The traditional solution to "mains buzz" or "mains hum" is to make sure that all of the components in your audio/video setup are plugged into the same outlet, thus ensuring that all grounds are at the same electrical potential.  As long as there’s no potential difference between grounds, then by definition there’s no voltage, so via Ohm’s Law there can be no current flow, and thus no unwanted hum caused by the current flow.

I just finally got around to setting up my receiver here, and got some pretty nasty hum right away, which I figured was due to the computers being plugged into different outlets than the TV and receiver.  So I ran an extension cord from the computers’ power outlet over to the TV/receiver, but it made no difference.

After a little bit of searching I found out that the coaxial cable line can cause a ground loop with the other components in the system, because it’s actually only grounded at the cable company (!) and not at your house.  Sure enough, unplugging the coax resulted in beautiful silence through the stereo speakers.

To fix the problem, you need to break the ground loop, which can be done with an old 75-ohm to 300-ohm matching transformer (Radio Shack Cat. No. 15-1140).  Of course, you need a 75-ohm signal for any modern TV equipment, so the solution is to buy 2 of these transformers and hook them together: the second one reverses the transformation done by the first, so the output signal is (theoretically) the same as the input signal, except that the ground loop is broken.

Radio Shack’s Cat. No. 15-1253 is pretty much the same thing except in the opposite gender, so I bought one of each to make it simple to hook the two transformers together.  But note that item 15-1253 does not break continuity between the input and output grounds (outer shield), so using two of those won’t break the ground loop; you need at least one 15-1140.

Steve Jobs was interviewed last night at "D", the All Things Digital conference.  Best line:

Quoting RSJ:

We’ve got cards and letters from lots of people that say that iTunes is their favorite app on Windows.  It’s like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in Hell.

Since I run Linux I don’t have much use for Mac OS X nor Windows.  But I used to be a Windows user, and unfortunately I still need to keep it around because of friggin’ IE, and I can say that it’s certainly the closest OS to Hell that I’ve used.  I also need to keep a Mac OS X system around because of friggin’ Safari, and we’ve now watched quite a few episodes of The Office on it, and it really is quite a joy to use.  iTunes really is pretty sweet, it’s awesome to be able to download a whole 350 MB TV show in 8 minutes, and the interface for the video player is totally lickable.

Update: check out the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates interview.  I’m only halfway through it so far and it’s been really interesting.  (Note: the video embedded in that page is just the prologue; scroll down for links to the rest of the presentation [i.e. the actual interview].)

Google has this message at the bottom of their front page:

Watch your favorite Super Bowl ad on YouTube.

Not having watched the game yesterday, I was thinking how I would have liked to have seen the commercials.  Looks like Google is betting a few people feel the same way.  At the moment it looks like ads from yesterday haven’t been posted yet (though there are lots of older ads) but no doubt they will be soon.

Apple has 3 new Get a Mac ads and they’re even better than the last ones.  My favorite lines are from "Out of the Box":

PC: What’s your big plan?

Mac: I might make a home movie, or maybe create a website, try out my built-in camera; I can do it all right out of the box.  So what about you?

PC: First I gotta download those new drivers, then I gotta erase the trial software that came on my hard drive...

Mac: Sweet.

...

Mac: Let me know when you’re ready to go.

PC: Actually, the rest of me is in some other boxes, so... I’ll meet up with you later.

These played fine under Firefox/Linux, but skipped horribly for me on Firefox/Windows.  In case you have that problem too (or if you just hate inline videos like I do) here are direct links to the ads:

Work vs. Home

Apple introduced some new TV commercials on Monday and I think they’re pretty funny.  You can watch them on the Apple website.

It’s kind of annoying how they present it as "The Mac vs. The PC" when it’s really about Mac vs. Windows.  I run a PC, yet none of the PC-based problems mentioned in the ads affect me at all, because my PC runs Linux, not Windows.

But other than that, the ads are good -- they’re funny and they’re pretty much completely accurate.

Over time we’ve seen Jack plug any and all manner of media into his cell phone -- memory cards, 5-and-a-quarter-inch floppies, clay tablets... why can’t he plug the darn recording into there and just transmit it back to CTU already??!?

Is is just me or does Jack look like a turtle? I mean, if the camera shows just his face, his serious face, he kinda looks like a mud-slider( my teacher has one, and they look alike).

This week’s episode of 24 was fantastic.  OK, so every episode is fantastic, but after weeks and weeks of good guys dying left and right, it’s nice to have a week where the good guys in their various subplots all not only live, but win.

Did you notice how when Wayne snuck up on Aaron he had an M16 or some such beast, but then after the commercial break Aaron had the M16 and Wayne just had a pistol?  I’d love to know what it was that Aaron said to Wayne in order to get the big gun.  Aaron is a man of so few words, and he’s so tough, I’m sure whatever it was, it would have been hilarious to witness.

And this has got to be one of the greatest Jack Bauer lines of all time:

Quoting Jack Bauer:

He’s using you.  He wanted you to get inside my head, and it worked.  And now I’m... upset.  You have three seconds to tell me where the target is or I will kill you.

Not to bump your exciting business news from top billing but it’s all your fault for getting me hooked.  And jumping in at day 5 is confusing.  Especially when we’re watching earlier days being rerun on the A&E channel the hour before tonights premier started and I have no idea which day it is or what time it started.  Yikes!  But it is a great show; however, I feel my heart racing various times throughout the shows and I’m hoping my age can handle it :)  Just kidding.

