11h Blog

As it turns out, that HDTV of mine will tune to the “on-demand” channels of Comcast. It’s pretty funny seeing what other people are watching.

I’m noticing a pattern in viewing habits. A lot of people that have the “on-demand” service will “rewind” and re-watch a scene over and over again. A few minutes ago, I watched someone re-watch, over and over, a scene from Napoleon Dynamite where Kip gets his ass kicked by the karate instructor.

Another habit that I have noticed is that around 21:00 to 00:00 there is someone who will fast forward porn or a movie with sex, or sex scenes, to the action scenes and the money shots. None of that fluff and filler for them I guess. This evening someone was watching the movie “sex and Lucia” but they were only watching the sex parts, over and over again…

I remember reading something about this on an HDTV forum, but I can’t recall the technical details. What I can basically remember is that I can see the on-demand ‘channels’ for all of the users on my block, or section of the cable broadcast in my area. For now, I can watch a wide variety of movies but I won’t know when they are on and I won’t know what channel.

11h.net originated from the idea of creating a new wireless networking protocol, entitled eight-oh-two.11H. Essentially, the protocol would address known security exploits in the current “Wi-Fi” and “WEP” standards and allow:

* User-customizable frequency range from 900MHz to 30GHz
* Efficient error checking with minimal overhead
* Integrated VPN Support

Unfortunately, the Technical Advisory Committee at our University deemed this as impossible for a Senior Project and was rejected.

Since I had already registered the domain name 11h.net, we decided to call our group the 11h group. 11h later proposed, designed, created, and demonstrated our accepted Senior Project: The MagLev Elevator.

All of our senior project management, content versioning, and collaboration was conducted through 11h.net. This was made possible by a great open source projected called NetOffice. It fulfilled all of the requirements of our Senior Project Class and Advisory Committee by providing Gnatt charts, weekly progress reports, and version control. The entire 11h website was originally hosted off a Comcast 256k/3M cable connection from a modified cabinet sitting in the dining room of a horrible apartment. Now, 11h.net sits in that same cabinet (now modified for better airflow) on a 1M/1.5M DSL connection in the closet of my Condo right on the river. The 11h.net servers will always be the foundation of keeping the 11h.net group together (although one group member took off to Arizona and she hasn’t really contacted us since… if you read this, send us an e-mail! We miss you!).

The first Summer I drove from Federal Way to Phoenix for a vacation (2002), I purchased a Magellan GPS 310 handheld unit and a power/data cable from Wal-Mart with my employee discount. I had every intention of taking advantage of Wal-Mart’s liberal return policy as soon as I returned from my trip. I used the GPS receiver along with Eltima Serial Splitter for simultaneous 802.11b war driving with net stumbler and navigation with Microsoft Streets & Trips 2002. Since it worked so well for me, I decided to keep it.

Unfortunately, as of sometime in 2005, the GPS receiver started becoming unusable. Portions of the LCD screen will not appear, making it difficult to use. More importantly, it no longer obtains a reliable fix on all the GPS satellites, making tracking incredibly inaccurate if it even tracks at all.

Since my girlfriend and I were taking a trip down the California coast highway, which included making stops at various places in San Francisco, San Diego, Long Beach, etc, I figured I’d like to have the GPS navigation to tell us where we were. So the day before we left, we took a trip up to Fry’s Electronics in search of a new GPS unit. I came across a Socket GPS Nav Kit for PDA’s. Now, the box only mentioned PDA support — it said absolutely NOTHING about working on a PC, only a PDA. But, being bluetooth, I assumed it would just use the Serial Port Profile and output NMEA data. I purchased it, took it home, and opened the box.

To my surprise, the thing came with an internal, replaceable, rechargable LI-ON battery, an AC adapter with several worldwide plug adapters, a 12V DC Adapter, and an extension cord that will work with either adapter or power two units at the same time!

Anyway, I plugged it in, stuck it on my window sill, and turned it on. Within seconds it had already gotten a GPS fix even with the blinds closed and the river and trees near by! Sweet! I plug in the Bluetooth USB adapter I swiped from work and fired up Microsoft Map Point 2004. Map point could see the serial port, but wouldn’t receive any data from it. Worried that it wasn’t outputting valid NMEA data, I fire up HyperTerminal and open the Bluetooth Serial Port. Yep — it was definately NMEA data! Why wasn’t Map Point working???

Being this is a poorly programmed Microsoft application, I imagine it was simply timing out when opening the serial port (every time the port is opened, the “bluetooth wizard” must ask you for the PIN code then make the connection — very annoying). To solve this, I fire up the Serial Splitter program, make a few virtual serial ports out of the virtual bluetooth serial port, and try Map Point on one of the “split” ports. It works!! W00T W00T!!

By this time, my girlfriend was already in bed asleep… it was late, and I had just changed the oil on my car before the trip and was tired myself… but I had to install the software that came with it first. The software is this program called “My Navigator”. Apparenly, they also included a PC version of it in addition to the PDA version. I open up the program, configure it for the other virtual serial port, and it immediately shows my location. I enter a destination of Phoenix, AZ, and I hear screaming out of my speakers in a female voice, “Proceed to the nearest road.”

Sweet! Now I have voice guided directions to navigate me through our road trip!! The best part (and the worst part) about the voice directions is they automatically will reroute the trip if you miss a turn. I say the best part because when driving in downtown San Francisco up very steep hills with 4-way stops every intersection on 4 lane one-way streets, it was nice to accidently miss a turn and reroute us to the next turn. I say the worst part because as we were driving through the redwoods, I wanted to stay on the Pacific Coast Hwy (CA-1) instead of highway 101. We kept hearing the thing repeat it self along the lines of: “In 500 feet, make a U-Turn onto Road” … “Ding” … “In Point-Seven miles, make a U-Turn onto Road” … “In 700 feet, make a U-Turn onto Road” … “Ding” … etc etc until it finally gave up and rerouted us along the highway we were on.

So with my laptop hooked up to my car stereo playing mp3′s from Winamp, the voice directions, and Map point to find hotels and food all in conjunction with the Bluetooth GPS receiver, it sure made life much easier in driving through the roads of california! The GPS receiver outperformed my expectations and now I am definately not going to buy a new car without GPS navigation. It is certainly a time-saver and a paper-saver. Oh, and the GPS receiver even works with my Nokia 6230 using this software. Pretty sweet!