Holy Crud!
It’s June and been a crazy busy month at that. Now that summer is here every weekend has been planned and full of events. I purchased a new MacBook Pro the ones they announced last Monday. It’s a screaming 2.8ghz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM and all kinds of awesomeness. iPhone OS 3.0 comes out on Wednesday which will be all kinds of awesome because I will finally be able to Copy and Paste.
I picked up a Flip Ultra HD video camera so that I can record all kinds of awesome videos in HD. You can check out my adventure the the grocery store here.
http://gallery.me.com/tristan.pipo#100087
But other then doing the life thing. Started going back to the gym. Nice to get back in the groove after a few years of vacation from it. I haven’t lost that much strength and the belly is slowly going away.
But next week I am on vacation and I won’t have any cell phone or internet access so hopefully the world doesn’t blow up while I am gone. It will be odd turning on that vacation auto responder I haven’t used that ever since I got gMail back in 2004.
Well hope to here from everyone soon drop me a line.
Comcast and Tivo
Hey Everyone!
So I thought I would give a quick update on what is going on around the Tristan circle of life. Last week I ordered a Tivo. This thing has been a pain in the ass. It took a week to get here. But there have been 2 major causes of frustration.
1. The Cable Card Experience.
So in order for the TivoHD to work you need to get a CableCard from the Cable Company. In the Seattle area we have Comcast. Usually for most of my issues I either hop on the Comcast Chat or get on Twitter and send a note to @ComcastCares. So my first try was with the Chat. I got one guy saying that I could just drive to the local Comcast Office and pickup the cable card. Slide it into the Tivo and drive home and call Comcast. Sounds good to me.
Some time passes…..
Tivo is actually coming now so I hop on Comcast Chat again and get a new person they tell me I need to schedule a tech to come out and install the card for a fee of $25. Previous guy told me I could do it myself.
The process of installing a cable card is basically moving one flap down and sliding in a PCMCIA card into the device. Didn’t seem $25 worthy to me. But I do recall charging people at Best Buy $160 for Hard Drive and OS Install.
Now that I had a conflicting argument from two different people. I hopped on twitter and sent a note to @ComcastCares I got the following reply.
So I have two people saying the same thing. So I decide to shoot an e-mail off to Comcast Cares. we_can_help@comcast.com I get a prompt reply from a Detreon Roberts. He says they need to schedule a tech to come out. So I accept that answer for the time being.
So I get home that night and make a phone call to Comcast. I get to speak to an incredibly seductive sounding woman named Jen or Jenn. I didn’t ask for the spelling but I wanted info about my Cable Card. She said that I can just go down to the Comcast Office and pick it up. I tell her about all of my experiences thus far. She says “They don’t know what they are talking about. I setup a CableCard for a guy today took 3 mins over the phone” So I e-mailed Detreon back and he says. “You should really get an installer out” So on Saturday the girlfriend of awesomeness decided to partake on the adventure of the Comcast store and we got the CableCard. Came home and installed it and it took about 3 minutes and we were golden.
So I guess I would like to thank the first Chat Person and Jen from Comcast in Washington for being the most helpful. Everyone else needs to think about what they are doing.
2. Upgrading the Hard Drive in the Tivo.
So this was a fun process that I did when the girlfriend was out tending to her late kitty cat Indy. So I was home alone which was probably a good thing because I was incredibly frustrated by a few sources. So I was cranky and just wasn’t a pleasant person.
So the scenario is that the Tivo HD comes with a 160GB HDD which gives you about 20hrs of HD recording. This was not enough for me so I bought a 1TB external eSATA drive hoping I could just plug it in and be good to go. This was not the case as Tivo doesn’t like this idea so I had to hack the box to get it working. So I take the TIVO apart and pull the hard drive. I come to find out that it would just be easier to install the external drive into the TIVO. So I have to take apart this external drive which I didn’t want to do but kinda have to.
At this point I haven’t even powered up the Tivo. So I take apart the external drive and then go to my Computer. I have this Pentium 4 3.6ghz machine I use to just screw around with when I am not using my Mac’s. Luckily I had this thing around otherwise I would have been screwed. So I open up the computer and need to free 2 SATA ports. Currently I have all 4 being used so I boot up the machine and find the HDD that I am not using and power it back off and unplug the two drives. Come to find out that I had these in a RAID 0 configuration so the computer won’t boot. So decide to say screw it all I can just reinstall Windows 7 Beta and just use one drive and setup the other drives later.
So I had to install Windows 7 again to just do what I needed to do. After that process completes I go download the TIVO hacking software called WinMFS.
I then shutoff the computer hookup the 160GB tivo drive and the 1TB HDD. Boot up the machine and followed the instructions located here.
http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/04/17/how-to-upgrade-your-tivo-hd-with-winmfs/
I am always baffled when people ask me questions on how to do things with their computer. Since I can find every answer by googling. See here is how you can do it to.
