One thing I've noticed when you get a TV broadcast that has 5-channel sound, it that you get the voices on the center channel. Particularly with things like voice-overs, sportscasters etc. If you can mute the center channel, you can watch a game, for example, with no commentators.

But sometimes you do want to hear what they said, if there is something on the field you don't understand. If you have a PVR, you can rewind and turn on the center channel audio (though rarely is there a good UI to do this) but here's another idea.

If the center channel is muted, offer a button that shrinks the display and puts up the last minute or two of history of the closed captions. Of course if there are already bars on the screen use those to display this. You can read quickly (let one of the scrolling controls let you move around) and figure out what was going on, faster than you could through replaying.

You may have run into the story of a fireman charged with burning down his own home. They charged him because his Safeway Club card records showed he had purchased the type of firestarter that was used in the arson on his house.

Sounds like a good case? Problem is somebody else confessed to the arson. He's now a free man.

People often wonder why privacy advocates get up in arms about things like the Safeway database. I mean, how can it harm you, especially if you're not doing anything suspicious?

The problem is that police are attracted to the evidence that is easy to find. But when databases become more and more comprehensive, the chance that they will contain something interesting grows.

In an old-time investigation, finding receipts for the firestarters would be a major clue, and mind convict somebody. That's because searches of what you bought weren't so easy. If you bought the very tool used in the crime, and it was prominent enough that they found it, it looked bad for you.

But the cops aren't aware they are falling into one of the traps of bad science. When you have a lot of data, you can always find something that matches what you are looking for. When you find it, your intuition tells you "this is too strange to be coincidence." But in fact math tells us that it is. That's why you must never start with the conclusion and dig around in a big pool of data looking for evidence of your conclusion. Good scientists have known not to do this for years. Cops haven't.

I love hard disk video recorders because they surprised me by being much more than super-fancy VCRs. They changed the nature of the way people watched TV in ways I didn't expect.

Now I've been working with MythTV which is an open source PVR. I have a new program in development, and if any of the readers out there are using MythTV I wouldn't mind some folks to test it out before I announce it to the Myth community.

This program does many things, including two things that I think could change the nature of how TV is chosen.

The system, called TVWish is in general a wishlist program. It lets you build large lists of TV you're looking to see. If the shows you want come on anywhere on your TV schedule, even years later, it will record them.

For example, I have gathered a list of hundreds of top movies, trimmed to what I have not seen and put it in my wishlist. Now if one of those movies shows up, I will see it. Reminds one of netflix perhaps.

The two big changes however are not this, though it's handy.

First, you can import your wishlist from a web URL. That lets you trust somebody else to program what TV your box will record. I call this a "critic" function because you could name the URL of a TV critic who recommends shows. I anticpate one day the same critics who get advanced tapes of shows and write newspaper columns about tonight's TV might create a list so that your box records it.

But it can mean much more than this. A "critic" can be a friend who recommends shows to you. It can be people on the east coast telling west coasters what was good in the lineup. It can be thousands of fans watching shows and rating them on their remote control, causing people to record and not record shows that night or in reruns. It can be people amalgamating the opinions of viewers and professional critics to redirect how you hear about TV.

The second element reflects something I wrote about before in my essays on the future of TV. I now call it Abridging a TV Series

Here, you take a series that is in reruns or syndication. You get a list of the episodes, ranked in order of quality. You put this list into my program and set a quality level. And you only watch the best. You skip the turkeys. Life is too short to watch bad TV. Already many TV show fan sites have episode lists with ratings, either critical or based on fan votes. I've been using these lists to manually abridge series and it's amazingly producitve. A mediocre series turns into a shorter, excellent one.  read more »

In spite of all sorts of efforts, I remain amazed at how many cables still go in and out of my PC. My home theatre PC, which I recently wanted to take somewhere, had me unplugging power, ether, audio, digital audio/SPDIF, keyboard, mouse, cable in, video out and a serial cable providing PPP to the old Tivo. It could easily have had another video, USB devices like a printer and more.

How about 2 wires into the next generation PC, or failing that 3. Power (no way around that yet) and 10 gigabit optical fiber. Ok, so we're not quite ready to run our HDTV video display (which needs over 3 gigabits for 2MP) on the ethernet, though we could quite often get away with it for everything but gaming if the display device had an X server with video decoders in it. So let's accept the 3rd cable as the video cable.

We made a mistake going to dedicated protocol wires like usb and firewire. Hard to say it's a mistake since it's so much better than what we had before, but I think IP is better. Instead, we could have built small hub boxes that have the power and the ethernet (gigabit now), into which small peripherals that need power like keyboards, mice and such would be plugged. Of course printers and other devices that already have their own external power would just need the ethernet.

Or, to extend an idea I pushed last year in the blog, a universal DC power system would be developed where data was exchanged (on minimal 5v power) to tell the power supply what to provide before the full power came on. Then you would buy blocks with the data and more sophisticated and powerful switching supplies which could run the devices we currently have 20 bricks and wallwarts to power -- routers, scanners, phones, external drives etc.

Of course, where it made sense we could even drop the ether part and have wireless, though we still need the power of course except for the lowest power intermittent devices that can have batteries.

It's amazing how many wires snake out of my desk, and even more out the back of my audio/video shelf. Sure would be nice if it could be a lot fewer.

Dan Gilmor notes that he is concerned about a new program called the “Silicon Valley 100” in which a marketing company identified 100 influentical silicon valley folks with plans to give us stuff in the hope of generating buzz. Dan worries whether people will disclose they got the stuff for free as part of this venture.

