Well.

Where do I start?

I’ve been joking recently about having three full-time jobs. I’ve been employed by the Victorian Government in my current role for nearly seven years. This has been hugely rewarding and I have enjoyed the job immensely. It’s a job which involves shift work, overtime, on-call duties, and accounts for a large portion of my life. It also pays the bills, lets me buy clothes, food, that sort of stuff. I will refer to this as Full Time Job #1.

Also about seven years ago, I caught-up with a long-time friend who I had known since high school (let’s call him Andrew). Andrew has worked in the television production industry for many years. We’d been chatting over coffee about computers, mobile telephones and the state-of-the-fledgling internet. We marvelled at Pentium-powered desktops, the brilliance of Microsoft Office 2003, and how you could access email from your mobile telephone using a technology called GPRS, without making a phone call.

Andrew had, at the time, been speaking about technology on Melbourne radio station 3AK with Brett de Hoedt. Andrew suggested we continue our coffee-talk in front of microphones at a community radio station. I thought that sounded like fun, and on the 29th of November 2004, Tech Talk Radio was born. Tech Talk Radio is a lot of fun, but it’s very time-consuming. It’s akin to a full-time job, which for the purposes of the exercise, I shall call Full Time Job #2.

I’ve always wanted to do a lot more with Tech Talk Radio, in terms of production, interviews, sponsorship, syndication, guests and research. I think we all do as much as we possibly can at the moment, but tempered (and rightly so) with a view to maintaining our sanity, our families, our other full-time jobs, a healthy amount of fibre in our diets, and so on.

Recently, the opportunity arose to help Andrew with a small television project*.

“But,” I said, “This sounds like another full-time job. I already have a full-time job. I’ve got two, in fact.” I shall call this fledgling proposal Full Time Job #3.

So a decision needed to be made.

After much soul-searching, spousal negotiation and visits to the accountant, I’ve devised a cunning plan; just how cunning, only time will tell.

FTJ #1 has been good enough to let me take leave without pay, while keeping open my existing position. The leave period is effectively until the end of this year. I started leave at FTJ #1 yesterday, which was Friday the 27th of May. I will have to go back in for a few days here and there, but that’s part of the deal. I am effectively now on leave from FTJ #1 for seven months.

FTJ #2 will now combine with FTJ #3. I have registered a new company, and will be working until the end of the year doing full-time Tech Talk.

The mind boggles. Am I serious? Yes. Am I insane? Probably. I’ll be doing some freelance I.T. and telecommunications consulting as well, to keep the bills paid and food on the table.

It’s a nervous and exciting time. I’m in an extraordinarily fortunate position of being able to return to FTJ #1 if things don’t work out. But I’m feeling very optimistic about things, and I’m looking forward to the next seven months with copious quantities of zeal.

As one learned colleague said to me last night, “You don’t want to die wondering.”

Words of wisdom indeed. Stay tuned.

*to be continued....

social media · Tech Talk Radio · TTR

Still searching for an all-inclusive family media centre? Maybe it’s time to look at the latest offering from Microsoft.

I’ve never had a PVR in the lounge room. Everyone has their own personal preference, and for me, it makes sense to have a PC as a fundamental lounge room component, alongside the television, the DVD player, the BluRay disc player and the surround sound system. In addition to recording programmes off-air, you can use a networked PC-based media centre to view movies and listen to music on networked file shares, surf the web, and watch YouTube and Twitterfall on your big-arse television.

And sometimes, it’s just good to have “PC functionality” on a big screen in your lounge room.

An old-fashioned version of Microsft’s Windows XP operating system was the Windows XP Media Center (sic) Edition. The last version was released about 5 or 6 years ago, and was intended for the lounge room PC to consolidate your audio and video libraries, TV recordings and provide a friendly user interface with large fonts and nice colours which could be operated with a remote control, or wireless keyboard and mouse.

Unfortunately, the reality was quite different. Windows XP-MCE was the buggiest, flakiest, most God-forsaken application, and just completely failed to do anything useful whatsoever. It wouldn’t recognize many standard tuner cards (despite them being recognized and operating faultlessly in the same PC outside of XP-MCE), and it wouldn’t play many movie formats (again, despite them being playable by Windows Media Player in the same PC).

After wrangling with XP-MCE for several weeks, I gave it up as a bad joke. I used my PC media centre with the AVerTV software that was supplied with the tuner card (which worked fine ’standalone’, for recording free-to-air), and I simply used Windows Explorer to connect to network shares and play movies with Windows Media Player or VLC.

