Pickabar Blog

Internet feeling sluggish? Lord of the Rings: Return of the King trailer is out, which may explain it. It’s pretty freaking cool, I must say. The battles alone look like they are going to be at a scale which I’ve never seen in any movie.

Ok, even the weight of geeks everywhere pulling down the trailer (as well as the new Matrix trailer) isn’t really having an effect on worldwide bandwidth. It would make for a pretty interesting story though.

Sarah and I decided to take our current apartment two whole minutes after I first saw it. First of all, Sarah had given me the ultimatum that she was going to stop looking if I didn’t like it. That definitely helped. It wasn’t the only selling point though; I really like the hardwood floors, the decent living space and the reasonably high ceiling. The one thing we didn’t like (other than the price of course) was the scaffolding which was outside of our window.

Our real estate agent, as well as our landlord’s employees assured us that the scaffolding would be gone in a few months once the cleaning was complete. Being young(ish) and naive we didn’t ask for specifics and decided to go ahead and sign the lease. Suffice it to say, we should have asked for specifics.

Most of the time the scaffolding isn’t that bad, but it is annoying. We’ve gotten in the habit of not looking out of the window too often as the people who were responsible for cleaning the buildings facade loved to leave trash and tools right outside of our window. Occasionally I’d wake up to the workmen outside having some sort of early morning yelling and tool throwing match…at least that’s what it sounded like.

This morning they were particularly noisy. I looked out of my window and…

Jeez, is that the sidewalk? You mean it’s right ouside of my window? The remains of the scaffolding were loaded onto a truck:

and for the first time ever, I got to see what my window looks like from the street (the two top right windows):

It’s gone!

Pickabar has finally moved into the world of universal remotes with the purchase of an One For All Kameleon universal remote.

I’d been thinking about picking up a universal remote since I got the PVR as it’s remote required changing between cable mode and auxiliary mode each time I wanted to change the volume on my Onkyo receiver. On the other hand, I have a horrible time picking any type of gadget let alone one which is such a big part of my normal activities.

So, I’ve waffled.

Last week one of our friends was over and I tried to explain to her what was necessary to switch to watching a DVD instead of cable. It took five button presses involving three different remotes:

My Remote Collection

Use the TV remote (right most) to switch inputs until you get to DVD. Three clicks. Use the receiver remote (middle) to switch inputs to DVD. One Click. Use the XBox remote control (second from left) to start the movie. One click.

Ridiculous. There shouldn’t be more remotes than people on your couch.

On Saturday I woke up with the determination to head over to the local Circuit City and not leave until I’d bought one. Ok, I did one last session of web surfing just to check for reviews and suggestions. I also made the obligatory stop at Amazon to check on the vox populi. After about an hour of more waffling between the Kameleon and the Sony RMVL900, I noticed some complaints about the buttons on the Sony remote becoming unresponsive after heavy use. That problem with the Sony model and the inherent geekiness of a remote control with dynamic layout sealed the deal, so I put on my shoes and got walking.

The One For All remote set me back about $89, which was more than I’d expected to pay when I first started looking, but I’m happy with the purchase so far. I was able to get it working with most of my setup in about fifteen minutes by following the very simple instructions in the user manual. The manual included codes for my TV, VCR, receiver and cable box, and I was able to get one of the RCA DVD codes to work for my XBOX. I also turned on the Audio Lock function so that all devices would use the receivers remote commands to control volume. I didn’t make use of the Home Theater function which allows you to control several devices at once, which would be another way to make sure that the receiver volume controls are always enabled. I haven’t been able to get my CD player to work with the remote, but I wasn’t very surprised as I purchased it in High School and haven’t had the remote for it for four or five years. I’ll post a comment after I’ve fooled around with the CD player a little more.

The Kameleon is a remote with a dynamic display and no physical buttons that shows only the groups of keys which are appropriate for the current context. So, for example, the DVR related keys aren’t visible when you’re controlling the TV and not all of the options for the Cable are visible at the same time. That helps make it easier to find the key you’re looking for, but can be annoying when the key you want isn’t on screen and you have to scroll through the various groups of keys to find it. This is especially annoying when the group of keys that is hidden is replaced by dead space. That’s the case with the DVR controls for the cable box, which aren’t visible at the same time as the Menu and Guide buttons. I have no clue what their thinking is…I’m not a big believer in the feature to be honest. On a more positive note, my original fears about the lack of tactile response have proven overblown.

In order to conserve energy, the remote control’s display is turned off after two or three seconds of inactivity. The slightest vibration or movement causes the display to turn back on. This isn’t usually a problem when you’re passively watching a single program as just picking the remote up activates the display. It can get annoying when you’re trying to fast forward or rewind to just the right part of something you’re watching, as you have to get used to wiggling the remote a bit before hitting the play button. Again, I’m hoping this is something they’ll think about addressing with a firmware upgrade. A timeout value of five to ten seconds would be much closer to balancing the battery life concerns with ease of use.

