UPDATE 1/22/10:So my wife just reported that Verizon called back and DID claim it was an equipment problem and will be sending techs back on saturday to fix it (shaking head). Big company communication fun, I have no idea, I’ll update again Saturday.

This is FIOS. This is BIG.

“Verizon Wi-Fi is not available for PDAs, phones, desktop PCs or Macs.”
In fact 64-bit Windows need not apply as well. It is ONLY available for 32-bit vista/xp. This is just ridiculous, wifi access is built on all open standards. It’s purely a marketing/business decision to alienate all of the PDAs, phones, Macs, etc…

It amazes me how Verizon can wave the Network Neutrality Flag and yet at the same time not offer any access to all to various devices. So, its network neutrality, as long as you’re the type of device we think deserves it.

The ugly? Well, the $1.99 mysterious fee is still an unknown factor and ETF’s have doubled on both FIOS and Wireless up to $350 and $360 respectively. FIOS prorates at $15/month and wireless is oddly $10/month which will leave a hefty chunk even at the end.

They continue to be my most hated/loved company. FIOS and FIOS TV are unparalleled, the wireless on the other hand? Well, lets just say I won’t be a quad-play subscriber any time soon.

Engadget also gets a FAIL as of 1:34pm PST, also erroneously reporting only a 2ghz model.

But there is some good news underneath the surface of this fairly standard refresh.

First the basics, support for up to 4GB of memory (up from an unofficial 3GB and officially 2GB maximum), more USB ports (no-hum), 802.11n, firewire 800 and the most obvious big enhancement the 9400M graphics chipset.

The real interesting part to me is the new 1066Ghz frontside bus and the socket that comes along with that (up from 667mhz). I can’t wait for someone to crack one open. It appears to use the Core 2 Duo P7350 which if I’m not mistaken is a socket P. Which means there might be quite a bit of latitude for upgrades.

New Mac mini

So in this table, the P7350 is what I believe the new Mini to be using. This means if the CPU is easily removable at a minimum the P8700 should be a drop in replacement at 2.533Ghz its part of the same exact line. The P9600 has a slightly narrower voltage range and twice the cache, but again I couldn’t see why this wouldn’t be a GREAT drop in replacement at 2.667Ghz. The top of the line would be the T9800, it has a higher total wattage which means a slightly higher chance of running in to trouble but at 2.933Ghz its worth trying.

Personally, I have a Mini that I upgraded to 2.33Ghz. It’s the same 34Watts as the original 1.83Ghz CPU that came with it originally. The only downside is that it does make quite a bit more noise than the original CPU when both cores are running 60% or more. But, if the original mini can handle a 35Watt CPU, the new one just might…

Can’t wait to see the first 2.93Ghz Mini benchmark!

P.S. There are in fact faster versions of the Socket P line of CPU’s but I omitted the 3.066Ghz C2Extreme (44watts) and the 2.26Ghz C2Quad’s (45watts) as just a little unrealistic with the stock mini cooling, but that isn’t to say it isn’t possible. Only time will tell when someone actually tries such a thing…

Update: Ask and ye shall receive (well partially at least), macminicolo.net has an unboxing and disassembly, no specifics on the cpu/socket but it all looks pretty similar to the current model.

You might want to hold off on the unless you’re already experiencing problems like some new MBP users are. My latest not-so-scientific numbers show its a risky bet.

Check out my older post on the topic…

The graph is basically the number of positive to negative comments made on MacRumors.com.

10.5.6 Update

Some totally useless statistics…

Apple released the 10.5.5 update the other day and while debating whether or not to run the update I threw together this graph. It’s basically the number of positive/negative comments on MacRumors for each point release of OS X from 10.4 and 10.5 to-date.

Anyway, while not the best reception for a release, 10.5.5 is tracking to be pretty average (46% being average and 10.5.5 at 50% as of today). I’m still at 10.5.2 as I skipped 10.5.3 because of the complaints and then just forgot to update since everything has been running so smoothly. It’s interesting to note the bad run from 10.4.6-10.4.9. I wonder if there were internal issues at Apple at the time or something to correlate it with.

Note: the 10.4.8 story was combined with the 10.3.9 release for whatever thats worth.

