In my quest for streamlined home entertainment, I must now pimp the MX-500 universal remote control. You certainly don't need to have your own home built DVR to get benefit out of this sucker (only downfall, its a bit big). The split between a programmable LCD with real buttons is how it should be done. Plus, you can program buttons to do multiple remote commands for different devices ... long story short, I can now press one button, it turns on my stereo and sets it to receive audio from my television and then turns on my TV. Bottom line, this is now my only remote control on the coffee table and it works well.

Buy this thing. It costs around $100.

I was griping before about my problems getting MythTV set up as as my homebrew DVR, but one by one I've cleared out my bugs and got it working. The real key to everything was finding the ivtv X driver. Once installed, things have been smooth sailing.

Right now I'm torrenting down media from the internet, transfering two phish shows from my old machine (lol, a PowerEdge server) while I watch TV and blog. I've gone fair use blue in the face.

I'll throw this out before I do any googling, but it seems to me that my Linksys wireless router doesn't like it too much when I'm on a bit torrent session. Or, at least, it all works and I'm not firewalled, but whenever I'm on one, my internet speed on my other box completely drops off. I'm only torrenting about 60K down and 40 up so that isn't much of an excuse. My guess is that the flaw comes in from the multiple people I'm sharing files with through the router to the internet.

Oh, and speaking of sharing info digitally...

And speaking of Vegas, it looks like you can't use google yet to track Southwest flights. bummer.

Today, I flew home to Cincinnati for the weekend. My dad tracked me directly on google, watching the little graph of my flight, knowing before I did that I got in 20 minutes early. Meanwhile, last night I stop by Barnes and Noble to pick up a copy of Bringing Down the House to help put me in the mood for my upcoming Vegas trip, only to spend a half hour searching for the book because I didn't know where it was. My searching finally led me to a computer marked "For Employee Use Only" and only after comandeering it, did I realize it would be in the "games" section.

Why oh why does Barnes and Noble not just put kiosks throughout their store to help their customers? I guess they're waiting for Amazon to completely eat their lunch.

As seen on BoingBoing, Fast Company has a series of interesting articles on corporate blogging (be sure to check the related stories). They go in-depth on the corporate blogging phenomenon paying particular attention to Robert Scoble's Microsoft Blog (external to Microsoft) as well as hinting at supposed internal-only blogging at IBM. Alas, no love for Dell (linux.dell.com/blog) and its internal-to-the-company yet public-facing blog. On a related cool note, guess who currently gets the google result for linux blog...

I thought I would try my hand at blog-ing from my new cell phone (Samsung i500 w/ 3g internet). It seems appropriate given the concert I went to yesterday (Moe.) offered full recordings of the show on CD just 10 minutes after it concluded, while during the concert I was simultaneously tivo-ing the football game (Ohio State) so that I could watch it straight afterward as if I were watching it live (as I had no knowledge of its outcome). The evolution of human information interaction continues.

A culture of instant gratification? Hardly. If it were, the Buckeyes would have won.

This has been reported everywhere, including slashdot, but its just that cool that I'll bother posting about it too. New smart solar windows which point their energy intake mechanism directly at the direction the sun is angled into the window. Not only does this maximize the amount of energy generated by your (what appear to be) cheap-to-manufacture windows, it also means no glare without restricting any ambiant light.

The story is here and also there are some cool pictures.

How come I can't buy these cheaply yet?

Jeremy Zawodny declares "PageRank is Dead". For the unititiated, PageRank is Google's method for determining website relavence. Jeremy writes that the days of PageRank are numbered because bloggers, among others, have learned how to game the system.

Though, I think Jeremy's got it wrong. Just because PageRank has been around a couple years and just because Google does not produce consistent results does not mean it is teatering on irrelavence. It simply means that it needs some tweaking, and I have a good feeling this is exactly what Google is currently working on. There has been a lot of chatter lately about blogging and its effects on Google, and its only natural that Google must and will adapt. Certainly there is more to Google than just the PageRank formula. I'm sure there are many different parameters and its just time to add and fiddle with them.

Jeremy and I agree that Google has a hard problem to solve, but in my estimation its just a small subset of the PageRank paradigm. I don't think it calls for something as new and revolutionary as PageRank was. Further, I just see the general sense of the blog entry as "Orlowskian"-- making a grand internet-related claim to generate traffic. And based on the responses he received, it seems most are merely preoccupied with their own modding down of their own name in Google's results. Thus, what's in a name? If PageRank gets a tweaking, is it not still to be called PageRank?

One responder to his blog definitely got it right. A google search for search engine doesn't even return Google first. Obviously, that just tells you its a work in progress.

