Disqus - Latest Comments for matthew_dippel

Re: SageTV Working on Version 7 Update with New User Interface

matthew_dippel — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 16:32:10 -0000

Sad to hear that they didn't have something to show off, but I'm very excited that they're overhauling the UI.

SageTV reminds me of many other brilliantly developed applications. It's pretty clear they are passionate developers. It's also clear that they know how to design a system that works well -- I have an HD-100 and HD-200 tied to my main SageTV Media Center ... The fact that it supports so many different formats, manages to provide an identical user interface to the actual "Big Box" I have everything running on and yet remains affordable is due to solid system design. But it sort of looks like the energy put into all of that came at the expense of a good UI. I couldn't hand the remote over to my wife -- someone who is pretty computer savvy but not a geek -- and expect she'd be able to figure everything out.

It takes a lot of work to get a 3D User Interface to be user friendly. Sage's existing vanilla UI isn't horrible, it's just cluttered and gives equal weighting to every component. I change settings rarely, yet it occupies as much of my main menu as my recording and video library do. SageMC's UI fixes a lot of that, but adds its own complexity (I remember having to explain Send to... *click* Archive ... Wife: "I don't want to send it anywhere."). It's not an uncommon problem ... Tivo won because of a well thought out UI. There's nothing on the market even today that compares as far as usability. BeyondTV is the closest to providing a usable experience for a PC DVR, but it lacks almost everywhere else from a technical standpoint (Windows only, no extenders, limited format support). If they pull a fantastic UI out of their redesign, they'll get the last of Snapstream's hobbyest customers.

Re: Win a Free Popcorn Hour C-200 Media Player

matthew_dippel — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:21:47 -0000

Always a good man with the giveaways. Take care!

Re: Amazon Kindle at $260 – What’s the Sweet Spot for eBook Readers?

matthew_dippel — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 19:48:13 -0000

That's what I ended up doing.

Purchased a 10" Asus Netbook. The display isn't anywhere near as pleasant on the eyes as the Kindle, but it is very nice and it's color. I spend much of my day reading an LCD screen, anyway, so it's not much of a drawback. It's heavier than a Kindle, and the battery life isn't as good, but I can pull a good 7 hours or so out of it (less if I'm listening to music or tethered to my phone to for internet access).

Re: Amazon Kindle at $260 – What’s the Sweet Spot for eBook Readers?

matthew_dippel — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 19:43:48 -0000

The sweet spot is about $150. I've seen the screen and it is pleasant on the eyes. I also like the battery life.

I would prefer a more open device with the elimination of Whispernet. Wi-fi that I can turn on and off or even just USB connectivity is good enough. I have plenty of books that came with the CHM or PDF on CD and plenty more reference materials that only come in PDF format. I'd love to read them on a good ePaper screen on a device with loads of storage space and the ability to search my library of text.

I was very close to purchasing the Kindle this summer, but the timing was bad ... my decision was stopped by Amazon's handling of 1984.

Re: Repair Your Own SageTV HD100 Extender

matthew_dippel — Fri, 29 May 2009 21:44:50 -0000

Thanks.

I haven't double-checked to see if I'm still in warranty ... I'm guessing removing the top would void the warranty, so I'm holding off until I can verify that.

If I'm out, though, I'll take it apart and see how everything looks. The HD100 has been a fantastic device ... It's a little ugly looking but every single consumer electronics provider should take note. This is the kind of flexibility that should be in every media device. I've very rarely had to wonder if something on my SageTV box would work on the extender. The experience on the extender is the same as the experience on my overpowered HTPC.
The sage folks should take note that having a solid base UI is also critical, but hey, it works well once you install the appropriate interface overhauls ... fighting with it for a solid day.

Looking forward to seeing what they did with the HD200. (It's in the mail right now)

I'll certainly post my findings to their forums. If the caps are bad, I'll put my camcorder to work. Sage has done a great job of letting their users run free. The software isn't open source, but they still have a loyal community behind them due to their flexible APIs and their hands off approach regarding customizations (despite their Java dependency................).

Re: Repair Your Own SageTV HD100 Extender

matthew_dippel — Fri, 29 May 2009 17:24:10 -0000

Any idea if this is something worth repairing proactively?

Do you know if this is happening predominantly with any particular block of units (I purchased mine after a very long period of time when they were way out of stock).

My thinking is this ... my HD100 is nearly out of warranty ... may actually be out of warranty now. I love the unit and have no intention of replacing it (I bought an HD200 as an upgrade, but I'm moving my HD100 to another television). I don't like the idea of leaky capacitors, especially since those are not solid capacitors. They can potentially damage to other parts (though, that looks like one very big, spacious board for a power supply, so the likelihood is probably low).

