MN Maven

So over the course of the week last week and again today I’ve been seeing and reading twitter posts all over about the snow falls in Utah and other places out west. I am really getting the itch now, I am truly excited to get out on the ski’s again this winter.

Last winter I spent most of my time on the snowmobile than I did on my ski’s but I am bound and determined to get at least 20 good days of skiing in this winter. Normally I would say that is paltry as “back in the day”, read back in high school I was getting over 100+ days of skiing in between my down hill races, free skiing, and out west trips combined, however with lack of time, and responsibilities at home, and the fact that my wife doesn’t ski forces me to lessen the amount of time i have to get out on the ski’s. Hopefully when my daughter is old enough I will be able to use her as an excuse to get out skiing more.

Of the last 4 years or so I’ve been going out west with a good friend of mine, Richard, who has recently picked up the love for skiing as much as I have, and it has been a yearly occurrence for us now to head out west. The first year we went out west to Montana, which was my first time to Big Sky and absolutely loved it. Then the last 4 years since Big Sky, Richard, and the crew and myself have been going out west to Utah ever since. Utah for some reason is one of the absolute best places I have been for skiing ever. I grew up skiing Colorado and thought it couldn’t get any better, man was I wrong. The skiing in Utah is just that good. Granted, to date, I have yet to get a powder day in Utah but this winter I am hoping to break that spell. My goal is to get at lest one powder day in Utah, not sure how I will be able to pull it off but I am bound and determined to pull it off, even if I have to fly out just for the day and then fly back home the next morning, I will do it if I have to.

So there you have it. Winter is just around the corner and I can not wait. Some people are already sick and tired of my twitter posts (cough Ross) but I could care less. Winter is my passion, and any activity I can do in the winter, skiing, snowmobiling, you name it, that is what I will talk about. So until next time.

- Josh

So the other day I wondered over to Teton Gravity and watched the trailer for their new ski video Re: Session. Right then and there after watching the video I was instantly ready for winter again. Last year I didn’t get out as much as I usually do skiing. I think I got out about 6 times total, but I did get out to Utah last year where as the year before I didn’t make it out to Utah. Last winter however I did put the miles on the snowmobile. I think I averaged almost 200 – 250 miles a weekend. I put on over 2500 miles total last winter, nearly doubling the miles I put on the winter before.

Now back to Re: Session. The reason I am posting this up because it merges two of my passions in one. Snow/Skiing and HD video. Re: Session was filmed with both Film as well as with a Red One 4k (read twice high def resolution) camera. Even though there aren’t many consumer grade 4k displays out there, the fact that they used a 4k camera to record/film this ski video just boggles my mind. I can not wait to see this video and experience the picture quality that something only a 4k camera can produce.

So if you have a chance head over to TGR and watch the Re: Session trailer.

It has been a long while since I have updated my blog here. With the birth of my second daughter, and my new foray into a salt water reef tank I guess I just lost track of free time and neglected my blog. Today I was going through my RSS feeds and found an article from Steve Guttenberg on Cnet so I figured this would be as good of time as any to start posting again on my blog.

Steve’s article, Sound vs Picture: What’s a better investment? hits on a pretty good topic and one that I feel very strongly about. Over the years I’ve been known as the “HDTV Nerd” or “home theater nerd” you name it, if it has to do with hdtv, home theater, or anything along those lines I delve into it. Reading Steve’s article it goes talks about the original early adopters spending $10,000.00 on their first plasma tv, and probably have upgraded several times since then. When it comes to HDTV’s I am a late bloomer, I didn’t buy my first HDTV until 2005, and even then hdtv’s were still relatively new and still slightly on the expensive side.

Along with my first HDTV purchase I upgraded my surround sound system, new speakers and new AV Receiver/Amplifier. When I purchased my first HDTV it was $2400.00, a 42” Sony Vega rear projection LCD tv. Even in 2005 that tv was still a little expensive for me.  At the same time I purchased the tv I splurged quite a bit and picked up a new 7.1 AV receiver a Yamaha RX-V1700, and Klipch Reference Series RF-35 Floor Standing tower speakers, RC-35 Center Channel, RS-35 surround sound (two pair, one for side surrounds and one for rear surrounds to get 7 channels).  Between the AV receiver/amplifier and the new speakers I nearly spent triple what I did on the tv alone.

