Chad Things

I recently moved to Chicago from San Francisco and, of course, had to figure out how I was going to get me some internets from my new pad.  In SF we found free wifi from the neighbors, but in Chicago we had no such luck - all the neighbor wifi signals were secure (encrypted).  That was fine by me, I was ready to have my own fat pipe at home - both shayna and I would get annoyed in SF when our free wifi wasn’t working or forcing us to sit by the windows.

I was also interested in getting HD cable or HD satellite TV. I haven’t had anything besides over-the-air since 2003, but i bought a nice HDTV from a friend that needed some HD content.  Plus Shayna wanted to get a landline so she could do some work over the phone without eating too many minutes on her cell.  So off i went to find internet, cable/satellite, and phone.

I first looked at comcast, the most popular around here, and they offer all 3 - internet, HD cable, and phone.  But I wanted quality HDTV, and I know comcast HD is not as good as others (comcast quality march 2008).  Also, I was pleased with Dish Network when i had it in 2003.  Some sports nuts like Direct TV better, but that ain’t me.  So now i just need to find me some internets.

Finding a Internet service provider was a bit more challenging.  According to dslreports, there were many offerings in my zip.  However, many said they did not offer service at my address - including RCN, verizon, etc.  Covad was available, but starting at like $100/month. Ouch.  Speakeasy was a good choice, one of the most reliable and best customer service, for about $55/month for 1.5/384 or $95/month for 3.0/768.  Ok, also high but more doable, but i figured i should also consider comcast.

Comcast had many options, but here’s a quick summary of the triple play i considered.  All these have the same cable options, about 200 or so cable channels, including 40 or so HD channels, a HD DVR (like tivo), which was $4/month more than normal DVR, and internet.  Total was $132 for 6.0/384 internet plus cable and HD DVR, or $140 for 8.0/384 internet, or $159/month for 16/768 Internet.  I also read many horor stories about comcast changing the price on their customers .. one guy got a $30 increase on his monthly bill.  Comcast?  I don’t think so.

In the end I went with AT&T.  At first their website said they did not offer service at my address, but some blogger said that you should call to double-check.  I did, and they did have ‘manual’ service at my apt.  The nice lady at ATT had many deals, including combos not on their website, so i’ll just list what i ended up getting - cheaper than comcast and they even partner with DISH for my area (U-Verse, their new TV over internet option, was not available for my location).

Notes: $5/month off DISH cuz AT&T deal, $10/month off internet cuz i got a phone line.

Initial costs were .. -$110.  Yep, I walk away with $110.  Breaks down like this: $40 for phone (would be free if i got $30/month free long-distance phone), plus $50 for internet modem.  Dish equipment and installation are free.  Thats $90 in costs, but i also get $200 cash back - $100 for internet/phone, and $100 for DISH.  So $90 costs - $200 cashback = -110.

My contract is for 24 months, but only DISH charges anything if i cancel early - $10/month.  So if i cancel at 14 months, 10 months before contract, i pay $100 to Dish.  If i want to move at 12 months, DISH will install my same setup at new spot for free (DISH offers one free installation per 12 months).  Pretty sweeeeet !!!

UPDATE - 6 November 2008:

I got .. misled on initial costs.  I only got $100 cash back, not $200 ($50, not $100 for each check), and costs were $70 for internet ($50 modem, $13 shipping, $7 tax), $47 for phone ($64 first bill minus $17 monthly), putting my initial costs at about $17 (still not bad, but $127 less than I was told.).

But what i’m really pissed at is the billing chaos.  More important than the errors and confusion, was the amount of time it takes to sort this out.  I spent about 4 hours total on 4 different occassions dealing with AT&T customer service.  Their managers seem competent, but do not trust anyone else.

The first billing confusion was based on the fact that I was told that I get free outgoing calls within 15 miles.  A manager at AT&T Customer Service assures me there is no such thing, and tried to sell me an outgoing call package deal.  No Thank You, Ma’am. Secondly, DISH is all sorts of messed up .. took 3 calls to sort of straighten it out.  See this picture with details on DISH Bill.  Basically they give you lots of credit on first bill to cover first and second bill, and the third bill should look normal. Did you look at that Bill?  what’s so hard about saying “TOP 200″, “Local HD”, “HD Silver” ???  One thing nobody mentioned is that they charge you $5/month if you don’t connect your DISH receiver to phone or wifi - “ADDL RECEIVER ACCESS FEE”.  What?   .

Overall the monthly is not far off - hopefully it will stay that way:

Related - I found a nice comparison of HD channels available nationwide.

