Digital Fort Camped out under binary cushions and blankets.

The march of progress: FM radio stumbles over cable, and onto the Internet.

We're wrapping up a civic holiday long weekend here in Ontario, something we call Simcoe Day here in Toronto.  Some beautiful weather and some quality relaxation time with the family.  I, along with my wife and kids, spent the weekend in Belleville to get some quality face time with the (grand)parents.

Being the technophile of the family, my father-in-law decided to present me with a problem that had been stumping him.   Joe & Sherry both enjoy Jazz FM, and in recent weeks, they could not seem to tune it in any more.

Bzzzt...

Sherry said there is nothing but noisy static and posited that the radio itself was broken and to blame, and Joe wasn't sure, but tended to agree with Sherry (as he should I suppose).

I was more of the mind that this class of device rarely breaks spontaneously, and by the description, the radio station had a strong signal and they had not moved or changed anything about the device before or since having issues with the signal.  I rolled up my sleeves to see what we could see.   What I found was a typical stereo, about 10 years past sale date, and there was nothing at all wrong with it.   The problem seemed to disappear when one removed the coaxial cable that was attached to the antennae input on the back of the device.  The Jazz station did not come in, but the static disappeared and the local mixed rock station came in loud and clear.  To me this meant that Joe had been taking advantage of the cable system's rebroadcast, and this was confirmed by Joe. He had all but forgotten that he had been doing so for years.  It was a value-add service included in the monthly fee Joe had been paying to the local cable provider, Cogeco Cable.

We did some quick process-of-elimination steps to ensure that the coaxial cable still had a valid signal, and looking back, we probably could have accomplished that more quickly by simply moving a television to that room, but that is hind-sight... you know.  Joe made a quick call to Cogeco and it turns out that they had quietly discontinued the FM rebroadcast service around precisely the time Joe and Sherry lost the ability to tune in.   I assume that this is because of the wholesale transition to digital signal, and the guy on the phone suggested the same... The solution, rent another digital box to attach to your stereo in order to get the music stations on rebroadcast.  Besides, he said, nobody uses that FM service anyway. 

While this isn't news as it has been happening throughout North America over the past few years, it is still ridiculous to me, and I think Joe feels the same way.  I'm not a cable technician, so I have no idea what they intend to do with the 87.9-107.9Mhz band of the spectrum on coax, but it seems to me that putting yet another digital decoding device in-line to replace what was a perfectly usable FM tuner is laughable.  We all understand why they would want and need to do so for high-value video and interactive services, but good old stereo FM hasn't changed since it was ratified as a standard in 1961, and putting a digital transition in the middle doesn't improve much but the cable company's bottom line.

I'm sure that this problem is equally laughable for the recent generations; some of whom would likely never have used an FM radio except for the fact that it's integrated into their iPod Nano. There are some people still listen to the radio, it's crazy, I know.  It is easily consumed, advertiser supported, local content that is relevant to those who choose to tune in.

The cable company is moving forward with their digital technology path and Joe is free to use a traditional antennae to catch available signals out of the air.   The value-added service the cable company had provided is no more, and there seems to be less and less value in the prices they are charging for their services.  Joe detached the cable from the radio.  I don't think he's going to be placing an order for a $7.95/month digital box anytime soon.

The funny part to me is that our (grand)parents are becoming technophiles in their own right.  Jenny suggested they could hop right over the cable company's digital decoder kludge altogether and stream Jazz FM straight from the Jazz.FM website;  putting that Internet connection they're paying for to good use.  It's not just for Skype and GMail anymore.

A week later.

The past week has flown by, I know it's a cliche, but the passage of time seems to accelerate as the years go by.   So what happened?

I did the 'weight loss contest' weigh-in with my brother-in-law last weekend. We're both heavier than we want to be, and we're both facing the reality of fatherhood and wanting to be around longer than perhaps we thought about before. Our schedule is to weigh in every 30 days, and to show steady progress. Cut the intake, balance the menu, drink more water, and get some exercise. That's the plan. I'll report in my progress later on.

Had a friend tell me about how they soft-modded their Wii and attached an external hard drive to run games while avoiding disc-swapping. It's funny how as we get older, that stuff becomes less of priority. Years ago, it would have been me telling people about it, instead of me being a year behind the times. That said, I liked the idea, bought a hard drive and followed the online breadcrumbs to hack my own Wii and load the games onto the drive so the kids will stop wrecking up the game disks while they are rampaging.  The guide linked above didn't quite work for me, as each Wii could have a different software ecosystem.  A couple of Google searches got me what I needed.  Good stuff.  Maybe Nintendo will take the cue and put an HDD in the next model.

I helped my grandmother buy a new computer this weekend. She's been a long time PC user, but she decided to take the conversion plunge and picked up an iMac. I transferred the contents of her old PC into a VMware Fusion virtual machine on the new rig so she'd still have access to the older software that she still uses daily. Software for which there is no replacement on Mac, and even the PC versions are completely different now. Being an IT guy who lives at the relatively leading edge of technology, I'm sometimes reminded that the software doesn't need to be recent to service real-world use cases and as long as it works for the task at hand.  VMware Fusion's included PC2Mac conversion doesn't work very well, sits there spinning on 'logging in and collecting information'.  My own experience and a lot of forum posts support this assertion.  If you are ever trying to do this, use VMware Converter Standalone instead, and be sure you uninstall all of Fusion conversion tool completely before installing Converter.  Use converter to write image out to an intermediary USB HDD and copy the VM image onto your Mac.   Ensure you exclude the directory you put the VM in from your Time Machine backups, because Fusion doesn't do this automatically for imported machines.  If you skip this step, your Time Machine drive will fill up pretty quickly.

Got myself a Cisco 881 for the edge of the home network.   It's overkill, but it works very well.  I was using an OpenSolaris machine with IPF and routing before, which was awesome too, but the IOS device was what I was looking for.  Original thinking was so I could VPN my portable devices back to home base using the Cisco clients that seem to come integrated with them.  Only problem is that it doesn't seem to work for my iPhone, and it's frustrating.  The Apple Enterprise Deployment Guide says I should be good using an IOS VPN, and my rig is at the right version, but it's not working yet.   I'll find some time over the coming weeks to work through the issues, and see if I can make it work.