MediaMVP

When I finished setting up the new HD TV and furniture, the old Dell GX270 for SageTV seemed out of place. It wouldn't fit in it, under it, or behind it.

So what to do? I moved the SageTV system into the "computer room."

I went back to the SageTV web site and looked around. I found they had a Hauppauge Media Extender. This is similar to the Microsoft Media Center Extender.

While Sage sells it, it is really just Hauppauge's MediaMVP 01000. Sage's is bundled with a license but I had a license that I could reuse for PlaceShifter (more later).

It comes in wired and wireless but wired was all I needed as I already had Cat5 at the TV.

I bought it from amazon.com. The first one was DOA so I went back to Amazon's site. They had a button to return it and even provided a pre-paid mailing label. Without me asking they cross-shipped a replacement. I had to scramble to get the defective one to the post office before the replacement arrived!

The second one worked perfect. I just hooked up the wires and turned it on. It immediately came up and asked if I wanted to connect to the SageTV. I replied that I did and I was done. Even the remote I used with the SageTV worked.

Oh, the PlaceShifter license - I had bought this some time ago. The media extender capability of SageTV uses this same license. It is a concurrent use license so I can use both PlaceShifter and the media extender, just not at the same time. The only "gotcha" to this is that the MediaMVP turns itself on (activitating the license) when it is powered up. So I just plugged it into my UPS to minimize this problem.

TV Wiring Diagram, Post HD

The movement to HD not only improved my picture but really cleared up the clutter behind my entertainment center. Here's my old configuration. And here's the new:

Input from the cable goes directly into the Scientific Atlanta 8300HD DVR. It feeds HDMI into the Sony KDL52W3000.

The Philips DVP5982 DVD player also feeds HDMI into the Sony.

Finally, I added a Haupagge MediaMVP 01000 to get the SageTV PC out of the living room. This feeds S-video into the Sony. More on that later.

GPS and Google Maps - Part II

Last time I related how I had been able to get my POIs off of my Mio C320 and into a format (kml) that I could post to a Google Map. In this post, I'll cover how I got the kml into Google Maps. That's a lot easier.

First, you have to be logged into Google. Then go to Google Maps.

Click on the "My Maps" tab and then "Create new map." You'll get the following screen:


Now, enter a title and description and click the radio button for Public or Unlisted. This doesn't matter for this project.

Back up above "Title" is a link for "Import." Click that.

Browse to your kml file for iGO POI Explorer and click on "Upload from File."

There it is!

To get fancy, click on "Link to this page" at the top right of the map.

Copy and paste that HTML to embed in your web page.

Ta da!

Mark Russinovich to the Rescue

My wife's laptop has been acting flakey lately. It gets where it won't print to the shared printer or save to our shared folder. To "fix" this, she has to right click on the Wi-Fi icon in the system tray and select "Repair." In a few seconds, all will be well. Well, almost.

She is also complaining about it being slow. I went and looked over her shoulder the other night. No wonder it was slow. The CPU was 100%. Hmmm.

Firing up Task Manager showed that the system was mostly in System Idle Process but the CPU in the status bar was hovering around 100%. What was using the rest of the CPU? Cooties? My paranoia led me to imagine all kinds of terrible things.

I remembered Sysinternals' RootkitRevealer. Microsoft bought Sysinternals in July, 2006 but hasn't spoiled them.

RootkitRevealer ran in a few minutes but didn't show anything. Back to square one.

Back to Sysinternals to pickup Process Explorer. Bingo. Look at this screen.

Now what hardware was causing those interrupts?

I had a hunch given the network problems so I popped out the Wi-Fi card. That was it. The CPU dropped to the single digits.

I moved it to the other PCMCIA slot with the same results. Guess I'll have to try another Wi-Fi card.

Finally, HD - Part II

Sometimes there are happy endings. In my previous post, I was waiting on the Philips DVP5982 DVD player to come back from the service center.

10 working days and it is back and it works! The first one not only had the "DISPLAY CONNECTED NON-HDCP COMPLIANT" problem but it was very sluggish as well.

The replacement is quick to respond to the remote and the upconverting looks great.

GPS and Google Maps

I was playing with my Mio C320 and got to wondering how I could log locations and then put them on a online map. That seemed like something that ought to be easy to do and it was but it was a long way to get there.

The Mio has a button to add POIs. But then I couldn't find where they were on the device. The short answer is that they are in the file iGO.db that's in the flash drive (not the SD card) on the Mio.

Then I needed to convert them to a format that I could import into something like Google Maps.

To do this I Googled and Googled and finally found iGO POI Explorer. There's a pretty good discussion of it in the GpsPasSion forums. A Google search works pretty well also.

I connected the Mio to my laptop with a USB cable. Then I could see the iGO.db file in \MIOMAP\MIOMAP. Remember that the Mio C320 runs Mio Map v3.3.

I copied iGO.db to my laptop and opened it with iGO POI Explorer.

This is what the POIs look like in iGO POI Explorer.

Then you need to export them to a kml file that Google Maps can import.

From there, it's just playing with Google Maps. I'll make that another post. Maybe you can figure it out before then.

Here's the result.


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