You're Not Getting Rid of us That Easily!

I am currently on hold with CableVision's disconnect department. I've been on hold for 17 minutes and counting. They have a special department you call if you are dropping your service and not moving. I expect them to give me a bit of a fight.

T-Mobile has transfered our phone number to their service, so we can now safely drop our cable service. Our antenna from Denny's came, but we haven't gotten the pre-amp. I just called them, and they forgot to put it in the box, they're sending it out today. I can't get too mad at them, they're basically a husband and wife team, and they were quite apologetic about the whole thing.

We also got some bad news about Boxee...

Wait this just in: I got through to the disconnect department, and they gave me absolutely no trouble. They simply put in the disconnect, and told me that I would still have the Internet service for $50 per month. They didn't even delve into my reasons for dropping their service or whether I have switched to a competitor. This was certainly a pleasant surprise. I expected them to off a discount of something to keep my service. Nothing. Not even a toaster. I guess the long wait time is simply the number of people who are dropping their cable service. Certainly not the experience people had when attempting to drop AOL.

So, as of today, we have no cable TV service, and we're saving $110 per month.

Back to Boxee. Remember that was one of the reasons we decided to try our bold experiment. Boxee gave us a front end to make it easy to watch TV. Through it, we've watched, 30 Rock, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the original Star Trek, Hawaii Five'O, Have Gun will Travel, Lost in Space, and a rather strange series of shows that includes babes in bikinis driving hot cars. Okay, I didn't watch that last one, but I certainly found the concept fascinating.

Anyway, Boxee is dropping Hulu from its service. This is a major disappointment because all the shows I mentioned were on Hulu. Well, the hot babes driving hot cars one isn't on Hulu, but all of the other shows we've watched were.

This is a big disappointment. Fortunately, it really doesn't affect us too much. Our downstairs TV is really a computer monitor, and our DVR, TV tuner, and Boxee Box is a real live computer. That means we can still watch Hulu on our set. Instead of going through Boxee, we'll just have to go directly to the Hulu website. That's a bit of a pain because Boxee had a nicer interface than Hulu's website.

However, I now wonder what other channels Boxee gets will be dropped. Boxee does pick up Comedy Central and CBS, but I wonder for how much longer this will continue.

How to Pick Up TV Reception in 20 Easy Steps.

Our old antenna is kaput. It's simply too old to get a clear signal. So, my son and I went on a merry chase to find a new antenna. We went to Antenna Web to help us pick out the type of Antenna you need.

Antenna Web is sponsored by the Consumer Electronics Association, and helps you figure out the size of the antenna you need, where to aim it, and the types of issues you may have with it. It then uses a color guide to help you pick out the antenna. Unfortunately, few sites actually list whether or not their antennas are certified by the CEA as to a specific range.

Most of he TV/Appliance stores don't sell antennas any more. I guess too many people use cable now. We went to Best Buy and a few other stores, but all they had were Digital Indoor Antennas. A few words here: There is no such thing as a digital antenna. Antennas pick up electromagnetic waves in either the UHF or VHF range. This is true for analog or digital signals. The difference is the way those signals are interpreted. It's somewhat like the difference between AM and FM. You use the same antenna on your car to pick up the signal, but once you receive the signal, they are interpreted in different ways.

So, what we really saw was a bunch of attractively packaged rabbit ears in flat high tech looking boxes. Each one specifically labeled it was for digital TV. In fact, one box even explained that you can't use your old antenna for digital TV.

So off to the Internet to find a new antenna. Again, most sites claimed they sold digital antennas and charged a premium. I wouldn't have minded that so much, but none of the sites gave you an idea of the type of antenna you were getting. We found only two that used the Antenna Web rating system.

One site that attracted my attention is Denny's TV Antenna Sales. The site outright admitted that there is no such thing as a digital antenna. Wow, that's refreshing! Denny also suggested you go to the Antenna Web site, find out the antenna you needed, and then Denny's selects the antenna you need based upon Antenna Web's recommendation. For example, according to Antenna Web, we needed a medium directional antenna. Denny's site also determined that since all of the stations we wanted to receive were within 80 degrees of each other, we could easily use a narrow directional antenna.

