Techronical

My Sirius Radio Violates FCC Standards-Sirius offers a free solution

Steven Hughes — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 12:04:57 +0000

OK, I received this email from Sirius that one of my older Sirius radios (I have three in my subscription) is in violation of the FCC and I shouldn’t use the FM transmitter. I should use a direct wired connection- I would love to but the maker of my car didn’t provide one with the stock radio; a Cassette adapter- (oh the one that didn’t come with my radio?) not that I really need it because I don’t have a cassette player in my car, its hard to find a new car that does; FM Extender Cable kit, hmm didn’t get that either nor does my radio have a connector for it; FM Direct Adapter with Professional Installation- I used to have one of these in my car to use with my Rio Car MP3 player that had at the time a lot of storage from 20GB upgraded to 60GB, but it was sold when I traded in my car. The best thing I have decided on since SIRIUS will provide you the best solution at no cost will be a direct connection adapter, but I will have to go through Sirius’ website to choose my option and be awarded with a certificate redeemable for installation at an installation center in my area I would rather opt for a direct connection option like this or this if available because the FM direct adapter had some grounding issue that resulted in a high pitch squeal (that I corrected by regrounding the FM adapter) every time the alternator kicked in.

Here is the letter I got from them:

Your SIRIUS radio contains an FM transmitter that allows it to operate wirelessly through your car FM radio. We have determined that the output of this transmitter exceeds the limits established by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). As a result, the unit may interfere with the performance of radios operating in areas adjacent to your radio. There are no health or safety concerns associated with this issue.

If you listen to your SIRIUS radio wirelessly through your vehicle’s FM radio, then please review the solutions listed below and select the one that works best for you. SIRIUS will provide you the best solution at no cost.

If you use your SIRIUS radio only when docked in a boombox, or directly connected to your car radio or home stereo using audio cables or a cassette tape adapter, then no interference can occur and no further action is required, provided you have turned off your FM transmitter. To turn off the FM transmitter, first press the MENU button. Use the channel up/down buttons to highlight “FM Transmitter” and push the SELECT button. Use the channel up/down buttons to highlight the "FM On/Off" menu item and then press the SELECT button. Use the up/down buttons to highlight "FM Off" and press the SELECT button. To exit the "FM On/Off" menu, press the MENU button. Use the same procedure to turn off the FM transmitter if you use Solution 1 or Solution 2 below..

Solution 1 - Direct Wired Audio Connection:

If your vehicle radio has a “LINE IN” or “AUX IN” jack, you can use a stereo cable to connect directly to your SIRIUS radio. This solution is the easiest to install and provides the best audio performance. Many newer vehicles provide the required audio input jack. It will normally be found on or near the front faceplate of your vehicle’s radio.

Solution 2 - Cassette Tape Adapter:

If your vehicle has a cassette tape player, you can use a cassette adapter that allows you to play your SIRIUS radio through the cassette portion of your vehicle radio. The adapter slips into your vehicle radio as easily as a cassette tape and provides better performance than a wireless connection.

Solution 3 - FM Extender Cable Kit:

An FM extender cable will provide a special transmitter antenna that allows you to obtain the best audio performance through your vehicle’s FM radio. This solution is easy to self-install, but does require that an easy-to-hide wire be run in your vehicle so the transmitter antenna can be placed in close proximity to your vehicle’s radio antenna. Using this FM Extender Cable Kit, you will continue to use your SIRIUS radio exactly the same way as you do currently.

Solution 4 - FM Direct Adapter with Professional Installation:

An FM Direct Adapter provides a wired connection between your SIRIUS radio and your vehicle’s radio. You will continue to listen to your SIRIUS radio through the FM tuner of your car radio, but the FM Direct Adapter eliminates the outside static and interference you sometimes experience when using a wireless FM connection. This solution usually requires professional installation. We will provide a certificate redeemable for installation at an installation center in your area.

