As I continue to play with HDTV, I found I had a horrendous time getting good output from my computer running the MythTV open source PVR into my TV. DVI, the uncompressed digital standard, just wouldn't work from the video card I had to the TV. The TV has Firewire/1394, which would allow me to stream mpeg-2 to it, and that would be really great, but as yet no software supports it because few TVs have such inputs.

Here's another idea, one that reverses old thinking. The earliest VCRs did their outut on an RF modulator to channel 3, the only way to get into older TVs. Now we of course recommend non-RF methods, such as composite video, S-video or best of all component video/VGA, or in the digital realm, DVI and HDMI.

But in fact with TVs being mandated to have ATSC tuners, could it make sense to go back to RF? This gives digital decoding in the TV, in theory the highest quality if the TV has a good decoder. The cables are easy and super cheap, and carry digital video and 6 channel sound -- something even DVI doesn't do. You can run them as long as you want.

Plus, you can have tons of multiple inputs, just on different channels. Put your cable box on channel 3, your PVR on channel 4, DVD player on channel 5 and so on -- no need for the plethora of inputs and mass of cables.

(Don't get me wrong, I think a single ethernet jack would be better than any of these methods, but the TVs don't have them and they do have the tuners now.)

There is one big issue, however, which is on-screen display and comptuer generated menus. The RF sends a compressed mpeg stream. On the
surface, that's great because the boxes handling the video can be slow and
cheap -- they are just slinging bits they don't understand. But once you want
to overlay text on the video, you suddenly have to decode the stream (hard enough) and then re-encode it, which is close to impossible with today's hardware. On the other hand, it should be possible to do non-transparent overlays, where you take over a region of the screen (perhaps the bottom is easiest) and replace it with your generated text.

The ideal solution to this would be to modify the protocols to allow sending a second stream to be overlayed, with an alpha channel, on the main one. This is true no matter how you send compressed video -- RF, ethernet or firewire. However, we don't get to change the protocols, the idea here is to make use of something already out there.

Generating Mpeg from computer menu displays on the other hand is something that should be within the capabilities of today's CPUs. They can do it at smaller resolution (720x480 DVD res is fine) but more to the point unless there are fancy animations, it's static and machine generated and easy to set up for quick conversion.

There's no encryption, which might cause pressure to balk at this but it has a lot of advantages worth considering as kludges go.

In my quest over the leak/sale of the entertainment.com mailing list, I have some amusing updates.

After telling them you don't respond to a "You sold my name" complaint with a request for all of the person's personal information, I got back yet another stock message, "Here's how you can get off our mailing list." I'm getting a lot of companies who use customer service reps for E-mail who clearly never read the E-mails. Yes, I also get software that auto-responds, but amazingly we also get humans who auto-respond.

Anyway, customer service clearly not working, I found their phone number and called their legal dept. where I spoke with a Jill Silverman. She expressed concern after she got clear on what had happened, and asked me to forward her the emails I had gotten to my special address created just for them. I immediately sent them off then heard nothing.

When I inquired again, she told me she never got the E-mails. I figured out why, eventually. The E-mails, which I had put in a text file attachment, were of course spams, and triggered her company's spam filter. Of course, my mail was dropped on the floor, no diagnostic for her or me.

So I put them in a web page and sent her the URL. That should make it through!

Creationists regularly complain that schools teach evolution improperly and should also offer creation science as an alternative. They went so far as to push one school board to put stickers on biology textbooks remindng students that evolution is a theory and should be critically viewed.

Well, surprisingly, I have some agreement with them. Evolution, like Quantum Mechanics, gravity and others is indeed a theory. And in proper science all theories are subject to intense scrutiny and testing. They are required to make predictions which can turn out false, and those predictions are tested with repeatable experimentation and observation.

So now I wonder, why if we give them their way — sort of — and mandate the teaching of “creation science” in the shools. Except I mean a rigourous, scientific treatment, by non-religious teachers, where a lesson about science and bad science is taught. Other examples of bad science should also be covered.

Students should be challenged to consider the predictions, past and present, of the creation “scientists” and whether they have come true. They should learn what happens when people conclude the results in advance and try to bend the facts to fit them. It happens in all areas of science, and a good education trains you to identify when it is happening, and when you are doing it yourself. They should of course also learn the predictions of evolution and many other theories and how they have been tested and verified. They should learn about theories that had supporters but then failed their tests and thus fell from favour.

Why creation science and not every other bogus fake science? Well, studies show it is probably the one most widely believed by the public, though psychic powers, alien abductions and others also rank highly. So as the #1 it deserves a place in our curriculum, because the critical examination of bad science deserves a place.

Indeed, for a student not actually going into science, it could well be that learning to understand bad science would be the most important thing they take out of the program. They will almost assuredly never need to calculate the velocity of a spherical monkey hanging from a massless rope over a frictionless pulley. But they will encounter bad science and have to deal with it.

(I think the same is true in math for non-professionals. One of the most important things they should learn is how statistics are misused.)

So give them what they want, and then see them beg to take it back.

When I give an E-mail address to a web site, I give a different one to each site. I have many domains, including one where all addresses are forwarded to me unless I turn them off.

I recently started getting some spams for "entertainment@" the domain, which is the address I gave to use the web site of entertainment.com, which publishes those books of discount restaurant coupons. Their privacy policy states they don't give away or resell the information, so something's fishy. (And no, since I get all addresses at this domain I know spammers are not dictionary attacking it, this almost certainly leaked or was sold out of Entertainment.com)

So I file a complaint and get back a form response explaining their privacy policy because I stupidly entered the selectbox saying it was a privacy policy question. When I sent back another note, you will enjoy the response I got back...  read more »

I have been building an HDTV PVR with MythTV and the pcHDTV tuner
card. It's been a major adventure, not yet ready for prime time, but
it's lead me to have some thoughts about things you want to think about
in a PVR that particularly relate to HDTV.

Suggesting new features is of course a somewhat futile activity. In open
source, the usually and appropriate answer is "why don't you go code up
this feature and add it?" In commercial products, most people feel
even the Tivo is too complex and they are correctly loathe to add
new features that complicate the user interface. So I make a priority
note on all of these.

If you are not familiar with certain linux video issues, some of this
will sound like gibberish.  read more »