Wax Off	Wax On

As I mentioned previously, one of the default Scientific Atlanta cable box codes worked for my new DVR cable box. Even the VOD and DVR functions were mostly supported, but I’ll probably have to map some of the custom buttons on the DVR remote (the triangle, square and circle buttons which are used for some of the DVR’s recorded program function) to unused buttons on the one for all. That’s not really a problem, though. What is a major problem, in fact the main problem I have with the new remote, is that the remote won’t display the PIP related buttons for a cable box. I can see the thinking behind that, but as more and more cable boxes have dual tuners this is going to have to be revised. I’m hoping that there will be a firmware upgrade at some point which will revise that as it’s a software limitation rather than a physical one.

Looking back, I seem to have focused on the negatives a lot more than the positive features of the One For All Kameleon universal remote. Don’t let the tone of this review fool you….the remote is far from perfect, but I’m delighted with the purchase as it’s really stopped the remote control kung fu it used to take to do anything with my setup. The best feature of the remote, and the one that really justifies the expenditure is macro recording. You can record macros of up to 15 keystrokes very easily. Now, switching from TV watching to DVD watching just requires pressing the M2 (M for Macro) key.

Goodbye old friends and former couchmates!

MetaFilter reports that the last US Levi’s plant is closing. Considering the bedrock of the Levi’s brand is the image of American Rebellion…oh screw it. I won’t even bother getting excited about yet another US firm moving it’s jobs off seas…at least until I make the post about the last factory of any kind in the US closing (check back in three years).

Take a gander before Monday morning or you’ll be ostracized from the geek community.

[via Gothamist]

Have you heard about the (probably temporary) Do Not Call Registry’s setback? A judge in Oklahoma has ruled that the FTC didn’t have the authority to make their ruling. Considering the overwhelming support the DNC registry has received, I don’t think it’s going out on a limb to suggestthat this judge’s ruling will be overturned faster than an ambitious congressman can call a press conference.

That said, it’s kind of sad that we need congress to step in in the first place. I’m totally in favor of the legistlation, but why can’t people vote with the only vote that matters…the almighty greenback? If enough people made the ideological choice to never buy from companies that use telemarketing or spam to get their advertising seen, business’ based on harassing people would dry up. Admittedly, these type of businesses are counting on the one in ten thousand knucklehead who is willing to spend money to “be his biggest”, just the type of person who is unlikely to adopt the aforementioned ideology, but at some point the diminishing returns would have to have an impact on a company’s marketing choices…no?

The most annoying thing about working with my WinXP machines is automatic window switching in Internet Explorer. Let’s say I’m reading an article in one IE window, while running a test in another IE window. Sometimes when a window is updated (I’m not really sure what exactly triggers it) I will get automatically switched from the active reading window to the window running my tests (and no, I’m not using JavaScript to set focus on the testing window). I was in that situation just now, and decided to close the window hosting the article after I’d finished reading it. Unfortunately, the windows switched just as I clicked on the X in the control box, so I wound up closing the window for my test instead of the one with the article. That’s five minutes down the drain…if I was tracking it, I’m sure I’d be up to close to a week of wasted productivity all time.

Who thought this was a good feature? In fact, it’s pretty damn rude IMO.

I spoke to one of my old customers over IM this morning and found out that the app I helped build for them has been a great success.

We actually built two ASP.NET apps for them which have been live for a few months now. It took about 8 months total, with an ungodly 2-3 hour (each way) commute every day. By the end of the engagement I had driven enough that I’d gone from being a neophyte driver with two hands on the wheels to an old jaded radio station changing leadfoot.

The app hadn’t gone live when I left the engagement, and I was honestly afraid that it wouldn’t every be ready for prime time. Well, I was wrong. The app went live early in the year, albeit with limited functionality.

Anyway, today I found out the app has been a great sucess and is making money for the customer. I couldn’t be happier to hear that. It may sound silly to someone who doesn’t code for a living, but I get a lot of pleasure from building applications which get used by people and which help companies make money. Increased profits mean (hopefully) more jobs.

I also love creating applications that make people’s jobs less annoying. I once wrote an excel macro that converted a two hour a week annoying task into a button click and a two minute wait. That was more rewarding than some of the enterprise applications I’ve built.

I’m really worried that I may not get to do either again for a while. Really worried.

SnippetCompiler is a new tool that allows you to test a few lines of .Net code without having to open up Visual Studio.Net and create a new project. If you’re at all like me, your hard drive is littered with projects which you created to test an assumption or evaluate the behavior of a line of code. Hard drives of the world rejoice!

I only wish I’d written it.

So, it turns out I will in fact be going to this year’s PDC.

I’m generally not big on conventions as I have a very low tolerance for slides, but this is definitely the exception. I’m expecting tons of great info on ASP.NET 2.0, which blew my mind at the big old convention in Nawleans. Chris Hollander and I were slackjawed during one presentation where a user profile was created by configuring an XML file. No coding, no database manipulation, just a configuration file. Not to mention Master Pages, or the new skinning features or…I need to calm down.

Must not think about L o n g h o r n….must not think about L o n g h o r n.

I’ve been too pressed for time to get the Alpha Whidbey bits up and running on my VPC, but I’m going to have to dedicate a few hours to it Saturday so I can be primed before I leave for LA.