So I followed that process and swapped out the 160GB HDD with the 1TB and the unit would power on and then crash. So I said WTF! I spent over an hour reimaging my PC with Windows 7 and the process didn’t work. So I swapped the 160GB drive back in and powered it on. This worked great. So I went through the setup process and then took the whole thing apart again to reimage the 1TB HDD with the above instructions. This process worked but took a great deal longer I was getting a bit more positive messages.
As a note if you are going to use WinMFS with Windows 7. Be sure you click “Run as Administrator” or this whole process will never work. So now with all of that completed I have 141hrs of HD recording and something like 1500 hrs of Standard Def recording.
So I got home at 8pm last Thursday and I didn’t finish with the Tivo Hacking until 1:30am. I was rather cranky by the end of the experience. The girlfriend doesn’t even appreciate the Tivo yet. Hopefully she will and I will get some good appreciatin back.
So that has been my Tivo experience. I must say after all of that work I am now an expert in the process of expanding the storage of the Series 3 Tivo’s.
I am sure there are more important things in the world to focus on. Anyone have any ideas?
500 Internal Server Errors
Update: Looks like the changes that I was recommended to do didn’t resolve the issue. We shall see what GoDaddy support can do.
Well looks like the fun doesn’t stop around here. I have been getting reports of users getting “500 Internal Server Errors” this seemed to be happening for Firefox, IE, Safari. I did some googling and found out that the error is an issue with the hosting provider I use running out of memory allocated to PHP which is running Wordpress. I have made the changes that the other sites have recommended and next time that the services are restarted for this server that should resolve the issue. So hopefully the GoDaddy Support team gets an easy close for the support ticket I opened.
Tristan Chimes In! With Ringtones! And Geekness!
So I got an e-mail yesterday from my stalker. Aka StalkerDave asking what ringtone I had on my phone. Well it’s the ringtone from the best TV show of all time. Arrested Development it’s the theme Gob uses in his magic show. I still need to grab the DVD and get his chicken sound for when I get a text message but all in good time.
I must say Arrested Development was introduced to me by my girlfriend when she got the DVD’s from the library. I got to watch 4 episodes or so before it ended up having to go back. I wanted to see more so I could have waited for her to get the DVD’s again but I didn’t have time for rational solutions. So I did some research and found that I could get each season for $20. I didn’t like this idea it just wasn’t geeky enough. So I found that you could hack an AppleTV with Boxee and watch Arrested Development via Hulu. I had been wanting an AppleTV for a while now so I decided to go that route since it was geeky and seemed cooler at the time.
Instead of spending $60 and getting DVD’s and being happy I decided to spend $300 on an AppleTV. Got a USB thumbdrive I had around the apartment and loaded the AppleTV Patchstick on there and installed Boxee and I could have Hulu on my TV. It has been shown that the AppleTV has been a great investment since it plays all my media now. I used to have this task delegated to the Playstation 3. But it wouldn’t play my DRM stuff from iTunes now the AppleTV does it all and I am happy. Plus the HD rentals on AppleTV make it worth my while.
But the moral of the story was I got to watch Arrested Development and every other TV show or internet video I wanted on the magic AppleTV box.
Which inspired my ringtone.
Link is in iPhone format so you will need iTunes to play it.
iPhone
Just got the wordpress app for my iPhone thought I would try to write a blog post. This seems better for short form but it works. Hope life is treating everyone well miss hearing from everyone. Trying to update twitted more and keep contact by emailing people now that I am a proper mobile device. Keep in touch.
Hello MySpacers
Well I was getting tired of people who still seem to enjoy the hell of myspace. So I found a solution for my blog that will automatically update my myspace blog letting people know I updated my real blog. So you are reading this now as a test that this new system works.
I hope all is well with the myspace world.
Flash Player Has Failed for the Last Time Emperor
So I have had this problem that has been bugging the crap out of me. For some reason I went to a website that wanted a newer version of flash player so I installed it and ever since then anything flash has not worked on the powerbook. So I have tried the Uninstaller and the Installer from Adobe’s website to solve this issue since that is all that their help had to offer. But the plugin would never show up in the list of plugins in Safari or Firefox. It didn’t work in Opera either but my experience with that software is rather limited.
So I searched Google and Forums and nobody was really offering any feedback that was anything that I hadn’t already tried. So last night I thought I would power through this problem because I had some free time and there were some e-mails with youtube video links. For a temporary fix I was taking the youtube links and pasting them into vixy.net and creating a quicktime file to download. Which was rather time consuming but hey sometimes you just need a laugh.
So I wanted to see where the plugins were installed on the Mac. So I found out they had a filename that went like this.
<name>.plugin
So I used spotlight to run a search for that plugin file name and found they were located under the following directory tree
/Library/Internet Plug-Ins
And I found a few flash player files so I deleted those. Since it is in a rather scary directory I had to type in the admin password for the device. That is one thing I love about Mac’s it won’t let you fuck it up unless you are really trying to on purpose.
So I deleted those and then tried to install flash player again. It was throwing me an error that I don’t have enough permission to do so. So I tried to run the installer from the command line using sudo which wasn’t really getting me anywhere.
