Benjamin Chodroff

Goodbye cruel world. I will see you again in 20 days. Ohhhhhhhh, sweet email, I miss you already.

One of the first problems I will experience with my no computer for 20 days is that I will not be able to check my grades for my courses. My last day of finals is today and the grades won’t be all up until Thursday or later. My solution? Well, this might be cheating, but I think it’s quite clever.

I need a way to check my DPR for my grades. Unfortunately, Case has implemented a portal system using some bastardized Oracle system that has horrible HTML output that a mastermind using curl, a command line HTML agent, would spend days implementing.

Luckily, I noticed lynx, a command line text web browser, has a very fancy and handy feature: –cmd_log=file and –cmd_script=file

Simply load up the URL with the –cmd_log=filename and it creates a log file of every action you do! It works beautifully even against some very harsh password protected signins and crazy unsigned certificates.

Here is what I did:

lynx –cmd_log=mylog my.case.edu

During this scripted session, I had it navigate its way over to my dpr (I logged in, and then manually told it a URL to go to since it couldn’t follow the javascript button). I then Printed the page to a file.

Then, I tested it again using the script file I created:
lynx –cmd_script=mylog my.case.edu

It whizzes through all the motions again and downloads my full grade report! Awesome!

I then wrote a bash script to search for my classes using grep. Grabbed the grades using awk. Emailed the grades to my cellphone via sendmail and my cellphone’s email address. I set this action to occur each day at midnight. I then created another script to remove the previous script from cron. I scheduled that script to run at the end of the month.

After reading an article about a PC World writer who goes without a PC for twenty days, I was inspired to try it out for myself. The question is…how?

Unlike the writer, I am not doing this for a good story but rather for my own benefit. I spend countless hours in front of a computer. In fact, I would be willing to estimate that I spend well over a third of the time I’m awake using a computer. Yes, it really is that bad. Ask my girlfriend about my email addiction. I respond to emails in *seconds*. I have every aspect of my life connected to the slickest Web 2.0 gizmos and open-source gadgets and spend each waking moment contemplating the latest computer news story or beta testing the newest product or…. Is this really what life’s all about?

This holiday break I am going to Costa Rica with my family. I think this would be the perfect opportunity to unplug. Granted, it is somewhat of a cop-out period to do this experiment since I will be on vacation. You have to start somewhere. I might be thousands of miles away from home, but I’d find a way to get my computer fix.

I am trying to think of everything this experiment will impact. No more DVD’s on my media center. I’ll have to contact my advisor via phone about my non-existant progress on my masters project. Eek - that’s going to be a sore subject. I’ll miss many important emails from work regarding the plans for my trip to India. However, I think I can do this.

My last final is on December 20th. I leave for Costa Rica on the 31st and will be gone for a week or so. Classes start back up on January 16th. If I stop using the computer December 20th at midnight, I can (hold on - let me check Google Calendar)….start using computers again on January 9th at midnight. Perfect! That gives me just under a week to catch up before classes start. No sweat! I will try to keep a written journal of my daily thoughts during this time.
The only problem I’m anticipating will be uploading pictures I take during my vacation. I think it’s fair to allow my father or someone else to do this for me so I can continue taking pictures.

December 21st is just around the corner and I have to start exporting my life to analog ASAP. I announced my plans to my roommate and he said, “You’re not going to last.” With that said, let the games begin!

It is no surprise to me that Cleveland only ranked the 24th most wired city in the US according to Forbes.

Having lived outside the digital haven of Case Western Reserve University last semester, I realized the prohibitive cost of purchasing broadband internet. We’re talking $35+ a month for your basic run of the mill broadband internet connection. Wireless hotspots? Not unless you hack your neighbor’s WEP key. Wasn’t ClevelandOne supposed to solve all these problems. Why is providing high speed internet going so slowly in the US? A better question is…why was there absolutely no competition for providing such a service? My only option was Adelphia unless I wanted to purchase a phone line just to get DSL. Adelphia’s speed was mediocre at best and their customer service was poor in my opinion. How much do I, the consumer, think is fair for a speedy broadband connection? $20 a month.

Mail me all the equipment, email only technical support, and a customer website with a community forum and I’ll be happy. Oh, and could I *PLEASE* get an upload speed greater than 20 kb/sec? Perhaps 200 kb/sec and no restrictions on outbound ports? I’d pay up to $25 a month for that service.

I have spent the better part of this last month wrestling with technical support and a slew of forums trying to get my Hauppauge PVR-500MCE tv tuner to work in Windows Media Center 2005.

At first, the card that I purchased from NewEgg had experienced poor reception quality in the lower chanels (mostly 2-8). I noticed this problem while running the card using MythTV (using ivtv 0.7 and knoppmyth). I assumed this must be a problem with ivtv’s support for the card under linux, and decided to see what I was missing by switching over to Windows MCE 2005. The card was designed for the Windows operating system, so how hard could it be to install it?

Very, very, very hard.

First of all, hauppauge’s support page is very confusing. It provides you with a download for some zip file which contains all the drivers for Media Center - but then they have a whole slew of other drivers and beta drivers and….which one is the correct one? Who knows?!

To make a very long story short, I ended up getting the card to work in Windows XP, but not in Windows Media Center. I was able to run the TV in WinTV 2000 and the lower number channels were *still* very fuzzy and would sometimes even go into black and white. Horrible. In Windows Media Center, I was unable to event tune into the channels.

I had Hauppauge replace the card. They commented, “This card [the PVR-500MCE] would be great if it ever worked.” Apparently, I am not the only one who has experienced problems with this card. Simply google the card and be amazed at how many people have problems with it.

After two weeks, I received my brand spanking new Hauppauge PVR-500MCE card in the mail. I popped in the card and got it to work in WinTV2005, but Media Center reported:

“the tuner hardware is either malfunctioning or not installed. please ensure that both the tuner hardware and a valid tuner hardware driver are installed.”

I played it safe - I reinstalled Windows XP Media Center 2005, including rollup2. Still, the same problem. I took out all the PCI cards from the computer except the card, and changed the cards position. Still, the same error.

Now, this is clearly a Windows XP Media Center problem - because the card works beautifully in WinTV 2000. However, I blame both Hauppauge and Microsoft for such a horrible experience. I am going back to Linux (SUSE + MythTV), but I am not happy.