Yesterday our new A/V receiver arrived: a Denon AVR-2310CI. We chose it because it has sufficient S-video inputs (many A/V receivers these days have none), it has video conversion features, and we found a great deal.

Setup went pretty well, except that unplugging the AT&T U-verse box and then plugging it back in caused the box to not reboot. The repairman was just here, and it appears that the problem lies in our Ethernet switch, not the U-verse unit itself. Oops!

This week, we will be having nerdy good fun updating our home media center. As we have time, we will record our progress on this blog for posterity.

Step 1 = setting up the Neuros OSD we’ve been meaning to install for a couple of years now. We started at version 3.21 and updated through several levels of 3.26, and then on to version 3.33. For the final versions, we had to go out and buy a compact flash (while at Fry’s we also picked up a 6TB NAS! can you believe you can just “pick those up”?!). It was fun to see the user interface gradually get better and better. Our only complaint so far is that the remote control is not very responsive. We’ve found one workaround that involves soldering, but we may just try an IR repeater.

Here’s info on the Neuros OSD:

The Neuros OSD – Digitally Store and Easily Access your DVDs, VHS tapes, and video media.

Today I attended an O’Reilly webinar about energy literacy, given by Saul Griffith. (Speaking of MacArthur Fellows, in 2007 he was awarded the MacArthur Foundation’s Genius Grant.)

To be honest, I’m going to have to review the slides before I come anywhere near understanding everything I heard. However, the minimal amount I took away was daunting: even a person as “energy aware” as Mr. Griffith consumes 18,000 watts (his 2007 estimate), but at the planet’s current energy production, we should be consuming more on the order of 2,500 watts each.

Meanwhile, although green/clean technologies are more efficient than what we have, they don’t produce enough energy for our ever-increasing needs. Nuclear power needs to be considered. And green/clean technologies come at certain energy costs themselves.

To add raspberry sauce to this already delicious cheesecake, the planet is warming at an alarming rate, which will lead not only to environmental catastrophes (whole cities, even countries, disappearing), but to “resource wars.”

Ah well; as one of the participants said in the chat window: “One person’s depression is another’s opportunity.” Anyone got any exciting planet-saving and lucrative ideas they’d like to share?

Take a gander at Mr. Griffith’s slides–if you dare!:

O’Reilly Webcast. Energy Literacy. September 23 02009.

Update:
The slides are now available on the O’Reilly webcast site, complete with Mr. Griffith’s narration:

Energy Literacy Webcast on the O’Reilly Site.

From commanding a tank platoon to building models that explain land-ocean-atmosphere dynamics. For example, periods of deglaciation (like now), tend to lead to volcanism (like wow), probably because the mantle of the earth is affected by removing the weight of the glaciers.

Peter Huybers – MacArthur Foundation.

All the 2009 MacArthur Fellows.

(from The Inquirer via Boing Boing)

SGI – Press Releases: SGI Unveils Octane III Personal Supercomputer.

An $8000 box that exceeds the Crays, Big Blues, and all the other super iron of my misspent youth. Up to 80 cores, up to 1 terabyte of memory, this is the kind of hacking tool angels and miscreants dream about. The weather systems to model, passwords to crack (um, check for strength and advise owners of weaknesses), the stocks and bond prices to analyze, and network simulations to run. To say nothing of the rendering, shading, and world building this sucker could do.

Wow, we are past the edge and well into the world of Something Big.

Our current paper shredder can handle only three pages at a time and throws up (i.e., breaks) when fed staples, CDs, or DVDs. It is very unsatisfying. And as the Mayor of Buffy’s Sunnydale knew, shredding is supposed to be a fulfilling, Zen-like activity:

Mayor: “It’s not working.”
Mr. Trick: “It’s supposed to do something besides shred?”
Mayor: “It’s supposed to cheer me up. Usually, using the shredder gives me a lift. It’s fun.”
Mr. Trick: “And today, you’re not getting the ya-yas?”
Mayor: “No. I guess it’ll take more than this to turn my frown upside down.”

I have a new shredder on order, as I’ve been finding many boxes stuffed full of VIPs (Very Important Papers) in the garage. Three pages at once is just not going to cut it (tee hee).

Who knew there were so many options when considering a paper shredder? There are light duty, medium duty, and heavy duty models. There are various “throat” sizes. You can choose from strip-cutting, cross-cutting, micro-cutting, and more.

And you can spend anywhere from $50 to $2,500 satisfying your shred-lust.

The one I’ve got on order was originally $160, but is currently $30 off with a $50 rebate, and I have a $25 discount card. Before tax, this baby is going to cost me only a bit more than a third of its original price–sweet!

By the way, shredders have a very interesting history, with characters ranging from pasta-makers to anti-Nazi propagandists to Oliver North. Who knew?

The key to getting the most out of your computer is solid, reliable software. When people I knew bought new PCs, or when I ran PC-based IT departments, I would always point them to the Google pack of applications, a set of applications (mostly from Google itself) that are solid and useful, but not complete. For example, there is no paint program, no compression program, no powerful encryption, advanced text editor, or file transfer programs.

I usually had to download these as separate programs from the web. Now I found that a group has put together my favorites of these (Dia/Gimp/Tux Paint, 7zip, TrueCrypt, Notepad2, FileZilla/WinSCP) along with some other interesting programs:

OpenDisc | Programs.

You download an ISO image (which is a byte for byte copy of a CD) then burn that onto a CD (follow the somewhat skimpy instructions here).

This is an easy way to introduce relative novices to open-source software because there is an introduction and explanaiton of each application. And, there are games.

This is an abstract of a paper explaining the results of a numeric simulation of an attack on a simulated network grid:

ScienceDirect – Safety Science : Cascade-based attack vulnerability on the US power grid.

The researchers found that attacks on nodes withe smaller loads created more harm than attacks on nodes with higher loads. Though they said this is counter-intuitive, think about it for a minute:

If you have an uneven distribution of work, the busiest entity has less capacity to absorb additional work. Think about asking a busy Mom to answer a survey while the kids are screaming. It’s likely she will shed some of her work to someone else (Dad?) in order to answer the survey. But if there is no one there to absorb the current work, any additional work causes Mom to be over capacity, and chaos reigns.

So build networks so they have at least two entities available for critical functions, and make sure that the unloaded entity gets checked as often as the loaded entity. Now, explaining that to someone paying the bills is another matter altogether.

Wow, something that cops, lawyers and professional interogators already knew

Featured Article – You can’t trust a tortured brain: Neuroscience discredits coercive interrogation.

More importantly, think what this implies for people undergoing extreme stress, whatever its cause. For example, how much previously-learned information drops away during social upheaval or disasters? Would it be possible to look at No Child Left Behind testing in the lower 9th Ward from before Katrina and now? Also what about someone who listens to media day after day that tells him or her that the country is falling apart and the newly elected government is responsible? What hormones are are stirred up after a daylong exposure to talk radio?

This is so wrong: