for the good time Jerry’s ramblings…

I had typed up this blog entry a few weeks ago, but hadn’t gotten around to posting it. On my way to work this morning, I was surprised to hear a clip of Big Star’s “Thirteen” on NPR followed by the sad news about Alex Chilton’s death yesterday…

These albums never get old. Katie introduced me to Big Star a few years back, and it seems like the CD has been in a regular rotation ever since. The #1 Record / Radio City CD was re-released in 2009, so I picked it up, and we’ve been enjoying it for months. It is funny to me that when Katie started playing Big Star, I thought it was a Teenage Fanclub album (taking me back to high school…). Turns out that Teenage Fanclub was just making a lot of Big Star cover songs.

Big Star – In The Street
Big Star – O My Soul
Big Star – September Gurls

Check out the playlist here!

1. Systems Officer – Pacer
2. The Whitefield Brothers – The Gift
3. Balmorhea – Bowsprit
4. The Plimsouls – Zero Hour
5. Arms – Shitty Little Disco
6. MillionYoung – Hammock
7. Gang Starr – The Way It Iz
8. Damien Jurado – Arkansas
9. Peasant – Well Alright
10. Typhoon – Starting Over
11. ELZHi – Deep (prod. Black Milk)
12. Ted Leo & The Pharmacists – The Mighty Sparrow
13. Pure Ecstasy – Voices
14. Ted Leo And The Pharmacists – Bottled In Cork
15. Freeway & Jake One – Microphone Killa

Using my handy new WattsUp, I collected a trace of power of Katie’s Macbook Pro and compared to my work-issued HP 8510W. The HP’s thermal and power management leaves a lot to be desired, so I knew that the Macbook would be the runaway winner on this one. But it is very interesting to see the results.

While the GHz is compatible between the two processors, I believe the HP uses a Merom (older) and the Mac uses Penryn (newer). So, it would be expected that the Mac would have a more efficient processor, but I doubt that the difference between the two can be attributed to the processor alone.

One interesting thing that I noticed with the HP is that the power consumption takes a large spike down around 700 seconds. I have no idea why this is happening… but at the same time I have noticed that the encoding speed also drops, so it would seem that somehow CPU performance is being throttled back. My guess is that it has something to do with overheating, but I can’t say for sure. I even tried looking at some obvious culprits (given my unique understanding of Intel processor thermal management features), but none of them seemed to be triggering at the time of the performance reduction. Given that the performance problem appears to trigger when the CPU’s temperature is 16′C below its max (100′C), it is very likely that the problem is something related to HP’s thermal management, which by the way, leaves a lot to be desired when compared to the macbook.

Looking at the cost of the encoding kind of diminishes the point of the comparison, so I almost hesitate to report it. Instead, I think you should look at the watt-hours for each device. The HP requires 216% more watt-hours to accomplish the same job!! And I can tell you from personal experience that the Mac is quiet and only warm during the encode while the HP fans are on full blast (and loud!) and the machine is so overheated that it is completely unusable. I’m not a ‘mac’ person necessarily, but I fully appreciate what Apple does in terms of thermal and power management and I wish more companies would do the same.

For the past three years, we have been suffering from a woodpecker attack at our house. Every year they show up at the south side of our house, find a nice perch on our window trim, and start pecking away at the wood. Each year, several holes up to 1″ in diameter show up on our exterior. And each year I climb up a very tall ladder to fill them with bondo, sand, paint. And then repeat the next year.

The woodpeckers that are problematic for us are the Northern Flicker.

According to the Portland Audobon Society,

During breeding season (April-June) male woodpeckers will drum on loud surfaces to establish their territory and attract a mate. Favorite sites for this kind of “rat-a-tat-tat” drumming are gutters, downspouts and flashing, but woodpeckers will also use siding as well.

This sounds exactly like the problem that we have been dealing with. And that also explains what I previously thought was bizarre behavior – the woodpecker pounding on metal vent terminators on our neighbor’s roof.

Determined to stop this cycle, I ordered some stainless steel bird spikes from Nixalite and frantically installed them yesterday as spring is truly upon us and our house is swarming with the pesky Northern Flickers. By 3pm, they were all installed on the south side of the house. I was buoyed by a report from Katie of a confused woodpecker looking for, and failing to find, a place to start pecking into the walls near our bedroom.