Denny's site also took a look at our setup: How much cable is there between the antenna and the TV? Will we be using a splitter? If so, how many splits will there be? Do we need pre-amp or post amps to help boost our signal. Even better, Denny's offers a 90 day return policy.

Another good site is HD TV Antenna Labs. Unlike Antenna Web (which they link to), they actually recommend specific antennas based upon your needs. They also have an excellent article about selecting an antenna. They also have a price comparison service and a user comment and ratings section. However, what we discovered is that few of the antennas actually have price comparisons. Most show no vendors at all, and those that do only list Summit Source as the only vendor.

By the way, Summit Source is also another antenna sales site that uses the Antenna Web rating system to help you select your antenna, but they don't help you beyond that. Plus, Summit Source doesn't offer a return policy. However, their selection is much greater than Denny's and their prices also appear to be lower.

Happy Birthday

Today is my birthday. It was a beautiful day -- about 55 degrees and I got to celebrate it by climbing on my roof. I have one of those semi-bungalow style really steep roofs that normal men my age wouldn't dream of climbing. But, I had a job to do.

On our roof is an antenna I had put up about 13 years ago. This was before we had cable the first time, before we switched to DishNetwork, and before we switched back to cable. I had cut the wire to the arial the last time because CableVision used the wire to connect our cable to our upstairs TV. Because the antenna was still connected, we ended up with mixed signals. (In my previous post, I reported it was DishNetwork that did this, but my son corrected me. DishNetwork wired our house correctly. CableVision reused the antenna lead without first disconnecting the antenna).

Anyway, I connected the lead, but alas, the TV tuner card isn't working. Daniel, my son who got me in this mess, is in Connecticut at the model U.N. He's trying to defend the U.S. position on private militias and space weapons. (HINT: The U.S. is the only country for these two items. He's going to have fun). I have decided to wait for him to return instead of trying to configure the card. He already did it once and would probably get mad at me if I tried. Doesn't matter I am a highly technical person. I am still a dad, and dads just screw things up. Ask your kids.

Also CableVision via their OptimumVoice department is causing all sorts of problems with our phones. They installed a new cable model (a Motorola SBV5222) and the phone line keeps dropping. We have no way of knowing until we pick up the phone, or we meet someone who asks, "Hey, what's wrong with your phone?". 

Some good news. The T-Mobile Hotspot@Home modem arrived. It's also a wireless router and it is much better than the Belkin wireless router we were using. It provides a strong clear signal throughout our house, and unlike the Belkin, it doesn't freeze up when we are pushing a lot of data through it.

Right now, T-Mobile provided us with a temporary number until they are able to get our home phone number transfered to our T-Mobile@Home phone. Since our old number isn't working due to the modem, I've rewired our phones to use the T-Mobile@Home instead of OptimumOnline.  At first, I changed our OptimumOnline phone mail message to tell people to dial the new T-Mobile number, but then I remembered that OptimumOnline has a forwarding feature which I was able to set via the webpage. Now, when you dial our OptimumOnline phone number, our T-Mobile@Home phone number rings.  As soon as the phone number transfer is complete, we're saying goodbye to OptimumOnline.

And, because our new T-Mobile@Home wireless router doesn't freeze,  we are actually able to use Boxee to watch Internet streams to our TV, and it is great. For the first time, I am watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I didn't see it the first time around, but they have all three seasons available via Hulu. Also available in Hulu are the five seasons of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and the Alfred Hitchcock Hour. I also showed my kids a few episodes of Hawaii Five-O which they thought was great in a very camp sort of way. We played Spot the Hippie. One of the trademarks of Hawaii Five-O was the hippie scene embedded somewhere in the episode.

We did have one disappointment, Astroboy isn't the 1964 original, but some 1990 remake. That's no fun at all. I haven't checked to see if they have Speed Racer.

So, even though we don't have reception right now, we are having a blast with the Internet streams -- especially from Hulu.

Fun for the Whole Family

Last night, we couldn't get more than channels 2 to 13 even when we try to set the tuner card in cable mode. Maybe we need to set it to analog mode too? Blah.

My son connected the cable to the cable DVR box and the cable from that to the TV Tuner card in the PC. This allows us the ability to set the TV tuner to channel 3, and use the cable box to change channels.

