Messing with drivers killed my Windows 7 install about a week ago. I accidentally deleted a bunch of drivers, and restoring them from the recycling bin didn't restore my internet, sound, or USB drivers... so I'm starting over with the software installation, and keeping track of the things I install.

For AVR programming you'll need:

Last Updated ( Monday, 18 January 2010 03:46 )

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I started a fun project over the break - a mix of basic robotics, networking, and microcontroller programming.

Here's the idea: say you're talking to someone on Skype, the camera is looking right at them, but then they move, or someone else comes into the room. You want to change your view, but you can't: you're stuck looking at the same spot. What I want to do is to be able to move the other person's camera from my couch in Illinois: I press a button, and their camera in Maryland swivels. 

Sounds simple, but there are a lot of issues:

Last Updated ( Saturday, 16 January 2010 05:17 )

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Cindy's family gave us a Netflix subscription for Christmas, along with a Roku Box. The idea is pretty nice: you pick a movie, they send it to you, and you send it back when you're done in an envelope they provide. Rinse and repeat as often as you want, with (usually) a 3-day delay between sending a movie out and getting the next one. And if you want more movies, there's a streaming service with quite a wide selection of movies. Throw in a couple of bucks a month, and you can get Blu-Ray disks instead of DVDs.

So far, we've only tested the streaming part (the first bluray just arrived), and the streaming quality is quite impressive (close to DVD). You can watch from PCs, XBoxes, special streaming boxes, etc. Unfortunately, the quality is noticeably worse on a PC compared to, say, a streaming box, so to get good quality you have to get another device. The Roku box we got for Christmas has both a wired and wireless connection, and hooks up to the TV through HDMI. It's the size of a DVD drive, and yet somehow manages to outperform my quite powerful desktop... go figure. Online forums claim it's intentional - piracymania or trying to sell more streaming boxes - or perhaps few people use their HDTVs as computer monitors. A guy at Netflix said the difference was due to Microsoft's Silverlite (DRM streaming tech like Flash)  not being capable of HD video

Either way, it's good stuff... lots of movies to pick from, both streaming and by mail in high quality. The Roku box seems to be a keeper, and claims to be able to do lots of other streaming as well. Seems to manage Pandora well enough...

I got an 52" tv for my birthday last year, but haven't had high-def movies to watch on it. My desktop's video card was happy enough to connect to it, so I got to play Civ 4 and Dragonage on a big screen, but videos have until now been pretty low-quality. Prices for Blu-Ray drives have dropped, though, so I went ahead and got one to replace the dvd reader in the PC. I tried it out on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and the results were quite amazing... the HD movie was quite exciting to watch, and when I played the same movie on DVD for comparison, it turned grainy and bleak. The feeling of immersion was all gone.

There are a few problems though... Cindy's dad (we were in Maryland for the past few weeks) routes all his input devices through a pretty recently made AV receiver. I connected my PC to the receiver through HDMI, and likewise the receiver to the TV. Everything went fine until I started the movie: apparently, the setup wasn't DRM-compliant: the PC, software, and TV were all good, but the receiver didn't know about DRM... So I had to connect directly to the TV instead. Now, the drive came with Cyberlink's PowerDVD 8 HD, which seems to work well. However, the forums say it only provides 2-channel audio, especially if you update it (apparently, some unupdated versions have full 7.1 audio). Upgrading to the full PowerDVD 9 Ultra costs around $50.