This worked well for many years.

Recently, Microsoft released Windows 7, and bundled the latest version of its media centre software with the Home Edition. Ho hum, I thought, the product probably hasn’t changed much, I’ll have a quick look but I can’t imagine using it as an all-in-one media centre.

Oohhh, but how wrong I was!

Microsoft, to its credit, has done an enormous amount of work on Win 7 MCE, compared with its XP ancestor. The user interface has been completely overhauled, and is fast, smooth and intuitive. The installation wizard recognised my tuner and set it up straight away. It seeks-out and finds audio and video media on the network, and adds files to its catalogue. It creates a new “Recorded TV” library where it stores all off-air recordings, and builds its own sensible filenames, thumbnails, and even saves a programme synopsis which it sources from the off-air TV  guide.

Hot-searching makes it very fast and simple to find pre-recorded programmes, indexed movies and other media.

The Main Menu is divided into a number of sub-menus:

• TV
• Movies
• Music
• Pictures + Videos
• Extras

TV

Recorded TV displays thumbnails of pre-recorded programmes off-air which are saved in a new “Recorded TV” library. You can see a brief synopsis of each, as well as recorded date/time, duration and other information. It’s simple, and it’s quick to launch recorded programmes.

One of the *best* features  is the recorded TV playback interface. When you move the mouse during playback, Win 7 MCE superimposes a slider control / timeline across the bottom of the display.  When you click-and-drag to jump forward or backward, Win 7 MCE displays a small thumbnail above the timeline, with a frame-grab of the programme at that point.  This makes ad-skipping an absolute breeze and sets Win 7 MCE ahead of many PVRs and internet TV services with this feature.

The Guide displays a conventional table that shows which programmes are currently being put to air by the “FreeView” stations, and which are scheduled in the near future. Simply right-click on these entries to see additional programme details, or to start recording, schedule recording, mark the series for recording (works very well), and a raft of other functions.

Live TV lets you watch television live. You can pause live TV, rewind live TV, view subtitles… all the usual features you’d expect from a modern PVR. What’s more, you can leave Live TV running while you click “back” or “menu”, and Win 7 MCE superimposes  the menu on top of the picture with an impressive “blend” effect.

Movies

The Movie Library functions search for and catalogue media on your network, as well as scheduled programmes in the FreeView Electronic Program Guide, which meet your search criteria.

For example, by selecting Movie Guide / Genres / Science Fiction – Fantasy, I can see in the next few days that “All Dogs Go To Heaven 2″ is on 7TWO, “Species” is on 7 HD Digital, and so on and so forth.  Of course as you’d expect you can right-click any of these results to record or see a brief synopsis.

Music

Win 7 MCE is great for organising your music.  Already got everything ripped to a network drive or external disk?  Simply add tracks to your Music Library by selecting Tasks / Settings / Media Libraries and selecting tracks or folders.

Search by albums, artists, genres, songs, and create your own playlists.  The album artwork is used nicely so you know what’s playing, what’s coming up and what’s available.  Microsoft even has native “visualization” effects, in case you like your TV / monitor to look like an animated tie-dye T-shirt.

The new Media Center also supports digital radio, if you have a digital radio tuner installed in the machine.

Pictures & Videos

As with music, Win 7 MCE makes it easy to manage pictures and video files on your network.  You can search for local media, as well as network file shares  and external devices.

It’s easy to add individual files to “Favorites”, and create playlists and slideshows.

By the way, all these functions operate independently. You can start listening to a music playlist for example, then click “Back” to the Main Menu, select Pictures and start a slideshow of your favourite happy-snaps.  You can show-case photos from your recent trip to Bali while you’re rocking out to Nirvana.  Or something.

Extras

There’s heaps under the hood: built-in support for BigPond Movies, media extender support for the Xbox 360, CD and DVD burning, syncing of content between Media Center and portable devices, and much, much more.

My Setup

None of this is running on the world’s fastest machine. I’m running Windows 7 Home 0n an Intel Core 2 Duo 3 GHz machine, with 2 GB of RAM and a 1 TB hard disk. This machine has a Windows Experience Index of 5.5.

I use the digital video output of my media centre’s video card, which connects directly to an HDMI port on the television. I have a lovely new Sony Bravia LCD television, and the picture simply sparkles.

Audio runs from the soundcard output of the media centre into an auxiliary input of a surround-sound audio amplifier.  The next project is to get digital audio out of the PC and into the same amplifier.

