30-Second Skipahead on Comcast

If you have Comcast, or any television provider that uses the Motorola DCT6412-III digital video recorder, you can program your remote control to gain a 30-second skipahead feature (like TiVo has). Here are the steps:

1. Press the “Cable” button at the top of the remote so that it is controlling the box.
2. Press and hold the “Setup” button until the LED under “Cable” flashes twice.
3. Type in the code 994. The LED will flash twice again.
4. Press but do not hold the “Setup” button.
5. Type in the code 00173. This is the skipahead code.
6. Press whatever button you want to map the skipahead code to. I suggest the “HD Zoom” button since it doesn’t appear to do anything.

This has probably been posted a million times before, but I figured somebody who hasn’t seen it before could take advantage of it.

Also, another cool thing you can do is map the “Mute” button to control the muting at the Cable box’s level instead of screwing with your television set or home theater equipment — nothing more fun then having the audio to a show just start playing randomly when a show was set to record! The process is pretty much the same, except I believe the code in step #5 is 141.

Happy skipping!

Ubuntu and Kubuntu CDs have arrived!

Woo-hoo! My set of three Ubuntu and Kubuntu discs from Ship-It have finally arrived. Now I can go and forcefully convert introduce my friends to the wonderful world of Linux!

(Oh, c’mon – what’s the point of using Linux if you can’t be an elitist bastard about it?)

Having Fun With An Ancient Apple IIe

So a little while back my dad and I were cleaning out the closet when we came across a rather large cardboard box. He asked if I wanted to see something very cool, so naturally I said yes. He took out the box and flipped open the top and said, “this was my first computer, ever – it’s an Apple IIe.” I knew about the original Apple computers as a result of reading Digg and also from having seen Pirates of Silicon Valley, but it was really amazing to see this ancient piece of technology still sitting around in my very own home. What was even cooler, though, was that my dad had replaced the top of his Apple IIe with a specially cut piece of transparent plexiglass – effectively adding a window casemod! 8)

The next logical step, of course, meant to fire this machine up and see if it still worked! So we got out a power cord and a video cable and hooked it up to the television (the only output option on these machines at the time) and flipped the I/O switch on the back of the power supply. The machine emitted a sharp loud BEEP as it awakened from its seemingly eternal slumber. No words could describe the awesomeness radiating from the computer. Trying to recall the little bit of BASIC that I knew, I punched this application into the machine with the built-in keyboard (and no SHIFT key either):

10 PRINT THIS IS SO RETRO DUDE
20 GOTO 10

My dad left me to play around on his old computer, and I took a look back into the cardboard box to see what else there was at the bottom. After some assistance in identifying the devices, there was a (really slow) serial modem, a CP/M expansion card, a guide on Apple BASIC, a booklet with the ENTIRE software source (in assembler) and the hardware schematics of the system (awesome, open specifications), a binder full of floppy disks, and two 5 1/4 inch floppy drives with ribbon cables. Sadly, I couldn’t get any of the floppy disks to be recognized by the machine as the plastic from the binder had sort of melted onto the disks. (Note to self: never store floppies in plastic sleeves for many years at a time.)

All in all, I had a great time fooling around with this ancient piece of electronics, and it really makes me appreciate how far we’ve come in such a short time with computers. I can’t wait for the day when I pull out a Pentium III fifteen years from now and laugh about the idea of actually doing work on that kind of machine.

Windows Mobile 6 Rant

While my good friend Josh is upgrading his T-Mobile Dash to the latest Windows Mobile 6, it seems I am going to be stuck with Windows Mobile 5 on my Sprint Motorola Q. Why? Oh, no other reason than because Motorola is coming out with a slightly improved phone and refuses to offer updates to their “older” models. What a rip.

I was actually looking forward to some of the new features such as the Vista look-alike skin, improve modem tethering, Mobile Office, much needed bug-fixes, and the desperately needed battery life improvements. C’mon Sprint, be cool like the other providers and actually provide us with the software update (I wouldn’t even mind paying a little for it)!

Happy Birthday to Me

Now – where’s my presents?

My favorite Firefox features

I would like to share with you some of my favorite Firefox features.

With Adblock Plus and its automatic subscription I no longer have to put up with annoying flashy banner ads that distract me from what I’m doing.

In my Bookmarks Toolbar I’ve got 11 of my most commonly visited websites and 5 great feeds right under my address bar. I can easily check the latest headlines with a single click, and a middle-click of the mouse button opens it conveniently in a new tab.

Google Browser Sync lets me keep my Bookmarks constant between all the computers in my house, and the Portable Firefox on my thumbdrive. Plus they’re encrypted.

Session Restoration is great for the occasional times that Firefox crashes on me I don’t loose all the tabs that I had open.

With the Fission extension I can move the progress bar into the address bar (Safari style), and combined with Aronnax’s GrApple theme (and UNO, of course) Firefox blends in great on my Mac. Of course when I’m feeling retro I’ll switch on Freewally’s Super Mario Bros 3 theme

VideoDownloader is a great little extension that lets me save the .flv files from Youtube clips and other embedded objects. I can then convert them to .mp4 files to stick on my portable video player.

Last but not least is the Web Developer extension. It is very powerful and has a plethora of features great for web designers, and a few for common web browsers too (like the ability to stop animations).

By the way, if you haven’t already – you should get !

You Can Encrypt, But We Can Decrypt

It’s amazing. I’ve seen over 12 articles today on Digg about this so-called magical number. I’m not really sure what it does per say, but it’s all the rage. Sorry MPAA, you can’t touch this.

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

But in all reality, it’s not so much the fact that the code is now publicly known, but it is more of a symbolic message from the Internet community screaming “we hate DRM” (and less of “we like to rip off corporations”).

I think that it is great that iTunes is now offering DRM-free higher-bitrate songs, even if Steve is just using it for publicity. It will encourage people to stop pirating music and support the artists they like in yet another way.

People like knowing that they now OWN the music they paid for, and that even if they drop their iPod, or if iTMS implodes, or they switch to Dell’s new Linux-based machine, that their music will still play without hassles. They merely want the same for their movies.