Please go to www.sirius.com/optimize and select the solution that works best for you. If you have any questions, please call 1-(877) 635-5130. Detailed instructions will be included with your solution.
You will improve the performance of your SIRIUS radio and reduce the potential for interfering with adjacent radios if you properly tune your FM transmitter. Please see the FM Transmitter Set-Up Tips below for more information.
We are sorry for this inconvenience. We are confident these solutions will allow you to continue to enjoy the great music, news, sports and entertainment that only SIRIUS Satellite Radio can offer with no impact on your radio’s performance.
Sincerely,
SIRIUS SATELLITE RADIO

FM Transmitter Set-Up Tips

To tune your FM transmitter turn off your SIRIUS radio and tune through the FM channels on your vehicle’s radio to locate an FM channel (except 87.7/87.9) that is not broadcasting in your area. If you use an FM channel that is being used by a local broadcaster, it will interfere with the performance of your SIRIUS radio. Once you have located an FM channel that is not being used for broadcasting in your area, save it as a preset on your vehicle radio. This will become your SIRIUS preset. If you’re not sure which FM channels are not being used in your home or travel cities, you can go to www.sirius.com/fmchannel and search for an FM channel based on zip code.
Turn on your SIRIUS radio. In the SETTINGS or MENU on your SIRIUS radio, locate the “FM Frequency” adjustments. Set the channel number on your SIRIUS radio to match the SIRIUS preset on your vehicle radio. Refer to your user guide for detailed instructions on how to do this. The FM transmitter in your SIRIUS radio is automatically set to FM channel 88.1. This may not be the best channel in your area.

If you regularly travel between cities with different active FM channels, you may need to find channels that are not broadcasting in each city. Several SIRIUS radio models can store multiple FM transmitter channels, so you can easily switch to the best FM channel for each city. Refer to the user guide for your SIRIUS radio for details on this feature. You will also want to set the FM channels that are not broadcasting in each city as presets on your vehicle radio.

So if you are wondering why Sirius is doing this for free it is part of the terms of the XM merger agreement with the FCC for their radios to be compliant with FCC standards. So to see if your radio is eligible for this offer from Sirius to make your SIRIUS radio compliant with the FCC head to Sirius’ website and you will need your radio’s ESN / SID as well as the FCC number located on the package of your radio (if you still have it) or on the back/bottom of your radio. Fill out the form and wait. Great job Sirius in making customers compliant- a free radio upgrade might have worked too.

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Midori More than a Fancy Green Drink - Could it be Microsoft’s future?

Steven Hughes — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:25:37 +0000

I was glancing over the SD Times article on Midori, which is based on Microsoft Research’s Singularity. Some of it I had heard before with discussion with some Microsoft people in the past about moving everything to the HAL layer and starting with a type of OS that runs like embedded that provides core PC operation with the hardware with the option to install virtual images of legacy operating systems(so comparability mode won’t be needed) without the pitfalls of using a Virtual Machine (problems with access to the USB, multiple network connections, etc.) as well as a simple OS with access to user based files(we are talking just what is important to the end user media files and documents no OS or drivers- (it should be seamless to the end user and should just work, if not start a new image). The UI would have links to the Web whether it be for file storage in the cloud, working with web based software or just using a browser. That is it pretty simple. Of course there will be some personalization’s, but people just want a simple OS without concerns for viruses, corruption, backup,etc that should all be done in the background seamlessly and with out the end user having to worry about it should just work.

Well the rest of my conversation is under NDA, but the folks at SD times revealed a good amount they read from some internal documents. So here is what they said that I found interesting:

SD Times has viewed internal Microsoft documents that outline Midori’s proposed design, which is Internet-centric and predicated on the prevalence of connected systems.