I'm certainly not afraid of a soldering iron, so I'm not worried about breaking the unit to replace those caps, but what I'm wondering is ... should I just do the surgery before the problem happens or is this one of those problems that is incredibly rare and not worth addressing unless it starts to experience the actual symptoms described? I positive I have at least three of those exact caps sitting in a drawer in my basement and I have the necessary tools/solder, so the total cost would only about an hour of time spent. I wouldn't want to waste that hour if the liklihood of failure is really low, but would happily do so if this is something more than say ... 25% of the units are experiencing.

Re: Repair Your Own SageTV HD100 Extender

matthew_dippel — Tue, 26 May 2009 18:28:30 -0000

Interesting . . .

Companies have to be very careful when selecting power supplies. Microsoft learned the hard way with the original Xbox that was responsible for some house fires. So many companies use the bottom of the barrel components to squeeze the extra buck out. I'm not accusing SageTV of doing that ... though I can't believe the functionality I get out of my HD 100 for the price.

Hopefully the problem is consistent, meaning that have a predictable defect that doesn't result in a house fire. I've had inexpensive PSUs in computers have very large capacitors explode. It's like a very small bomb going off inside of the computer and instant power down followed by the stench of melting plastic and other chemicals.

Consequently, soldering a capacitor into a board like that is a relatively easy thing to do even for folks who have never used a soldering iron. The parts your soldering are large enough that you shouldn't require a positionable magnifying glass (though that helps immensely).

A few points worth mentioning:
1) Don't use one of those "cool heat" soldering irons.
2) If you don't already own a soldering iron, buy one with adjustable wattage. If your iron has heat settings, use the lowest heat required to melt your solder (low diameter solder can make this better).
3) Watch the polarity! If you do it backward you could end up with a fireworks show. If you decide to power it up without the top on "the first time" do so while wearing safety glasses. Though they are small capacitors, I've had a small capacitor explode and leave a solid dent in a steel case.
4) Consider investing in no clean rosin flux *type RA*. Use as directed, it makes getting the solder to the soldering point much easier.

Re: Looking For Reader Feedback on GeekTonic - Open Mic Day

matthew_dippel — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 19:44:25 -0000

Agreed on the sidebar content. I don't use tag clouds, recent comments, categories, featured stories or the like. I'm not saying I'm an average blog reader, so focusing on your stats is the way to go.
I'm guessing that the geektonic store is something that provides a commission or affiliate fee to you ... Focusing on a few good products in the HTPC market and making those other elements vanish might drive some more sales while providing your readers with links to quality products related to HTPCs.

Re: Looking For Reader Feedback on GeekTonic - Open Mic Day

matthew_dippel — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 19:24:06 -0000

You run a great site, Dave.

Re: Looking For Reader Feedback on GeekTonic - Open Mic Day

matthew_dippel — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 19:18:33 -0000

1) When someone mentions their interest in HTPCs, DVRs and the like, I point them here because of your fantastic and insighful commentary and reviews. I love your blog and visit it regularly.
2) You provide substance, keep up the awesome work ... don't worry about frequency.
3) I rarely listen to podcasts due to time, so I can't comment on this one.
4) I'm not good with logos and I find people that are good at creating logos to be the kind of folks I don't relate with very well. Looking over the logo there, using my completely unqualified opinion, I'd match the "G" that's in the flat panel display with the lower case "g" that's in geek tonic wording to keep it consistent. I don't do logos but I do UI, so that's my sense: consistency makes a user interface simple and elegant. I don't know if that same sort of thing applies to logos so I'll leave it to your designer.
5) Engadget. You reviewed something related to SageTV. I also was reminded of your site several times by your participation on the SageTV forums.
6) "Keep up the wonderful work, I really enjoy reading your site" If that hasn't been repeated a thousand times, consider it repeated by me, a thousand times.
EDIT:
I did think of something: http://en.wikipedia.org/wik... ... Currently your blog displays the default "Blogger" icon as the icon next to your URL in the browser. My silly blog on blogspot has the same icon, and I don't pretend to run anything even remotely useful to anyone but myself. :o)
It'd be a good idea to change this to something else. If you decide you want to use the logo, a small version of the lime slice would fit rather well.
SECOND EDIT:
Disregard the last one ... I must have had it cached, because I'm seeing the favicon now. Doh!

Re: The SageTV HD Theater Extender/Player Giveaway

matthew_dippel — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 09:11:22 -0000

In this post right here?

Re: Netflix Watch Now Movies Worth Watching - Episode 4

matthew_dippel — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 08:36:56 -0000

Tango & Cash! Haha, that was one of my favorites from the 80s genre of "lets try the Beverly Hills cop idea without Beverly Hills or Eddie Murphy".

