The new UI change in iTunes 10.1.2.17 had me tripped up, as the download button has been removed from non-downloaded podcast. Thus if you have frequent updating podcasts, and there is a gap, under the old system you could click the download button.

The red arrow shows where the button used to be.

There is now per podcast subscription settings, but the “download all” option which will fill those gaps, will also delete each podcast as it’s listened to.

Well today, I discovered you can just double click on the missing podcast, and it auto downloads.

A very simple UI change, it makes it cleaner, and still allows users like me to do what you want, but very non-discoverable, unless you have the habit of double clicking everything…

[_Update: One day later_] The new 10.2.0.34 release has the buttons back.

Wow, I forgot how loud they can be and how long they can last, also about the concern for the electrical gear plugged into the wall.

Since moving to Windows 7 I have been missing having the navigation pane of Explorer expand to my current path (like in XP).

Today while fiddling with settings on my new Win7 box, I noticed the oh so obvious option, that I’d missed before:

Step two in getting rid of MediaCom is replacing there terrible DVR.

The two options that saw where buying a Tivo or a home DVR system.

Tivo:

Pros:

• It just works
• Cheap up front costs. $100 to buy, $240 for first years rental, and then the $120 a year or $400 for life time subscription. Thus total cost of ownership $740

Cons:

• The device would not work when we return to New Zealand
• Not so keen on the phoned-home information
• No commercial skipping

For a long time I’d wanted to setup a MythTV system, and that was my plan, but I was reading about capture card support and other issues, and SageTV’s commercial product looked like it had all the bells and whistles, but the real game changer was the HD300 client device. At $150 (+$30 for Wifi USB dongle) that was one of the cheapest “PC’s” I’d  ever seen. The server software costs $80 (but if you buy the HD300 and Server together it totals $200 (plus wifi)), then your paying $230 for the client side and that still cheaper than any PC I’ve ever seen. Given that SageTV run of Linux and Windows, I could use newer capture cards that had only Windows drivers.

For the server I was looking at Dell, HP/Compact, and the above PC’s on Amazon, but the Dell 570 was the cheapest PC $270, 500GB and 2GB RAM. For +$40 you could upgrade to AMD Athlon II X2 245. It also had two PCIe slots, and free RAM and SATA ports.

For capture I was looking at the Huapage 2250 or AverMedia A188C, the AverMedia was cheaper (even more in white box version), but Amazon had lots of people complaining that it didn’t work for them. I did think that most those people were using it in QAM (cable) mode, thus decided to go that path.

So in the end I had a bill of materials of:

• HD300 ($150)
• HD300 Wifi USB dongle ($30)
• SageTV Server software ($50 - bundle price + shipping $16.20)
• DELL 570 with AMD Athlon II X2 245 ($340 + free shipping)
• AverMedia MTVHDDUWB HD Duet - White Box ($70 + free shipping)

Build Costs: $656.20

Pros:

• Works here in the US
• Works in NZ (with a new capture card ~$100)
• Expandable hard disk space, to allow storage growth
• Has commercial skipping features
• Noisy PC/HDD’s in different room
• Lots of Geek pride

Cons:

• Rolling your own solution, thus owning all the “why’s it not working”
• Higher upfront cost
• Need for networking between the client and server, in a rented house, thus needing Wifi to work

So given that both solutions total cost was less than a year of Cable TV (from any of the providers, excluding the teaser first year price), building was looking like a great choice.

So I pulled out my credit card, and place my third orders and waited.

Well actually I went to bed very late but very excited, also a little apprehensive about if I made the right choice, and hoping it all worked out.

[2021-07-17: This post from 2011 never seemed to have been published, not sure why, so recovered 10 years latter for hindsight reading pleasure]

Project ‘Goodbye Mediacom’ is underway…

After having Mediacom’s cable TV service for a year, their teaser rate has ended and they want to charge $69/month for basic cable + $6/month for HD + $11/month for an DVR device.

You know what? I don’t want to pay ~$1,000/year for TV.

I’m paying them $45/month for Internet (12mb), so if I remove the TV that will go to $65/month (they will have there pound of flesh), but the key problem is paying for TV.

I don’t really like to watch TV, as there are lots of development work I’d rather be working on, so 1K/year is too much for something optional that I don’t like.

So the options are:

1. Over the air broadcast & Tivo
2. Over the air broadcast & home made PVR
3. No TV
4. Put up and Pay

The first two plans relied on if we could get an aerial that worked where we live, otherwise we ether had to put up with Mediacom or just have no TV…  The house we are renting has a “no putting up aerials” rule, so it would have to be internal, and I didn’t have the option of putting it in the attic, as I wouldn’t be able to run the cable into the livingroom/office without plaster work, and I wasn’t going there ether.

