One of the things to be aware of with Tivo is that if you don’t watch a show it will be deleted to make room for new recordings, unless you tell Tivo not to delete the show. However, if you keep too many shows there won’t be room to record anything new.

The downside of this approach is that Tivo now becomes yet another inbox that I need to maintain – like email, voice mail or my to-do lists. I’ve often spent an evening watching shows I was only vaguely interested in, just so I can delete them to make room for something else. You can imagine the crushing anxiety this kind of stress can cause!

Like all of life’s problems, the answer is simply more technology. Or in this case, a bigger hard drive.

Tivo is made from commodity hardware, and it’s using the same general parts used on all PCs (and Macs these days for that matter). Any new hard drive will work, as long as it’s IDE. 300GB drives just hit the magic $100 price point, which is the max I’ll spend for a hard drive. The base “40 hour” Tivo ships with a 40GB hard drive so this makes for a significant upgrade.

It’s not as simple as “open case, drop in hard drive” as you need to set up the drive with the Tivo software. The best way to do this is to hook the old drive and the new drive up to your PC, boot from a special disk, and run a command line program to transfer the operating system and settings over. If you’ve spent time inside a computer case you shouldn’t have too much trouble with it, and the end result speaks for itself:

Yeah, that’s a lot of Mythbusters episodes.

For the record, here’s the drive I purchased and the software I used. You’ll also need a set of Torx bits to get into the case.

Thanks to Seafoam for cracking the case first and proving that it works.

When I heard he was in town, both Gord and I signed up immediately.

With a military-spec brush cut and horn-rimmed glasses, Cory wouldn’t look out of place managing a mainframe forty years ago. The only visual evidence of his techno-weenie background was the single ipod headphone dangling from the neck of his brown argyle sweater.

Once the packed lecture hall settled in, the ideas started fast and furious – Cory’s love of technology is palpable. He covered a tonne of ground, from the “war on abstract nouns” to identity theft via stolen fingerprints on gummy bears. To quote Gord, “it was like drinking from the firehose.” Having been well steeped in the the ideas that form the basis of the talk, neither of us heard too much that was new, but his style and manner of presentation made a potentially long seventy minute talk pass quickly.

While many of the tasty lesser ideas that were tossed out could have stood alone, the bulk of the conversation was on how we collectively are “sleepwalking into a surveillance society” as we accept more and more intrusions into our private lives.

I’d place Cory on the technology-optimist camp, but he certainly painted a bleak picture of the potential for abuse, drawing parallels between the Soviet Union Black Marketeers and college students getting busted for setting up file sharing.

Cardinal Richelieu’s famous quote was used several times:

“Give me six lines written by the most honorable person alive,
and I shall find enough in them to condemn them to the gallows.“

Clearly, the massive data trail anyone of us leaves any time we fire up a web browser, cell phone or even walk outside could provide more than enough material to hang the most pious of us. Something to think about the next time we allow our right to privacy to be further eroded by politicians using fear to sell dubious security measures.

I saw a few tape recorders and apparently the talk will be converted into a podcast and uploaded to NowPublic. Definitely worth a listen if you get the chance.

Which of course means that I have a Bacon number of 4, given my acting debut in “Leave it to Johnny.”

Warning — it’s note for the squeamish.

The goal with this project was to convert a combined utility room & bathroom into a functional and attractive space. At the same time, we wanted to ditch the bad 80s wallpaper and carpet (bathroom carpet = yuck) and design something more in step with our ninety-five year old house.

It was the largest home improvement project I’ve ever tackled, and it definitely stretched my skills (and patience) sometimes to the breaking point.

Thankfully I had a lot of help from friends and family, including my father-in-law who has forgotten more about construction than I’ll ever know, and my wife the painter, cheerleader and butt-kicker.

You can view the whole set of photos on Flickr.

Sigh.

Contrary to popular belief, a camera actually has a higher dynamic range than the human eye. At any given instant, an eye can discern a dynamic range of just over 6 stops, whereas a high end digital camera can resolve up to 11. However, as you eye moves around a scene, it quickly adjusts to the amount of light you are focussing on which effectively increases the overall dynamic range of the scene up to a max of around 20 stops.

High Dynamic Range Imaging (HDR) brings a similar effect to film, by allowing the combination of many different exposures of the same scene into one image using specialized software. The final output of the process has a unique other-worldly look to it that I find interesting.

On our last camping trip I dragged my tripod along and got a chance to try taking photographs that I could use to create such an image.

Here is one of the better results of my experiments:

Note how both the rocks and the sunset are evenly exposed.
Here is a collage of the photographs used to produce the HDR image:

To take the shots, I placed my camera on the tripod and set it to manual mode. I fixed the aperture at f/8, and began taking shots at different shutter speeds, beginning from very fast to very slow. Back home, I used Photomatix to produce the final image, but there are a number of other tools you can use such as Photoshop CS2.

You can view a great collection of HDR imagery on Flickr by browsing for the HDR tag. The Wikipidia article on HDR provides a good overview as well.

Like fisheye lenses and the “Lomo look”, HDR is a bit of a novelty technique, and too much of it can become overwhelming. That said, it’s fun to try and a good reason to dig out your tripod and figure out how those manual settings on your camera work.

• (August 3, 2006) Bridgestone Firestone Chile To Close Plant
• (July 28, 2006) Bridgestone Firestone Announces Price Increases
• (July 13, 2006) Bridgestone Firestone To Close Oklahoma City Tire Plant
• FIRESTONE TO TAKE NEW, ADDITIONAL STEPS TO RECOVER RECALLED TIRES

I think it’s time to hire a new PR person.

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