Dave & Pen's place on the Web
technology
New Hosting Provider
Jul 26th
After many years with the same web hosting provider this weekend I decided to change. The reason behind it is over time I saw the performance of Pennstar.net slowly degrading. So much so that I was having trouble bringing up the site or logging into the admin area. So the site is now hosted by www.asmallorange.com. They were referred to me by a friend of mine and so far I there is a noticeable difference in the performance of the site.
In other news I have attended three birthday parties in the past 4 days. 
The first party was for our neighbor’s Jason and Julie’s youngest Jeslyn. Jeslyn turned 2 and had a small family birthday at Chuck E Cheese’s. Penni and I felt very honored that our family was invited to the “family” birthday party. All of the kids loved hanging out and playing on all the stuff. Daniel is now addicted to Air Hockey. I swear he played something like five games straight against Jeslyn’s older brother Jase.
Here is a video of the kids all dancing around at Chuck E Cheese’s
Last night the awesome Annie Spell came over and watched our kids for us, so Penni and I could go and celebrate our friend Rick’s 50th birthday party. It was a Hawaiian themed party. Neither Penni nor I had any Hawaiian shirts, clothes etc, but that didn’t matter as when we got there they had grass skirts for everyone to wear It was a great party with lots of funny stories told.
The final party was today. Stephanie’s friend Hailey is turning four and she was also having a party at Chuck E Cheese’s. This was a little kids only party, so I took Stephanie to the party while Penni took Daniel to get a new backpack for school and then pick up my movie tickets so I could see Inception with my mate Collin. Inception is one cool movie!
It was a very full weekend, adding on top of it all the migration of Pennstar.net to a new host means it might be time to go back to work to have a rest.
Ripping Audiobooks to iTunes
Jun 26th
Thanks to my experience of trying to rip an Audiobook to iTunes this week, here is a handy little guide on how to do it.
(1) Click on the edit menu and select preferences.
(2) Make sure the Audiobooks option is selected
(3) Change your “When you insert a CD” option to “Show CD”.
(4) Click on “Import Settings”
(5) Set the “Import Using” to “AAC Encoder”.
(6) Set the “Setting” option to “Spoken Podcast”.
(7) Insert Audio CD into your computers drive and wait for the album to appear.
(8) Select all of the tracks in the album.
(9) Click on the “Advanced” menu and select the “Join CD Tracks” option.
(10) Click on the “Advanced” menu and select the “Make AAC Version” option. The tracks will now be copied to your computer in one large file of about an hour and ten minutes instead of lots of 3min tracks.
(11) On completion of the ripping, go to the “Recently Added” playlist and select the file you just created.
(12) Right click on the file and select “Get Info”.
(13) On the info screen select the “Options” tab and change the “Media Kind” to “Audiobook” and check the “Remember Playback Position” and “Skip when shuffling” check boxes.
(14) Repeat steps 7 through 13 for all of the Audio Books CD’s.
Your newly ripped Audiobook should now appear in your library under Audiobooks and act accordingly.
Desktop Microphone
Jan 29th
One of my work mates asked me the other day what type of microphone we use with our computer. I went to tell him, but he responded with “Just blog about it, and I will find it on Amazon from there.”
So here we are. We use the Logitech USB Desktop Microphone
For around $20 from Amazon.com I’d make the purchase again.
Tivo HD
Aug 23rd
As I mentioned previously we placed an antenna in our roof so we could pick up the local stations in HD, without having to pay the cable company anything. As a side effect of this we needed to be able to record the HD signal. Having been Tivo users for the past 3 years, we couldn’t imagine having to sit down and watch TV at an appointed time. There was only one way to do it and that was to get a Tivo HD.
All in all the installation was quite simple. Connect the basic cable signal up to the cable input. Connect the antenna up to the antenna input. Connect the Tivo wireless adapter into a USB port. Plug the Tivo into the TV and then plug the Tivo in.
Go through the Tivo guided setup, which takes about half an hour and you are up and running.
It was at that point that I ran into my first and only problem. The problem had nothing to do with the guided setup but with the version of the software that came pre-installed with the Tivo HD. 
The base software installation was version 8.1. Apparently somewhere in between version 8.1 and the latest version 9.4 Tivo fixed a “feature” Tivo HD users have come to call the “Gray Screen of Death” GSOD. The GSOD is something that for me only occured on my cable channels. What would happen is randomly the Tivo Box would loose the cable signal and then only show me a gray screen. This would mess up the recording of a show and allow me to only watch TV that was coming in via my antenna. The only way to get the cable channels back was to reboot the Tivo unit.
After talking to the Tivo tech support who only said that I needed to upgrade my software without giving an explanation ( I don’t think the lady I talked to really knew why I should upgrade apart from that was what she had been told) I force connected to Tivo to get the latest software upgrade.
This took quite a while but the good news is that I now have software version 9.4 and everything is now fine.
So how did I know it was a software fix? While waiting for the software to download I started reading on Tivo’s Forums, where I found this used to be quite a common occurrence. For some people though it was worse then what I had. If they were using dual cable cards then when the Tivo HD peformed a GSOD for them, they were dead in the water. With a reboot their only recourse. Now however after software upgrades, everything seems to be good.
The moral of the story is, if you buy a Tivo HD and encounter the GSOD, make sure your unit has at least software version 9.4 installed on it.
After all this would I recommend getting a Tivo HD. YES!
For more on this issue check out Tivo Gray Screen Part II
