Blog For Whoever

Here’s a a couple of videos of me and my brothers Stephen and Michael mountain biking some trails in Lambert Park, Alpine, UT. Michael has the helmet cam doing the taping and Stephen is up front in the white shirt. I haven’t been on a mountain bike in about 6 months. Actually since the last time the 3 of us got together I think. And it was years before then. It was a fun ride, it definitely makes me want to get a new mountain bike. Anyone got a decent full-suspension bike they want to sell?

So it’s been a couple of months since I’ve flown any of my planes or driven any of my R/C cars. They’ve all been busted up in a broken pile of parts and clutter and I just haven’t had the time or energy to get them back up and running…until last weekend. The last time I flew my Mini Showtime 4D the rudder servo stuck mid-flight with the rudder swung all the way out to the right. It was one of the cheap E-Flite S75 servos, the kind that just about everyone blames at one point or another for the loss of their plane. Fortunately I was able to land it with only minimal damage to the fuselage from a less-than-stellar landing (which didn’t have so much to do with the cocked rudder but a big pipe sticking up out of the ground that I somehow didn’t see. Doh!)

I replaced the rudder servo with a new S75 (I know, lessons are hard-learned) but it’s only a $12 servo and it only weighs 7.5g and doesn’t tax the BEC in the ESC. I did replace the elevator servo with the much-better Hitec HS-65HB servo which although is heavier and draws more current, is a very robust servo for a park flyer like the Showtime. I figured if I lost the rudder again, I’d at least be able to land it, but if I lost the elevator, I knew I’d be dead, so I didn’t want to risk it. My old S75 that was on the elevator was on its last leg anyway. The HS-65HB draws more current and according to the specs on the E-Flite 40-Amp V2 ESC, they don’t really rate it for running 3 micro servos and 1 digital servo, but I figured it couldn’t be too much more. Besides I’ve got the ESC placed so plenty of air flows over it. Of course, the loss of the BEC in your ESC is probably the worst thing that could happen mid-flight. I think at that point the plane is a total loss, so it’s somewhat of a risky tradeoff. But the HS-65HB is a smooth servo, and it’s a drop-in fit in place of the S75.

My first flight with the plane all fixed up went without incident. Though I was nervous since I hadn’t flown for so long. People talk about having rusty thumbs, and boy do I know it. I didn’t try anything too crazy, just flew around doing loops and some inverted flight and I kept it nice and high in the air. It was a blast to fly again though. And the new elevator servo really has some great authority to move the plane up or down on command. I’d like to replace all those stinking S75 with them. But a new BEC would be a must at that point, and it’s an expensive upgrade. So until another S75 bites the dust (and hopefully I can recover the plane) I’ll be sticking with my current setup.

Of course R/C planes aren’t my only vice, I also recently broke out the ole’ Micro RS4. I think it was some 8 years ago that this little 1/18th scale R/C car took the radio control world by storm. I spent more time than most people should playing around with this sweet little R/C car, so much so that it took up almost 3 years worth of my time and life. (Check out www.aktionRC.com and you’ll see what I’m talking about). Now it’s been more than 3 years since I even opened the boxes that these cars lie dormant in and inside of one weekend I have almost 4 complete rollers ready for electronics and ready to race. Now that my kids are a little older and the HOA built a full-court basketball court up the street, I’ve got the perfect racing team and perfect track to race at. Once I get them up and running I’ll throw up some more pictures and specs of what they’re running. For now it looks like the kids’ 2 cars will run stock motors on full-upgraded 540 and 480 chassis’ converted back for stock setups and my car will be running a 180-sized 6200 Kv brushless on an 11.1V li-po. Should be lots of fun! More details to follow…

So a good friend of mine is close to winning this Willy Wonka contest by having the most downloads of his music. So in an effort to help him win this contest, I’m throwing up the video player here and asking that anyone who comes across my blog to please give his songs a listen. Cary writes some great music with clean beats and catchy melodies that is sure to keep you coming back for more.

Turn up your speakers, sit back and enjoy the tunes. (Move your mouse over the player to unmute it). To hear more music from Cary Judd or to pick up a copy of his latest album, visit www.caryjudd.com. You can also hear more great songs by clicking on the Music tab in the player below. So here you go Cary, hope this helps you win.

Okay, I admit it, I’m not the greatest blogger in the world. I thought it would be more fun to do, or I’d be more into it, but as time goes on, it just interests me less and less. I’m either a lazy bum or I have nothing to blog about, or a little of both. I’ve always been sort of at odds with the whole “let the world know everything about you” frame of mind. Part of me wants to let loose, and the other more sensible side, keeps me in check. That’s why I don’t blog on this site very often, or update my Facebook status or worse yet, actually attempt to even create a Twitter account. Must be my age showing through, because I know the kids just love this sort of stuff. This post in fact may never see the light of day, as do many of my incomplete drafts.