So, I finally decided to clean up this site and upgrade WordPress. Unfortunately, that took lot more effort than I ever anticipated. Apparently, 2.5 was a major restructuring of how things work. That would be fine for the average user but I’ve made many customizations and optimizations over the years and it took quite a bit of recoding to make it work in the new system.

The good news is that the new system has a much better layout for customizing pages that I can see will make upgrading in the future much easier. Everything seems isolated in the themes folder under your specific theme. I still have a few things that I should probably clean up in the main directory but, I’m already 20 hours or more in and I don’t feel like coding anymore. At least comments, rss, etc… are all working again. Although, there will probably be a few missing layouts…

So I thought it might be a bright idea to illustrate what has to be one of the more over complicated HTPC (Home Theatre PC aka. PVR, Tivo thing, etc…) setups ever, mine… Ok, probably not, I’m sure plenty of people have crazier setups. But, it does surprise me how reliable it has been, even with so many computers involved. So how does it work? Magic! Ok, maybe not but something like this…

SageTV controls most of it. But, after trying numerous 1394 (a.k.a. FireWire) cards I never managed to get Windows XP, the Scientific-Atlanta SA-3250HD STB, and Charter Cable’s crappy signal to get along. Magically (Apple did create the standard for 1394) it just works without anything special on a Mac. So, FireWire is plugged in to the Mac, Sage TV controls it, all HD and digital channels go through the Mac and get recorded to the main media server/raid as raw MPEG-2 TS (transport streams). SD signals get recorded directly to the RAID through a Hauppauge PVR150 in the Windows box. All channels SD and HD are controlled through the 1394 (no infrared blaster silliness).

The great thing about this set is you get pure digital recording and playback all the way to the display. Digital cable -> Firewire digital files -> HDMI TV. The only other systems that work like this are DirectTV TiVo, some dedicated cable/sat. company PVR’s and Cable Card based systems. Unfortunately, after many years of unencrypted goodness, earlier this year Charter turned on 5C encryption on all HD pay channels. Note 5C is the digital encryption for the HDMI not the encryption that protects which channels you get which I believe is DigiCipher 2.

So what does the future hold? FIOS TV and the Hauppauge HD PVR Model 1212 likely. Unfortunately, this may mean losing pure digital recording/playback. But, I would regain recording of all HD channels.

The future is more likely the Internet and Bit Torrent. It’s really too bad for the studios that downloading bit torrent TV shows are often higher quality, more convenient and let you build collections as compared to the ‘legitimate’ offerings (Hulu, NBC online etc… and even recording SD/HD TV from cable/sat). But, this is a rant for another time…

Update: For completeness I added my parents Mac Mini to the full diagram (click the image), it runs Front Row Apple’s not so good PVR software, its slow over the Internet, but I believe that might be something about Samba. She can watch movies via the remote mount to my RAID and I put aliases in her Movies folder in her home directory.

So being the lucky guy I am, both my parents and I both have FIOS 20Mbit Bi-directional internet connections (actually they may have a slightly lower tier). So after the 50th time I had the conversation “You should really see this movie, tv show, etc…”, I got to thinking it might be cool to connect our networks in order to allow them to share my media library/HTPC.

Unfortunately, getting my father to reconfigure his home network firewall is pretty much a non-starter. So I had to find a more creative solution.

So here it is, a quick how to get Samba connected over a reverse ssh Tunnel on OS X.

SSH Tunnel
sudo ssh -N -p 222 -c 3des user@domain.com -L 222/127.0.0.1/139

-N detaches terminal for ssh tunnels
-p is the port – I’m using 222 because if you use port 22 then you have to disable SSH/remote access on the local machine you are connecting from.
-c encryption type – 3des is the default blowfish is faster if CPU time is an issue remote user/domain

(direct from the man page)

-L [bind_address:]port:host:hostport
Specifies that the given port on the local (client) host is to be
forwarded to the given host and port on the remote side. This
works by allocating a socket to listen to port on the local side,
optionally bound to the specified bind_address. Whenever a con-
nection is made to this port, the connection is forwarded over
the secure channel, and a connection is made to host port
hostport from the remote machine.

Ok, now you have a tunnel, the next step is mounting the remote drive.

Mount command
mount -t smbfs //user:password@127.0.0.1:222/remoteshare /mountpoint

Note: A friend noted you should NOT use root for the mount command or Samba may not mount correctly.

