It seems that at least one of the hard drives in our TiVo is slowly dying. Fortunately, we still have our old DirecTV receiver laying around, so we can still watch Tour de France coverage on OLN. But, being temporarily without TiVo makes me now realize how much I loved it. The pause button is an amazing thing. I caught myself watching a dumb show on Comedy Central tonight. With TiVo, I rarely watched bad TV. I generally only watched programs I had recorded in advance AND really wanted to watch.

Anyone with packrat tendencies might already be wringing their hands over this idea of having lots and lots of shows recorded, waiting to be watched. If you have a bad guilt complex, you might start feeling a lot of pressure to watch all those shows. I felt like that, too, until I read the following bit from Jeff Keegan’s Hacking TiVo where he tries to explain to friends why it’s a good thing:

“What they didn’t get was that it was always better to have a TiVo full of shows I know I like than to have nothing and have to watch whatever happens to be on at the time. An empty TiVo is a bad, bad thing. … At first we felt compelled to watch everything we’d recorded, calling it ‘TiVo debt,’ but we got past that. We watch what we want, and ignore what we find ourselves not watching.”

That quote alone was worth the price of the book for me. If I want to watch TV, I start with the most interesting items I’ve already recorded. Since the second drive gave us a total of 157 hours of recording space, we recorded lots of things that might interest us. Every now and then I would notice that something I had recorded had gone a couple weeks without getting anywhere near the top of my unofficial priority list. I would then either watch it or delete it guilt-free.

I liked this idea so much that I’ve applied it to my many piles of unread books and magazines. Rather than feeling stressed out about the large number of unread books and magazines lying around my house, I now take the more positive view that I always have lots of interesting stuff to read. If I find a magazine laying around unread for a long time while more appealing stuff is piling up, I toss out the old stuff. Unlike the TiVo recordings, each extra magazine takes up additional physical space in the house, so I need to be a bit more proactive in my magazine pruning. But, the philosophy of keeping around enough good stuff so you never have to waste time on mediocre stuff still holds.

Hmmm, I’m thinking I may be a geek. My idea of a self-help book is a book on hacking digital video recorders.

Howard Rheingold wrote recently about his troubles with his Treo 600, and his even greater troubles in trying to extract reasonable customer service out of Sprint.

Fortunately, I’ve run into few problems with my Treo, with none of them serious enough to require me to run the Sprint PCS customer service gauntlet. My only recent experience with their call center was when I was trying to change my service from my old phone to the Treo. Two of the people I spoke with were reasonably helpful, and both were very friendly. Too bad I was just calling for info. One was beyond useless. I dumped him as quickly as possible and called back in hope of not getting another mouth breather. The final person I dealt with was a bit shifty. While he told me that Sprint probably wouldn’t give me the rebate (they actually did honor it), he told me I should go ahead and submit it anyway. He did manage to get my phone programmed and working pretty quickly, though. Based on what I have and heard from others, I was extremely lucky.

I’ve seen a lot worse in the Sprint stores. While buying my last phone, I overhead a salesperson guilt trip a young kid into buying a far more expensive plan than he needed. Half of the other salespeople sat around and chatted while a line of about ten people waited for service.

If Sprint didn’t offer such a cheap all-you-can-eat data plan, I would almost certainly switch carriers.

During the Euro 2004 tournament, our DirecTiVo started having a lot of video and audio stutter problems. By last week, the shows we were recording had become almost impossible to watch. Sometimes the video would freeze for minutes at a time. The on-screen guide was also slowing to a crawl. Bringing up the screen to see what had been recorded sometimes took over thirty seconds.

This is the same Hughes HDVR2 that I upgraded two months ago with a 160 GB drive add-on kit from weaKnees. Fortunately, it’s still under warranty. They requested that we send back both drives, since once you add a second drive, the first one can’t operate without the second one there. That seems a little puzzling to me, but maybe the TiVo software or TiVo’s Linux distribution starts striping new recordings across both drives after it detects the presence of a second drive.

Hopefully, the problem is with the new drive. Otherwise, we have to pay $79 for weaKnees to deal with the original problem, plus presumably more to replace the old bad drive with a new one.

Although I did make it to the Fire Arts Festival Friday night, I ended up being at work so late that I didn’t have time to go home and get my camera. I didn’t even have time to eat dinner. So, unfortunately, all I can show off are some poor quality photos taken with the camera on my Treo.

The Pyrocussion performance was pretty cool. Bob “Bonefire” Hoffman built these devices. When the performer pulls or hits with a drumstick on a rope or wire near the bottom, a burst of compressed gas is released out of the end through a whistle. As you hear the whistle blow, the small fire that is constantly burning at the top of the tube explodes into a fireball. The performers played the devices to the accompaniment of two drummers.

The above photos really don’t do the Singularity Machine justice. Before each performance, the rocks in the center are soaked with a combustible fluid. After the fluid is ignited, two guys in aluminized high-temperature protection suits use big tubes to turn the fire into a raging vortex. I’m guessing the tubes were blowing air at high speeds, but I don’t know for sure. The end result was a twisting, tornado-like vortex of fire that extended up to fifty feet in the air. Supposedly it can reach 75 feet, but it was pretty windy Friday night. The wind added a little extra excitement to many of the performances that night.

Wally “PyroBoy” Glenn had a box of sand that was drenched in compressed gas. Flames danced on the surface of the sand. You could put on an aluminized glove and run your fingers through the fire zen garden to create cool patterns of flames. Even with the glove, my hand got really hot in just a few seconds. One downside of interacting with this artwork was that my hand smelled like gas for hours.

The Fire Arena was filled with many more art works that were consuming vast quantities of compressed gas. By 11 pm, I started to get a pretty bad headache. Having not eaten dinner certaily didn’t help.