So what has Dan been up to these days? Well, I’ve been taking tons of pictures with my Nikon D40 that I bought a few months back. Hands down best investment I’ve ever made in terms of capturing priceless memories. That thing has paid for itself out of the great photos I’ve taken of my kids. Pictures that have captured moments in their lives that hopefully they will be able to look at one day and remember when they were young. Sure, the point-and-shoot cameras capture memories too, but there’s something unique about the way an SLR can capture so much more out of a facial expression, or a laugh, or a smile in one of my children. I absolutely love using it and can’t seem to take enough pictures. So much so that it’s brought me to an interesting topic of conversation regarding picture management and back-ups. I currently have just over 104GB of digital pictures that span the last 10 years of my life and lives of my wife and children. That makes up 40,173 pictures in 522 folders on my computer as of this writing. So I usually end up struggling with two things – how do you manage that many pictures? And how to you backup that many pictures to ensure they last…forever? But that’s a post for another day.

Other than that, we bought an Xbox 360 and Guitar Hero World Tour. Bought the Arcade edition from Target (and got a Jasper core). So the wife and I have been staying up late at night playing that instead of just watching TV. We’ve both pretty much mastered playing most of the songs on Bass on Expert, which is a bit easier than playing Guitar on Expert. I can play most of the songs on Hard, but Expert is still too much for me, depends on the song, but I’m getting better. The kids actually like playing it too. We just need to get some other games.

Though playing Guitar Hero has its fun, it hasn’t stopped me from playing the real guitar and writing my own music (okay, so it’s slowed it down a bit). I did manage to build a mini recording studio (a very modest one at that) in our den with some equipment I’ve been accumulating over the years. I built a super cheap Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) out of an old 2.0 GHz P4 computer. I installed the latest RC of Windows 7 and have been using that in addition to some free software (Audacity, Riffworks) to lay down some tracks of some songs I’ve been wanting to work on. It’s a lot of fun, but so far I haven’t turned out anything even remotely decent. But I’ve had some fun doing covers of other people’s songs and just figuring out how to play some new songs. I’ve added Coldplay’s The Scientist to my list of cool piano songs I can now play. I was intending on transcribing it, but so far haven’t got around to it. If you’d like it, drop me a comment and I’ll get my butt off the Guitar Hero and finish it up. It’s such a great song and fairly easy play. I’ve also been figuring out the tab for Hey There Delilah by Plain White T’s. That’s a great song, I end up with it stuck in my head all day long, but it never gets old. And it’s a great song to just sit down and play. My wife wants me to teach her how to play it. And she never plays the guitar (unless you count playing Guitar Hero).

In other news, I’ve been dying to build a new Core i7-based computer to replace my aging 3.2 GHz P4 but so far just haven’t been able to justify the need to spend the $1300 it’s going to cost to get me the system I want (i.e., 920 CPU, 6GB RAM, X58 Mobo, 1920×1200 LCD, 10k RPM HDD, 2x 1TB HDDs, 4670 graphics, etc.). So it just sits in my Wish List over on Newegg while I watch the prices of hard drives, CPUs, motherboards and RAM drop into the dirt. Though in all honesty, the new MacBook Pros have caught my eye. I’ve been looking at getting a netbook to replace this massive Dell (that’s really just a huge brick) and the 13″ MBP just looks so stinking awesome. Not because I want to “switch” and become a Mac guy, but just because Apple’s sweet-looking hardware and insane battery life is so much better than anything Dell, Asus, Acer or HP have to offer, in my opinion. First order of business though would be to install Boot Camp and get Windows 7 on that little beast. That would be very cool. I’m not buying anything until Windows 7 is officially released. I’ve been using the RC for a month now and it is awesome. But again, a post for another day.

And that’s about it. It’s no wonder though that I never blog, this post alone took more time to write than I care to admit. Though I’m going to try and get a few extra posts in here in the coming months of some of the things I’ve been working on or playing with, and I’m going to try and keep them short and sweet, if that’s even possible coming from me. If not, we’ll see you in 8-10 more months.

I’ve got an old XEQ-2 active crossover made by EV that I’ve been using for the crossover on my subwoofer for my home theater. The one thing I always disliked about this EQ was the 30-Hz built-in high pass filter. Worse than that, the options for adjusting this filter don’t offer any solutions. Each click of the switch adds +6 dB boost at varying frequencies from 29Hz to 60Hz. Definitely not optimized for HT and certainly not for a subwoofer that is, by design, flat to 20 Hz. What I really wanted was to do was adjust the filter for a predetermined cutoff frequency that corresponded exactly to the maximum excursion capability of my new Audiopulse vented subwoofer. And this is how I did it.

First off, why put a high pass filter on a subwoofer at all? Commonly referred to as a rumble filter or subsonic filter, the idea is to remove frequencies below that which you can’t hear or those frequencies below where your sub can adequately produce, in an effort to reduce driver excursion and reduce stresses put on your amplifier. Any vented subwoofer will essentially unload below tuning which can cause the driver to exceed its rated xmax (or even xmech) cause severe damage to the driver. However, the problem with most rumble filters is the cutoff frequency is arbitrarily chosen and usually does not represent the ideal cutoff point for the subwoofer to which it is connected. It is either too high, in which case it negatively impacts the natural frequency response of the driver/enclosure, or it’s too low and still allows the driver to exceed its rated excursion capability. An ideal subsonic filter is achieved by setting the cutoff frequency to be low enough to have a negligible impact on the acoustic response of the driver/enclosure while still maintaining just the right amount of safety margin for the driver so that it does not exceed xmax.

