Matthew Botos

While in the Poconos celebrating my mom’s birthday, I took my bike along for a ride. Merli-Saronski in Carbondale, PA had been recommended, so I set out to explore the park Saturday morning under overcast skies. A blue trail from the parking lot offered some nice singletrack along the top of the mound that makes up the park. It dropped me along the lake and the “beach”. I rode and walked a bit of the yellow trail around the lake, which was a little too narrow and root-strewn for biking.

The red trail proved a bit more technical, and ultimately led me to a long blue descent. Though it seemed to be a little too much downhill without any climbing, I was committed and ultimately found myself along a river a few miles from the park entrance. Rather than the long, steep climb back up, I bailed to the road to get back to the car. The final leg up to the parking lot was a long climb on which I did my best “Dead Elvis” Lance Armstrong impression (see Lance Armstrong’s War.)

Talking with a local in the parking lot, I learned the main loop is the orange trail, with blue off branches, and the longest descent in the park that I had done. He also gave me a lead on lunch: the “Second best hot wings in the world” at the Windsor Inn. (They bow to the originators in Buffalo.)

View the Biking Merli-Saronski photos

An offhand remark about plasma TVs consuming more power than other types led me to a bit of research today. Using some sample Samsung models, I set out to see what power consumption is like for plasma, LCD, and DLP sets in the 40 to 50-inch range. The results:

• LCD: 250 to 325 watts (40 and 52-inch)
• Plasma: 380 to 480 watts (42 and 50-inch)
• DLP: 230 watts (independent of size)

By comparison, my humble 32-inch CRT consumes about 100 watts, which increases slowly with screen size. That makes sense for CRT and DLP sets, since you’re really just running a projector behind an arbitrarily-sized screen.

To answer the original question, plasma TVs do indeed draw significantly more power than LCDs, adding yet another factor into TV decision making. I’ll be content with my current set while letting prices come down and the amount of high-definition content increase.

DSL and cable Internet services are increasing including combination modem and gateways/routers. Their true functionality is often hidden; Verizon sent me a Westell 327W without so much as a quick-start manual. As the last link shows, though, Google finds the full manual easily enough and reveals all its secrets.

One of the those was particularly interesting given some flakiness on the part of the stand-alone router currently plugged into my cable modem. Instead of using the DSL port as a connection to the Internet or external network, it can be configured to use one of the ethernet ports. This feature lets you use it as a stand-alone wireless router with a cable modem or any other kind of ethernet connection. Nice to know you can get some extra mileage out of your hardware!

While setting up the courses for the Wissahickon Mountain Bike Poker Run, I learned volunteer work can be fun and entertaining:

As John and I were putting in a marker at the bottom of a climb, Dave was making his way up with a trailer in tow. Halfway up, the sound of churning pedals gave way to the scrape of metal on rocks. We turned to see the trailer’s tire, which we had just pumped back up with air, come rolling down the hill. Bouncing over the rocks, it evaded John’s attempt at capture and jumped into a stream!

Taking my bike into the shop to fix a loud noise while using the rear disc brake has taught me the following checklist:

• Tighten rear suspension pivot bolts
• Check hydraulics
• Replace contaminated pads

The pads turned out to be the culprit that sent me back to the shop a second time. Though they’ll last for years, they’re vulnerable to contamination that renders them forever noisy.

Kudos to Harvard for announcing the end of early admissions. With skyrocketing tuition and applications making college applications into a real pressure-cooker for high school students, it’s about time someone took some of the stress out of it. While elite colleges may love filling 20-50% of their classes with more affluent students set on attending their schools, it rushes others to complete SATs and applications while giving up choice and flexibility to weigh financial aid offers.

Harvard and the other Ivies really have the impetus to start such a change; they’ll always have the reputation to draw plenty of applicants. Hopefully the idea will trickle down to more schools and give high school students back a bit of their time and sanity.

Engadget got their hands on a Tivo Series 3 HD unit and drew the expected conclusions: some neat features, but a bit pricey. The second is especially true compared to what the cable monopolies are offering, making me wonder about Tivo’s future.

The Series 3 has two high-definition tuners, two cable-card slots, an external hard drive connector, and the usual slick interface software. The price tag is a cool $800, plus monthly service fees now that lifetime service is no longer an option. (Though you can apparently transfer an old lifetime subscription for $200.) And that’s the rub for the average TV watcher: when $10 a month gets you a cable company DVR, why pay that plus $800 for Tivo hardware?

That dilema leads me to speculate two possible futures for Tivo:

1. Own the high-end DVR niche. Similar to Apple’s computers, they already offer a combination of well-designed and integrated hardware and software for those willing to pay a premium. Though a smaller market, there’s still enough money in it to be profitable.
2. DVR software provider. Like Microsoft, they could realize that hardware is now a commodity and the real money - and their real advantage - is in software. They already seem to be moving in this direction, having lost their hardware deal with DirecTV and inked software deals for Comcast and Cox cable boxes.

The Vintage Aircraft and Classic Car show at Wings Field was a fundraiser for Angel Flight East, and a fertile ground for photography. There were lots of old vehicles with a real style to them.

View the Wings Air and Car Show photos

After suffering several Picasa crashes under Wine recently, I decided to upgrade to Google’s Picasa for Linux package with an integrated and tweaked version of Wine. The RPM install was quite easy, leaving me to move my Picasa data to the new copy.

While Picasa is very good about storing information in the image file instead of a separate database, it does store thumbnails and some metadata in a Google/Picasa2Albums folder. This Google folder should be moved to "~/.picasa/drive_c/Documents and Settings/matthew/Local Settings/Application Data". The ~/.picasa directory is the same as a ~/.wine directory, so you can also add any additional drive mappings under dosdevices.

Picasa will now find your old library, and show all your previous photos without needing to regenerate thumbnails. Hopefully, it’ll also be a little more robust!

For those who would like to get emails when I post to this site, you can now sign up for email notification.

This uses the WordPress Email Notification Plugin as a starting point. With a bit of tweaking, I was able to apply my site theme to the pages used in signing up for email. The key is to load the WordPress functions; assuming you installed maillist/index.php in your WordPress directory:

include ("../wp-blog-header.php");

Then you can call get_header(), etc. in maillist/index.php to apply your theme. A few paths through the code exit immediately, so closing markup required reworking that logic. You can download maillist/index.php if you need these changes.