What's Wrong With My Cable?

In anticipation of the transition from analog to digital TV, I added a standard cable box in one room and upgraded to HD the family room’s.
Long ago, we would not be needing cable to provide us a daily fare of infotainment (information-entertainment) from boob tube (a mocking reference to old TV sets prior to the flat screens that we have now); just plain antenna positioned on the roof top or wherever so the pronged aluminum contraptions can grasp signal of frequency modulated broadcasts from local TV stations.
Anyway, the upgrade went well for sometime until last Friday evening the HD receiver just won’t receive the remote signal. On Saturday, I dialed the cable’s 1-800 number- a labyrinth of machine-recorded messages I have to pick a choice one at a time. Is it a ploy so that if I am short of patience would just hang the phone and let it go? But anyway, I went through all those choices and was able to talk to a live person in the company’s St. Louis office. He scheduled a dispatch for the nearest crew in our place and that should happen the next day though. So meantime, I have no TV. True enough on Sunday just after the hour of one, the cable guy came and replaced the HD box with a refurbished unit, and voila, I could watch TV again.
Technology has virtually made us dependent on the all important 1-800 number and the cable guy. Indeed!

Off with the Landline Phone

Just disconnected our landline recently, not because we are going somewhere else or we have no use for a telephone, it’s because we want to cut on some financial expense, the phone included.
Everyone in the family carries a cellphone with unlimited text messaging plan; family members and other mobile phone users with the same carrier as ours we talk /chat with for unlimited time of any day of the week and without getting over and beyond the limit of our plan. And we access Yahoo messenger as part of the plan package.
So what’s the landline for?
To receive and record calls of telemarketers calling anytime of day peddling wares, services and plans, etc. And us have to delete all the garbage messages saved at the end of the day which to our personal opinion adds task uncalled for. Now we tucked the good old landline phone in the garage in a box and go on with life, free again from answering uncalled for rings, until the telemarketers find my cell number which should not be long from now.

Messing my Desktop

Good to have my HP Pavilion media center TV PC again after a lull of more than one week. Actually I messed up the computer by merely opening the case and taking out dust within. Should have used that compressed air canister. I was prompted at opening the desktop due to the noise emanating from the inside which noticeably vanished when dust was removed. But I may have moved something, next time I booted the computer, a smoke and burnt odor came out from the inside. Then it just conked out; it would not power up.
I referred to the knowledge base of HP (using the Sony Viao PC), which routed me to an online tech-help, an operator halfway across the globe, in a call center in India. After zeroing on the cause of the malfunction (which I very well know), I ordered a new power supply. An “HP” supervisor called to finally confirm the order and assured it would be processed within three to four days, which stretched to over a week.
This afternoon, arriving home from work, I found a package by the doorstep. My new power supply!
I went to work immediately and replaced the burnt part. Such a difficult task for a non-tech person. It took me some time figuring out how to unplug and attach the right cables with the very tight architecture of the motherboard. This experience will not stop me from tinkering the desktop, though. And I saved some bucks had I called a geek team that charges an hourly rate (Note: Power supply part is that piece with a yellow sticker).

Camera, Action!

The rush to open the box and test the product before reading the accompanying brochure-instruction is always my pitfall. I did it again on the flash memory videocam, see previous discussion on this link on Plants on a Tire/ Digital Media dated July 5, 2009. That was the offshoot of my comment about figuring out how to extract the pictures without installing the Picture Motion Browser.
So I calmed myself, the adrenalin and rush to test first the capabilities of the camera suppressed, I spent some minutes reading twice the slim handbook that came with the product which completely wiped out unanswered personal queries. That was easy after all. Before the purchase I browsed extensively the Sony website for info and comparison of the same and related products just to get a better perspective.


