Patrick’s weblog, featuring posts dating back to 2002 on topics including technology, open source, networking, and various technical adventures.
On Thursday morning I finally managed to get through to Congressman Mike Doyle’s office on the issue of the broadcast flag. For once I was even able to speak to his technical aide on the issue. The basic gist that I got was that representative…
So how much does it cost to buy off your fair use rights? According to my analysis, somewhere around $305,740. That is the amount that the National Association of Broadcasters and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association have spent in the last two years to…
Last night I blogged about Mike Doyle’s support of the broadcast flag. I was fortunate enough to have an officemate overhear my call to Doyle’s Washington office (202-225-2135) and ask me what the broadcast flag was. I got my little chance to get on my…
The title sums it up quite nicely. Instead of making it easy for me to watch HDTV, they’re making it quite difficult. I called them last week to inquire about HDTV support on cable. I was told that I needed to get a cable box,…
Last night I was pleasantly surprised to find that my new hard disk from Outpost.com/Fry’s had already arrived, despite ordering it on Friday and only paying for ground shipping. Note to the other folks from the Burgh, Outpost ships from Columbus, thus you get your…
Priblog is fast on its way to Dogfood state. I’ve just implemented comments into the system. It’s not pretty by any stretch of the imagination, but it seems to work just fine. They’re all foaf-enabled, so you can still have all your fun by pulling…
I’ve been having some fun with MythTV as of late. I found out that Comcast now offers HDTV in my neighborhood, so I placed the call. It was going to cost me an extra $5.99 a month for HDTV, as I’d need a receiver box.…
Like many people, I’m morbidly watching the upcoming disaster in south east Texas. I decided that now would be the time to play with Google Earth to see what it can do. I’ve been pretty impressed. Here’s a snapshot of what I just did: Projected…
Last week discovered Gizmo, the neato VOIP service from SIPPhone.com. After talking to some WPLUGgers, I was inspired to install Asterisk, the open source PBX software. If I actually had a land line, this might be more useful, but without one, I was determined to…
When all the cool kids were raving about Skype, I went and signed up for an account. I haven’t used it much. I think I got maybe two calls on it, and both times I didn’t have a microphone handy to actually take the call.…