Re: Guess what? Automated news doesn't quite work. - Techmeme News

matthew_dippel — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:48:47 -0000

One of the things I've liked about your sites is the fact that they're *not* perfect. Algorithms can't be taught political correctness or compassion as your Anna Nicole grouping demonstrates. But when Techmeme "gets it wrong" with technology stories, it actually allows a reader, very quickly, to see the evolution of a particular topic. I found it great for reading about the recent Yahoo!/Microsoft developments because the chaos on the page mirrored reality. One story talked about everything breaking down while the one just below it talked about how angry Flickr users were, while the one below that talked about Jerry Yang asking for more money while further down a story indicated that things were moving along and the deal would probably close. The resulting contradictions actually told a story of the giant mess that ended up being the outcome. I don't think any other site truly captured that situation like Techmeme's algorithm did.

All of that aside, I love the site. It's a model of efficiency. In one minute I can see what the latest trend or outbreak in my industry is. I visit Techmeme a few times a day and it's replaced most of the noisy blog aggregation sites. I can see how a human touch could make things a little cleaner, but keep the edits very light ... don't discount the story that is told by "related chaos".

Re: Deals of the Day: Antec Twelve Hundred Case $140 and Linksys Extenders $99

matthew_dippel — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 20:00:06 -0000

The 1200 case looked incredible. I have several working hard drives in a plastic bin. around in the 200GB size (they get very little on eBay). My current NAS case is full, due to recent sales on 500GB drives.

I saw this case at Microcenter (retail) but for $200. At about $99, I'll bite, but I'm guessing that won't happen until someone is selling it used. I appreciate the use of the larger fans ... more airflow with less noise. This case screams "headless NAS on Linux", for me.

Re: http://www.geektonic.com/2008/09/placeshifting-for-beyondtv-has-arrived.html

matthew_dippel — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 17:09:52 -0000

This is a fantastic feature for BeyondTV and it's nice to see a community developed component make such an impact.

It also looks like BTV's Web Admin is using a set of ports that can be sent through a Secure Shell (SSH) session rather than having to open them through port forwarding directly at the firewall. I've done the SSH "port redirection" process with SageTV's "PlaceShifter" product and it's worked very well (despite the decryption overhead and limited outbound bandwidth). It was fun on my last business trip showing people that I could access my entire media library from my laptop, and could do so securely.

I have to say that I really like the Silverlight approach here. Based on what you've written it sounds as though simply having a BeyondTV license is enough to enable this functionality.

Re: Time for a New Media Server PC

matthew_dippel — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 08:24:16 -0000

Nice setup. I recently had similar problems. Two drives went dead, then the replacements started acting up (with one of them actually failing almost immediately).

Before I figured out what was going on, my motherboard went south and the PC wouldn't boot. After opening the case, I noticed a small burn mark and pieces of a capacitor sitting in the case. It was near the CPU, so I replaced the board and CPU (it was a good excuse to go from a lower end processor to a Athlon X2 5000+, which was a good improvement over what I had, and very inexpensive at the time). I received my third replacement drive at this point and fired it up. It ran fine for a few hours, but once SageTV started recording a few shows while transcoding, the box blue screened with a message usually reserved for bad memory.

It was at this point that I opted to test my PSU (Power Supply) with an older PSU tester that I had lying around. Everything worked great, but my PSU tester wasn't capable of simulating load, it just tested the voltages and I had to manually test a few other leads because my tester didn't have a place for them. I figured I'd already blown enough money, I might as well replace the last piece (I knew it wasn't my Silverstone case...the only problem that could have been there would be an accidental short and I had reseated everything carefully), so I went out and picked up an 80 Plus PSU recommended by one of the larger reviewing sites (escapes me at the moment). The problems vanished, and my PC was quite a bit quieter.

That's the difficulty with troubleshooting HTPCs. If I had two drives simultaneously die on my home workstation, I'd automatically look at the PSU, but on a server or an HTPC, that's not unusual at all since Servers and my HTPC will be working the drives equally in a RAID configuration. Because I didn't think to check the PSU then, I lost my motherboard and CPU (this is where I really should have connected the dots). Inexpensive Power Supplies start to flake when they are under constant load and I had forgotten that this was the original PSU from three upgrades ago.

Oh well, like you, I'm not complaining. "I now have a very powerful HTPC", and I'm quite pleased! I think I've been on this configuration for about a year now and it's still humming away.