Kim and I watched the movie Hostage yesterday (Bruce Willis, 2005).  I really liked it, and I think that any other fan of 24 would like it too.  I’ll post a comment with more specifics; don’t read the comments on this post if you don’t want to see spoilers!

PBS has a new series called NerdTV where the shows are released online, for free.

NerdTV is a new weekly online TV show from PBS.org technology columnist Robert X. Cringely. NerdTV is essentially Charlie Rose for geeks - a one-hour interview show with a single guest from the world of technology. Guests like Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy or Apple computer inventor Steve Wozniak are household names if your household is nerdy enough, but as historical figures and geniuses in their own right, they have plenty to say to ALL of us. NerdTV is distributed under a Creative Commons license so viewers can legally share the shows with their friends and even edit their own versions. If not THE future of television, NerdTV represents A future of television for niche audiences that have deep interest in certain topics.

They just started 2 weeks ago and have released two shows.  They are about an hour long each and I’ve watched part of both of them, both of which were very interesting.  But if you don’t have an hour to spare (which I don’t really right now), you’ll see on each show’s page there are two links called "The Juicy Bit" and "The Nerdy Bit," which are short clips of some of the best parts of each interview.

The second episode (the current one) features PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, and it’s extremely interesting because he shares lots of business insight, and also insight into some habits of engineer-types, such as why we tend to pull all-nighters often.

Aside from the content being awesome, this distribution model totally rocks.  I’d so love for Fox News to distribute The Factor this way, so I could watch it during the day at my leisure, instead of having to be at home and in front of the TV at 8PM or 11PM.

Remember those old Apple "switch" ads?

Check out this switch to Linux video.

Sometime about a year or two ago, when I watched O’Reilly almost every night, I saw all the great Quiznos commercials as they came out.  (And by great I mean the freakish hamster ones, not the freakish baby ones.)  They would then post them on their website and I’d go download them because they were so funny.

But one Quiznos commercial in particular seemed to be yanked from rotation on TV after only a day or two, and when I checked their website for it, it wasn’t there.  But apparently it did get online at some point because I just found a copy on a random blog.  I’ve now mirrored it here so check it out.

(I’ve got the first and second ones too, which are also great.)

I’ve never been to Louisiana, nor do I know anyone from there.  I think that makes it seem even more surreal and far away when I see on the news that the city of New Orleans has been destroyed.  It’s just unbelievable.

On a lighter note though:

Quoting CNN:

DARYN KAGAN: Well, it’s Hurricane Katrina that’s still very much making history all along the Gulf Coast. That includes New Orleans.

Now, the French Quarter of downtown New Orleans still too wet and too flooded to get our satellite trucks in there, but with the use of a new technology called FTP, our John Zarella able to go out into the streets of the French Quarter, shoot a standup, shoot his story, and send it back us to via computer. So here now, John Zarella from the French quarter in New Orleans.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOHN ZARRELLA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: We are on Common Street in the French Quarter. The height of the storm still not here on top of us yet. But already, you can see blown out windows in the building across the street from us.

...

John Zarrella, CNN, in the French Quarter.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KAGAN: And once again, John Zarrella filing that report just a little while ago, using our FTP technology, filing it simply through computer.

I don’t know whether to be appalled or to feel sorry for this reporter.  I don’t expect the average person to know much about computer technology, but you don’t just bust out with "a new technology called FTP" or "our FTP technology" when you have no idea what you’re talking about.  And even if you are completely clueless, surely you must know that mankind has been transmitting video over great distances via cable and air for decades; why should it seem so miraculous now just because a computer is involved?

For the record: FTP is one of the oldest computer technologies there is.  Algore invented it 20 years before the world wide web, and it was even around before the internet was called the internet.

SBC is now offering high-speed DSL internet service for just $15 per month.  That’s merely a third (or a half in some cases) of the cost of most broadband internet service, and less than most dial-up internet service for that matter.  Unfortunately it looks like it isn’t yet available in PA, but hopefully this drastic move by SBC will force the hand of other ISPs and cause similar price cuts.

I’m now living without the Fox News Channel, which means I can’t watch the O’Reilly Factor.  But one of the best parts of the show is the Talking Points Memo, and it turns out that you can watch that segment (and only that one) online for free.  Just visit this page, click any episode, and on the resulting page you’ll see a "video" link under the T-Points section.

Is it me, or has Crest discontinued the Icy Mint Striped flavor of their toothpaste?  It’s still listed on their website but I haven’t been able to find it in 5 different stores for the past month.  Fearing the worst, I’ve tried some other flavors -- Cool Peppermint, Fresh Mint, and Minty Fresh Striped -- but they all might as well be called SuckyMint compared to Icy Mint Striped.

In more better news, I saw one of these guys the other week:

It’s a Hitachi EX1800 Large Excavator.  I think it’s the biggest construction vehicle I’ve ever seen.  The photo doesn’t even come close to conveying the gigantic size of this machine.  Here’s one with a man in it for scale:

That’s a little better but still doesn’t really let you appreciate how huge it is.  But the brochure for the current version of that model gives some numbers: it’s nearly three stories tall (not counting the arm); the bottom of the thing is over six and a half feet tall, i.e. you could walk upright underneath it no problem; and the scoop holds between 300 and 400 cubic feet of material, depending on whether it’s the backhoe or the loading-shovel version.

(show full-size image viewer)