The EV XEQ-2 is the perfect crossover for achieving this. The first thing I needed to find was the service manual for this unit. I found it in an unlikely place – someone’s eBay auction that had ended months ago. They had a link to both the manual and the service manual. The service manual has the schematic for the unit which is key into figuring out how to adjust the high pass circuitry. This is what I learned while looking over the schematic. The filter for the low pass section is made up of a single-chip dual op-amp. The one op-amp is for the 18 dB/octave low pass section and the other is for the high pass section. This is how the high pass filter and boost work according to the service manual:

“U2 (1) is an active high pass filter. S2, the LF EQ switch, controls the cutoff frequency. In the FLAT position, U2 (1) becomes a second order (12 dB/oct.) high pass filter [which is down -3dB at 30Hz]. At other positions, U2 (1) becomes an underdamped high pass filter. In an underdamped second order filter, a peak occurs in the frequency response just before the curve breaks away from a flat response. Once past the peak frequency, the curve falls at 12 dB/octave. The peak frequency is noted in the swtich markings on the front panel. The peak amplitude is approximately 6 dB.”

This is the basic function for many bass boost circuits found in a lot of plate amps. It’s just an underdamped, i.e., high-Q, high pass filter which creates a peak is the response at a calculated frequency. The calculation for determining the f3 (or -3dB point) of an active 12dB/octave filter such as this is represented by the formula: f3 = 1/((2*pi*(R1*R2*C1*C2)^0.5). Damping is represented by Q and is calculated by the formula: Q = 1/2*(R1/R2)^0.5 where C1=C2. Since am trying to achieve a maximally flat response, I will shoot for a Q = .707, which results in a very simple resistor calculation represented by R2=R1*2.

For my application I wanted to reduce the FLAT response so that the corner of the filter is somewhere below 20Hz, or the same frequency that corresponds to the point where by sub begins to reach xmax. To determine the best -3dB point for my rumble filter, I checked out the excursion plots from Unibox for my sub design. Excursion doesn’t become a problem at 500W input until we go below 18 Hz. So that is about the point that I need the corner of this filter to be set to.

Though the formulas are usually enough for determining the necessary values, I ran across a really cool simulation tool that let’s you build a simple schematic and then run an AC analysis to see just how your circuit will look in the real world. It’s called National Instruments Multisim Analog Devices Edition. I found this tool while checking out some op-amps from Analog’s Devices web site. I won’t go into a lot of detail on the capabilities of the free version of this software, other than I found it works very well for modeling and simulating active filters, among many other things. I drew up the schematic, following the schematic in the service manual, of just the low and high pass portion of the entire EQ. This version is limited to 25 components, so I was unable to add the input unity gain buffer circuitry since that pushed it over the 25 components. For the simulation though it doesn’t really need it since it assumes the AC voltage source is a already a low impedance source. If you were to want to build this circuit, I would recommend adding the input buffer so the high output impedance of various receivers does not inadvertently alter your low pass cutoff frequency. A full schematic is shown here as well. I set up the low pass for around 80Hz with resistor values that were calculated using the formulas as defined in the owner’s manual for the XEQ-2.

I entered the values for FLAT which is a 36k and 75k ohm resistor and ran an AC simulation from 1Hz to 1kHz. The results show up in a graph in a new window. The simulation appeared very accurate as the -3dB point was exactly 30Hz, right where EV says it should be, and right where I’ve measured it before. Also, the 80Hz low pass modeled correctly as well. Satisfied that my schematic is correct, and the simulation is working properly, I began adjusting R23 and R29 according to the results I had calculate above shooting for a Q of .707 and recording where the actual f3 turned up. In most cases everything was dead on. The simulated response was pretty much right where the formula said it would be and had no hump or bump, hence critically damped, and perfect for my subsonic filter.

Now this is all fun and games, but how do I decide what cutoff is right for my sub to prevent overexcursion? And how will it affect the frequency response? This is where a great feature in Unibox 4.08 becomes extremely useful. There is the option to import an .frd file, which is summed with the box response giving you combined response of your enclosure and your active EQ. Using NI Multisim I was able to export each of the simulated FR plots and pull them into Unibox to see just how the different cutoff frequencies affect both the FR and the excursion. My first filter cutoff was set to 15Hz, and although it had very little impact on the FR of the sub, it still allowed the sub to be overdriven below 15Hz at 500W input power. So I adjusted the filter and imported a 19Hz cutoff point. Now the excursion is in check and never exceeds 22mm at 500W input power and the FR is minimally impacted. This is most likely the ideal spot, if I had just one cutoff point to choose, but the great thing about the XEQ-2, is that it offers six different cutoff points which are easily selected between with a switch on the front panel. This is where as massive DP6T (dual-pole-six-throw) switch comes in really handy. I can select resistors values in pairs for all 6 switch positions which correspond to 6 different cutoff frequencies and remove using any boost completely.