You can avoid paypal fees entirely if you do these:

1. Setup personal account (not business)
2. Only receiving payments for Services. For the other types (eBay Items, Auction Non-eBay, and Goods-Other), there is a $500/month receive limit on personal accounts.
3. Notes about the person sending you money -
   • No fees if sender has enough money in paypal account to cover sending amount.
   • No fees if sender’s balance falls below $0.00 AND is reloaded by a US checking account
   • Yes fees if sender’s paypal balance falls below $0.00 AND is reloaded by a credit card - Paypal charges 4.9% + $0.30 USD, plus limited to only 5 of these per 12 months.

Sources (must be logged into paypal to view):
https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_display-fees
https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_show-limits

Now that i’ve had my iPhone a while, here’s some tips and tricks i can share.

• Get a case to protect your iPhone. Following most apple store employees, i bought Agent 18 eco-friendly.
• MegaPhone - mac application - see your call log, SMS/TXT log, iphone filesystem, read/write to iphone notes from your MAC, etc.
• Disk full? 8GB or 16GB iPhone actually has 2 filesystems, first is only 300MB and might fill up if you install lots of apps. In addition to moving /Applications to bigger partition, and chmod +s Installer, i did this
  cp -Rv /opt/iphone/lib /var/root/lib
rm -rf /opt/iphone/lib && ln -s /var/root/lib /opt/iphone/lib

• Geek? Dual Boot your iPhone
• Use iPhone’s internet on your laptop (slow, but useful in a pinch)

If you’re iPhone is freed/jailbroken, get these (best items first)

• fring - finally a found a google talk client (blog). Also does chat/IM with yahoo, aol, MSN, ICQ, Skype, Twitter, SIPwith others apps
• Productivity/WebSearch - shortcut to searching on google, wikipedia, ebay
• Multimedia/MobileScrobbler - last.fm client - like internet radio, but need good wifi
• iLog - view details about missed/received/dialed calls (with call duration!), individual SMS, etc.

Couple months after I replaced a drive in my terastation, another drive died. Sigh. Time to upgrade. Took many many hours, but I upgraded my 1TB Buffalo Terastation (4 x 250GB) to 2TB (4 x 500GB). Of course its less than 2TB - once RAID 5 is setup, it comes out to about 1.4TB of usable space. And you definitely want RAID 5 - that means if any one of the 4 drives dies, you don’t lose any data, just replace it before a second drive fails.

Here’s the deets:

1. Bought four 500GB drives for about $100 each,
2. Copy data from Terastation to one of the 500GB drives - mounted via USB on windows xp, could also work with IDE inside PC (4-6 hours)
3. Disassemble Terastation, pull out 250GB drives (<1 hour)
4. Copy data from 500GB to 2 of the 250GB drives on windows xp PC (6-8 hours)
5. Partial Reassemble Terrastation with 4 new drives (10 mins)
6. Upgrade Terastation firmware to 2.16 (had trouble with disk format till I did this)
7. Format each disk (5 mins) (had to reboot a couple times to get it to work)
8. Create Raid array 1 (RAID 5) using all 4 disks (2 mins), raid “checking” took 13 hours
9. Create shared folder
10. Copy data from the 2 250GB drives back to terastation.

More on http://buffalo.nas-central.org/index.php/Terastation_FAQ

My last backpacking trip to Sykes was great, but my GPS watch ran out of juice after a second full-day of use. Sigh. I figure if I ever do any multi-day backpacking trips and want to record the GPS waypoints the whole time, i’m gonna need a way to recharge. Plus I like being green, so I looked into a solar panel charging device.

My goals for a device, most important ones first:

• Recharge my Garmin Forerunner 305
• Recharge my 5G iPod
• Recharge my iPhone
• Can’t break easily
• Lightweight, small
• Under $100
• Bonus: works with AC outlet and DC car cigarette lighter
• Bonus: work like my current iPhone AC to USB charger
• Bonus: minimal attachments

This roll-up solar charger looked cool - It can recharge a laptop - but was too big and expensive. Solio was pretty popular on the ol’ google search results, and they have 2 models that met my goals - the Solio Classic and the Solio Hybrid 1000. Looking at the tech specs, the classic has a bigger battery and more juice, but the 1000 is a bit more rugged, as this guy suggested. The H1000 doesn’t charge as well as the other Solio products, but I liked that it was the most durable and cheapest. We have a winner that meets all my goals. Watch video. I paid $74 including shipping/taxes at thenerds, and it arrived 2 days after I ordered it. I confirmed it worked as expected with my GPS watch, iPhone, and iPod. Hurray.

It’s on. Shayna and I are volunteering this Saturday 9am-1pm, it goes 2pm-2am, and tons of our friends will be going to south bay to check it out. But chad, what is it? Well, lets let Yuri’s Night Bay Area do the talking:

“Yuri’s Night is a celebration of space exploration—and mankind’s curiosity, scientific ingenuity, technical achievements, and spirit of collaboration that have made it all possible. This year, NASA’s 50th anniversary, the Bay Area will be home to the largest Yuri’s Night celebration ever, with 8,000 people joining astronauts, artists, scientists, engineers, and musicians to pay tribute to our global space heritage and to celebrate how much more is out there to be discovered!”