Anybody riding BART through West Oakland Friday or Saturday night got a free peek if they were looking out the north-side windows when the train went by. If you didn’t know what was going on, it might have been pretty freaky to look out and see a 50 foot tornado of fire surrounded closely by about two hundred cheering art lovers.

Kasia Wojnarski’s Tunnel Vision was a roughly twenty foot long punched out iron tunnel with lines of compressed gas ending in steel wool. The tunnel was covered in flames. Given that the wind had made the night pretty chilly, my friend Michael and I took the opportunity to stroll through it twice. Not only was it nice and warm, it was pretty cool to walk through a tunnel of fire.

Quite a few performances occurred on a stage in the middle of the Fire arena (a formerly vacant lot / parking lot). The Kabari fire dancers were excellent. Just six months after taking a class from Belva Stone at the Crucible, they put on a great show. There were lots of other great performances, but I have to catch a 6 am flight to Dallas tomorrow morning, so I’m afraid I won’t be covering them here tonight.

The Oakland Tribune [1, 2] ran some articles on the festival, but I couldn’t find the photos online. The articles in the paper were accompanied by a couple of nice photos.

There are still two nights left for you to attend the Fire Arts Festival at the Crucible on 7th Street in Oakland.

DESCRIPTION: An incendiary and landmark exhibition of fire and light artistry at The Crucible’s industrial arts facility and a 100,000 sq ft outdoor Fire Arts Arena in West Oakland! A wealth of workshops, classes, lectures, exhibits and stimulating demonstrations culminating in one night of artist lectures and three nights of ground-breaking art and mind-blowing performances – different performances each night!

I’m planning to be there Friday night. If I can shoot some decent photos and video, I’ll post them here later. It costs $20 to get in Friday night, but you get a $5 discount if you are in costume.

The schedule for Friday night is:

MC: $teven Ra$pa
7:30pm          Gate Opens!
7:30-8:30       DJ Vordo
8:30-8:55       One People Voice Company Balinese Gamelon Orchestra
9:00-9:10       Kabari, fire performance troupe
9:10-9:15       Luna, blacklight bellydance with flaming sword and wine glasses
9:15-9:25       Capacitor, dance fusion
9:30-9:45       Infinite Kaos - "Sacrifice"
9:45-9:50       Kook Troupe - excerpt from "Elementica"
9:50-10:50      DJ Vordo
 -      Monkeyboy, poi
 -      Fire Arts Collective, fire jump rope
 -      Karisini of Pyrostura, double staff
 -      Pyrocycles, oil rig fire bicycles
 -      David Sloves, double staff
10:50-11:10     One People Voice Company Balinese Gamelon Orchestra
11:10-11:25     Copper Lantern Fire Theater
11:25-11:35     Pyrotruck - with members of Xeno
11:35-11:40     Grand Finale with soprano Marisa Lenhardt, The Fire Conclave and all fire performers and fire sculpture!
11:40-12:00     Fire sculpture continues quietly

Congratulations to all the people who have contributed articles to Wikipedia. The site just passed 300,000 on the article-o-meter. If you haven’t checked out Wikipedia, yet, you definitely should. The community system for writing encyclopedia-style articles has worked out amazingly well.

Hmmm, I just noticed that there are no articles on “incinerating toilet” or “incinerator toilet”. Some day I may have to fill that gap.

I downloaded the amusing video short Office Space Wars (found via Boing Boing) recently and I wanted to show it to my wife on her PowerBook. The video played fine under Fedora Core 1 with Xine, but the playback had lots of stutters and glitches under Windows Media Player on Mac OS X. The movie is a wmv file, as in Windows Media Video. I’ve never had a problem playing back a QuickTime movie on Windows, but Windows Media Player for OS X has been nothing but problems and poor quality, even with files in Microsoft file formats.

Since Xine was a no-show in Fink Commander and it was already getting late, I checked out VLC (sometimes known as VideoLAN Client), which I had always been happy with on Linux. VLC played Office Space Wars flawlessly.

Given my luck with the wmv file, I decided to try an AVI file that had not played properly in QuickTime Player. Windows Media Player refused to play it all, claiming it was in an illegal file format. With the free version of QuickTime Player, the audio was unlistenable and the video didn’t appear at all. I downloaded the 3ivx MPEG-4 toolkit, which got the video working in QuickTime Player, but didn’t fix the audio problem. VLC played the AVI file flawlessly.

I ended up enjoying the UT2004 demo so much, I bought the full version. Having now installed it and played through a couple of the new maps, I can confirm that UT2004 is totally worth it.

Install Tips for Linux

Video Driver – Make sure you have a fairly new, if not the newest, version of the drivers for your video card. If you are using Fedora and have an Nvidia-based card, you can install a kernel module, as opposed to having to compile your own kernel. See my previous instructions for more details. The Nvidia kernel module updates sometimes lag the kernel updates, so you may have to wait a few days or longer for it to show up at livna.org.

Installing from CD – The UT2004 Disc 1 CD includes a shell script for installing the UT2004 binaries. Do not run it from the base directory for your CD-ROM drive. Otherwise, you will not be able to unmount the disc so that you can switch to the next disc.

Follow the prompts until you are asked to mount the Unreal Tournament 2004 Disc 2 CDROM. Then, open another terminal window, su to root, and unmount the cdrom drive. Press the physical eject button on your drive to eject the disc, insert disc 2, wait for it to come up to speed, and then click yes in the dialog.

Assuming that your cdrom drive is mounted at /mnt/cdrom:

$ su
Password:

umount /mnt/cdrom

Repeat the unmount-mount process for each CD, when prompted by the install program.

After you complete the install from CD, download the most current patch for Linux. UnrealTower has good instructions for installing the patch.