To make this run at login, put it in a text file, chmod it executable and then put it in your login items.

Great! Final step, how to make the connection persistant. Enter launchd.

`launchd` is a unified, open source service management framework for starting, stopping and managing daemons, programs and scripts. It was introduced with Mac OS X v10.4/Darwin v8.0, and is licensed under the Apache License.

Unfortunately, you need to make a launchd plist and launchd is a bit of a bitch, so its much easier to just go get Lingon by Peter Borg it’s free, it works and you won’t have to learn launchd.

Now you have a great persistent remotely mounted Samba title over SSH.

Notes:
1. The mount command is a simple terminal script, but you may need to put a delay in the script if the connection isn’t up before the login runs the mount script. There is probably a way to get launchd to handle this but I haven’t spent the time to figure it out. So if the session disconnects it will automatically reconnect but not remount the drive.

2. The 1.83 GHz Mac mini doesn’t seem to have enough CPU to playback and receive HD content over the SSH tunnel (works fine if you download, then play). I may try to use blowfish to see if it improves playback. Normal SD divx/h.264 seems to be just fine.

I’m interested to know if anyone has any suggestions to improve this setup.

Note: As of somewhere around 10.6.7 IIRC this stopped working. As far as I can tell SMB and AFP no longer accept connections from the same box over 127.0.0.1. I’m really not sure why. As an alternative I’ve switched to using MacFuse, MacFusion and SSHFS which seems to be working reasonably well. I also switched the cipher in SSH to use arcfour in an attempt to eek out a little more performance.

So if you ever wondered what happens if you screenshare in a loop, here is a nice fun picture =)

People will argue until the end of time whether or not widescreen is better than traditional 4:3 monitors. Personally, I believe most webpages and most documents are much taller vertically than they are wide. So you want the most vertical space possible. I’ve heard the argument that with widescreen you can have two vertical documents simultaneously. But, nothing prevents you from having to vertical documents with even more vertical space on non-widescreen monitor. 1600 wide is really no different than 1680 wide when viewing two documents at once.

So at the end of the day, what really matters is how many pixels get on screen and for any user who’s been around since the days of CRTs, for the most part widescreen has been a big downgrade not an upgrade. If you are buying a monitor for the first time in today’s market I can see how widescreen would not seem like a downgrade. But since most CRT users came from using either 1280×1024 or 1600×1200 the equivalent widescreen models have been downgrades.

I would argue that most users who had CRTs at 1280×1024 looking to upgrade to a LCD would have preferred 1600×1200 rather than 1680×1050. Unfortunately, widescreen monitors were much cheaper in comparison. Only recently in the last couple years have 1980×1200 become available at consumer prices. So I would argue that for the most part widescreen monitors have been downgrades rather than upgrades for anyone who has had a high-resolution CRT.

More recently 1920×1200 models have come out and they are still pretty pricey, some examples of very high rez monitors…

For me, when it comes down to it, maximum pixels on the screen means more to me than anything else. So 1.92MP is better than 1.76MP any day of the week, so i’ll be sticking with 1600×1200 until I decide to upgrade to a 1920×1200 model.

So as a techie, my biggest complaints on the iPhone (besides the inevitable scratches that will drive everyone nuts to the point of class action lawsuits) are…

1. No 3G high speed network support. EDGE is 2.5G and barely acceptable for the type multimedia this phone is capable of.
2. No expansion. A simple SD card slot would make your 4G unlimited gig…
3. Battery not removable.

So I got to thinking about it and so far no one has said how long the ‘exclusive’ Cingular thing will be. It could be as short as 6 months maybe a year at the most.

The second thing I thought of was, hey this is standard apple operating procedure. Release a product that is amazing in every way but a few, then 6-12months later ‘blow everyone’s mind’ by adding all the missing features and forcing everyone to upgrade =)

So the lack of HSDPA/EVDO is because 6-12 months later they’ll announce ‘iPhone Pro’ with a removable battery and HDSPA and twice the memory or SD card slot or similar. It will also fix the crippling xyz bug that all the first gen owners are inevitably going to complain about (buzzing, hissing, or some other odd glitch that really drives 1% of the users mad).

Anyway, i’ll probably wait for the 2nd gen, cause my Treo700p on EVDO does 95% of the functionality with 1% of the stability and 5% of the fineness.

