Red really is a wonder dog. She can fetch the remote, the phone, or even a beer out of the fridge. But when Livy started eating table food, she wasn’t the only one. Livy liked dropping food on the floor for Red or even being so bold as to have Red eat it out of her hand. Jenny and I have always been strict about Red not getting table food, but once Livy gave her a taste she was hooked. Ever since we’ve had a problem with Red taking food off the table and the kitchen counters when we aren’t home. We’ve tried to be vigilant about not leaving things out, but inevitably we are in a hurry and something gets left out and Red can’t resist. She knows it is wrong and she is sorry as soon as we walk in the door, but she just can’t beat her addiction. I’ve been frustrated by figuring how to curb her behavior and have been trying to come up with ways to deter her. Others on the internet are just as frustrated and the best solution I could find online was to put things on the table that would fall and make noise like a can filled with rocks to scare her. From the evidence, it looked like Red was sly enough to not knock something like that off and that it probably wouldn’t scare her off anyway. So I started brainstorming my own solutions and expensive impractical solutions, such as an electric fence or a some type of rigged shock collar came to mind. Yeah, it sounds harsh, but I was at my wits end.

When I talked Jenny into letting me get a Nintendo Wii, I told her that half of it was to play games and the other half was to play with the technology in it. The remote for the Wii, called a Wiimote, is the main difference between it and other gaming systems and a large reason for its popularity. The Wiimote has an Infrared (IR) camera on the front, a 3-axis accelerometer, and connects wirelessly via Bluetooth. The Wii comes with a sensor bar which sits on top of your TV which is simply a bar with two IR LEDs, one on each side. When the Wiimote’s camera is pointed at the sensor bar it can see the IR LEDs and can tell where you are pointing it and move the cursor on the screen. The accelerometer is used to detect how you are moving it so when you are playing tennis you just swing the remote as if it were a racquet. All of this information is transmitted back to the Wii over Bluetooth. Rather than reinvent the wheel, Nintendo used an existing standard for Human Interface Devices for the Bluetooth connection. Computers with Bluetooth use the same standard and this means that the Wiimote can actually be connected to a PC. Nintendo does use a proprietary format for their data, but a good portion of the format has already been reverse-engineered and can be found on Wiili.org.  A friend of mine at work wrote a simple driver to be able to use the Wiimote in LabVIEW which can be found here. So this basically enables you to use the Wiimote as a wireless sensor.

In my case, I wanted to be able to detect when Red was getting up on the table and scold her in some way. Using the Wiimote on one end of the table and an IR light source on the other end, I could detect if anything blocked the line of sight. To create the IR light source I got a IR LED from Radioshack for $1.79 and taped it to a AA battery. In addition to that, just in case Red was really sneaking and got past the IR light beam, I used the Wiimote’s accelerometer to detect vibration as a backup. So then I wrote a little program in LabVIEW to read the data from the Wiimote and if an attempted theft was occurring it plays a sound file and logs the time. For Red, I recorded myself scolding her.

So this past Sunday I set Red up for failure. I cooked brunch before we left for Mass complete with bacon knowing that Red can’t resist bacon. Then we conveniently left some plates on table when we left, but not before we armed the new security system. But what fun would it be if we weren’t there to see Red when she got caught? So I set up the camcorder to get more evidence. I was pretty sure that she would do it right after we left the house and would go straight for where Livy ate and sure enough she did. See for yourself below. Now we’ll have to see what the long term effects are and how long it will take to completely break her table surfing behavior.

Our photo gallery, powered by the free open source software Gallery, has served us well. I spent quite a bit of time tweaking it to get it just the way I wanted. I’ve been pretty happy with it, but it still lacked a couple of things that I wanted. First, the slideshow options it provided were not up to par with current technology and second there wasn’t a good solution to include videos. And when it came to videos, I really wanted an option where I could post the video to Google Video or YouTube so that it wasn’t using up the space on my website.

I had thought that it would be a fun project to create those features and provide back to the community, but somewhere along the way my ample free time has disappeared. Shortly after I set my photo gallery, Google started their Picasa Web Albums which I recommend to people who didn’t have their own website. So I’ve taken a little bit of my own advice and I switched our photo gallery over to a Picasa Web Album. Their user interface is really slick and intuitive. You can even use the arrow keys to navigate through the pictures. They also have a really nice slideshow. And you can post videos in your albums just like pictures. The videos even play seamlessly in the slideshows too. They offer 1 GB of storage for free so I can put up a lot of photos and even have higher quality than what I had on our site. I put up all of the photos from our old album and it is only using 15% of the available space.