Coming from an audio background in car audio, as that was my passion before getting into home theater and surround sound setups, I have always been a fan of good sounding audio as well as good, deep, clean bass. I knew that I wanted a good solid foundation to build my home theater on, so the money I spent on my surround sound setup I knew was going to last me years to come as well as give me the enjoyment as well as an enveloping experience only a good speaker setup can give you.

I now however, find myself in a predicament, I have an older AV receiver, that I spent a pretty penny on 4 years ago, that is no longer up with the current times. My AV receiver doesn’t support HDMI switching, doesn’t support HDMI inputs at all, so I can not get a blu ray player and use my current AV receiver and input lossless audio via hdmi into my receiver and experience the next gen audio formats (Dolby Digital True HD and DTS Master Audio).

Now going back to audio vs. video, I currently have a Panny PT AE900-U 720p projector. After I completed my basement home theater build I sold my Sony HDTV and put the funds towards the projector and screen. I went from a 42” rear projection HDTV to a 106” front projection setup. I was more frugal when it came to my video, I didn’t want to spend the money for 1080p as it was still several thousands of dollars to get 1080p and even more money to get a 1080p projector and at the time all I was watching was over the air hd, and upscaled dvd’s with my HTPC setup. I figured I would rather get “ok” to “good looking” video quality in the HD world and get the wow factor from the shear size of the screen than get a smaller screen and 1080p.

So between video and audio, I still would rather have the audio first and foremost and then video second. Granted video is the whole reason I am down in my home theater in the first place, but I enjoy the video more when I have a good sounding surround sound setup to accompany the video, and know that it’ll be that way for years to come.

So now that Comcast has implemented the 250gig a month limit I have been trying to come up with a solution to monitor my bandwidth usage and track it from month to month. Currently I am running a Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 router with third party firmware from DD-WRT. DD-WRT has it’s own built in traffic monitoring, however with the event of a power loss, the monthly tracking is lost, so because of this I wanted to come up with a solution to utilize my WHS box that runs 24/7, is on a UPS, and has basically an unlimited HDD space so log files won’t be an issue. Because I am running DD-WRT it allows me to capture SNMP packets and use that to monitor my traffic. In the past I’ve used simple tools like SNMP Traffic Grapher (STG). I soon found out that STG wouldn’t cut it for what I needed and started looking around for something more robust and something that would save my data month to month.

One of my past jobs, working for a small Dialup, DSL, and fixed wireless ISP we were in the habit of taking advantage of free and open source tools to monitor our network. Two of the tools I used on a regular basis were NAGIOS and MRTG. Both were and probably still are great tools for what we needed to monitor the network, however the people I worked with were big into Linux and understood it inside and out. I am and windows gui, give me a gui any day of the week. So I started looking around for something that would install on windows server 2003 (IE my WHS box) and found Cacti. After digging around some more I found a .exe self installer that someone put together on the Cacti forums and from there it was simple as double clicking, following a few instructions and I was up and running with Cacti on my WHS box.

Here is the Windows stand alone installer for Cacti: http://forums.cacti.net/about14946.html

The installer does everything you need to get it up and running, all you need to do, is download it, transfer it to your WHS box, then RDP into your WHS box and double click and install. The installer finds out that you already have IIS installed and up and running on your WHS box, so its a really easy, straight forward install.

Once you have Cacti installed, you then need to enable SNMP on your router, in my case I am running the buffalo router with DD-WRT which makes it extremely easy to do. Next follow the Cacti documentation to setup cacti and traffic monitoring. Once you have that done that you are now good to go and you are now monitoring you incoming and outgoing bandwidth. I now just wish I had a way to send me a notification if I were getting close to the 250gig a month cap. Like have it alert me via email if I were to get within 90% of the 250gig cap, but for now I have at least got it monitoring my traffic and logging it, which was half the battle.

As always you can register here and comment on the blog, or follow me on Twitter.

- Josh

How i use my HTPC

As Brent I didn’t start using my HTPC for TV, but instead for movies and music. I first got into HTPC’s for DVD upscaling, and post processing. When I bought my first HDTV and realized how crappy DVD’s looked on the tv, I started looking into what it would cost to upscale and post process dvd’s to give me a near HD video quality. I looked at what it cost for higher end upscaling dvd players, which at that time (fall of 2004) weren’t highly available. The players that were around were upwards of $500 and didn’t offer that great of an improvement. There were also high end video processors but those cost more than the tv itself, so that was also out. At that time I had hooked up one of my hold PC’s to the TV and I was using that to play back downloaded tv shows and downloaded movies but I had never thought of playing back DVD’s through the pc. I then discovered AVS Forum and saw what others were doing with PC’s and how they were using direct show filters like FFDshow and using that to upscale and post process dvd’s to drastically improve the video quality of dvd playback. I was soon hooked. Some people would say, and some times still do, say that PC’s with FFdshow and other filters were as good if not better at upscaling and de-interlacing dvd’s than what you could find in higher end video processors.

