So what is this bizarre plot to the left here you ask. Some highly technical computer modeling of some fringe science? Perhaps one of those new-fangled computer thingies we know dvhart is always going on about. Maybe some nostalgic artifact from his days studying electrical engineering? Well... no. In fact it is simply the beam plots of an over the air antenna I am looking at installing in my attic. Yeah... just trying to watch TV. Turns out that there is a lot that goes into picking up a TV signal - an awful lot. I'm a week into my search for the right antenna (or antennas as the case may be - VHF-HI an UHF bands you know), and so far I've determined that despite living within 3 miles of the two transmission towers I care about, and even though those towers are within 10 degrees of each other, I appear to be dealing with skyline multipath and some other issues resulting from living in a valley and being surrounded by lots of very large trees. Oh, and the foil backed insulation in my house really doesn't like radio waves. It's been fun, but I don't know how anyone without 5 years of intense math and electrical engineering coursework behind them would dare attempt a less than trivial antenna installation. Sheesh. No wonder nearly everyone I know pays for cable! So in case you're interested in what it would take to setup OTA DTV (over the air digital television) at your house, check out the following links. Happy Hacking.

• TV Fool
• Antenna Web
• AVS Forum
• HDTV Primer (the source of the image above)

After a few weeks of disillusionment with my progress on BrainDump, John S. pumped me up with noise about casting a broad net and all that. You know, the percentage of people interested in BrainDump may be small, tiny even, but if I notify the entire planet about it, I may just get a handful of interested and talented people to participate in its development. So this weekend I spent some time and finished up the web presence of BrainDump.

I'm a hopelessly slow reader, and it continually frustrates me, and later shames me in front of my friends. I just can't read the information fast enough to keep up with the world! I blame elementary school who had me read a grand total of I think 2 books by the time I was 12 (both involving dying dogs [1]... what the hell is wrong with you people?). I've been reading some things on how to improve my reading speed while maintaining comprehension, and also looking into how technology might be able to help. A colleague pointed me to SpreedNews which turns out to be awesome, and I top out at just under 500 words per minute before I simply don't remember anything about what I read. Now if the Amazon Kindel could incorporate this technology and allow me to read anything on the Kindel with this fancy rate adjustable phrase flashing awesomeness, I'd buy two... today. Unfortunately, one of the core technologies of the Kindel is their fancy pants epaper screen, which while it is great to look at and easy on the batteries, its refresh rate wouldn't allow for 20 words per minute, let alone 500. Ah well, maybe when Devon is my age he can get me a nice ereader that solves all my problems, without killing any dogs.

1. "Old Yeller" and "Where the Red Fern Grows" - both belong on the banned books shelf at my local library.

OK, so while all my co-workers took a half-day to check their systems for each of the openssh and dns exploits earlier this year, I foolishly let it slide, thinking I had more important things to do. So while I didn't procrastinate so long as to get hacked/phished/etc. I did wait until tonight. So after a few hours research (and a couple educational jems, I've finally regenerated all my system's host keys and have deleted all my .ssh keys and regenerated them on systems where I have console access, relying on ssh agent forwarding everywhere else (thanks Josh). As for DNS, I've redirected my router to opendns which is looking to be an excellent service (thanks John). So I should be all buttoned up again...

It's a very novel concept I know, but the guys at wicd have managed to write a wifi network manager that does things like remember your WPA key (unlike some other more common NetworkManagers). I still need to see if it can do really complicated things like save a config for a hidden network (ooooooh!) and handle enterprise authentication (LEAP), but for now I am very happy to have replaced NetworkManager with something that appears to just work. Check it out: http://wicd.sourceforge.net/. Now, how 'bout it Ubuntu, can we ditch NM already - isn't two broken release cycles enough?

I've been enjoying streaming music to my Playstation 3 with the most excellent MediaTomb uPNP DNLA Media Server for a while. Tonight I managed to get MediaTomb to present the MythTV recordings in a format the PS3 could actually understand. I used the Cidero UPnP A/V Controller to debug the XML presented to the UPnP client by the server. Turns out the PS3 prefers video/mpeg over video/mp2p for MPEG2 video files - picky picky. Simply adding the following:

<map from="mpg" to="video/mpeg"/>

to the MediaTomb config.xml and removing/adding the recordings folder got my PS3 streaming video from MediaTomb. Excellent!