We then notice that there's a 3 to 4 second delay between what gets displayed on TV, and the sound played directly from the cable DVR box. Of course! The TV tuner card takes some time to capture the image and send it to the monitor. We think everything might get cleaned up once we connect the cable to the antenna we have on the roof.

Another fun fact we discovered. We originally had an antenna, then we got DishNetwork. When we did that DishNetwork used the cable from the antenna for the Dish. This created a bit of a problem since the TV upstairs (we hadn't mentioned that one yet. Did we?) was now getting input from the satellite dish and the antenna. My solution was to go on the roof and cut the cable. After all, we didn't need the antenna any more.

Now, I'll have to go back to the roof and reattach a coaxle cable to the antenna. Fun. Even worse, we now realize we simply can't unplug the cable and plug in our antenna because we still need the cable for Internet. Fortunately, Optimum recently rewired our cable to provide a direct connection between the cable modem and the cable. Before, we were connected to the cable modem with three coaxle cable splitters. Now, it's just one. We can reroute the antenna wire through the basement, to the splitter, and simply remove the wiring for the TVs from the cable.

Also, thanks to the Republicans, we now have a deadline in getting all of this to work. Come February 15 or somewhere around that date, our house is going digital whether we like it or not.

I looked into getting Tivo. It's $300 for the unit and $13 per month for the Tivo service. We originally didn't go that route do to the price. Maybe it would have been cheaper...

How to Save a Small Fortune: (Hint: Spend a Large Fortune)

We went to the marvelous Meadowlands Exposition Center for the Computer Expo today. We went there for two items: A TV Tuner card and a Analog TV to DTV converter box. We got neither. That doesn't mean we didn't spend any money.

Instead, we bought a Philips SRU9600 remote control for $24.99 and a set of four Phillips CD445 phones for $34.99 (one base station/phone combination, and three other non-basestation phones). The phones will replace the two 2.4Ghz cordless phones that we can't use because every time we talk on them, our wireless network goes down. Plus, if we get the Tmobile@Home service, we can't wire it into our house like we can with the Optimum Online service. These four phones, plus another set of three will replace our current set of phones in our house, and T-mobile@Home should be able to handle it.

Since we didn't pick up the TV Tuner card we were looking for at the Computer Expo, we ventured down to Best Buy to pick up a TV Tuner card and a Analog to Digital TV converter. While we were at it, we picked up a 24" Samsung monitor for $325. Yes, this is not the 37" TV that I was planning to buy some day. (I've been married for 25 years, my dreams are small). But, we figured it picture was at least as high as our 21" old analog TV, so it would be just a large a picture. Plus, since it is a computer monitor and not a TV, we could use the MythTV/Boxee box as a computer when no one is watching TV.

My wife was excited about a new computer in the house because she has to share the computer with me. I tend to hog up all the computer time by doing such things as work. It's just so unfair. Anyway, we loaded Firefox, Evolution email, and Open Office (remember, this is a Linux box) on this MythTV/Boxee box for her. Now, with a real computer monitor, and a wireless keyboard and mouse, she can use that for her needs.

We picked out a Pinnacle PCTV HD card from BestBuy which is suppose to be compatible with MythTV. I made sure that the card itself had a low profile. What I didn't check was to make sure that the slot cover on the end actually fits into the slim profile Dell Inspiron 530s that we bought. I ended up removing the back cover off of the card, so it would fit into our computer. Of course, without the back cover on the end of the card, it is rather wobbly.

My son put together the system, and spent about an hour getting the card to work. He found out he had to download the firmware from the card, and then extract it. Fortunately, I was able to help him because of my Unix skills.

Where we stand now

My wife is grumbling under her breath because of the mess of boxes and parts that are strewed throughout our house. We have spent about so far about $1000 for getting rid of cable which we have determined we won't be entirely rid of anyway thanks to their monopoly on high speed Internet in our area.

My son has gotten the TV Tuner card to somewhat work. Except that the picture on the very top is full of static and there is no sound. Boxee and MythTV seem to work fine (although we haven't tried to record a program with the MythTV DVR feature). And, our picture isn't high definition. Plus, every time my son plays a video through Boxee, our router loses contact with our cable modem, and thus our Internet goes down.

It's turning out to be a long hard slog.