So the plan is to replace R23-R36 with resistor values which correspond to cutoffs of 12Hz, 14Hz, 16HZ, 18Hz, and 20Hz with no bass boost. Then the last switch setting of FLAT I will remove the resistors completely which basically removes the filter from the circuit and makes the response flat to 1 Hz. So when it says flat, it will truly mean flat.

For the last year or so I’ve been wanting to get a new digital camera. Up until now our current Canon SD400 has been solely responsible for taking thousands of pictures of the kids, vacations, projects, speakers, computers, R/C cars, planes and everything else over the course of its life. It’s actually been a really great camera, so good that there’s been very little drive to buy a new one – until last week. My daughter turned 4 on Wednesday and my wife was throwing her a birthday party in which she found herself taking care of about ten kids all by herself. As she was juggling playing games, face painting and taking pictures of everybody there came a knock at the door. She was out on the patio in the backyard and she had set the camera in her lap but when she stood up suddenly to get the door, the camera went crashing down to the hard patio ground with a thud. She thought momentarily, crap, I broke the camera, I bet Dan will be thrilled.

Upon powering it up the lens did not want to retract back into the camera body and just beeped and shut off. I spent an hour or so messing with it trying to get it working again, even went so far as to tear the whole thing apart. It’s pretty amazing the complexity of a something like a digital camera, so many tiny pieces and parts that work together in perfect unison to do something as ’simple’ as take a picture. I got all the way to the lens mechanism when I concluded it was probably was shot. It no longer would freely rotate in and out though I couldn’t tell exactly what had broken. But even if I could fix it at this point, or buy a new lens somehow, I’d probably never get the camera back together. So I figured it was time to say goodbye to the trusty point-and-shoot and pick up something bigger, something better, something like a digital SLR. So I bought a Nikon D40 and after taking only 30 or shots tonight, I couldn’t be happier.

There’s a lot of great DSLRs on the market these days and you can spend anything from a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars without looking too far and from what I’ve read, just about any SLR is better than most point-and-shoots. Now I don’t consider myself a photographer by any means, but I really wanted to take a shot at getting a decent camera to see if photography was something I could really get into but I didn’t want to spend an arm and a leg for a super-fancy camera either. Ultimately I decided on the D40 because of it’s affordable price, numerous features, and great customer reviews.

The D40 came out in December of 2006, almost 2 years ago, but it continues to compare extremely well with even the newest cameras that are coming out. In spite of its relatively low pixel count by today’s standards, it’s got all the necessary features one would need in an SLR. Features I don’t even understand as of this writing, but hope to soon figure out. I bought a book to go along with the camera, because like they say, a camera is only as good as the photographer. Without learning how to use this camera, it probably won’t do me much good, or at least I won’t be getting all that I can out of it without learning how to set some basic functions and what they all mean. It’s all been very exciting. So far I’ve just taken a few shots of my 2-month old son on Auto, at night, inside the house, with the flash and they have all turned out 10x better than anything that old SD400 was capable of doing. My favorite part is the shallow depth of field that this thing has. Close-up shots show great detail on the face but everything else, like the background, are soft and out of focus. They make the pictures look so much more realistic with much more depth, rather than being just a flat 2-dimensional image, even though that’s still what they are.

I obviously have nowhere near the experience with the camera to give a decent review at this time, but with the many reviews that already exist, there’s nothing more I could say about the camera that hasn’t been said by seasoned professionals. Here’s just a few of the reviews that convinced me that even though this camera is probably the least expensive DSLR available today, it’s definitely worth looking into for anyone delving into the SLR world for the first time.

Ken Rockwell Raves about the D40
Steve’s Digicams D40 Review
Digital Photography Review – The D40
The Nikon D40 from Amazon

I bought the camera from Amazon for $431 and got a free $17 neck strap. I also picked up this book, the Nikon D40/D40x Digital Field Guide by David B. Busch and so far have made it through just the first chapter. It’s the best-reviewed, highest-rated book on Amazon for this camera, so it seemed like a logical choice of books to get. It seems like all my decisions these days are based solely on logic. Not sure what’s wrong with me. But according to Amazon the D40 the ranked #2 only behind the Canon Rebel XSi which costs $215 more than the D40. That’s just enough to pick up a decent 55-200mm VR zoom lens. Additionally the D40 is the least-expensive, highest-reviewed DSLR you can buy and gets a ‘Highly Recommended’ by all the major review sites that I came across. When it came to replacing my old (and now broken) point-and-shoot, the option of buying a new point-and-shoot did cross my mind briefly, but with the cost of the D40 being so reasonable, and the performance being so much better, it just didn’t make much sense to pick up anything else. I’ll be posting some pictures in the next few weeks so stay tuned.