There are some trade-offs. For example I can’t customize the way the pages look. Luckily I like their simplistic pages but I can’t put a link to get you back to our site. I also lost control over the settings of things like the RSS feed. The benefits of switching are worth it though and one thing that finally pushed me over the edge was that Google released a data API (or a way for people to write code to access the things in the albums). That means that I’ve still got access to the pictures and could write code to do things with it that I wanted such as displaying a random photo on my other web pages. (Luckily someone else has already done that too.) Finally, they will continue to add features and as they do I don’t have to update anything to get them. For example, they recently added the ability to "Map" your photos by dragging them onto a map. So now you can really see where we were when we took our pictures on vacation.

So feel free to go check out our new album and latest pictures and videos. Just click on the "Photos" link at the top of the page and you should be redirected to it automatically.

As Jenny knows all too well, I’ve always got something on my wishlist. Usually something to do with technology. This year for my birthday was no exception. I’ve been pestering Jenny to let me get a Nintendo Wii game console since it came out last November. I’m not much of a gamer these days but I was intrigued by the technology. While other game consoles have focused on High-Def graphics and are marketed to 16-25 year old males, the Wii takes a different approach. It is marketed more as a family or group fun system and has even been popular with senior citizens.

It wasn’t too hard to convince Jenny to let me get one, but finding one was the hard part. They are still in such high demand that you still can’t find them on the shelves in stores 6 months after its release. I got mine a couple of weeks ago by checking the internet for people posting Sunday ads early and found that Target was going to be advertising them. It didn’t show how many they were going to have but I showed up 15 minutes before they opened and got in line and was able to get one. Actually, I had a $20 gift card to BestBuy which was expiring on that Saturday so I took a leap of faith and bought a Wiimote before I even had the Wii.

So why is it so cool? The most interesting thing is the controller, called a Wiimote. It is wireless and uses Bluetooth to communicate to the console which means no wires and good battery life in the Wiimote. It has a built in 3-axis accelerometer which means it can sense when it is moved and its orientation. So when you play tennis, all you have to do is swing the Wiimote as if you were holding a tennis raquet. It also has an infrared (IR) camera on the tip and there is a "sensor bar" which has IR LEDs which sits on your TV. The poorly named "sensor" bar doesn’t actually sense anything. Instead the IR camera in the Wiimote can see it and allows you to "point" at the TV and it acts similar to a mouse. It is really pretty amazing and as people start doing more interactive things in the living room, the IR camera pointer system seems like a big advancement. When they couldn’t fit anything else in the Wiimote, they put a port on the bottom of it to plug in an accessory such as a standard controller or a nunchuck (yes as in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). The nunchuck has an analog joystick on it as well as another 3-axis accelerometer. That enables you to play games like Boxing simply by swinging with each hand. And the features don’t stop with the Wiimote. The console has build in wireless internet, an SD slot, and USB ports. The WiFi was a big selling point with me. The Wii can get updates over the web and you can even buy and download old games from previous Nintendo systems. The Opera web browser is also supported to let you surf the web which is more useful than you might think. It is easy to check out TVguide.com to see what is on, use Google Reader to check all your RSS Feeds which has already been specialized for the Wii, or any other website. It allows for some cool intergration with the outside world like streaming music into your living room and other Web 2.0 type applications.

Oh, and you might be wondering about the "Mii" in the post title. You can create a cartoon-like character of yourself to use as your player. You might even spot other Mii’s on your system in the crowd and you can register your friends Wii and your Mii’s can travel to their system and vice versa.

Overall, the Wii is aptly named because it is a lot of fun. Jenny enjoys playing tennis with me but she prefers to play on my team rather than against me. Part of my sell to Jenny was that since it isn’t going to be getting any easier to go out bowling with friends that now we can just have people over for dinner and bowling. Feel free to invite yourself over!

This year won’t be your typical spring forward and fall backward because the U.S. Energy Policy Act of 2005, passed by the U.S. Congress July, 2005, extended Daylight Saving Time (DST) in the U.S. by approximately four weeks. So this year Daylight Saving Time starts 3 weeks earlier on March 11, 2007, and ends one week later. This year it won’t be quite as easy as changing your clocks and watches. You’ll also have to take care of things like your PC which usually adjust automatically. Windows released an update which you hopefully got through the automatic updates feature and should have enabled. You may also have other software or devices that need to be changed. Jenny and I have to update our cell phones running Microsoft Smartphone 2003 as well. Who knows, this may cause more trouble than Y2K.

