Chris​Hubbs​.com

We got my first computer when I was 7. My dad was writing a book, so bought a little PC with two 5.25" floppy drives and a monochrome monitor. (Ah, the good old days when you had to put the MS-DOS disk in to boot, then remove it to put in a program disk.)

Dad had a tech-savvy friend come over to show him how to run Wordstar and Datastar while I looked on over their shoulders with great interest. I apparently soaked it in pretty well, because it wasn’t long before Dad would call me in to answer his questions before calling his friend, and 30 years later I’m a “computer guy” with an engineering degree and a programming job and still actively in family tech support.

As my three daughters have gotten older (the oldest is 10), I’ve uneasily looked forward to a day when there’s some issue of tech which has me confused and one of them says “oh, Dad, it’s easy! Here, let me show you…” But I’ve always figured it would be quite a way off.

But then yesterday after some begging and pleading for a membership on some money-grubbing movie-associated game site, we settled on a different option: the full-blown version of Minecraft.

Parents these days are probably familiar with the game, at least by name. It’s a low-res graphics world-building game that has Creative and Survival modes and the ability to play solo or to join up to servers on the internet to collaborate with others. The girls have been playing a stripped-down iPad version for months, but got a few Minecraft books for Christmas and have been wishing for the full version.

So last night I bit the bullet, bought licenses so they can play concurrently, and set up a local server so they can play together w/o having to deal with the outside world. But once I showed them how to log in and start the program, I realized something: that’s all I know about it.

If they have questions about how to do something in the game, I’ve got no clue. I had to Google to figure out what the keyboard controls were for my five-year-old since the 10-year-old had the book in the basement.

They played the game for 30 minutes before dinner last night and while at the dinner table it was non-stop jabber about what they had discovered. “Hey, did you know how to do this?” “Did you know that if you do that then this will happen?” “I made it do this!” But while I loved their excitement, I’ll admit that the rest of it sounded like Greek to me. I’ve got no clue.

In many respects it feels like a new era. Here’s a computer-based thing that they know and I don’t. And I’m cool with that. Really. * deep breath *

My ten-year-old is getting into programming and if that persists, we’ll get a Raspberry Pi for her birthday and then I’ll be able to prove (at least for a little while, I hope) that I’ve still got a thing or two to teach her about technology.

But kiddo, fair warning: at this point you may as well start counting down the days until you starts getting phone calls from me. You have been warned.

I’ll confess - I did almost all my Christmas shopping via Amazon this year. Amazon is usually bang on with shipping, but they clearly get bogged down in the Christmas rush. Exhibit 1: the tracking on this package of mine from yesterday.

Delivered just before noon.

Left Amazon facility: 7.5 hours later.

But hey, if my choices are have the package get to me on time or have the website shipping info be accurate, I’ll happily accept the fact that the box was sitting on my doorstep when I got home yesterday.

Yeah, this is a nerdy post. I’m not expecting it’s of huge interest for my usual readers but might be helpful to others searching for more information on this configuration.

In my quest to use my home-built DVR to capture video that can be easily played via my Roku, I ended up purchasing a used HDHomeRun Plus (HDTC-2US). (This replaced an old original-model HDHomeRun that was still working beautifully.)

The HDHomeRun Plus has integrated hardware to do H.264 video transcoding, so if you want to stream live TV across your network you can do it at less than full HD quality, and you can also record video at lower bit rates.

Hardware Setup

This is the easy part. The HDHomeRun has three plugs on the back, and you simply plug in each of them as the QuickStart instructions show you.

The coaxial cable coming from the antenna in my attic connects to the antenna port; the ethernet jack connects to my router, and the power plug, well, you can figure that out. The power adapter is different than the original HDHomeRun (the Plus takes 12 volts; the original takes 5). A nice improvement here is that even though it’s a dual tuner, it only requires one antenna input. The original model required splitting the antenna signal and plugging it in twice. Getting the extra cable and splitter out of the signal path improved my signal strength on a couple of channels.

You’ll also want to make sure you have the latest firmware installed. The HDHomeRun client software might do this for you automatically; if not, the firmware is rather unintuitively available on the Linux Downloads page of the SiliconDust website.

Software Setup

First, assuming you’re running Windows 7 like I am, install the Windows HDHomeRun software. This will include the configuration app and the QuickTV app. You can run the configuration app to scan for channels and watch them directly from the configuration app.

Then you can bring up Windows Media Center and configure it using the steps on the HDHomeRun Instructions page. That should get you to the point where you can record video using the HDHomeRun and WMC.

The Video

Recording with the default HD settings, this setup will record full high-def TV signals in MPEG2 video format (using the .wtv file extension), with file sizes at about 6 GB per hour.

But that’s a huge file and doesn’t stream well, so I wanted the HDHomeRun to record as H.264. With the latest (June 2014) firmware update, there is the ability, using the HDHomeRun Config application, to select a default transcoding profile. Click on the HDHomeRun device in the left column of the app, and then choose the transcoding level you’d like on the drop-down that becomes available.

That seemed too easy, to the point where at first it didn’t seem like it was doing anything different. Indeed, WMC continues to record .wtv files. However, the .wtv video container now becomes a lot smaller - on the order of 1 GB / hour. It turns out that the .wtv format is just a wrapper around various formats, so if you record the transcoded video, the .wtv container holds H.264 video.

Preparing for Playback on the Roku

Interestingly enough, the .wtv file played pretty directly on the Roku - apparently it managed to recognize the transcoded video format. However, to get the file into the typical .mp4 format so that it can playback on various devices, one more conversion step is necessary.