Midori is an offshoot of Microsoft Research’s Singularity operating system, the tools and libraries of which are completely managed code. Midori is designed to run directly on native hardware (x86, x64 and ARM), be hosted on the Windows Hyper-V hypervisor, or even be hosted by a Windows process…

According to the documentation, Midori will be built with an asynchronous-only architecture that is built for task concurrency and parallel use of local and distributed resources, with a distributed component-based and data-driven application model, and dynamic management of power and other resources.

Midori’s design treats concurrency as a core principle, beyond what even the Microsoft Robotics Group is trying to accomplish, said Tandy Trower, general manager of the Microsoft Robotics Group.

The Midori documents foresee applications running across a multitude of topologies, ranging from client-server and multi-tier deployments to peer-to-peer at the edge, and in the cloud data center. Those topologies form a heterogeneous mesh where capabilities can exist at separate places.

In order to efficiently distribute applications across nodes, Midori will introduce a higher-level application model that abstracts the details of physical machines and processors. The model will be consistent for both the distributed and local concurrency layers, and it is internally known as Asynchronous Promise Architecture.

UPCOMING:

Microsoft Maps Out Migration From Windows
Internal documents reveal that Microsoft is carefully mapping out migration strategies to move customers from Windows to Midori, its planned legacy-free operating environment. Virtualization, and a composite application model that permits applications to be hosted by both OSes, are key to the strategy.

Midori Created With Heightened Security
Microsoft’s effort to design a next-generation operating system is projected to offer memory access
control, protect against privilege elevation attacks, and enforce
least-privilege computing.Midori will have provisions for distributed concurrency—or cloud computing—where application components exist in data centers. Doing so will require work in three areas: execution techniques, a platform stack and a programming model that can tolerate cancellation, intermittent connectivity and latency…

The rest of the article is good read, but this looks to be more of a developers OS for embedded based systems, that will hopefully reach the enterprise and consumer space in a future OS build.

Edit: The SD Times has a followup article here.

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The Mojave Experiment

Steven Hughes — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 09:47:31 +0000

Well I was pointed out this by Mauricio Freitas of Geekzone and when it finally went live this morning I sat down and watched a few of the videos of the Mojave Experiement. If you are familar with the Folger’s challenge, this is very similar.

Chris Flores also posted up a post about it here on the Windows Vista Blog and said this:

"Last week we showed a video of the Mojave Experiment to a small group of folks here on campus. Today we are excited to share the results with the public.
For those new to the Mojave Experiment, it’s a focus group effort we initiated a few weeks ago. We interviewed and polled 120 participants in San Francisco, in hopes of better understanding everyday users’ perceptions of Windows Vista and seeing whether there really is a gap between perception and reality. We wanted to see how people reacted to Windows Vista when they were not aware they were seeing Windows Vista. We recorded our discussions, and today you can see them for yourself.

Some other facts about the research:

The focus group took place over three days in San Francisco and was conducted earlier this month.
All participants were either Mac, Linux, or users of versions of Windows that came before Windows Vista. Respondents were chosen from the focus group organizer’s database, called at random, but then selected based on having a low perception of Vista (<5 rating on a scale of 1-10).
The participants were given a demo by a trained retail salesperson - geared towards the experiences they seemed most interested in following a series of interviews. While the retail salesperson drove the demo, it was geared by the interests and direction of the participant.
We did not use some geeked out or custom built PC. We used an HP Pavilion DV2500. It had 2GB of RAM and was running an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20GHz. The OS was a 32 bit version of Windows Vista Ultimate.
Of the 120 respondents polled, on a scale of 1:10 where 10 was the highest rating, the average pre-rating for Windows Vista was 4.4. After they saw the demo, respondents rated Mojave an average of 8.5.
Finally, some people have asked if Mojave is the big marketing project we’re working on - it’s not

(That was me). The Mojave Experiment is just that: an experiment we conducted on the fly that yielded interesting results. We’re publishing the video today because we think you’ll also find it interesting."