Recently I did a series of posts on the new Windows Vista and its features. The conclusion was that although Vista has some really nice features most people probably don’t need to upgrade their current PC. But did you know that you can get several of these new features on your current Windows XP PC for free? Yep, that’s right and I’m not just talking about Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Media Player 11.

Windows Desktop Search – Ever wish you could find things on your computer as easily as you can find things on the web. Most web search engines scour the web and create an index so that when you search for something it just looks it up in the index instead of going to every site. Windows Desktop Search is a search engine for your PC. It adds a search box to the taskbar and indexes your files when you aren’t using your computer so that when you type something in it gives you instant results. It even starts giving you results before you finish typing. It searches most of the common file types as well as your email and contacts. You can also get add-ins for file types that it doesn’t natively support such as the one for searching your Internet Explorer history. I’ve recommended Google Desktop previously, but since Windows makes both the OS and the search engine they have better integration between the two. It’s obviously helpful when you don’t remember where you saved a file or when you are looking for an email on a topic but you don’t remember who sent it, but I’ve also found it useful for more common tasks. If I need to look up an address or phone number it is quick to just start typing their name into Windows Desktop Search which immediately pops up a link to their contact information in Outlook which is quicker then the 5 or 6 mouse click to actually open Outlook and navigate to their contact.

Windows Defender – This is Microsoft’s free anti-spyware protection utility and it is the same as what is built-in to Vista. Other free anti-spyware tools require you to manually scan your PC, however Defender provides real-time protection which means that it is constantly monitoring for spyware similar to how anti-virus software watches files you access for viruses. Like anti-virus software it also updates itself automatically.

Family Safety from Windows Live OneCare (Parental Controls) - The parental controls in Vista are in my opinion the biggest feature for the typical family with kids. Family Safety isn’t as full featured as what is in Vista, but it is a good start for still being in beta. It installs on your computer and then requires you to log in with a Windows Live (MSN Messenger) login. As the ‘parent’ you can set the policy for your children’s accounts to filter the web content on different categories. It also lets you record their history so you can see where they’ve been. It is a little annoying to have to log in everytime you access the web, but when Livy is old enough to start surfing I’d want something to protect her from stumbling across something nasty. Using the Windows Live accounts also works well for most people since they typically use the same Windows user account for the whole family.

Yes, we are officially a computer system builder now. OK, so we’re not starting a new business, but I did build our family a new computer. We’ve had the previous computer for 4 years now and it only had 512 MB of RAM. It also had Rambus Ram which is really expensive. (Rambus and DDR ram were both new when we got it and DDR took off and Rambus didn’t which is why it’s so expensive.) So upgrading our old computer wasn’t really an option. We didn’t need a super-computer but since we started doing video editing we definitely needed more horsepower. We compared building our own versus buying a PC from somewhere like Dell. We found that the higher end computer you are looking for the more you can save building it yourself. So I’d say we saved about $500 from what an equivalent system would have cost retail. It’s a tough comparison though because it’s hard to build the same system at Dell. Our main motivation for building our own was to be able get all of the options and features we wanted. Our features ranged from very techinical to very practical.

CPU – Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz 4MB L2 Cache
Motherboard – MSI Platinum P965
Memory – CORSAIR XMS2 2GB DDR2 800Mhz
Video card – BFG Tech GeForce 7600GT 256MB
Hard Drives – Two Seagate Barracuda 400GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s
Optical Drive – Samsung Dual Layer DVD Burner With LightScribe Technology
Card Reader – Built-in card reader
OS – Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition w/Upgrade Coupon for Vista – OEM
Case – Ultra Wizard Mid-Tower ATX Black
Power Supply – Antec Neo HE 550W
Case Fans – Antec Tri-Cool, 120 mm & 80 mm

Additional Features:
9 USB 2.0 ports (3 on front)
2 Firewire ports
Built in card reader
DVD burner with Lightscribe
Matrix RAID (50 GB RAID 0; 350 GB RAID 1)

Practical Features – One feature we wanted was a case that had a door we could close that would cover up the power buttons and DVD drive; we also wanted to be able to lock that door. I used to think that cases like that were annoying, but that was before I knew how good Livy was at pushing buttons. She will hold the power button down for the required 5 seconds and then look up at the screen and laugh and clap as it powers off. We also have some more standard features like a built in card reader, lots of USB ports including 3 on the front , and a front Firewire port.