For that step I’m using MCEBuddy 2.X. MCEBuddy is pretty slick for a free app. It has the ability to sit and monitor for new recordings, convert them, rename them and move them around on the disk based on show and episode information, and do transcoding. It’ll do serious transcoding if you need it to, but since my .wtv files are already H.264 on the inside, there’s a transcoding profile called MP4 Unprocessed. This is a quick operation (about 10 minutes for a 1 hour program) that transforms the .wtv file into an .mp4 file. Quick and easy.

The end result of that process is H.264 encoded .mp4 files, all ready to stream to my Roku within 10 minutes of the recordings being completed from my over-the-air antenna. Pretty slick.

Last week we used some Amazon rewards points and a couple of gifts and upgraded our bedroom TV and bought a Roku. Our old solution, using a monitor and a Mac Mini, was OK,but was getting more and more inconvenient - Plex was great for watching recorded TV, but the Netflix plugin is broken and had to be watched through a browser, Amazon video was even harder to watch, etc, etc.

So now the Roku is awesome for streaming video, and the Plex app for Roku talks to our Plex Media Server (running on our HTPC) fine, but it chokes pretty hard when trying to playback the HD video files recorded off of OTA TV channels. (Basically, the HTPC doesn’t have a high-powered CPU, and when I try to stream 6-GB/hour MPEG-encoded files to the Roku, the HTPC has to transcode the video first, and it’s barely up to the task.

Next attempt: setup some transcoding software. Enter MCEBuddy. It’s convenient enough to use, and there’s a free version, but with a wimpy CPU transcoding from HD MPEG to H264 takes on the order of 2x realtime, meaning that it takes just over 2 hours to transcode a 1-hour show. that’s sort of manageable here in the summer when we don’t record too many shows, but once September hits the HTPC will be transcoding all the live-long day just to try to keep up. There’s a paid version of MCEBuddy that I dropped $15 on with the possibility that it’d speed things up, but my video card is old and slow enough that there’s no hardware acceleration to help out.

So now what? Upgrade the video card so I can do faster transcoding? Might be a possibility, but the better solution looks like to be updating from our current HDHomeRun tuner (a 5-year-old original model) to the HDHomeRun Plus, which has H264 encoding hardware built in. Now I just need to find a spare $100 somewhere. Anybody wanna buy an (aging) Mac Mini?

I’ve owned an iPhone for 18 months now, but haven’t had a PIN in place to lock the device until yesterday. I’m gaining the ability to put work info on the phone, but to do so I have to have a PIN and an auto-lock on it. So, I set up a PIN and set it so that I’m required to re-enter the PIN after 15 minutes of inactivity.

What’s been striking to me so far (after just one day with the PIN in place) is how infrequently I have to enter the PIN. Most of the time when I pull my phone out to look at something, I’m still within the 15 minute window since last time I had it out.

I haven’t really evaluated yet whether this represents an unhealthy level of attachment / addiction, but it’s been a startling (and somewhat troubling) bit of insight.

Tech writer Paul Miller spent a year unplugged from the internet, and returns today to share his insights.

Paul reports that while the first few months disconnected were freeing and encouraged him to read more deeply, write more, and do more recreational activities, what he found after several months went by is that this “freedom” wasn’t all he had thought it might be.

It’s hard to say exactly what changed. I guess those first months felt so good because I felt the absence of the pressures of the internet. My freedom felt tangible. But when I stopped seeing my life in the context of “I don’t use the internet,” the offline existence became mundane, and the worst sides of myself began to emerge.

I would stay at home for days at a time. My phone would die, and nobody could get ahold of me. At some point my parents would get fed up with wondering if I was alive, and send my sister over to my apartment to check on me. On the internet it was easy to assure people I was alive and sane, easy to collaborate with my coworkers, easy to be a relevant part of society.

So much ink has been spilled deriding the false concept of a “Facebook friend,” but I can tell you that a “Facebook friend” is better than nothing.

Paul says that while he thought he might find his “real” self disconnected from the Internet, instead he realized that his “real self” and his online interactions were rather inextricably linked.

He relates a conversation with a young relative during a recent visit:

My last afternoon in Colorado I sat down with my 5-year-old niece, Keziah, and tried to explain to her what the internet is. She’d never heard of “the internet,” but she’s huge on Skype with the grandparent set. I asked her if she’d wondered why I never Skyped with her this year. She had.

“I thought it was because you didn’t want to,” she said.

With tears in my eyes, I drew her a picture of what the internet is. It was computers and phones and televisions, with little lines connecting them. Those lines are the internet. I showed her my computer, drew a line to it, and erased that line.

“I spent a year without using any internet,” I told her. “But now I’m coming back and I can Skype with you again.”

In the end, Miller has decided, being connected with those he loves is more important than whatever “freedom” his technological disconnection provided.

Miller’s story highlights many of the concerns that have gone through my head whenever I have considered “unplugging” in some way or another. Yes, I might gain back some “free time”. Yes, I might be better able to sit down and read 200 pages at a single go instead of 20. (Wait, I have 3 small kids - what am I thinking? 200 pages is a pipe dream.)

But my friendships and social interactions over the past decade have been hugely influenced and enabled by technology. I’ve made friends over Twitter, and blogs, and forums; people that aren’t just ‘creepy internet friends’ but that have become real, embodied friends when we’ve had the chance to meet in person.

So when I think of disconnecting the way Paul Miller did, the first word that comes to my mind is “lonely”. Which means, for better or worse, I’m going to be staying connected.