It just goes to show you that word of mouth is still the most powerful form of advertising. None of these people even used Vista and they had negative things to say about it from articles written by the press, IT workers trying to get legacy applications written for XP (drivers and version checking create install problems), people trying to install Vista on old hardware (heck its almost cheaper now to get a new laptop with Vista than upgrade the hardware and purchase the OS seperately and deal with finding the drivers hoping it will work) and ads by Apple, come now, Isn’t a Mac a Personal Computer?. As a Featured Community member we have been banging the drum for Microsoft to wake up and do something and this looks to be a good start.

The thing that I don’t like is that there are only 55 of the 120 videos available(where 6 of them combine some of the other videos in a mashup) and some of the remaining 49 are from the same people, so who knows what editing was done, but I only counted about 35 different people. However I still think the Mojave Experiment does a good job showing that the public does have preconceptions of Vista before using it. What they should do is a follow up of the same people actually using a copy of Vista for a month and then video their responses for a true benchmark.

I am just hoping that the new $300 Million ad campaign gets them alot more than the $300 million they blew through on the launch that nobody saw. Microsoft has been criticized by everyone that they stink at marketing, come on $300 million dollars and no much of a buzz and no buzz during the year of Vista? For that much money you could pay a few groups of people to give demos across the country to Big Box stores, people’s houses, schools, work places, public areas, and large events. How cool would it be to see a tractor trailer/RV or even a Ecnoline Van with demos of Windows Vista in the parking lot tailgating and giving people hands on experience with it.

Hopefully the Mojave Experiment will help the people at Microsoft look beyond the Microsoft distortion bubble and into the real world as well as open the eyes of those that have them closed to Vista. (Note to MS use these videos and make a commercial out of them or at least link to it from the Windows Vista website.)

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Cuil is anything but Cool

Steven Hughes — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 15:36:00 +0000

I don’t get it. All the hype about Cuil.com with $30 million dollars in venture capital funding with the expectations of it being the end all of all search engines and slated on being the next thing to replace Google. Maybe I am missing something? It doesn’t have better search results than Google, Live.com, Yahoo.com or Ask.com. (Yeah, there are tons more out there, but these are the ones I use mostly and they all seem to work pretty well.)

I guess its greener because black is supposed to save more energy than a white home page and goes for a simple quick load like Google minus the occasional fancy artwork of the day.

I really hate the way it shows your search results, the layout just stinks and the results really sucked. A quick Vanity search for Techronical had shown alot of irrelevant searches and old links to a site long, long ago lost to the database corruption error several months back. So they don’t use any modern spidering. Their search results found 2,876 results for techronical many of them repeats. If I invested in this I would be pretty upset with the results.

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Sirius and XM merger approved by the FCC

Steven Hughes — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 11:58:42 +0000

Well its about time…the Federal Communications Commission has officially and formally approved the merger between Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. and XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. Hopefully I can end one of my subscriptions and just keep one satellite radio in my car. Yes I am one of the few that have both because there is content on both that I like and have been waiting for this merger to be approved for quite a while. According to the details of the merger content will be available on all current radios and of course new features on future ones like a la carte channel selection.

Both XM and Sirius must cap their prices for three years after joining and allow consumers to choose the channels they want and pay less for packages of channels and a la carte menu pricing. Radios that allow a la carte channel selections will eventually be available for in car dashboard installations as well as stand alone radios.

On Thursday, XM, of the District, agreed to pay $17.5 million in fines and Sirius, based in New York, agreed to pay $2.2 million to resolve complaints that some of their radio receivers sold to consumers and signal-boosting radio towers violated FCC technical rules. Both companies said they would bring their equipment into compliance. If you noticed newer radios no longer have the strong FM transmitter in them (you know the ones that bleed into neighboring cars when you pull up to a stoplight and share the same frequency and for a brief moment the content of your satellite radio until you pull away) and now have external FM transmitters that you have to string somewhere in your car making for a messier installation, but FCC compliant.

