Category: Tech

Fe Fi Fo FiOS

I’m one of the lucky ones who has Verizon FiOS. Not only is the Internet service the best there is for American consumers, HDTV is also the best it can be, because the system delivers the signals exactly as they are received, with no re-compression. I do have one quibble, however, and that’s the HDTV DVR. It pretty much sucks. So it’s good to see that Verizon is working on improving their set top boxes, with an eye toward eliminating STB’s all together.

http://youtu.be/QogfVxtsOP8

And I want FiOS TV to carry BBC America in HD.

Xfinity by any other name is Comcast

Comcast is going door-to-door today, trying to get Verizon FiOS customers to switch to Xfinity. Ha! Fat chance. I gave the two sales guys a real earful, not that they deserved it personally, telling them how, in 2005, Comcast left me without Internet service for a month. A MONTH! The only thing that was working was e-mail, because it came from their own domain. Finally, after I’d pushed and complained almost every day, a technician called from a van, on his way to a substation, and I used traceroute to help him find the dead gateway.

Comcast offered no credit for the loss of service, so I asked for an adjustment and the request was denied. Sporatic outages continued after that, the same as they’d been previously. I got tired of resetting the cable modem, and I knew FiOS was coming to town. That was when I vowed to switch the moment FiOS was available. March, 2006, I saw the fiber optic cable being installed on the street, and I called Verizon to order service.

Since then I’ve had essentially no problems. Oh, a few times when I happened to be online at midnight the router went offline for 3-5 minutes, undoubtedly for some scheduled work, but that’s been it. As confirmed by the FCC, Verizon FiOS is not only the fastest home Internet service, it is also the only one that is perfectly consistent throughout the day.

As I told the Comcast/Xfinity reps at the door today when I refused the discount they were offering, there is NO WAY, AT ALL, I will EVER switch back to Comcast, as long as I can get FiOS in this house. Period.

P.S. By the way, my Comcast e-mail address still works. For whatever reason, it was never deleted. It’s dougpratt5 on comcast dot net. Everything sent to it is automatically forwarded to one of my dograt mailboxes.

Recovering and restoring sounds and pictures

For Thanksgiving, WBUR’s On Point with Tom Ashbrook rebroadcast a program from last year, about the discovery and restoration of the Bill Savory collection of Jazz radio broadcasts from the late 1930’s and early 40’s.

[audio:http://audio.wbur.org/storage/2010/09/onpoint_0910_2.mp3|titles=On Point: The Savory Collection]

It takes a lot of technical know-how and painstaking work to copy old 78 rpm transcription records and then clean them up digitally, without losing the vitality of the original performance. Compared to dealing with old audio recordings, handling and restoring movie film is an even more difficult and expensive undertaking. Here’s a fascinating short documentary on the Chaplin at Keystone restoration project.

http://youtu.be/voEGsQj4CPs

As wonderful as it is that computers have made it possible to salvage, reclaim, and reinvigorate these materials to an extent never before possible, I wonder about the future. There’s so much technology involved, with so many different digital formats, how will people be able to see and hear this stuff in a hundred years? Which reminds me. I have VHS home videos from a full-size camcorder that I need to transfer to the computer.

XPerienced system

It was ten years old today that Windows XP went on sale to the public. Prior to its release I’d been running XP at work for a year in beta form, and knowing it would be a winner I bought a Compaq Presario 5300 desktop computer for Carol on October 25, 2001, as an early birthday present. Three years later, it became Eric’s system when I bought Carol a Compaq Presario 2210 laptop computer. Like the desktop computer it has 512 MB memory and a 40 GB drive, except the desktop came with only 256 MB and 20 GB.

Over the years I’d purchased two Dell desktop systems, and both suffered major motherboard failures, which means I’ll never buy another Dell. Meanwhile, both of the Presarios continue to chug along. Carol is still using the laptop and has no complaints and the desktop, with a USB hard drive attached, is in the basement ripping CDs and running Logitech’s free music server software.

Logitech Squeezebox Server

Microsoft will continue supporting Windows XP through April 8, 2014. There are two Windows 7 64-bit systems in the house now, but I have never used Windows Vista at home. Having used Vista at work, I knew it was a clunker.

P.S. This is post number 2500.

Hi-Five for Hi-Fi

The death of pioneering radio producer Norman Corwin, age 101, received some attention this week, but I’d like to point out another recent death. Edgar Villchur, only seven years younger than Corwin, was a pioneer in home audio. Villchur can take some of the credit — some would say blame — for the home hi-fi craze in the 1950’s that drove many a wife crazy, if not out of the house.

Villchur started Acoustic Research in Cambridge, MA, and his sealed box design, the so-called acoustic suspension speaker, proved that low frequencies could be reproduced in a home without a gigantic cabinet like another legendary speaker had, Paul Klipsch’s Klipschorn. The trade-off was efficiency. Acoustic suspension speakers require a lot of power.

In 1957, the year before Villchur introduced the legendary AR-3 loudspeaker, Herman Horne on Hi-Fi was a 3-part parody on The Stan Freberg Show, a radio series on CBS. The entire run of the show is on archive.org, but with only so-so sound quality. I’ve assembled the Herman Horne segments, taken from the Smithsonian Historical Performances CD collection of the show, and it’s obvious that only part 3 came from the original magnetic tape.

[audio:http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Oct/HermanHorne01.mp3,http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Oct/HermanHorne02.mp3,http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Oct/HermanHorne03.mp3|titles=Stan Freberg: Herman Horne on Hi-Fi,Stan Freberg: Herman Horne on Hi-Fi,Stan Freberg: Herman Horne on Hi-Fi]

Note how Freberg changed the voice of the character, making it more comical in the second and third installments. A lot of what he made fun of about audio fanatics is still quite true today. I think the only real difference is there isn’t much of an emphasis on sound effects.

Pulling on a Poulan

I’ve had a Weed Eater gasoline leaf blower for 10 or 12 years. The spark plug won’t come out anymore and the muffler is rattling around loose under the partially melted plastic body, but last fall it still started and ran. Knowing that its days are numbered, and with the New England autumn coming on fast, I’ve been looking for a replacement. Today I bought a Poulan Pro BVM210VS, on sale at Lowes for $90.

I got it home, installed the tube, put in some 2-stroke gas, and followed the starting instructions:

  1. Set the choke lever to “start”
  2. Press gas primer bulb 6 times
  3. Pull the cord five times
  4. Click the trigger to make choke switch over to “run”
  5. Pull the cord until it starts… or the cord comes out in your hand

Huh? That last part wasn’t in the instructions. I stared at the cord in my hand, no longer a part of the leaf blower. So I poured the gas back into the can and drove back to Lowes to return the Poulan Pro. When I got home again I saw that the old Weed Eater — also a Poulan product, by the way — still had some gas in it, and the thing started right up.