About
jason's weblog, jason typing stuff

Jason Haslup
jason at haslup dot com

Subscribe
RSS: Subscribe

Links
These are a few of my favorite links.

Tue, 27 Apr 2004

New Remote
blog

Got a new toy yesterday... a new Harmony 688 universal remote control. Up until now I've been a Pronto user, but I could just never get used to the LCD touchscreen... I liked the fact that you could customize the heck out of it, but we ended up just using it in order to turn things on and off at once. Once we did that, we'd switch to the actual device remote for everything else. This meant, of course, we had five remotes sitting by the sofa.

So I've been waiting for this Harmony remote for a few months now since it was designed with Tivo in mind. That just means a couple of extra buttons, plus easy accesss to the transport (FFwd, Rewind) buttons. There are a couple of things that make the Harmony Remote unique. First and foremost is that it uses a web-based setup. Yep, you have to have access to the internet in order to program your remote.

At first I was a bit leary of this, which is why I never bought one of their remotes until now. The standard question of "what if the company goes out of business and you're left with a brick remote?" looms, but if that happens, oh well. I'll switch to another remote, or maybe the folks who make the remote will provide a utility before they close up shop. So I'm ok with the web-based setup... it works, it's pretty easy to use, and sort of nice that I can configure my remote from anywhere.

The other nice feature of the remote is that it's activity based... setting it up is at a higher level than configuring each button and setting up macros to do things all at once. Of course, this is also a bit of a detraction from the device, as I'll talk about later.

The good side, though, is that it makes the setup incredibly simple, and using the remote is just as easy. A set of four buttons on the top of the remote lets me choose what I want to do: "Watch TV", "Listen to Music", "Watch DVD", or "Watch Video". That's it. I push one of those buttons and the remote fires up the correct devices, sets all the inputs, and reconfigures its buttons (and LCD screen) for that activity.

The 688 also has what's called Smart State Technology. That's marketing-speak for a memory of what state your devices are in. So, if the night before you turned everything off with the "Off" button, the device knows that when you hit "Watch TV" that it needs to power everything needed up. Then, when you want to watch a DVD and hit that button, it knows that only the DVD player needs to be powered up.

The remote itself also has a nice little help system... at the top of the remote is a small LCD display that usually displays what action you're currently in and allows four "soft buttons" that can be configured. It also serves as the display area for help. At first I thought I'd never use the help system. I mean, really... on-screen help for a remote?

But then tonight when I powered up my system (by hitting "watch tv"), I noticed that the input of the TV wasn't set correctly. So on a whim, I hit the dedicated help button. In less than two seconds, the TV input had changed and on the LCD display of the remote was one question: "Did this fix the problem?" I had to look at the screen again to make sure that it was my head that appended ", dumbass?" to the question. Yes, Mr. Remote... that did fix my problem. And from there on out, the remote worked just fine when powering up. Show off.

One thing that I wish was possible (without a huge hack, explained below) is some sort of macro capability. When I first saw the LCD soft buttons I figured I could use it for some commonly-used activities. For example, I wanted to create a button that automatically switched to ESPN-HD when I was watching TV. Unfortunately, you can only assign soft buttons the functions of normal buttons. That's it -- you can't assign multiple presses or create macros to do that. Kind of lame, but I can see that they're keeping things simple, which is ok. For now.

Of course, the fine folks on some of the AVS forums I read have figured out ways to get around this. One method involves setting up multiple instances of the same device on the web site, then setting up a chain of those devices that are active when you're in a certain activity. Yeah, hard to follow, and a hack worthy of praise.

The other method is to manipulate the "Learn IR" portion of the remote (where it "records" the infrared signal from your original remote for buttons it doesn't know). If you're fast enough on the trigger, you can get multiple key presses in while your 688 learns the IR.

I haven't tried either of those methods since the lack of those macros doesn't bother me too much while I'm still getting used to the remote. I guess someday it might, but hopefully they'll have a fix by then.

That's about it really... two nights into it and I'm pretty pleased with the 688. I've put away all my other remotes, which I couldn't say I did with the Pronto, so that's something. Expect to see a pronto on ebay very soon now...

Thu, 08 Apr 2004

MLB Update
blog

In another installment of the hard-hitting journalism I call "haslup.com"... an update on listening to Arizona Diamondbacks baseball games! Here comes a Pulitzer!

So apparently my "Bad News..." post below isn't quite correct... although I haven't tried it yet, it appears that you still have the option of using RealOne player to listen to or watch baseball games from mlb.com. But as always, along with the good news comes the bad news... WindowsMedia streaming video appears to be better than RealOne's streaming video. Oh the humanity.

So, not only did I sign up for MSN Premium (cheapest way to get the baseball games), I'm no choosing WindowsMedia player over RealOne. Uncle!

That's about it... all is well in Bozeman.

Fri, 02 Apr 2004

Google's GMail
blog

So, google announced their plans for gmail... a web-based email service, similar to Yahoo and Hotmail. Google, of course, took it one step further.. they're "giving" you 1GB of space... you'll pretty much never need to delete or file anything for a few years with that storage quota.

Of coruse Google's thing is that you'll be able to quickly search your email for anything... so forget about filing things manually into folders, just search for it. I think that's awesome... searching the web on google is faster than searching my WindowsXP hard drive, so it seems like a great idea.

Some people don't like it, though... they're worried about the fact that google's going to "scan" your incoming emails and provide their trademark AdWords based on the content. No banner ads, no annoying messages at the bottom of your outgoing emails, just AdWords on the containing page. Not actually inserted in the email, like it seems like some of the idiots in that article think.

It's also funny that they think all of a sudden google's going to become the central storage place for email. Google's providing a service for your email... if you don't like the fact that your email is stored on a third-party machine (i.e., not your own), don't freakin' use the service. If you don't like the fact that an AdWord for a mexican food restaurant appears next to your email which has the word "dinner", don't use gmail. Don't send email to folks who use it. Make a choice, that's what is great about this country.

I think gmail will be great... I'm not sure I'll actually use it, but I think the ability to google-search my email is a great idea. I don't care that my email's on google's servers... I don't care that every email I read will probably have a linux, zaurus, or hdtv AdWord right next to it. I can ignore those things just as easily as the more invasive yahoo ads that are actually inserted into emails (and therefore are now sitting on my hard drive at home).

I'm done. I have linux running on my playstation2, now... that's exciting. That means I have linux running on two pda's, three x86 pc's, a playstation2, a Tivo, and maybe a linksys firewall. Yeah, I'm a junkie.

2010 : February (2)
2009 : February (2)
2008 : January (2) February (2) March (5) April (1) June (1) July (2) October (1) November (3)
2007 : January (3) February (1) March (1) June (2) December (1)
2006 : February (4) March (4) April (11) May (5) July (7) August (5) September (4) October (3) November (6) December (2)
2005 : January (1) February (6) April (2) May (4) June (3) July (8) August (5) September (3) October (3) November (1) December (1)
2004 : January (9) February (5) March (6) April (3) May (2) June (1) July (6) August (10) September (1) October (4) November (3)
2003 : March (6) April (3) May (1) June (18) July (9) August (4) September (5) October (2) November (7) December (2)