The Sony HDR-CX100 features a max still photo resolution up to 4MP megapixels with a dimension of 2304 x 1729, already huge in size and disk usage that starts at 1.52MB per shot, I eventually set it to 1.9MP after a series of tests. This setting alone with a dimension of 2016 by 1134 consumes a minimum of 803 kbytes and up, depending on the elements and artifacts captured in the photo. With a zoom capability of 10x optical and 120x digital, it was good buy for me. In comparison, digicams now are out which starts in the 10 megapixel range. I cautioned myself for web purposes, a respectable photo is one in which you can see details without sacrificing bandwidth. Besides I'm not printing poster sized pics.
For video purposes, I set the default recording to the internal 8 gb flash memory while the stills are saved on the removable 8 gig memory stick pro duo. Capturing HD action while taking still shots at the same time was a breeze.
The unit has an Exmor CMOS sensor imaging device using Carl Zeiss® Vario- Tessar® optic lens.

Here are edited sample pics , as always I prevail myself on posting large files that are overwhelmingly huge, in terms of storage and image viewable width-length dimensions. These are shots using the auto setting taken at a distance of about 30 paces. Good enough, I had a close-up of the boughs!
Oh, yes, I did not install the Picture Motion Browser, as I was able to make a work –around in the transfer of videos and photos to my media center PC, much safer though than endangering the camera unit by connecting it to the computer.

Plants on a Tire

Some catchy title, but no, just placed the potted plants inside the tire “hole” after having watered the backyard. I was testing the photo capability of my phone sans no aid of focus and good light. Past pics here, including this one, unless stated otherwise, were taken using a Palm Centro only.
I used to have a Canon powershot S400 until it got dropped on the floor, would not record on the memory card anymore. (Can I get it repaired? Is the cost of repair worth it?) The replacement was a Canon digital Elph 750, borrowed by my daughter right now on vacation overseas. Still have to test a new unopened Nikon coolpix S220, a birthday gift (this July 28) for another daughter.
Was thinking of a "cheapest” SLR but the thought of using one, kind of intimidate me, I’m not into serious photography so I settled for a new Sony handycam HDR-CX100 capable of HD video and a 4-megapixel still photo, which is for me, quite a good trade off.
Yesterday, took some stills but currently figuring out how to transfer the images that resides on the hardware’s internal flash memory into the removable eight gig memory stick pro duo without the necessity of installing the accompanying program Picture Motion Browser into my computer. Already I have one that takes charge of converting all photos and home videos into either a slide show or home movie in somewhat professional presentation DVD format. (Will discuss this on a forthcoming blog.) Also, I don’t want to cram programs any more than is necessary into my main multi media computer.
The HD cam is a replacement of an old reliable, heavy weight, but am still using, digital 8 Sony DCR- TRV330, my second. The first was a JVC.
I have no idea on the plant specie(s)/ name, got any? Will check it out later. By the way, the one with flowers I just stick the stem my wife brought home from office one afternoon and let it grow that way up to now. Click on the picture for a larger image.

Digital media on my Palm

Few years back my sister sent thru snail mail a handy reference book which after continuous usage some pages just peeled off from the bind. At some point I would misplace the copy when needed that I took myself to task, OCR-scanned the pages and saved into a text file.
Using the digitizing program Dropbook, I was able to convert the file into a fresh ebook complete with notes and page numbering system.
The digital copy now resides on my Palm handheld. Then I added more ebooks– novels and info-reference stuff, including a Thesaurus sourced from the online store of eReader, now a division of Barnes & Noble. Later I expanded the memory capacity to accomodate more ebooks and digital home family videos and music.
Once in a while I would visit sites offering free ebooks. One of my favorite is that of Project Gutenberg that aim to digitally preserve documents, some rare and historical, for the generations to come. Project Gutenberg welcome volunteers to proofread ebooks in the process.
PG is teaming up as a contributing organization with other like-minded group in launching the 4th Annual World eBook Fair which begins July 4th and ends August 4th this year. The fair aims to provide free public access for a month to over 2 million eBooks titles led by the World Public Library Association. See you online, and by the way do drop some donations.