My 2 cents…

So I was in Fry’s Electronics today and I wanted a 16foot USB Repeater cable. Its basically a 16 foot USB cable (the maximum the spec. allows) and a little bus powered hub on the end. Anyway, after searching the “USB Stuff” isle for about a minute I realized it was on another isle. No problem, ah…the “USB Cable” isle, hmm product 1. $39.99, ah another one, crap $39.99. I was also looking for a plain extension. 10Ft $12.99…ouch…

So after about 5 minutes of digging, I give up and start wondering again. Out of the corner of my eye on a random isle, ah, mixed in with the Firewire cables, a few lone USB cables. Found the SAME 16foot extender $14.99 and the same one bundled with a 10foot and a 6foot cable for $19.99!

Aye…I feel sorry for all the poor saps who just pay full price…

Check out the picture, yellow is HALF the price of blue!

This article is a tad old, but its still very relevant. I recently decided that my cheap ass Canon S520 (paid $50 refurb at Frys) is lacking compared to modern printers. I also recently started doing more photography and decided it might be nice to have a nice printer. Tom’s Hardware did a nice review of the 3 current $300-400 range printers from Canon, Epson and HP. Anyway, so sum up…

The Canon and the Epson were very close and better overall than the HP. The Canon IP8500 had the edge in Speed. The Epson R800 has its edge in better Quality and print Longevity (uses pigment based inks instead of dye based). The Epson also had a couple little features I think might be nice the canon doesn’t, roll paper, firewire, and better fine art paper selection. The Canon on the other hand has pictbridge (lets you print from memory cards), duplex printing (double sided) and a user replaceable printhead. The Epson print head is not user replaceable, so if its damaged or clogged and can’t be cleared using self-cleaning it needs to be sent in for repair. Although, I hear in the latest models this is less of a concern, I would use your printer occasionally to keep the heads clean and follow the directions when replacing ink. I’ve also heard one of the caveats of any of Epsons printers is that if you switch print qualities they tend to go crazy about head cleaning and in general they tend to be fussy if you don’t use them often.

I hear the Canon prints can have some color variation compared to the Epson’s when viewed in different lighting conditions, as well as they tend to be a bit exaggerated which can make printing portraits (which have subtle skin tones) a little challenging. On the other hand your average pictures will look brighter and more vibriant.

From pcworld’s review, they both seem to have almost identical photo print costs.

A. So if you need the extra speed and want to sacrifice a very small touch of quality for a nice boost in speed, the Canon is your man.

B. If you demand the highest quality and want fade free water resistant archival quality prints on a variety of papers and follow the directions to keep your heads unclogged the Epson is a winner.

After taking a look at some print samples from both printers, its very very close. I would need to have identical prints to really tell you which one is better, but it does look like the Epson has the edge. Its detail from its 1.5picoliter drop size just seems to edge out the 2picoliter drops on the Canon.

I think for most users the feature list will be the deciding factor since they are so close to each other in quality.

P.S. Ok, I take it back, after reading tons of additional reviews I think the less hassle of the Canon is winning over the archival inks of the Epson. They simply clog too often from user reports than I think is worth it to me. I don’t print every day and I don’t want to waste $10 in ink warming my printer up every couple of weeks.

So if you haven’t heard, yesterday 6/6/05 Apple announced they are moving from the PowerPC CPU to Intel based processors. If I hadn’t heard it from the horses mouth (Steve Jobs) and if he didn’t do it at WWDC (their annual World Wide Developers Conference) I wouldn’t have believed it. Its been rumored for more than 10 years, but this time its real.

My good friend Damien wrote an interesting piece you can read here…
Live from WWDC: Apple switches to Intel. What does it all mean? (By Damien Stolarz)

My understanding is that in the short term, nothing is really changing. In the long term there are many industry ramifications, but to the consumer, it really doesn’t matter. It means some faster Mac laptops and a different logo on your CPU.

For the consumer:
1. You will still need to own a Mac to run OS X (according to Damien Stolarz quoting Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller) . Yes, I’m sure there will be interesting hacks to make them work on non-apple machines, but that won’t be supported.
2. Initial non-fat(compiled for both CPU’s) binaries (applications) will run slowly on Intel based macs using “Rosetta” apple’s emulation layer.
3. Interestingly, also according to Damien Stolarz “Schiller said Apple wouldn’t do anything to preclude people running Windows on Intel-based Macs.” Meaning windows fans of the Apple laptops/desktops can run windows.
4. Apple will ship Intel based macs Jun 2006.
5. They will continue to update and create better/faster PPC based machines until at least 2007.