A half an our later, I was sitting at my computer while Paloma was playing in the living room, and I started to year a rhythmic, loud banging. At first I thought it was Paloma, banging on her drums or a table. But the sound was too loud, too rhythmic to be her. Sure enough, it turns out the clever bird found a nice perch on the north side of the house, and was banging away on the siding…. Defeated, I opened the window to shoo away the bird. At least Paloma got some pleasure in seeing the pretty bird up close.

An interesting option for dealing with these birds, from the Audobon Society’s web page is to install a sound deadening device where the birds like to perch. I may consider that as a quicker, and cheaper, option versus the Nixalite for the future.

You win this time, Mr. Flicker, but next year will be different…

Tallest Man On Earth – A Field of Birds

In my search for some new mp3 blogs, I stumbled upon this gem from 2009. I don’t know much about the band, but the music speaks for itself. Here are probably my two favorite songs from the album.

The Love Language – Lalita
The Love Language – Sparxxx

A few months ago I got a voicemail from a ‘Restricted’ caller

As it turns out, I had never gotten around to cleaning my backpack after our trip to Mexico, and when we were burglarized in April, my luggage claim sticker went with the thief.

The Trail of Crumbs

Excited, I went to the precinct to see if there was any other stuff of ours that was recovered. Sadly, this was it. Just a backpack, some lint and some baggage claim tickets.

I did get a bit of the story behind the burglers, though. There were three guys, heroine addicts, who had been involved in over 100 burglaries in the past year. Typically, they would drive up to a house that looked like a good target. One guy would wait in the car nearby, I’m guessing with a cell phone to contact the guys in the house. The guys would take whatever was easy to grab, throw it into the car and drive away.

After having been burglarized twice, one thing I can recommend is that you don’t put anything valuable in your bedroom as this is the favorite place for thieves to go. Or, if it has to be in the bedroom, be sure to lock the valuables away in a safe.

The Clash – Police and Thieves

Owen Pallett is the type of artist I should have been into a long, long time ago. I’ve been casually listening to songs of his (released under the name “Final Fantasy”) for a few years now, but I never actually listened to a full album. I was intrigued by some of the pieces from his latest work, Heartland, and bought the album. I am in love after just one listen, and after 20 listens, it is growing on me even more.

Owen Pallett – E Is For Estranged
Owen Pallett – Flare Gun
Owen Pallett – Keep The Dog Quiet

I received my WattsUp .NET a week or two ago and fiddled around with it a bit using its basic logging features. I’m happy to see that it reports 0.1W precision (compared with 1W on the Kill-a-Watt). Overall, the WattsUp seems like a nice device although it is a little tricky to use. Complaints:

• I have found the USB port to be flaky
• The two-button interface is a bit cryptic (e.g., “SELECT” and “MODE” sound like the same button to me… I can’t remember which does what).
• On at least one instance, it took the think several minutes to boot… but thankfully that isn’t happening anymore.
• Data log size is way too small… for thinks like a refrigerator, you really need a week or more of logs and with just basic data the WattsUp fills up in 10 hours.
• The WattsUp web interface doesn’t send a timestamp with the data which means it can get out of order if the data packet gets lost in transit. Some jitter may occur in the logged results. I’ll eventually look at putting the data logging on a local server to reduce this jitter.

Complaints aside, I now have it functioning as a web-enabled logger, and I’m happy to report that it is much easier than anticipated. After checking out various user forums on the WattsUp website and looking at their communications protocol document, I expected that getting the web-based logging going on this device would be very difficult. But, as it turns out, the protocol is quite simple.

I don’t know the technical terminology for it, but the WattsUp reports data to any website and server side processing script (php, Perl, etc) using a webform POST style format. For example, I can tell it to talk to www.theshrollys.com and point it to /cgi-bin/wattsup.pl, and it will send a message with a format like this:

http://www.theshrollys.com/cgi-bin/wattsup.pl?id=1&w=0&v=1199&a=381&wh=0&pcy=0&frq=599&va=458&rnc=0&sr=20

It will only send the parameters that you have programmed it to send (using the USB software interface). The default data push period is one sample every 20sec, but you can modify that by having your server side script respond with a new update rate. What’s more, if you are interested, your server script can actually power cycle the load! To tell the WattsUp to send data ever 1sec, you respond with this:

Content-type: text/html

[0!1]


The “!1″ tells the WattsUp to update the data send rate to 1Hz. The ’0′ says “leave power on”.

As a trial run last night, I set up Katie’s Macbook Pro to transcode our O Brother Where Art Thou DVD to an M4V (H.264) format using Handbrake, and checked the results when I woke. Very nice! Included in the plot is both the handbrake encode (~37W on average) and a long period of idle (~13W). Just for fun, I’m going to have to run the same DVD encode on my HP 8510W and compare.