When we first moved into the house we tried a small internal aerial, the  and it basically didn't work [RCA ANT121](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00009W3E2), I could see that there was digital TV, but was always "bad"

So I went to best buy and picked up a more expensive internal aerial with amplifier, the [Trek FDTV2A](http://www.amazon.com/Terk-FDTV2A-Omni-Directional-Amplified-Digital/dp/B001VYQG16), which also didn't really work, there were three channels that were 80% but crackly, and the rest would never work for more than a few seconds. I tried it flat under the TV, vertical behind the TV, vertical on the wall, and held by hand. Flat worked best, but really wasn't good enough. I found the +10db amplifier didn't seem to help the signal quality, but I didn't do any empirical testing.

So I return that to [BestBuy](http://www.bestbuy.com/), and purchased the [Antennas Direct - ClearStream 2](http://www.amazon.com/Antennas-Direct-C2-CLEARSTREAM2-Antenna/dp/B0017O3UHI), this worked well in the living room pointing out the corner of the house (behind a chair) and in the office (the final project planned destination) I got 100% signal for 4 major channels and a total of 19 channels. I also also picket up a rocket-fish powered +4db amplifier/splitter, but my testing showed that across the 19 channels that it had a zero or non-positive effect. So I returned that.

I purchase these things directly from BestBuy at their +20% Amazon prices for the very reason of returning if they didn’t work. So in the end I was not stressed at the additional purchase price.

Now that I knew that Project ‘Goodbye Mediacom’ was viable, I started the planning for the DVR replacement.

Wow this is the coolest thing I’ve heard/seen in ages…

hp Stanley Williams - Video Lecture on the Memristors Discovery

I have my site and my comments on the internet scraped by those really annoying zero value add sites (you know with 80% advertising), and the worse thing is the don’t scrape very well. Text on the next line gets mixed into the url, Google see’s these bad links, follows them and they 404 by my server. So now my Webmaster Tools crawl error screen, is filling but with rubbish.

Ideally would be a button to say “ignore this link it’s junk”, and have Google silently ignore that inbound like. Basically down vote the bad link.

But that doesn’t happen, so I’ve been resorting to adding more and more RewriteRules to my .htaccess to make those bad links work, hoping Google will notice, and remove them. But it takes so long.

You can check them with the Fetch as GoogleBot, and it notes success, but this doesn’t feed into the error results.

So another nice feature would be to “requests a recheck of current errors” button.

So I ponder how bigger websites (those that get actual traffic) deal with this, as it reduces that value of the tools provide, and makes you question if it has an impact.

Update: was getting ready to ask about the above on the Webmaster Tools forum, but followed the ‘Please Read First’, and sure enough they have my questions answered in the FAQ, but still it’s really ugly. It’s like lots of warning messages in C++ that were fix in the code 3 months ago, it makes it really hard to notice the introduction of new problems.

I’m currently upgrading our VB6 reporting application to use Crystal Reports 11.5 SP6 as the current reports don’t display on Windows 7 64bit, and we need one more lap of the current system before it’s refreshed.

The VB code is done, now onto the updating the installer part. Slowly working my way through the dependency files for each .dll to work what files to install where. After that I’ll copy them into the source repository, so it can be built on the build server. Then upgrade the install scripts, and start testing.

Cons:

• VB6
• Crystal Reports
• Remote development (I’m the US rdp’ing to a NZ server)
• Nullsoft Scriptable Install System
  Pros:
• Not using Visual Source Safe

I’ve been putting this task off as long as possible, but the time has come to have it “done” so there’s no where to run…

After 30-50 minutes of rage and starting the project over, I learned the hard way that just because Interface Builder is part of the Xcode suite, it has no clue when Xcode is building. Thus does not save the .xib file, and thus why I had no UI widgets turning up in the simulator.

I watched a demo video so many times over and over, checking every step is done, and it’s the one he does with the keyboard short-cut, and doesn’t mention, saving. ARGGGG!

For the last few weeks, my work project has not been building it’s WinCE target on my new Windows 7 PC. Each project would just say “skipping build”,

12>------ Skipped Build: Project: PROJECT_NAME_12 ------
12>
13>------ Skipped Build: Project: PROJECT_NAME_13 ------
13>
========== Build: 0 succeeded or up-to-date, 0 failed, 13 skipped ==========

and if I tried to edit the project properties (or build/clean/rebuild project only), I would get

“The operation could not be completed”

It then dawned on my to try a new project test, and the SDK was missing from the options:

A bit of focused searching found Windows CE: SDK Doesn’t Show up in Visual Studio 2008 post, and the solution worked for me with my Visual Studio 2005 SDK under Windows 7 also:

1. Make sure Visual Studio 2005 is not running. I also shut down the device emulator manager but you may not be using that
2. Open a “Visual Studio 2005 Command Prompt” as Administrator. On Windows 7 just right click the short cut and pick the “Run as Administrator” option
3. Enter the following command: msiexec /package <the path to your .msi file>
4. Install

You need to used the same steps above to uninstall the SDK as well (as compared to the Control Panel’s ‘Programs and Features’ options), otherwise it won’t uninstall correctly.