Long run questions:
1. Will it mean cheaper Macs? Unclear, but it will at least allow it to happen if Apple chooses to.
2. Will it mean lower quality support from apple? Unclear, but bigger markets are harder and more expensive to support.
3. Will they still innovate? Absolutely, in fact partnering with Intel is probably the best way Apple can drive the industry to support new technologies. Bluetooth, 802.11, 1394 Firewire, USB…apple didn’t invent all of them, but they certainly drove the industry to use them.
4. Will it mean worse Stability? Probably not, they’ve been compiling OS X (every version) and all of the Apple Apps (iTunes/iPhoto/iMovie/etc…) for both Intel and PPC for the past 5 years secretly.
5. Will it mean worse Security? Unknown, A Windows virus might run fine inside an emulated environment. Could it get out?
6. What will it mean for 64-bit computing? Good question, since they are going to keep making PPC’s until at least the end of 2007, Intel could easily come out with a 64-bit chip by then, and really we don’t know what the first chip will be. The development box is a 3.6Ghz P4 for what its worth…

Stay tuned…

I’m not the only one hoping you can’t blow up the world via the Internet right?

Broadband over Gas lines?
So the other day I ran in to this press release from Nethercomm. At first I thought to myself, “this can never work”. But I sat down and really thought it through and I’ve decided its brilliant. Although I’m missing the required electrical engineering knowledge to truly say its going to work, on the limited knowledge I do have, I would say its has a much better chance than broadband over Powerlines which has been all the rage and flop for quite some time now.

Think about it, if you can use all the spectrum you want and all the power you want there would certainly be PLENTY of bandwidth. Now there are limits, such as wavelengths that won’t go around corners nicely. Power may be limited by how much leaks out places like your pilot light as well as how much is practical for the home side to transmit (you might think twice about that $30/month service if you also spent $15 in power to transmit a few hundred watt signal 24/7).

But even more likely, this might just work. You have system that is inherently sealed (save pilot lights and gas appliances in use), a medium that is totally homogenous (low pressure natural gas) and nothing else between you and the customer. Unlike power lines, no messy transformers and other such obstacles to a clear signal, no worries about unshielded lines, etc. The only problem I can think of, is areas where plastic lines are in use, and really its only an issue when they aren’t buried below a few feet of dirt and concrete (which they are most of the time).

I will enjoy seeing how Nethercomm (a local Los Angeles, CA company) works out all the kinks.

Fios Success
Wow, it has been over a month since i’ve posted. The fiber installation went totally smooth. The bandwidth rocks! With my 15000/2000 connection I’m getting 1800Kbytes/sec downloads and 230Kbytes uploads (6-10x faster down and up than the typical 1.5/256k cable). The standard DNS servers they set you up with seem to be a tad overloaded (causing initial page lookups to be slow), but I quickly fixed that using a very fast one that pings about 4ms to me and using riskinit.com as a backup DNS (typically pings less than 30ms). Here is a small gallery of the hookup. The provided D-Link 604 (DL-604) is totally adequate for most setups. I setup some port forwarding for the different computers in the house and everything is running smoothly.

Overall I would say I’m very satisfied. FIOS is only $50/month for a great service. I’ve only experienced very short transient outages of maybe 10-15 seconds once or twice in the last month. The average user wouldn’t ever notice this (it’s only because I use my connection 24/7 that I notice even the smallest glitch).

P.S. Limit, drop me an email!

I think I may have finally broke through the bureaucracy! I made yet another (I can’t accurately say but I would guess like my 10th call) to Verizon today and actually got someone who had a clue! After about 10 minutes of playing with addresses in the computer we came up with the fact that 21870 Nutrir Way was listed as QUALIFIED… For anyone who hasn’t clicked on the image yet…Nutrir way is a small driveway that dead-ends and doesn’t really exist (except on maps). Our property fills in the gap between Corvo/Nutrir and Canon.