I just got back in from Cincinnati for the weekend. As with all airtrips, this is where I read books. Mostly, this is about the only time I ever sit down and read from paper. The choice of this trip was Skunk Works, by Ben Rich, father of the stealth bomber.

The book basically recounts the history of Lockheed Martin's skunk works devision (the people that invented the term skunk works) and Ben Rich's time there from work on the U2 spy plan, the SR71 black bird and then on to his tenure running the Skunk Works and developing stealth technology. Its a really great read and is really a recounting of the cold war through the technological development side-- one of its best features being the recounting of the same event through different "other voices" which include pilots, generals, CIA gmen, etc. In fact, some of the stuff would seem like it should still be classified.

I'm not done reading it yet, but just got through an interesting section on the black-bird and how the airplane was shelved prematurely (to put sole reliance on the use of spy satellites) by then secreatary of defense Dick Cheney. It even recounts how after it was decomissioned early and some situation occurred which called for its use, Cheney again refused as he felt that once it got operational again, there would be no way to decommision again. Rich doesn't really elaborate, but it does make you wonder why such a useful plane met such an early demise. I could throw in a consipiracy theory about control of information (spying controlled by the NSA as opposed to the air force), but really that all is groundless. I guess I just don't like the guy.

A very good read though. Tom Clancy says "Dynamite--The true story of America's crown jewels." I wonder if Clancy really said that, or if it was the novelist he hires to write books under his own name.

I won't bother promoting Andrew Orlowski's rant about "googlewashing" by linking to it, but the gist of his argument is that blogging gives inordinant amount of power to bloggers in influencing the results that google returns. While his rant was dumb, he is actually onto something.

I just was looking through my web logs to see the referrers, and after doing a bit more digging, it appears my website is the second returned link when doing a google search for "jamband communities". This is because my music page uses those words and because my blog and representive linux work get interlinked throughout the net. Thus, google gives more credence to the words on my site.

If I know I shouldn't be the second result, then google should too. Oddly, this very blog entry may bump my pagerank further. Looks like google's got some perfecting to do.

Usually, I don't just lift links from mega-bloggers (slashdot, boingboing, etc) unless I've got some spin to add to it. In this case, I do so only because I've got a clever title to go with it. See more about how creationists may be exploiting Amazon so it recommends creationist books to people. Originally found on boingboing.

Interestingly, I got an email today from Austin Chase, the president of BlogTV.com. It seems, while searching daypop, they came across this entry where I mention that someone should put together a TV news program based on blogging. It appears they are pursuing just the same.

In the meantime, their website doesn't have much going on for it for now (check back in May), though it does refer people to blogchalking.com which appears to be an effort to add geographical relavence to blogs. Austin also mentioned a soon to be announced promotion that blogtv will be doing in conjunction with BlogShares and perhaps blogtv's intention to create an easy to use online blogging system for the masses. This is all well and good and I think there is much untapped potential in utilizing blogging on a grand scale, but I want my BlogTV! I wish them all the best, but until I can see my TV news utilizing blogging, they could just as well call themselves blogoverse.com. Oh wait, I own that.

Of course nothing happens overnight. You got that Mr. Orlowski?

TechTV (or some like-minded network) should create a Blog News Program. They hire some techno-anchor and use tools like Technorati or DayPop to track interesting stories and blogs related to these stories. Of course, this would apply to the geek crowd and geek news, but it could actually be a viable way for a technology related TV station to cover non-tech news-- punditry minus the talking heads. I'm going to go submit this idea to The Screen Savers.

follow up:

if it took 500 years from the point where we realized earth wasn't flat to being able to orbit our planet, does this mean in another 500 years we'll be "orbiting" our universe?

If there's one thing I learned from my high school German class teacher, its that JFK mispoke and when in Berlin, he actually exclaimed that he was a jelly doughnut. Turns out she was wrong.

Now, physicists are saying that the universe may be doughnut shaped. Can you believe people used to think the world was flat?

I've been thinking about the Columbia disaster recently and I really think its such a bad deal that we underfund NASA by so much. There is so much opportunity out there and so many people willing to fork over big $$$ that I seriously think we should change our focus to space tourism in order to get the space industry off the ground. Once we're rolling in the money, there will be plenty of resources to do whatever scientific stuff needs doing.

In the meantime, you could sell space tourism to the American people as a tax on the rich. Seriously. Only the rich could afford going up there (for now) and it would just be easy money for Uncle Sam to collect...straight from rich people's pockets. You might even be able to fund social security.

On another note, and speaking of space tech, check this story. Some Japanese scientist developed a suit which takes a picture of what is behind you and displays that picture on the front of the suit. Effectively, this makes you invisible since when a person looks at you, all they see is what is behind you. I've always wondered why this wasn't possible.