Sometimes a good deal comes along that’s so good you need to jump on it whether you need the item or not. For me today that deal was an AMD Athlon 64 3800+ Venice core CPU for $21.99 from Newegg with free shipping. A 24-hour deal that as of this writing ends in less than 2 hours and of the 99 desktop CPUs on Newegg it is the cheapest one available just beating out a vanilla Sempron LE-1100 by $1. It’s pretty amazing the kind of technology that can be bought for $22, less than what it takes to fill my car only halfway with gas. This 3-year old processor used to sell for over $350 and was once considered one of the best performing CPUs available with great overclocking potential. The 3800+ represented the highest stock-clocked Venice core from AMD and runs at a cool 2.40Ghz. Most people have been able to get this CPU up to 2.7-2.8GHz on air cooling and with only a marginal bump in Vcore. This 89W processor built on 90nm technology certainly can’t compete with today’s 65nm and 45nm processors in terms of power dissipation or performance, but for a mere $22, I’m not sure anything else comes close in terms of price-to-performance ratio.

Okay, so I’m sure I didn’t need to buy this aging hunk of transistors and silicon, but I figured Newegg wasn’t going to have these around for long (not a single 939-socket mobo can be found on their site) and once it was gone I’m sure it will be gone for good. And since I’ve got a 939-based system for my HTPC, I thought it would be good to just have on hand either as a backup, or as an upgrade to my 3200+ Venice core that’s in there now. Though the benefit may be marginal, since my 3200+ is already overclocked to 2.4GHz, essentially making it a 3800+, I am hoping to be able to squeak a few more MHz out of the OC and get it running at 2.6-2.7GHz, therefore in keeping in tune with AMDs naming convention, it would be somewhere around a 4100+ (which according to the way I remember AMD marketing these things, it should be comparable to a Pentium IV running at 4.1GHz).

I’m still on the fence with the whole Blu-ray DVD player, but feel that I may need a small bump in processing power for decent playback of Blu-ray DVDs without hiccups. This is my last ditch effort to keep an old PC around for at least a few more years and still have it do what I need it to do. I’m planning on keeping Windows XP on this machine for as long as humanly possible. Up until a month ago I was still running Windows 2000 on at least one my computers in the house, so I can imagine running XP for several years to come. Anyway, there’s tons of great articles on AMDs Venice CPUs and different systems people have thrown together with lots of benchmarks and results from overclocking. Though I can’t recommend jumping into the already-dead 939 socket, for $22 you could build a very capable HTPC or light gaming rig for cheaper than you could build almost any other system with any other CPU today.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/8327/1
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/3800Venice
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/athlon64-venice.html
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2548&p=1

Update 11/22/2008 – I finally found some time tonight to pull out my old 3200 and install the new 3800. I remembered to drop the clock back down to the stock clock, so I wouldn’t have any issues booting up with the new CPU. The swap was a breeze. I cleaned up the HSF with some rubbing alcohol and put on a new thin layer of Arctic Silver heat sink compound and clamped it onto the CPU nice and tight. I definitely liked the way Socket 939 worked in that regard, way easier than Intel’s LGA 775 socket. Unbelievably Microsoft didn’t make me reactive Windows like I expected was going to happen. Apparently you have to change out more than just one major component to have to go through that. Thank goodness for small favors (though it only takes 6 minutes and a call to MS to get it reactivated, so it’s no big deal, but if you don’t have to do it, the better).

I immediately rebooted and went into the BIOS and started OC’ing. Not that I need to OC it, in fact it’s plenty fast for just a modest HTPC at the stock speed, but where’s the fun in running stock? I bumped it up 5% and everything ran fine, so I bumped it up 10% and added a bit of Vcore just to bring it up to 1.40V as read by CPU-Z. Everything was still running good and the CPU was running at 2.64 GHz with the bus at 220 MHz, HT at 880 MHz and my DDR400 running at 220 MHz (or 440 MHz). I tried going one step further to 225 and Windows wouldn’t boot. So I bumped the Vcore up to 1.45V and it still wouldn’t boot. So I called it good for now and dropped it back down to 220 MHz and set the Vcore for 1.425V. Things seem to work fine there. I was more curious as to how much higher the x12 multiplied 3800 CPU would go over the x10 multiplier of the 3200. I was running a 15% OC just to get to 2.30 GHz and now I’m running a modest 10% overclock and my CPU is at 2.64 GHz. I watched The Incredibles and there wasn’t a single hiccup and the audio didn’t drop out on me once. So I’d say it was a worthwhile investment. Windows loads in under 30 seconds and I can be on the Internet or watching a movie just a few seconds later. Additionally, windows shuts down in less than 10 seconds. I know it’s not a real merit for how fast your computer is, but I’m keeping this machine extremely light on software apps, so I don’t have any benchmarking suites installed. Other than Super PI, which this thing can calculate to 1M decimal places in 33 seconds. Slow by today’s standards, but still faster than it was! My 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo E6700 does it in 17 seconds. So, yeah.