Right now I am wondering what will happen with my lifetime subscription radio, I wonder if they would wave the $75 transfer fee so I can also get a la carte programming.

For more information on the merger as well as pricing check out SIRIUSmerger.com and XMmerger.com.

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Media Center Sideshow Gadget

Steven Hughes — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 12:57:44 +0000

Since I first mentioned Windows Vista Sideshow gadgets at Boston Pocket PC, we have received lots of comments from people, that they would love to see some for Media Center Sideshow gadgets. Well guess what, Stuart Thailand over at the Media Center blog found that there are some beta Windows Media Center Gadgets for download on the Microsoft Connect site.

I’ve been talking about this for months now over on TGB and the potential Windows SideShow holds and that this was indeed coming. Released today at long last, is Beta 1 of the Windows Media Center SideShow Gadget.

I’ve had a very quick look at it and done some screen shots. I need to play around with it in much more detail and do a full write up about it soon.

I’ve opened a new thread on TGB here to discuss this new SideShow Gadget.

Media Center Gadgets - General Information and Known Issues There are 4 Media Center gadgets: Download and install the Beta Media Center Gadgets: Click here to download.

Note: To get this download you have to first be a member of Connect and join the beta for Windows Sideshow (you will be automatically approved). After you register the link in the Click here to download will work.

TV:

Browse TV and schedule recordings. Browse the TV program guide, view metadata on upcoming or current shows, and pick shows to watch and record (single showing or series), without interrupting the TV viewing experience. Recorded TV. Select a previously recorded program to play back, without interrupting the viewing experience on the TV.

Music:

Play Music. Browse the media library, control music playback on the PC by using the remote control device instead of the primary display, such as a TV. Play radio presets. Browse your radio presets and playback that station through your Media Center.

Pictures + Videos:

Browse the picture and video libraries. Make a selection on the remote and that picture or video will be displayed on the TV.

Now Playing:

Provides "now playing" information. The remote control device shows information about the currently playing medium, such as the track title or the time elapsed similar to the Windows Media Player SideShow gadget. Known Issues: Enabling the Gadgets on more than one SideShow device to control the Media Center PC is not supported for Beta Enabling the Gadgets for more than one user session on your PC is not supported for this Beta.

Thanks for the great find Stuart!!

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Windows Mobile Total Access

Steven Hughes — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:52:36 +0000

If you are already familiar with Microsoft’s Windows Mobile Owners Circle, you may have noticed they now have a new look and some new added features.

Taking feedback from a survey that was put out a few weeks ago to the community. They now have a new name and new look that works on both your desktop and mobile device.

We have a new look and feel for the Web site, along with the new name. We’re also working harder than ever on more fun offers, new software, great content, and useful technology to help you get the most from your Windows Mobile phone.

Windows Mobile Total Access is your guide to all your phone can do:

• Make your phone unique with free ringtones, extras, and add-ons.

• Learn what you can do with your phone with tips, premium help, and how-to advice.

• Do even more with games, software, services, and more.

Check out the new Web site on both your PC and your mobile phone!

See how easy it is to find the ringtones, games, or help content you’re looking for.

- Windows Mobile Total Access Team

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Encode any Video format for Zune

Steven Hughes — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:37:43 +0000

I read this over at Long Zheng’s blog this morning on how to use MediaCoder to encode properly for the Zune. You will need to download his preset from here to get all the settings optimized for Zune encoding and it is pretty fast too.

The Codec settings Long used are:

Video:

Format: Windows Media
Codec: Windows Media Video 9
Mode: Bitrate-based
Bitrate: 768 Kbps
Resolution: 320×240
Frame rate: 25 fps

Audio:
Encoder: Windows Media Audio
Codec: Windows Media Audio 9.2
Resample: 44100 Hz
Mode: CBR
Bitrate: 192 Kbps

It’s nice. My daughter can now get her favorite YouTube videos, like Potter Puppet Pals onto her Zune.

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