So I figured that I needed some more permission so I loaded up Quicksilver and used it to launch NetInfo Utility. Went looking for users and found my username. I was assigned a UID and GID (User and Group ID) of 501. So I changed it with this utility to 0 which is the root user UID.
Doing a little research I found out a simple command in terminal could have fixed my issue for changing UID as well
sudo niutil -createprop . /users/userName uid XXX
This does create one issue with changing file owners but I didn’t think about that at the time. So after the change was made I logged out and then logged back in. Installed flash. Launching the NetInfo Utility and changed my UID and GID to 501 again and then logged out and back in again.
After I log back in I find that all of my desktop settings have changed so that took a little brain time to figure out how to change how everything was displayed but that was quickly resolved and youtube is working again. Which prompted a twitter update.
I know this is rather technical and most people will just blow this off but I thought I would share my experience in case a future google search user runs into the same problem I had where flash player just stops working.
So nice being able to see that Kitty Kat Finally Dance
Eyeball Inspection with Other Things
Hey Everyone! Comments are down was wondering how everyone has been. Hope everyone had a good weekend. Lets see what did I do. Oh I recall Friday had a few beers on Friday and then went home and went to my friend Nick’s house. It was also Jason’s Birthday since my comment didn’t post to your myspace here is my thoughts on the matter.
But watched the Departed again. I really love that film. I had to go see it in the theater in the solo fashion. But Nick’s mom was watching it with us. I must say that she doesn’t handle swearing or violence in films that well. I don’t really understand that fact it’s never really been a bother to me. Then we kicked back and watched some Red Dwarf and hung out.
I called Ollie on Friday night and I figured the best way to settle the issue was to be the bigger person and here is the summary of my voicemail. “A lot of bullshit seemed to happen. I don’t see us ever in agreement about this issue. I am going to let the past be the past and be an adult and move forward. Let Bigons be Bigons we have a long history and I hope we both can accept that and move along.” Didn’t get a call back but he went to Jason’s Dinner on Saturday night and all was good again.
But Saturday morning I had to get up and go to the Eye Doctor. I hadn’t been in 3 years and my glasses are in horrible condition. One nose piece is missing. The other doesn’t have the soft padding so it tears up the right side of my nose. They are all bent to hell and don’t fit at all. So I went to the Eye Doctor and my eyes are a little worse. But nothing major but time for new lenses anyways. I picked out a nice pair of the FLEXON frames they are cool as hell you can bend them as you wish and they weigh nothing and I got the scratch coating and the glare coating. Then I had to go back in and the doctor put this yellow goop in my eyes that made me have like lazy eyes. She did some thing looking into them. It would seem that there is something wrong with my right eye that she wasn’t really clear on. She wanted to check it when my glasses arrived to see if it was just some odd thing.
To be honest I have been a little worried about it. Usually I am not one to worry but I have been pondering over the past few days what it would be like not being able to see. But just a thought I had been pondering.
Me and the KGB Mafia Man decided to part ways because of our beliefs. Which I am not really clear on but life takes it’s own paths and might as well enjoy the journey. Not sure what I am going to do with fromseattlewithlove.com
But Saturday went to get some Pho with Jason and we kinda just putzed around all day. Ran into Hans and Daniel at Chungs and me and Hans talked about Windows Vista and probably made Danile and Jason want to rip their skulls out and beat us to death with them. But that didn’t happen.
I think I have found the phone I am going to be using for the next 2 years. The Motorola Q. Craig has one and they seem interesting. T-Mobile offered me the T-Mobile Dash for $149 instead of $199.
Sunday went and hung out with The Mick and we saw Ghost Rider. That movie was just blah. I really don’t recommend it. I did find one part slightly amusing Eva Mendes.
She was wearing the same ever so cleavage revealing top in the movie. That that I was complaining it gave the movie some value. But it was always the same top but either a different color or a different jacket over it. Other then that Nicholas Cage didn’t really make the film for me. I just couldn’t find one great thing to say other then nice cleavage. So I will give this film a rating of 17 out of 348 total possible score.
But anyways it’s Monday I am not really with it yet. Need to get my brain back into thinking mode. Talk to you soon.
Pimping some iTunes
Well I have had this album on preorder for a while now. The new Tenacious D. The Pick of Destiny. I must say it’s a rather catchy tune. I just want to go around screaming “It’s a Pick of Destiny” I should record myself saying that. You get the CD Covers and a video with the whole deal the Time Fixers. Yes I make some cash if you click on it. More if you download a few songs.
And always if you need to catch up on Heroes you can grab the episodes for $1.99 a pop. Tonights episode was awesome. I always await Monday at 9pm. It’s good to finally have something that isn’t shit on TV.
Just trying to pay some bills. Pimp some stuff I like. =) Also if you haven’t picked up the king of all media players. The iPod I also got the hook up for you on that.
Alright I am done paying the bills. I make 5% of your purchases if you click the link and go buy something in iTunes. The hardware has a variable pay scale. So anyways enjoy. Happy clicking. Thanks for reading.