I decided to join Netflix today after reading a lot of great things about their new “Watch Instantly” feature. They’ve got over 12,000 titles available for immediate download to your PC, or as the case may be, your Home Theater PC. With my new HTPC working quite nicely, the only next thing to worry about is what to watch? I’ve been enjoying watching recaps of the Olympics, which utilizes Microsoft’s new SilverLight plug-in for IE. (All I have to say about that is it looks fantastic and playback is crisp and clear and uninterrupted). But when it comes to options for downloadable movies, Netflix seemed to be the obvious choice for it’s great selection, low monthly subscription costs and unlimited movie downloads. That’s right, unlimited downloads for all but the most basic plan. I opted for the $8.99/month plan which allows only 1 DVD out at a time but unlimited movie downloads. I plan on testing this unlimited concept over the next 14 days.

So far the kids have watched just about all of the Charlie Brown episodes and Free Willy 2 while I’ve only watched Almost Heroes (Matthew Perry is so funny in that movie) and an episode of 30 Rock and all of them have played flawlessly. The picture quality on our 50″ HD LCD TV looks near DVD quality and even somewhat better than network broadcast SD content. The original aspect ratio of the movie is maintained during normal and fullscreen playback which is what I personally prefer since there’s nothing worse than geometric distortion in movies. You’d never even notice that you were watching streamed video online from a computer. Movies are decoded as 2.0 Dolby Pro Logic and sound just fine through the S/PDIF out. Though 5.1 would be really nice, I don’t suppose it’s totally necessary for casual movie watching. Though if Netflix wants their download feature to take a serious position in the average home theater, they will need to to add 5.1, I believe.

Netflix has a great gallery view of movies that are broken down into genres and further into subcategories of each genre. By just hovering over a movie, you get a quick glance at other details, such as the rating, runtime, etc. There’s additional details submitted by reviewers that goes into more details on how the movies are rated, so you can further monitor whether or not that PG movie is going to have anything that might be inappropriate for your 5-year old (though not quite as detailed as Amazon’s IMDB). The web pages are easy to navigate and well laid out. Additionally, once you start to rate a few movies, Netflix begins to get an idea of the kinds of movies you like and makes recommendations, which is very cool.

The movies play back using a Windows Media Player plugin for Internet Explorer (IE6+ and WMP11 required) which must be downloaded the first time you watch a movie and takes only a few seconds to install. The quality of the movie you get depends on your internet connection speed and comes in 3 flavors. The highest claims to be about 2.2Mbps bitrate video. That’s about 1/2 what you might get from a DVD so expect there to be some amount of additional compression but the picture still looks quite good. The last time I ran a bandwidth check on my Internet I was getting just over 19Mbps, so needless to say, everything we’ve watched has been the highest quality. Even my laptop over a wireless-G connection will play the highest-quality downloads. There’s definitely room for Netflix to move up to an HD-quality stream, especially since WMP is already set up to decode up to 1080p without issues. The infrastructure is in place, it’s just matter of when HD will be available. On their site the only comment they make is that they are working to offer HD content “in the future”. I’m hoping they kick it in gear really soon, because ideally, high definition downloads on-demand would be awesome.

Anyway, if you also live 20 minutes from a Blockbuster and they’ve called you half-a-dozen times letting you know that you’ve basically just bought the last three movies you never returned (no, that’s never happened to me :-p) and you’ve got a PC you can hook to a TV, I would definitely recommend checking out Netflix. We all know it’s been around for a while but if you haven’t looked into it, now’s the time to try it out.

Update 10/1/2008 – Netflix announced a deal with Starz today that resulted in over 1,000 new movies being available to watch instantly, a lot of which are, believe it or not, actually worth watching. Up until today I would have given Netflix a D- in terms of decent content. They tout a lot of movies, but after watching a few oldies-but-goodies, there wasn’t much else that was even remotely worthwhile. Renting DVDs through the mail was the only way to get anything good. Now they’ve got Spiderman III, Pirates of the Caribbean and Meet the Robinsons just to name a few. The kids are watching Disney’s Enchanted right now and the picture quality looks great (not that they are paying any attention to that). I have noticed that there is a much more dominant strobe effect to the background during pans and scans. It’s not always noticeable, it depends on how quickly or slowly the camera is panning over a scene, but it is definitely choppier than a regular DVD. It’s probably due to movies being filmed at only 24fps but is most likely compounded by the extra compression in getting a 5GB down to only 1GB. Though I haven’t read about anyone else complaining about the same thing. Anyway, I haven’t browsed all that’s new, but I’ve added at least 10 movies to my Watch Instantly queue and can’t wait to sit down a watch a few of them.

In the same week that I picked up a used HP 3.0GHz P4 computer, my old Athlon 2600-based HTPC bit the dust. So I ended up taking the Biostar/AMD computer I had built for my daughter last year and turning that into the new HTPC. She ended up getting the new HP. The computer works great for her and her games but doesn’t offer too many options for tweaking, since it’s basically a bone stock HP D530C desktop with integrated graphics and built around the old i845 chipset. It’s got a Northwood core Pentium in it and 1GB of RAM, running Windows XP and it works great for a kid’s PC. The computer I had built for her last year sported a Biostar TForce 6100-based mobo with a 16x PCIe slot and the now-obsolete 939 socket for the older AMD Athlon 64 CPUs. I built that whole computer for about $160 with an Antec case and although it’s definitely not the fastest machine in the house, it turned out to be a great starting point for the new HTPC build.