So anyway in the Verizon computer we changed our ‘service address’ to 21870 Nutrir and now we can order FIOS. I’m supposed to get a call back tomorrow with the install date! FINALLY!

Crap, now you all know where I live…all I can say is BEWARE OF FIBER DOGS!

UPDATE 3/24/05: Installers will be here April 1st (ok maybe they are kidding me, but I got a confirmation#)!

UPDATE #2 3/27/05: While house sitting for my parents the FIOS installers came HERE to check some stuff out for their installation and noticed the same name, talked to him and helped him with the exact location of our house. He confirmed that now that he knows exactly where it is he would survey it on the way out [of the canyon] and will be there on the 1st!!!

UPDATE #3 3/30/05: The linemen came out today and ran the actual fiber, I took a couple shots of it. Overhead wire connection, extra corning cable and the connector (even bigger version).

UPDATE #4 4/1/05: So Verizon flaked…funny joke…haha I’m really laughing. Damn bastards…rescheduled for Monday. I wish they just would follow their own schedule.

I love cars, computers, and photography. So anytime I can mix all 3, its a good excuse for a post. Although this news is easily 6 months old, (its practically sacrilegious to post something this old on the net) I only look for this sort of firmware upgrade anually. So it would seem that Tesla Electronics has finally has posted their long promised road-race upgrade to the popular G-Tech Pro Competition performance meter. I haven’t had a chance to review it in action, but the feature list seems decent. It boasts 90mins of data logging at 20 samples/sec and 180mins at 10/sec. This is in contrast to the much higher resolution drag mode where it only stores 300 seconds of runs. Since you can always upload the data later to your PC, this is plenty of storage. They also added other misc. features such as the ability to store setups for up to 4 vehicles and improved documentation.

I love mine, my only major complaint is the display is totally un-viewable at night. The backlight was never very good to begin with and has deteriorated to absolute crap over the years. Mine is an older ‘blue’ backlit model, maybe the newer ‘orange’ models are better.

Anyway, it was another good excuse to take a shot with my macro lens.

[WARNING REALLY BIG IMAGE]

I’m a big fan of macro and micro photography. Alas, my 100MM macro lens is one of my favorites. Once in a while a camera manufacture will make a truly great lens, the Pentax-F 100MM F2.8 lens (and the FA version as well) is one of them. When used on a 2/3rd format digital its equivalent to a 150mm macro. So I was playing with my nifty Pentax *ist DS the other day and took a picture of one of my monitors just for the heck of it. So then I felt compelled to compare it to my LCD. Wow, I knew there was a huge difference (LCD is obviously sharper), but its a huge difference. You can easily make out the Trinitron mask on the Sony G400. The LCD is a Dell 2001fp and the pixels are nice and clear in the picture.

Anyway, I just thought I would share.

So I went a little crazy and put in a bunch of my neighbors address in to the Verizon FIOS availability form. Mix in a little Photoshop and you have what is driving me mad. FIOS is available in what appears to be completely random locations.

The picture is a link to a map of my neighborhood. Click it…

Ok, explain that! I’ve thought about it and its either 1. random (maybe to stage the workload?), 2. computer error or 3. the bundles of fiber not hooked up at the CO have no particular order. What ever it is…its driving me a bit insane…

I’ve called and the CSR filled out a engineering report, but I don’t have any high hopes of that changing things.

A few new exchanges seem to be up and running, bringing the total now to seven major exchanges servicing different areas. I’m sure Topanga will be considered part of the Los Angeles, CA exchange. There are now plenty of speed tests of everything from 5/2 all the way to 30/5.

Tampa, FL - tampfl.fios.verizon.net
Los Angeles, CA - lsanca.fios.verizon.net
Philadelphia, PA - phlapa.fios.verizon.net
Washington, DC - washdc.fios.verizon.net
New York, NY, - ny325.fios.verizon.net
Dallas, TX - dllstx.fios.verizon.net
Arlington, VA - arlington.fios.verizon.net

Another site has some nice pics of fiber being installed in Redondo Beach

In other news, my father has been offered FIOS and has an install date. So, I’m a bit jealous, but not entirely surprised as he is much closer to the CO. I’ll have pictures and full coverage of the install which I believe is set for around the 22nd of february.