Re: Snapstream's Rakesh Agrawal Interviewed by Mike McGuff

matthew_dippel — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 17:54:24 -0000

"I worry about hackers and stuff"

@queonda:
I'm with you there. The web server runs, by default, using authentication that's sent in the clear. That's easy to capture. I noticed some methods for configuring it to work with SSL encryption, but even then I don't trust that the underlying software has gone through enough secure code review to make it impervious to hackers and I prefer to not have to run firewall or antivirus software on my HTPC due to the performance hit it takes (I have other measures employed to protect it).

So ... I found a way around all of those problems:
I installed an SSH server on my Linux NAS (same can be done on Windows, but I have a Linux NAS so that's what I chose to use).
Here are the benefits:
1) PuTTY is all that's required to attach and securely tunnel into your home network. You can forward local ports on the machine you're using so that they map to ports on hosts within your home network. All of the mapped ports tunnel through your SSH server. Putty will run as a stand alone executable from anywhere you can write data. If a machine is locked down to only allow a web connection, you're stuck, but if you can so much as read an executable off of a thumb drive or write/execute an executable to a My Documents folder (typical scenerio for work PCs), you can connect.
2) You get a fully encrypted secure tunnel using software that is regularly tested for vulnerabilities and very regularly patched. SSH is secure if it's configured properly and it's not too difficult to get it right (I'd say ... it's about less difficult than getting SageTV+MC working properly the first time). You can also run the SSH server on any port you want (hint: pick a port that isn't normally blocked by firewalls, and not port 80 or 443).
3) You can tunnel your SageTV Placeshifter traffic through it (and it works without any performance hit that I've seen), so you can close up those ports as well.
4) SSH doesn't tunnel your *whole* connection like VPN does. Thus it doesn't prevent you from selectively using local resources and your "home network" resources at the same time.

I define nothing but the SSH port as forwarded on my home router/firewall (mostly, not completely true, but bear with me). I receive no attacks because I'm running on an obscure port that doesn't normally carry ssh traffic (and I have some countermeasures in place that help). When I'm remote, I can access practically everything on my home network through my SSH server, and that's the only way I operate when I'm on an untrusted network (coffee shop WiFi, etc).

I, too, liked Snapstream.net, but I didn't like its inflexibility -- at least at the time I stopped using it -- which was either make everything I select for recording "top priority" or "bottom priority". It didn't offer a way to fully manage my recordings. I found that annoying. Having the full web interface available is a massive plus, and even in the BTV days, I tunneled the full interface for the same reasons.

Re: Snapstream's Rakesh Agrawal Interviewed by Mike McGuff

matthew_dippel — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 17:21:50 -0000

I have to agree with you on this one . . .

I purchased Beyond TV, Beyond TV Link, Beyond Media and the Snapstream Firefly and Firefly Mini remote. I used their solution exclusively for a very long time (I actually started with Snapstream PVS if any of you remember that program). I still think Beyond TV is one of the easiest HTPC applications to get working "out of the box". (Beyond Media, unfortunately, wasn't worth the expense).

It seemed at some point that they took a long break from developing their core software. I had feature requests in for MKV support, among other things. Ultimately, this year I switched to SageTV and got it working exactly as I wanted after a month or so of fussing. SageTV+SageMC is a technologically better product, though there are still some areas where I find BeyondTV excels (ShowSqueeze works better and can be scheduled to run off hours ... I still haven't found a way to make this happen in SageMC).

From a purely business perspective, Snapstream has the right idea focusing on Enterprise customers. It's easier to support a handful of high-paying Enterprise folks on specific hardware than it is to support thousands of hobbyists on whatever they managed to piece together. In the end, they'll have to put some of that money back into the software and I'll bet there will be plenty of cross over in where features benefit both the enterprise customer and the hobbyist.

But just based on how Beyond Media was essentially abandoned (from a development standpoint it's 1.1.2), I'd expect that future capital is going to be aimed at Enterprise first, and hobbyist second.

Re: Open Mic - Give Me Your Requests, Ideas, Questions, Comment Recommendations

matthew_dippel — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:03:08 -0000

Brent,

I love your blog. I credit your review of the SageTV HD Media Extender as the reason I purchased it. It answered several questions I had and I was not disappointed with the result (I ended up writing my own review after receiving it . . . fantastic product)

Stick with what you have been doing. You clearly understand the high-end HTPC user. There are plenty of blogs that cover gadgets/consumer electronics in more general terms (Engadget/HD/Mobile, CrunchGear, Gizmodo, and on and on and on). Yours stands out because of the thorough posts on a narrow subject matter.

I'd like to know more about your HTPC setup, how you switch between the various softwares for doing your reviews, how you manage your library, hardware recommendations and anything related to this topic and its peripheral technologies.

... And if you can find a way to make your blog scale to the width, my widescreen display would feel a little more useful :o).

Keep up the great work: You have a world-class blog here.
..
Matt