I certainly never had any thought of keeping it secret, and having my name in Newsweek certainly wouldn’t make it easy to do so. Slashdot called it an “elitist club” but in fact, all it amounted to for me was getting an E-mail from Auren Hoffman asking if I could be put on the list and if I would mind being sent free stuff with no strings attached.

I actually at first wondered if it was a particularly clever phishing attempt. My brain is trained to be wary at notes from strangers saying, “We’ll send you lots of free suff, just give us your address.” :-) Back at the dawn of the internet, my e-mail address got put in a book called “E-mail addresses of the rich and famous.” I was flattered for about 10 seconds until I saw all the bizarre spam I ended up getting because of it.

But I couldn’t see any reason not to let them send me the stuff. My opinion certainly can’t be bought so easily, and most of the people on the list are well off enough that the same applies.

So while I was planning on disclosing the background — I am naturally skeptical and assume the people I talk to should be as well — I don’t even really have Dan’s reservations about those who don’t go out of their way to disclose this. As he says, the press get most of the stuff they review for free and it’s just assumed. (To the credit of his arguments, this is not true of Consumer Reports, which is indeed very high integrity.)

Will this program get us to talk about products we would not have gone out and bought on our own, or talked about if we did buy them? Quite possibly. I just don’t see it as so sinister, or novel. So, once I figured it wasn’t a phishing scheme, I said I would give it a whorl.

And oh yeah, I’m taking the toilet seat for a second bathroom, because I already have a different brand in my master bathroom, and think in general they’re cool. No idea about the one they’re sending yet. Now whether Hoffman will get people to blog about their hemorrhoid problems is a different question.

You see it everywhere -- signs on buildings where a light has gone out. It is often amusing where a missing letter changes the name of the company in some silly way.

They spend fortunes on these signs, but bulbs are hard to replace. So why don't they make them with a special unit that has sockets for 2 bulbs, and switches over to the backup when the first one burns out? It's not actually that much more expensive, as you are going to pay for the 2nd bulb eventually (especially incandescent) though here you pay for it earlier.

To get fancy, you want a way for it to tell somebody that a bulb went out. A small data over power chip could constantly squirt simple low-data-rate packets down the power line, "I have a bulb that went out!" Something like the x10 protocol, which can be transmitted by a chip that costs pennies.

Could use that protocol for remote turn on/off as well if you wanted. You would wait for a few bulbs to go out before sending a worker out to replace them. That worker costs more than the spare bulb anyway.

When you go out hiking and photographing, carrying a tripod can be too much, even my lovely carbon-fiber one. Besides, you want a good hiking stick on a hike anyway, you exercise more of your body. And most hiking sticks have a small tripod screw in them to use as a camera mount.

But here's a plan to make an all-out monopod/hiking stick kit to do a lot more than you can do with just the basic stick.

First, like many sticks, you want a spike end you can stick in the ground with an rubber cap you can put on it. Some monopods have tiny tripod legs that come out of the base that can be used for a light camera on level ground, which is also useful.

However, my alternate proposal takes longer to set up but would be more stable -- guy wires. In this case some retractable strong wires that can be pulled out from near the top of the stick. On the end of the wires you would find, or could attach a means to loop the wire around something (nearby tree, railing) and ratchet to pull tight the wire. You would also have a set of fine ground spikes that could be staked in soft ground and connected to the wire loop, then ratcheted tight. Finally, you cold put weights on the wires, such as rocks, your other gear or a person's foot in a pinch.

The result could be a moderately stable platform, on which you would put your ball head, or in my case panoramic head. Of course weights or thin stakes would not resist a hard shove (though being tied around railings and trees might) but it should be able to handle a fairly heavy camera, since it is the main pole which does that job.

And of course it would all collapse into something 19" long to go in your suitcase. Though you probably couldn't have the stakes in carry-on luggage.

When you get an ant infestation here in California, you need to make sure your kitchen is clean with nothing to attact them. But if you have pet food out, they will find it.

In theory, ants won't crawl over some materials like vaseline. But if you coat the bowl rim with vaseline, it will get in the pet's hair.

So I suggest a wide pet bowl with a deep and large groove near the base which you can squirt something like vaseline into. It must be wide enough that ants can't do the living bridge trick to cross it, and deep enough that pet hair won't get into the vaseline. That stuff should stay around for quite some time before needing a refill, though if you dishwash the bowl, you will lose it.

Just back from the nightmare of holiday travel, which started at 5:30am on Christmas morning and a security line snaking all the way to baggage claim. Coming back 6 days later, I braved the door to door shuttles from the airport.

I generally regret the decision to use these shuttles, which seem to average about 1 hour 30 minutes for the 35 minute drive to my home from SFO. This time, they had 10 people waiting for my town (which would normally be a dream as you would not spend all that time wanding around closer towns dropping off earlier folks) but in fact after we saw others had waited an hour for any shuttle to show up, we went to the caltrain, which takes an hour for the trip but is predictable.

The curse of these shuttles is how unpredictable they are. For some they are a quick trip but often they will drive you many times around the airport waiting for passengers, and then on an unpredictable drive. The public hates unpredictability even more than slowness, and would pay for predictability, I think.

So can computers, and some common sense, fix this? Surely you could make reservations which tie your flight number into the database so the shuttle company sees your plane arrive and knows pretty accurately when you will make the curb. (You can confirm that with a cell phone speed dial if your cell number is registered.) If lots of people did this, you could know how quickly a large enough group of people who live close together would be ready to leave.  read more »