Batteries are getting better. In the last few years manufactures have been able to up the capacity of batteries for portable electronics. Typically manufactures of electronics tend to use up this power by either shrinking their devices (smaller batteries) or adding power sucking features (big color screens, etc…). The good news for you, is 3rd party companies are making new batteries for your old devices.

Have a 1st or 2nd generation iPod? It originally got 10hrs of battery life. Now it gets up to 24hrs (20hrs+) with a NewerTech2100mAh battery for only $39.99! Not bad, they also have a slightly lower power 1800mAh model (15-19hrs) for $29.99 at the same place.

Another example, the iBook 500mhz started with a 3300mAh battery, my wife’s model has a 4000mAh battery and you can get a 4800mAh battery now. So if you have an old laptop with pathetic battery life, look around you may be able to breath new life in to those old laptops with a high capacity battery.

P.S. For the technically challenged, there is a service that will do it for you for $79.99 with 24hr shipping.

Exchanges up and running:
arlington.fios.verizon.net
dllstx.fios.verizon.net

Top speed? 28254/4503
That is some tasty bandwidth!

So, I just wanted to know what’s the best bang for my $$$ in video cards with recent video games like FarCry and Doom3. So a quick excel spreadsheet later, here is what I have…

			Farcry*	Doom3**	Farcry	Doom3
		Price	FPS	FPS	$/FPS	$/FPS	Lower is better
6800 Base 	$275 	60	55	$4.58 	$5.00 	$4.79
9800 Pro 	$163 	40	25	$4.08 	$6.52 	$5.30
6800 GT 	$380 	79	65	$4.81 	$5.85 	$5.33
9800 Base	$140 	35	21	$4.00 	$6.67 	$5.33
9600 Pro	$100 	22	12	$4.55 	$8.33 	$6.44
9600 Base	$75 	17	8.5	$4.41 	$8.82 	$6.62
X800 XT		$480 	92	59	$5.22 	$8.14 	$6.68
X800 Pro	$385 	71	42	$5.42 	$9.17 	$7.29
6800 Ultra	$580 	86	68	$6.74 	$8.53 	$7.64
9800 XT		$407 	45	27	$9.04 	$15.07 	$12.06

Nvidia 6800NU

ATI 9800NU

*Farcry VHQ No AA/AF 1024
**Doom3 HQ Demo1 4xAA/8xAF 1024×768

All cards 128MB

Also, there seem to be numerous reports of the 6800 Base (aka 6800NU (non-ultra)) being software unlockable to make it much faster. But, your milage may vary on finding a card that this works on.
 
 
 

If anyone has any suggestions/additions, feel free to leave a comment.

Things to do when installing OS X

But, I have this part of my brain that gives me great pain when I think of data loss and gives me great satisfaction in knowing I’ve achieved the greatest possible quality or when I save all data. So while I completely enjoy the benefits of using lossy formats like MP3 and JPEG, I have a strong urge to be efficient about doing so.

So at some point I learned that jpegtran can do lossless image transformations with JPEG. But, using a command line tool to do hand rotations of pictures is much too tedious to be useful on a larger scale.

Hence, EXIF. Exif is the Exchangeable Image File Format. It’s a nifty little standard for adding useful information to JPEG files such as thumbnails, camera metering modes, camera orientation and all sorts of other information that might be useful.

Now, take the jpegtran algorithm, throw in some EXIF awareness in the mix and you get exifiron! Simply type ‘exifiron *.jpg’ in a directory full of jpegs and automagically all your original jpegs are rotated to the correct orientation.

Nifty eh?

Here is a nice link to jpegclub.org that has quite a few lossless jpeg applications, including some nice easy windows binaries for those command line deprived windows users.

They are, Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania.
As, obvious from my first post on the topic, we already knew about all these states with the exception of MA. I’ll have to go digging through more forums later and see where in MA they are installing.

For additional reading check out and some pictures of actual installations, check out DSL/BroadbandReports.com. Another interesting site is fios.3v3bizich.com which has forums for people to report sitings of fiber installs.

For more pictures of the same model Optical Network Terminal (ONT) check out the the Fiber Direct PDF links in the last post.

So, for the first couple of months my brain didn’t allow me to even acknowledge the small army of Verizon trucks that started building up in the Canyon (Topanga Canyon). Since I didn’t want to prematurely get excited and become completely preoccupied by it, I just ignored it. Well, between the official Verizon announcements and my wife actually asking the Verizon guys what they were doing, I finally had to come to terms with the reality of the situation.

