Carl Hutzler’s Blog

We had our pretty much annual (at this point) Memorial Day party today. A bunch of close friends came over. Phil made his trademark margaritas, we “kicked” a mini Heineken keg, and Badminton was a plenty. I set-up a black back drop and a couple of flashes and let people do self portraits of themselves. The results were pretty cool.

A couple of weekends back the family went to Philadelphia to the Franklin museum to see the King Tut exhibit and the science stuff too :-) On the way back we visited Longwood Gardens which is near Wilmington, DE. If you have never been to Longwood, you should go. Anytime of year is amazing. Some more pix here.

A great post over at lifehacker.com shows how to take some open source code that Google ported to the Mac which allows you to mount a remote file system right on your desktop as if it were a local drive. Basically the software suite uses MacFusion and MacFuse to enable this feature set. Once installed you can mount both FTP and SSH shares as if they were local. And the cost is right too! ($0.00)
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Did you know that you can get crystal clear HDTV signals right over the air? I guess I did somehow realize it, but to be honest I did not fully comprehend how easy it was to get HDTV via a UHF antenna until recently. It just never dawned on me that over the air (OTA) signals could be that good. I guess I was trained that TV from an antenna always had static, ghosting and was a general PITA. That’s why we have cable, right?

Well I have good news if you don’t already know….the good news is that with that old UHF antenna you have on your roof or in your attic, you can get lots (I can get 40+ stations) of perfectly clear, high contrast, no static, beautiful HDTV stations, in very high quality all the way up to 1080i resolution! And you don’t have to pay the damn Cable or Satellite people. And from what I can observe, the quality of the OTA signals is actually better than the ones you get through Comcast Cable (maybe because Comcast compresses the signal via QAM encoding?).

Antennaweb.org is a great site to visit to see what is available in your specific location. They tell you the direction of the stations, how many miles away, and even what specific type of antenna will work for you (color coded so you buy the right one). See images below.

Oh, and you might not want to spend $900 on an HDTV TIVO either. A Mac mini or MythTV might be a better option and more versatile too.

I recently switched from Cingular to Sprint. I had been a Cingular customer for over two years but recently had become unhappy with the quality of calls, disconnects, and coverage.

I went to Sprint because they have:

a) Roaming on VZW and VZW has always had amazing coverage in the strangest places

b) Sprint had nights/weekends starting at 7pm included

c) Sprint offered an add on to let me use my EVDO/Bluetooth phone as a modem to connect to the Internet which is very useful for my businesses for $40 for unlimited.

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