Category: Tech

Composite video beats HDMI?

This will be a totally techie comment, but I’m so surprised by something I’ve got to explain it. I have a Verizon FiOS Motorola QIP6416 DVR set to 720p with an HDMI cable going to my Panasonic video projector. HDTV looks wet-your-pants fantastic. SDTV is rather disappointing, and I avoid it.

I have a FiOS Motorola DCT-700 digital/analog converter with a cheapie RCA composite video cable going into a Panasonic DMR-ES15S DVD Recorder that’s set to 480p. From there is a 12-ft component video cable going to a Kenwood THX receiver that has a 50-ft component cable going to the projector.

There is absolutely no comparison in picture quality. The bottom-of-the-line DCT-700 going through the recorder and the receiver totally blows away the video going directly from the top-of-the-line DVR over HDMI. Savvy techies would say “no way!” but I’m telling you definitely yes.

If you can read this, don’t worry

I just received the notice below from my Web hosting service. If you’re reading this, then you’re unaffected, and you don’t care. If you aren’t reading this you should be worried!

Connectivity Between Cogent (Our Bandwidth provider) and Sprint

If you are having issues connecting to your website, or any other website hosted by IPOWER, this alert will provide some information to you.

Yesterday, 30th October, 2008, a press release was put out notifying the industry that Sprint-Nextel had severed its internet connection to Cogent (the provider of bandwidth for IPOWER), resulting in the inability of Sprint-Nextel’s customers to connect to any website that gains bandwidth from Cogent.

As our datacenters utilize Cogent to provide bandwidth, unfortunately, our customers are affected.

We’ve been in contact with our provider, who says they are attempting to work with Sprint to resolve this issue.

Our Network Operations team has begun investigating a way to get around this block, to get our customers back viewing their websites. However, it is uncertain at this time, if that will be possible.

For more details on what happened, and why, the press release can be found here: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&tab=wn&ned=us&q=cogent+sprint&btnG=Search+News

We appreciate your patience while we try to resolve this. While we would love to assist you, there’s little to nothing we can do in this situation, aside from relay the message to our provider that our customers are having issues. Please remain patient, and we will provide more information when it becomes available.
– 10/31/08 at 10:11 ET

Our Confused Clock

Do you have a radio controlled clock that receives the shortwave signal from the atomic clock in Colorado? Eric has a digital model in his room, but the analog “atomic clock” in the kitchen is old enough that it doesn’t know about the change in dates between Standard and Daylight Savings time. So Sunday morning it had fallen back. I switched the time zone setting to force it ahead by one hour. Because it’s an analog clock, this is how it’s done. Looks like a time-elapse effect from an old movie
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2008/OCT/AtomicClock.flv 440 330]

Technical Note

The blog theme has been changed. It may not look it at first glance, but behind the scenes it’s not the same. Please let me know if anything doesn’t work or seems wrong to you. Thanks.

Well, that didn’t last long. It blew up. Back to the old theme.