Macbook Pro DVD Encode

If you’re interested, here is my wattsup.pl Perl script for handling the data. Not very sophisticated right now, but good enough and enhancements are in the works as I have time.

Finally, one thing I was concerned about was lost data (packet loss or general internet slowness). Unfortunately, the data sent to the server does not include a timestamp, so I must timestamp it locally. This means there is some jitter in the results. If my server is slow, it could apply the wrong timestamp. If packets are lost, timestamps get skewed. And so on. I took a look at the distribution of time in between samples as a function of my server side timestamp. Overall, it is pretty reliable, but there are some bad outliers.

WattsUp Time Between Samples Distribution

Last year when we put on a new roof to our house, I scrambled to come up with a new home media wiring plan. The wires only cost maybe $200 for all-you-can-eat HDMI and cat6, and the roof costs closer to $25K. So, while we had the plywood decking ripped up, we had the roofers run a cat6 and HDMI everywhere that I wanted it.

Shortly after that project was done, I cut through our living room walls to install the HDMI and cat6 wall jacks using the simple but very versatile generic blank wall plate + keystone low voltage wall jacks from pchcables (and many other places). No more running a wire across the room in order to watch a DVD! This alone was reason for rejoicing.

A year later, bluray players have gotten extremely cheap, perhaps because everybody is banking on new 3D technology? But I’ve got an old (1 year old) Epson Powerlite 6100 projector with no plan for 3D in my future, and a bluray player is a highly desired upgrade from my old 480p Oppo DVD player.

I settled on the Panasonic DMP-BD60 player as the reviews were pretty good and the price unbeatable.

Very excited about the possibility of the 600 new lines of resolution my projector will start displaying, I plugged it in on Friday night. It was sort of like turning the key on the car, and only hearing the starter. My projector indicated to me that it can’t display the image and the DVD player sent a cryptic message “U73″, indicating a ‘serious’ HDMI error. Ugh. After an hour of tinkering, I have proven that with a short cable, everything ‘just works’. But with my 50 foot HDMI cable, tucked away in the rafters of my home, it fails to start up.

I modified the DVD player settings to use 1080i, and the signal goes through fine. Sigh. As it turns out, not all cables are created equal, and even though a cable is ‘rated’ for 50 feet of HDMI 1.3a, that doesn’t mean that it will work with all DVD players and projectors.

I looked a bit into the specs to demystify 1080i vs. 1080p (default setting). I didn’t get it – why would 1080i work but 1080p doesn’t work? The simple answer: bandwidth. With 1080p, there is a full 60Hz frame rate sent to the projector. With 1080i, it also sends images at 60Hz, but only half of the lines for each frame. Therefore it is effectively delivering 30Hz frames, half the bandwidth of the 1080p, and most importantly, the timing requirements are easier to meet over a long cable run.

As it turns out, according to this nice explanation, the bluray DVD format is a 24 frames per second format, and it is converted to a 60fps format before going to the display. The extra 36 frames are just filler. When the signal is sent as 1080i, it has 30 full frames per second (compared with 60 for 1080p), and then the projector actually deinterlaces the signal into a 1080p display, including a full 60fps signal.

The point is that I will probably never know the difference between 1080i and 1080p on my setup, but it sure would have been nice if I could have spent an extra $50 for the right cable when my roof was open. My recommendation: test the wire before you close the roof!

Spoon – Don’t Buy the Realistic

I thought I would start up what promises to be an irregular series of posts documenting some of the new music I’ve been listening to from the blogs I follow, mostly a repackaging of great content already out there. To make things simple, it is just a playlist (*.m3u) and a track list, in no particular order. Enjoy!

Feb. 2010 Playlist.

• Ted Leo & The Pharmacists – Even Heroes Have To Die
  
• Love Collector – First 48
  
• Love Langauge – Lalita
  
• She & Him – Thieves
  
• The Tallest Man On Earth – King of Spain
  
• Tiago Sousa – Insonia
  
• Title Tracks – Every Little Bit Hurts
  
• Bonnie Prince Billy – Death to Everyone.
  
• The Soft Pack – C’mon
  
• Elliott Smith – Cecilia/Amanda
  
• The Heligoats – Fish Sticks
  
• Abe Vigoda – Wild Heart
  
• Built To Spill – Hindsight
  
• Cajun Gems – Japanese Banjo