I thought I was going to have to pick up a new sound card since it didn’t appear that this board supported S/PDIF, which is essential for delivering 5.1 DD/DTS sound. I lucked out when I realized that it actually had the S/PDIF output after checking over the manual online. Since I had bought it as an open box special from Newegg, I didn’t get the adapter that allowed you to use the S/PDIF out, so I didn’t even realize it had it. From the manual I found which pins on the S/PDIF header were for the coaxial line and soldered my own header together with an RCA jack on the other end. I plugged it into my coaxial input on my Sony DD receiver and voila, I had 5.1 surround sound. Biostar does sell the cable for $15, so either way I would have been able to get it to work, just this way was cheaper.

I bought a new Western Digital 3.0 Gb/s SATA 640GB HDD to replace the old WD IDE 320GB one I had been using for the last couple of years. This new drive is made up of two single 320GB platters and offers cool, quiet performance. I partitioned off 40GB for Windows XP and left the rest for data. So far the drive has been great, and the clean install of Windows makes for a speedy-feeling new PC. Later on I plan on upgrading to Vista and using Media Center, but for now it’s just XP. I also will get an HD TV Tuner card sometime soon, though for now my HD DVR is working fine.

The biggest complaint I had with my old HTPC was more or less the fault of my Sony HDTV, which put a 1″ black band around the picture when using the VGA input. Sony apparently did this on purpose since they assumed since you’re hooking up a PC that you wouldn’t want any overscanning. Which is true, mostly, unless that PC is going to be playing back movies, home videos and viewing pictures, in which case you do want a certain percentage of overscanning. But the 1″ underscan was just annoying. And the only way to really get rid of it properly is to not use the VGA input at all and instead use the HDMI input. Which meant, I needed to buy a new graphics card to replace the integrated graphics of the 6100.

I basically wanted the cheapest graphics card that was HDCP-ready, had HDMI out and fit a PCI Express x16 slot, since I had an older motherboard that doesn’t support the latest 2.0 standard. Most people like to go with fanless cards for HTPCs since they are obviously quieter, but I’ve found that fanless cards tend to run hotter, and that heat just makes everything else in your case hotter, so what you think you may be gaining in noise, you’re losing in having to deal with some extra heat. In reality, a quiet fan can be just as good or better and still not be noticeable above the noise of the other fans in the system.

The card I ended up picking was a Radeon HD 2600PRO from ASUS. It was $54 with a $30 rebate, so I thought, what the heck, for $24 maybe I can finally get rid of that stinking 1″ black border! It’s not the sportiest graphics card for gaming, but should be capable of fluid playback of 1080p video, which is all I really need. I have actually been really impressed with the card so far. It’s nice and small, so it should fit in just about any case, even the smaller HTPC cases. It does have a fan, but it spins quite slowly and is inaudible above the other 3 fans in my case, which are also set to spin as slowly as possible while still maintaining decent operating temps. From 3 feet away, the whole thing is completely silent. (Update: This card is now obsolete, but the Radeon 2600 XT can still be had and is actually a better card with a higher clock and GDDR3 memory. Just don’t forget to pick up a DVI->HDMI adapter since for whatever reason, the XT doesn’t come with one).

I downloaded the most recent Catalyst drivers and have been having fun messing with the settings. The best option this thing has is the ability to select exactly how much over/underscan you want with a simple slider. With the HDMI out running into the TV, I was able to set the card to overscan just enough to get rid of any borders, but still allow me to get to the Start menu in Windows and hit the X to close down apps. I couldn’t believe that I wasted hours, days, even weeks messing with PowerStrip trying to get my old card to lose those black borders and with this card I did it in less than 1 minute. Amazingly simple. And the HDMI picture looks flawless. I don’t believe I’ve got 1:1 pixel mapping, since the text is somewhat blurred, but the intent of the HTPC is for TV, movies and pictures, not writing text. I’m sure you could get 1:1 pixel mapping, but for me having the overscan right where I want it is more important. The resolution is set to 1280×720 with a 60Hz refresh rate, which is native for my 3 year old 720p HDTV.

Just for kicks, I ran the Auto Tune Overclocking feature which took the GPU core clock from 600MHz up to 790MHz in 5Mhz steps and then bumped up the memory from 500MHz to 550MHz before telling me the auto tune was complete and the settings were optimized. Everything worked fine till I tried running 3DMark05 when it crashed. OC’d too high apparently. So I dropped it down to 700/525MHz and it ran just fine. I hadn’t even intended on overclocking this card, since I really don’t need it, but it’s kind of fun to have it overclocked, though it didn’t make much difference playing back DVDs or WMVHD files. I ran 3DMark05 and got a score of 6455.