Personally i’m going to have fun and listen to music - one of my favorite DJs ever, Tipper, will be playing a twilight set. But there will also be fun costumes, interesting art, fascinating science, and friends. What more could you want for a saturday? Buy your ticket now!

I just got an iPhone, and its great, but Apple does not allow 3rd party applications out of the box (games coming soon). So what to do? Well, if you want more apps, you must jailbreak your iPhone. Before Feb 2008, it was a bit complicated, but since apple released 1.1.4, its easy as apple pie - here’s what i did:

Following instructions from iPhone Atlas, I changed Settings/General/Auto-Lock=Never, downloaded and ran ziphone app on my mac, doing jailbreak-only (i’m already using the official AT&T carrier). It took less than a minute to reboot back into iPhone and there i saw 2 new apps - Zibri’s Blog and Installer. The Installer app is how you easily install your favorite games, utilities, and other apps. Hurray.

After browsing top 20 apps, I installed these (and you should too, copycat)

1. Sources/Community Sources - do this first, gets list of available apps (packages).
2. System/BSD Subsystem - some other apps need this first, including OpenSSH and NES. If you install this, change password from default “alpine” using openssl. Do not use passwd - you may get stuck in “edit home screen” reboot loop
3. Games/Caissa Chess - better graphics than other chess
4. Games/Chess - not sure if its better than Caissa
5. Games/FiveDice - Yahtzee
6. Games/HuaRongDao - puzzle game, simple yet hard
7. Games/iCave - simple, reminds me of vanguard
8. Games/iSolitaire - you know it
9. Games/Labyrinth - tilt iPhone to guide marble around labyrinth
10. Games/Mahjong - classic chinese game
11. Games/Othello - another classic
12. Games/PuzzleManiak - combo of different games, online scores
13. Games/Sudoku - latest fad
14. Games/Tris - one of many Tetris games
15. Multimedia/CameraPro - like default Camera app, but you can zoom, black and white,
16. Multimedia/MobileScrobbler - last.fm client
17. Multimedia/TuneWiki - play music with this, and it downloads lyrics and advances them to the music
18. Multimedia/iFlickr - upload to .. you guessed it
19. Productivity/WebSearch - shortcut to searching on google, wikipedia, ebay
20. Productivity/Sketches - like the old “paint” .. you can take a pic of your friend, give’m a mustache, then email it.
21. Toys/Flashlight - very simple - get a bright screen to find those keys you dropped in the bar
22. Utilities/iSpit (geeks only) - turn your iPhone to a simple HTTP server
23. System/OpenSSH (geeks only) - lets you wirelessly connect to your iPhone like its a computer (copy/move/delete files, etc).
24. System/Term-vt100 (geeks only) - get your xterm on. if you got login problems, try this vt100 fix.
25. Development/Perl (geeks only) - installs perl 5.8.8-2

You got any cool apps? leave me a comment.

NOTES: More info on jailbreaking from crunchgear, from lifehacker, for iTouch, . If you can’t wait for Apple’s iPhone SDK, there’s already an O’Reilly iPhone Development book to help you write your own application.

ISSUES:

First time i did all this I ran into some issues, had to restore back to 1.1.4 (damn broken passwd). Second time was no issues - so you prolly won’t have any. But here’s notes on what happened to me in case it happens to you:

First was that calling/SMS didn’t work. On the ziphone app i clicked “Help & Info”, then Troubleshooting, and found the following which fixed it.

1. Tap on Settings from the home screen.
2. Choose General
3. Choose Reset (all the way on the bottom)
4. First try “Reset Network Settings” - The phone will reboot. If things still aren’t working, go back and try “Reset All Settings”.

Phone rebooted and now i saw my AT&T and Edge network logos again. Hurray!

The second issue was that the installer could not install anything, which turned out to be a temporary issue. The first time i ran installer, it updated itself (checking sources, refreshing sources, update, restart) .. which is normal. As soon as installer works, the internets say to install Sources/Community Sources, then System/BSD Subsystem, then System/OpenSSH. “Community Sources”, which contains list of things to install (games/utils/etc), installed OK, but i got stalled on BSD with a “Package Download Failed (null)” msg. I did alot of digging, found and did this troubleshooting checklist, but still no luck. Then i figured out I was in a temporary vortex - others noticed as well - and waited till the next morning when I had great success installing many packages.