Box on lines

Box before mounted on lines

Fiber Dogs

Fios (FYE-ose) is coming! FIber OpticSystem? FIberOpticS? FIber OShit! ‘FIber Optic Service’ (thx Zoli).

I’m not really sure what it means, but its good. For those who don’t understand the initial significance, fiber is going to START by giving you about 10 times what you get with a similarly priced DSL/Cable connection. It has the capability of being 100-1000x faster. The FiberDirect system they are using is capable of up to 622Mbits down and 155Mbits up.

That’s fast, very…very fast. That’s faster than your typical computer fast. That’s download a full DVD in a minute fast. Probably faster than you’re computers Ethernet (typically 10-100Mbit) and hard disk (typically 20-50MBytes/sec).

Anyway it isn’t going to be THAT fast out of the box.

It’s noteworthy that Verizon has chosen to pioneer the fiber territory (although SBC has announced in very me too like fashion a hybrid fiber network of their own which may turn out to have better economics). The RBOC’s (Regional Bell Operating Centers aka. Baby-Bells aka Verizon, SBC, BellSouth and US West/Quest) are entering in to a difficult time. Two of their primary sources of income, local and long distance phone calls are being encroached upon or wiped out. The cost of Long distance has fallen to almost nothing recently and IP Telephony only stands to shrink the market even further. The other source, local service, is being encroached upon by cable companies with wired solutions and with cell phone prices lower than ever, the wireless providers are squeezing them as well. Many users coming to the conclusion that their cell phone is all they need. So with cable providing internet, video and expanding in to voice and Wireless companies coming from the other side with slower but more convenient services, the RBOC’s need to find them selves a future.

Fiber patch bay (note garfield pencil box)

Guy outside window! BOO!

Working yet?

The Internet and Video are obvious choices, but the sheer cost of building networks is enormous. Typically with large public companies, you end up in a quagmire of sorts. If you invest large sums of money in to a network with an unknown future and soak up all the profits, share holders tend to cry bloody mercy and run you out with flaming torches. On the other hand, if you hold off too long and don’t invest in new technology, the world will pass you by and before you know it, your industry doesn’t even exist! Kodak is a good example of a company that waited too long and is now paying the price for not embracing digital with all its might early on.

Details

Verizon is going to be spending billion of dollars over the upcoming years on rolling it out to all 35million of its customers. Here is a short list of sightings i’ve compiled, this list is in NO WAY comprehensive nor does it confirm availability. I just trolled through all the forums as of today, so you don’t have to. The only confirmed area to be up and running is Keller, TX. Huntington Beach and Murrieta have been announced but not confirmed.

Huntington Beach, CA
Murrieta, CA
Topanga, CA
Whittier,CA
Hillsborough County, FL
Tampa, FL
Valrico, FL
Lutz, FL
Pasco County, FL
Arlington County, VA
Leesburg, VA
Falls Church, VA
Massapequa, NY
Mineola, NY
Nassau, NY

Irvington, NY
Rockland County, NY
Chester County PA
Valley Forge, PA
Phoenixville, PA
Downingtown, PA
Wilmington, Delaware
Silver Spring MD
Rowlett, TX
Wylie, TX
Keller, TX
Grapevine, TX
Irving, TX
Allen, TX
Southlake,TX

Package pricing:

Up to 5 Mbps/2 Mbps*	Waived	FREE	$39.95/mo
Up to 15 Mbps/2 Mbps*	Waived	FREE	$49.95/mo
Up to 30 Mbps/5 Mbps*	Waived	FREE	$199.95/mo

Pirelli Optical Cable, (yes, the same guys who make high performance tires) seem to be providing the cable here. Kimmy was cool enough to get a Verizon guy to give her a piece of fiber to bring home. From this piece and the measurement (~14.6mm) of the cable that was temporarily hanging out side in our front yard I was able to determine that its probably an FusionLink Armored cable.

Installations are being reported as using AFC’s FiberDirect system. More reading can be found here… Fiber Direct Overview PDF and here… Fiber Direct Brochure PDF

Fiber

Fiber lit by laser pointer

Stalking verizon guys

Cable

And if you just can’t get enough, here are plenty more pictures of verizon guys.