While playing around with FFdshow settings, I stumbled upon people also using their PC’s as DVR’s by adding tuner cards and recording cable tv and OTA ATSC HDTV. I then found myself looking for software that would allow me to turn my HTPC into a DVR. I started using BeyondTV, then SageTV, also tried GB PVR but at the time (again fall of 2004) nothing caught my eye, nothing was easy to use, or easy to setup. I soon found out about Media Center 2005 and from then on I was hooked. I ended up buying a new pc from Dell which came with a tuner card and Media Center 2005 which got me to the point where I am today. Since that PC I have built damn near 4 more HTPC’s or upgraded hardware to the point where I am today. Once I started getting really into Media Center and tuner cards I have never looked back and have never stopped. I went from having a single ATSC and a single NTSC tuner in my first HTPC to now having 6 ATSC and 4 NTSC tuners in my main HTPC and having 2 NTSC, 2 ATSC and 2 QAM tuners in my “test” HTPC that I am currently using to test out Windows 7. Right now I just re-installed my test pc with 7068 release of Windows 7 which so far has been running great for me and is slowly looking more and more like I will definitely be upgrading to windows 7 full time on my “production” HTPC once it goes RTM.

Most of the time my wife still refuses to use Media Center full time. The only time she’ll use it, is if I am sitting down to watch tv and she is there with me, basically if I am there to man the controls, or if I am on my computer in our room and she’s watching tv at the same time she’ll ask me to set it up and start playing a tv show. My goal once I get the home automation system up and running fully is that she’ll be able to fully use media center and control everything without me being there. That is one of the main driving forces for me looking into home automation is so that she can use it without having to worry she’ll break something. However even though she refuses to use it by her self in most cases, she’ll bitch and complain if it isn’t working correctly. If she can’t consume her media when she wants that is when the HTPC takes the brunt of it and she wants it out of the house. As of lately though, other than my guide data issues, we’ve been living a trouble free life with media center and the extenders and with Windows 7 it keeps looking like it’ll only get better.

My HTPC setup in my home is a Client/Server configuration. The main HTPC which is located in my comm closet which is adjacent to my Home Theater room is where the central hub of everything “connected” in my home is located. Main cable tv feed, cable modem, router, switches, patch panel, AV distribution, you name it, it is located in the comm closet. The comm closet also serves as an AV rack for my home theater, where I located my AV receiver, my xbox 360, hd dvd player, 5 disk dvd changer, cable box, monster power center and more. The closet allows me to access the AV rack from the rear so I can easily disconnect, add or change equipment with ease and not have to worry about wires all over the place. My HTPC is the same way, I have it located in this closet as I have 10 tuner cards, so that mean I have 10 RG6 coax feeds that go into this PC. Having 10 RG6 coax feeds at times can make a real mess. But having a closet of this nature allows me to have everything connected, and hidden out of plain sight, which keeps the WAF high, and keeps the system out of reach and means that it can be up and running with no potential of some one turning it off or messing with it.

With the HTPC located in the Home Theater and directly connected to my projector, the HTPC feeds my home theater movies, music, tv (Live and Recorded), and any other media content from pictures, and other home videos. From there I use media center extenders located in my family room which consists of a 32” plasma 720p HDTV. The second media center extender is located in my bedroom where I have it connected to a 32” LCD 720p HDTV. Also in my bedroom I have my “test” HTPC in a small form factor desktop HTPC case that I use in conjunction with the media center extender to consume movies and other content I can’t get with an extender. With Windows 7 on the test pc I have it setup to load all recorded tv from my main “production” HTPC so that I can watch recorded tv on the test pc just like I would if I were using the pc if it had tuner cards doing the DVRing. With windows 7 and the advent of home groups that were added it now makes it much easier to share recorded tv from pc to pc and have it show up in the recorded tv section of media center, it just adds that additional ease of use to the whole setup.

Over all the way I use my HTPC is to tie in all my digital entertainment needs into a single, easy to use, great looking interface, and without Windows Media Center I would not be able to accomplish this the way I do now. Yes I could use other solutions like SageTV but we all know what I think of SageTV, and I will just leave it at that.

- Josh