My CPU is an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Venice core which is overclocked to 2.40GHz with a Vcore of 1.425V up from the stock 2.0GHz and 1.40V. I’ve got the HTT multiplier set to 4x which gives me an HTT speed of 960 MHZ, right in between the recommended 800-1000MHz. My memory speed is set to 166MHz, which operates at 200MHz with the stated bus OC. There aren’t a lot of multiplier options for the RAM with this mobo, but running the DDR400 at 200MHz essentially represents stock speeds. The only next higher option is to run it at 240MHz, which my RAM didn’t seem to like. Thought I didn’t mess with the timings or voltages. They are stock at 2.5, 3, 3, 8 and 2.6V. I’ve got 2×512MB of Corsair ValueSelect running in dual channel mode for a total of 1GB, which is plenty for running XP and playing movies. I spent quite a bit of time messing with the overclock options in the BIOS and getting plenty of beeps and booting issues until I settled on a reasonable overclock. My Venice core didn’t like running at 2.6GHz, but was stable at 2.5GHz, though my S/PDIF seemed top drop the audio more often with it that high. So 2.4GHz seemed like a decent OC while still allowing me to keep things nice and cool. I calculated pi to 1M places in 36 seconds (using the super-cool Super Pi), the same time it takes my P4 which is OC’d to 3.5GHz. AMD certainly had something going for it back in the day. In reality, I need to keep the OC at a minimum, since power efficiency is also important for a PC that typically might be powered on most of the day. I just think it’s fun to push it and see what it can do.

CPU usage while playing DVD movies (480p) is around 3-10%. While playing some 1080p WMVHD stuff from Microsoft in Media Player 11, CPU usage went up to about 25-35% and playback was still smooth without hiccups. While watching some HD trailers from Apple in Quicktime 7, CPU usage went up to over 60% and playback was interrupted a couple of times most likely from the stream coming in too slow. Playback still looked fine otherwise. I have in the plan to buy a Lite-On Blu-ray DVD player as soon as I can come up with an extra $100 bucks to spend. I’m hoping that this setup will be capable of smooth playback of at least 720p of the latest Blu-ray titles, since that’s all my TV can display. Based on what I’ve read, they recommend a faster CPU than what I’ve got, but I think with it overclocked like it is, I think I’ll be able to swing it. My new 2600PRO should be up to the task though. The GPU usage during my sample 1080p stuff was only 10%, so apparently it doesn’t take much to playback 1080p in reality. Obviously if I were building a new HTPC today, it most likely would not incorporate any of these pieces of hardware, since most are obsolete, but it just doesn’t represent the latest and greatest of what’s available or what could be built today. But it also goes to show that it doesn’t take a lot of cash and the fastest processors and graphics cards to make a decent home theater PC. Even an old PC can become converted with just a few minor hardware upgrades.

So to sum up, heres’ some quick specs on the new HTPC w/links to Newegg for more details:

Biostar TForce6100-939 Motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 3200 OC’d to 2.4 GHz
2×512 MB Corsair ValueSelect RAM
Western Digital 640GB Hard Drive SATA 3.0 Gbs
Asus HD2600 Pro 256MB Graphics Card
Antec NSK4400 Case and 380W PSU
Windows XP SP3

Here’s a couple of pictures:

Ben Gibbard and company performed last night in Mesa and quite literally rocked the stage for almost 2 hours straight. They played a total of 22 songs all of which sounded fast, loud and rockin’. They put their studio versions of each song to shame. Even the mellower, slower songs just rock when they play them live. They need to release a live CD. They’ve just got so much energy. After the first couple of songs, Ben and Chris commented on how hot it was. Yes, it’s hot in Arizona. Yesterday it was 109°F at 5:00 P.M. and by the time Death Cab came on it was still 103°F (though other weather reports say it was a few degrees hotter than that). Ben said “it’s like a microwave…in about 45 minutes…I’ll be delicious.” Chris said it was more like a “macrowave”. Ah, but it’s a dry heat guys. Nothing like Virginia this time of year. I was impressed though, even in the heat, they didn’t miss a beat.

There were very little breaks between songs, it was just one great tune after another all blended together into one great show. They played a good mix of old stuff and new stuff, the favorites and the classics. They put on such a great show that it was hard to believe it was already 10:00 P.M. by the time they played their last tune and said good night. I really just wanted them to keep going until they’d exhausted every tune off of every album. They kept the between-song chitter chatter at a minimum, but the best thing Gibbard said was in the middle of Follow You Into the Dark, there were a few people waving lighters in the air, and he says, “I like you guys keeping it real with the lighters, it makes a band feel they’re Bon Jovi.” Ben rocks. It was an awesome show, one that won’t be forgotten any time soon.

Here’s what they played in order – Mesa Amphitheater, June 19th, 2008. This playlist is going on the iPod right now.

Bixby Canyon Bridge
The New Year
Why You’d Want to Live Here
Photobooth
Crooked Teeth
Long Division
Grapevine Fires
A Movie Script Ending
Company Calls
Title Track
Soul Meets Body
I Will Follow You Into the Dark
I Will Possess Your Heart
Cath
Sound of Settling
Marching Bands of Manhattan
—Encore—
Your Bruise
Title and Registration
No Sunlight
Styrofoam Plates
Tiny Vessels
Transatlanticism

I didn’t bring my camera to the show, but here’s some video that some other dude shot. Enjoy!