I finally broke down today and got a 16GB iPhone. I mean, seriously, a geek like me waiting like 9 months to own an iPhone? WTF? Well, not not a big fan of the phone and SMS part - the main reason I bought it is to have a mini web browser internet device with a nice user interface. I’ve always loved the iPhone interface - half my friends have iPhones and i’ve been jealous for a while. I considered waiting for next generation iPhone (3G phone, GPS, etc), but according to appleinsider, it’ll be summer/fall before they come. I just couldn’t wait!!

I bought it at the Apple Store in downtown San Francisco. It took about an hour from walking into the store till chadPhone was totally up and running. Breaks down like this - Buy iPhone .. 5-10 mins. Open iPhone, plug into your mac (I brought my macbook pro with me, so i could register it quickly). iTunes notices iPhone, leads you down registration process. I chose the $59/month (450 mins, unlimited data, 200 SMS TXT msgs/month). For $10/month more, you can get 1500 SMS msgs/month, or unlimited SMS for $20/month. I love SMS but i’m pissed that Apple/AT&T are charging that much for SMS when it basically costs them nothing. I much rather use safari/gmail. Anyway, registration ends with giving AT&T your credit card, and done - 10-15mins. So less than half hour my iPhone was registered and i could make outgoing calls. They said up to 6 hours to route incoming calls to my new iPhone, but really it took another 20 mins. Total .. 50 mins.
Already found these 22 tips, what are your favorites? anything to avoid?

Update - Download hundreds of cool games and applications from people besides apple by jailbreaking your iphone.

Back in 2005, i bought a Buffalo Terastation 1TB NAS (Network Attached Storage). Basically its a backup device - a mini-computer box with 4 harddrives, each 250GB, or 1TB total. Last week one of the drives died after a power outage (we get a lot of outages on san jose ave), and today i fixed it. However, it wasn’t that easy - I spent over 3 hours on it - when it should have taken less than one. So i’m just gonna note a few things so the next guy might have it easier. Now here’s where i’m gonna geek out, so all non-geeks .. move along.

When i first setup the terastion, i did a RAID5 + RAID1 - that means i got a 750GB partition out of my 4 250GB drives. So if any one of the four drives dies, i don’t lose my data. I just pop in a new drive and rebuild. Easy. This worked great for 3 years, never had to replace a drive. Every now and then we’d lose power and when i powered on my terastation, it would take 1-2 days to check the disks before we were good to go.

Last week Terastation would not recover - it would boot up for a minute, do disk check, then turn off (power light was off). However, each of the four drive status lights would stay red, with disk 3 blinking red. After reading the manual, I decided to replace disk 3. I also read the wiki FAQ, so i knew i could replace with any same-size or bigger drive. I did this, spending almost 45 mins opening the terstation up, switching the drive, and putting it back together. Turned it on, and it stayed on. Yay!

So now all i had to do is connect to the web manager interface and “rebuild the raid array”. Once i logged in, it said Raid array 1 error - i clicked it, and I’d get to array 1, and it listed disk 1, 2, 3, 4 .. but the checkbox to disk 3 was greyed out. I spent a while looking through the web pages and decided something might be wrong with my new disk. I turned it off, took the thing apart (only took 15mins this time), pulled out my new disk, and basically connected it to my PC in a external USB drive box. It worked fine. Ugh. Was terastation broken? I tried the old drive, that terastation thought was dead. It also seemed OK by PC standards. Ugh.

After going back in forth and trying different things, it turned out that the new drive had to have the jumper in Cable Select to work. The older 3 western digital drives were not in Cable Select mode. Whatever.

Also, the LED lights on the front don’t always do exactly what the manual or FAQ says. Specifically, i loved this blog on replacing terastation drive, but at the what he says is different than what i saw. Once I clicked ‘Restructure RAID Array’ , the lights were all going nuts and within a minute it went to a page that said “Restructuring has completed successfully” “Checking RAID Array”. At this point my 8 drive lights are blinking red and green - the 3 old ones have solid red status, new one is not lit, and all 4 have blinking green activitiy. Power light is on, diag light is blinking green. On web interface, i clicked on Raid Array 1 and it says it is “Rearing (x.x % Complete)”. I waited a few mins and refreshed page .. percent complete is increasing. It’s working !!! 4 hours later it finished - my setup is as good as it ever was.

I love YouTube, but i wish they supported higher quality - 320×240 just ain’t enuf. Enter vimeo - 640×480 and .. 1280×720 - thats right, full 720p HDTV !!! Here’s a video recorded at 720×480 (480p) and uploaded to youtube (right below), then vimeo (below youtube).

The Old Ones from Chad Norwood on Vimeo.

Or if you want full HD, check out this HD Video - The Art Of Beat Making - make sure you watch it fullscreen size to fully appreciate it.

For the techie, the only constraint is you get 500MB a week - no 10 minute limit. And they give you instructions on how to encode it depending if you want 1280×720 (HD Help) or regular tv quality around 640×480 (imovie help).