Technical Features – I wanted a dual-core processor and the Intel E6600 is the best bang for the buck. At 2.4 GHz it’s faster than the E6300 and E6400 you’ll see in most retail computers, but it also gains a lot of performance from twice the L2 cache at 4 MB. Next, we had to decide whether to go with RAID storage which requires multiple hard drives. RAID 0 boosts performance by splitting the data and writing/reading half the data to/from each hard drive. RAID 1 provides an automatic backup and writes all the data to both drives so if one drive fails the data is still safe on the other drive. Typically you would need 2 hard drives for each type of RAID so if you wanted both your would need 4 hard drives. The motherboard I selected has the Intel ICH8R southbridge which provides Matrix RAID Technology which lets you use two hard drives to do both RAID 0 and RAID 1. So the system uses the performance RAID 0 to store the OS and program files, but RAID 1 for all of our data. We also wanted this system to have enough horse power to met our needs for several years. If we ever need more performance we could easily overclock it and get 50-80% more performance.  I upgraded and got a little better RAM just in case we decide to overclock. Some technical features we really didn’t care about, like the video card. We don’t do any gaming so any basic video card would do for us, as long as it had a DVI connector to be able to provide a digital signal for the 22" widescreen I got on the day-after-Thanksgiving sale. Finally, we went with Windows XP Media Center Edition, which came with an upgrade coupon for Vista Home Premium. Since this is our main PC, this gives us time to let issues with Vista shake out before we switch over, but we won’t have to pay for Vista when we decide to switch.

Purchases – We found that we could get the best deal on almost everything from www.Newegg.com. I’d bought things from them before and had good experiences and the same held true this time. Shipping was less then $20 for everything and one big bonus of shopping at Newegg is that you don’t have to pay tax, which would really add up. Priding myself as a bargain hunter I did get a few components from www.Frys.com, such as the the case, power supply and fans. I actually got the case for free after rebate. There were also rebates on a few of the other things as well which helped with the price. We also got an OEM version of Windows which is cheaper and sold to "System Builders." It has license restrictions like what comes preinstalled on a retail computer.

Verdict – Two thumbs up! It is screaming fast with plenty of RAM and hard drive space to last us for a long time. We’re pretty happy with it. I’ve put it through it’s paces to test it out and it really performs. Our custom PC is also exactly what we wanted. There is definitely some risk in building you own, and I wouldn’t recommend it unless you know what you are doing or have help from someone who does. I spent plenty of time reading up on the internet to make sure I knew what I was getting and that it would all work together. 

Oh and Livy’s favorite feature is the blue LED lights from the fan that looks cool with the lights off.

You may have heard that Windows Vista has finally hit the shelves. So should you run out and get it? Well, first I’ll say that I like Vista and I think Microsoft got a lot of features right, especially for the average home/family user which I’ve already blogged about. But before you upgrade you computer you might want to ask a few questions.

Will my old software work on Vista? Maybe. It would be best to Google it and go ot that software maker’s website to see if they have any updates for Vista. Vista has some features to help old software, but anything that is part of a hardware driver will need to be updated.

Will my hardware be supported? Maybe. Again you’d have to check the manufacturer for a new driver. Your old driver definitely won’t work due to changes in Vista. Most hardware vendors will be producing Vista drivers but they may take a little while and may have bugs. But for most hardware that is less than a year old it shouldn’t be a problem.

Can my computer run Vista? If you have to ask then I probably wouldn’t recommend it. Most likely it would be a better idea to just get a new computer when you are ready rather than upgrade your old one. There could be cases where you were going to pay for software that is included in Vista that would make it worth it to upgrade, like parental controls for family.

If you are still curious, you can download and install an upgrade advisor program from Microsoft’s site which will evaluate your PC, including software, hardware, and peripherals. It will also help you choose the version that you want. That’s right there are multiple versions with different features. You can find the comparison here. Most likely you’d want to go with Vista Home Premium. The only feature it doesn’t have that I would want is Remote Desktop server which is what allows me to use my desktop PC from my laptop here in my recliner in the living room. But there is free software that can do that, too.

So the big question now is when? Well, it is kind of ironic that I just purchased all the components to build my own PC last night, including a copy of Windows. So what did I get… I went with Windows XP Media Center Edition. It comes with a coupon that I can redeem for a copy of Vista as did new PC’s which were sold since last November. I’m planning on using XP for at least another 6 months and letting someone else get all the bugs worked out and then switching to Vista. I’ll let you know how it goes.