I did have a wireless card in my earlier Windows XP Media Center.  It did the job okay, but video buffering and network speeds were always a problem.  Eventually I got sick of the stop/start wireless networking and cabled a 100 Mbps port to the rear of the machine.  I’d strongly recommend cabling a network connection to your media centre instead of relying on wireless.  Trust me, you’ll notice a massive improvement in network access speeds and reliability.

The Verdict?

Windows 7 MCE is streets ahead of its predecessor, Windows XP Media Center Edition. Microsoft has done a lot of work to keep the product competitive against big names like TiVo, the Foxtel iQ, the Boxee and others.

Playing devil’s advocate for a moment, I can think of three four things where Win 7 MCE falls short of a digital PVR:

1. the proprietary Microsoft recorded TV file format, which can’t be used by other applications without first being converted to something standard;

2. the system startup time, i.e. if you see something on live TV and want to start recording straight away, when your media centre PC is turned off;

3. the mechanical noise of a physical PC in your lounge room; and

4. unwieldy wireless keyboards and mouses lying around the lounge room.

For me, these are not show-stoppers.  Windows 7 MCE is a real contender in the digital lounge room.  If you’ve got a spare PC lying around, and a VGA port or spare HDMI input on the television that needs to be put to good use, you could do a lot worse than loading Windows 7 Media Center and connecting it to your digital living room.

Unlike its predecessor, you won’t be disappointed.

digital living room · digital lounge room · Media Center · media centre · Microsoft · PVR · Windows · windows 7

Dear Microsoft,

Please don’t send ninjas to Adam Turner’s house, to abduct and torture him in some secret facility.

On Tech Talk Radio tonight I said something akin to, “Adam was in here a few weeks back, and had Windows Phone 7 and it was really cool.”

What I meant to say was, “My brain is switched off, and I’m talking on live radio, and what Adam actually had was a WinMo 6.5 device running HTC’s Sense UI.”

These are the show notes for the episode I was thinking of, which went to air on 2nd August 2010.

And this is a photo of Adam’s menagerie, taken by me on the night:

See… no Phone 7!!

Apologies to Microsoft, and to Adam. I’ve rechecked my medication, it’s all good.

As you were.  Carry on.

adam turner · awkward moments · conspiracy · Google Phone · HTC · Microsoft · Phone 7 · Tech Talk Radio · TTR · WinMo 6.5

Recently I was building a new Windows 7 Home Edition system, when I encountered a hurdle I hadn’t faced before.

I booted from the Windows 7 installation disc, and started ‘nexting’ through the install wizard. I only got a few screens in, when I hit a snag. A dialogue asked, Where do you want to install Windows? – but – no devices were listed in the table.

Strange, I thought.  This screen should list my brand-new SATA disc. I should have 1 terrabyte of disk space ready to partition, format and install Windows.

I rebooted, checked that the BIOS could see the disc (it could), and rebooted.

Needless to say, I hit the same snag. Repeatedly.

After hours of rebooting, refreshing, trying to install updated drivers, fiddling with BIOS settings and re-seating all the SATA connections inside the machine, I found this little pearler in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Symptoms: When you try to install Windows Vista, the hard disk on which you want to install Windows Vista does not appear in the Where do you want to install Windows? disk configuration window.

Yes! Yes! That’s me! Just substitute the number ‘7′ for the word ‘Vista’.

Cause: This issue occurs if the hard disk partition contains an invalid byte offset value. For example, this issue occurs if the partition has a byte offset of zero (0).

Okay. Suddenly I’m thinking that my brand-new SATA disk might not be so brand-new after all. Anyway…

Resolution:

1. Use the Windows Vista DVD to start the computer.
2. At the Windows Vista installation screen, click Next, and then click Install Now.
3. Press SHIFT+F10 to start a command prompt.
4. At the command prompt, type diskpart, and then press ENTER.
5. Type select disk number, and then press ENTER. In this command, replace numberwith the number of the hard disk that you want to modify. For example, if you want to install Windows Vista on the first available hard disk, type select disk 0, and then press ENTER.
6. Type clean, and then press ENTER. You receive the following message: “DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk.”
7. Type exit, and then press ENTER to exit the DiskPart tool.
8. Type exit, and then press ENTER to exit the command prompt.
9. Restart the computer, and then start the Windows Vista installation.

Problem solved! I got to the same screen, which this time listed the previously-missing storage device:

Of course, it’s easy when you know how.

diskpart · install windows · installation problem · windows 7

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