Effective, well, right now, Comcast has imposed a 250 GB bandwidth cap on your traffic. You no longer can use more than 250 GB per account. That is, unless you haven’t already fired Comcast.

I did that a few months back (first taking a speed hit with AT&T DSL, and then a massive speed boost with local SureWest fiber), and haven’t looked back since. I really could only suggest Comcast at this point, if it’s your only broadband option.

And, I’d also suggest you start to move away from Comcast as your TV provider… vote with your wallet. I will move away just as soon as DirecTV launches either HD TiVo (as in, a modern one with home networking) or Windows Media Center support.

Send a message to internet providers that caps are bad, and will hurt them (much more than us) in the long run.

Yesterday, SureWest came out and deployed the fiber lines. I’m taking a personal day today to bask in its sheer light-refracting glory.

Just to give you some speed rates, I am now getting sustained speeds of 48 mbps down, and 56 mbps upstream. That means that I can email an entire DVD worth of information… in under 15 minutes.

When you start talking these speeds, latency (the response time) comes into question. I am getting about 8 ms over high speed connections.

What does all this add up to? PhoneNews.com loads in less than a second. That’s hot.

These speeds will be used for a lot of technological developments at both PhoneNews.com and MechaWorks. That makes the astronomical bandwidth bill of about $218 per month, a bit easier to stomach. Hey, per megabit that comes to $4.36 per megabit. Comcast charges $54/month for 8 mbps… I’m paying far less per bit.

Oh, and caps? SureWest says they really don’t understand all these ISPs capping left and right. They would love to offer gigabit internet, except Cisco can’t come up with routers and remote terminals fast enough.

As I noted would happen previously, we are now moving from our temporary offices, to our new offices. This process will take the rest of the week, and probably a couple of days into next week.

Unlike the last move however, I will be much more available. Things should go much less unhinged this week.

I had my concerns about the Hauppauge 1212 HD PVR. First, it lost Media Center support (thanks to Microsoft gutting H.264 from TV Pack 2008 at the last minute). Then, it got delayed… a lot.

But, when it comes to capturing HD video, there aren’t a lot of choices out there. A few FireWire boxes touted component in, but they didn’t have the processing power to handle HD video. There are a few cards out there which are cheap, but the ones below the HD PVR’s $249 price tag, suffer from the same video-audio sync issues.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the HD PVR just works. It captures video without trouble, and it puts video on the computer in a state that you can actually edit.

There are a couple of flaws. First, it puts video in the horrific .TS file. I believe that this was due to the chipset that Happuage had to go with to meet the price tag. Thankfully, they include an MP4 converter. Unfortunately though, the MP4 converter botches the header tags… preventing the files from loading in QuickTime (and yes, that includes Apple TV, iTunes, iMovie, and Final Cut). Ouch.

But, there is a quick fix, VisualHub will turn the .TS H.264 file into a H.264, or an (oversized) standard MPEG-4 file, without any trouble. VisualHub is only $24, and considering Amazon.com chops $40 off the retail price, you’re still saving money versus competing products.

Did I mention that it’s the only capture box (with a reasonable price tag) that will capture 5.1 surround sound, in addition to capturing 1080i in H.264? Yeah, that’s hot.

Bottom line: I love my HD-PVR. It lets me capture HD video up to 1080i, without costing me an arm and a leg. Unfortunately, the lack of Media Center support means that it really isn’t going to serve it’s original purpose (of being, well, an HD-PVR), but it does make the best capture device on the market for prosumers.

Room for improvement: Mac support, banish the .TS format, Media Center support (beg Microsoft for an updated TV Pack 2008).

And, to show it in action, here’s my HD PVR capturing an Xbox 360 bug. I took the H.264 TS file, and ran it through VisualHub, converting it to an MPEG-4 on maximum quality.

Xbox 360 Bug (MPEG-4, 26.5 MB)
Buy an HD-PVR from Amazon.com

Many with Acer Aspire One nettops had noticed that the device was needing a BIOS update. Nothing really stood out as major, just minor quirks here and there that felt like they were rooted at the BIOS level.

And, some of you may have seen leaked BIOS builds. Unfortunately, many of those wound up frying Aspire One units when tried. I avoided them for that reason…

Well, Acer just posted a new BIOS (version 3304) on their support web site. Just go here and select the Aspire One as your system to see the update.

Now, here’s the kicker… you have to use an old-style DOS boot to update the BIOS. Good luck with that, I may post a guide if folks post in the comments that they are stuck on that. And, to rub salt in that wound… Acer neglected to post any kind of change list for the update.

Long story short, I moved. Went through guided setup. Told it to go from CableCARD to OTA-only mode (I’m having the installer out later this month).

Now, my TiVo is trying to record shows using the OTA map in my old area. Even when I chose the channel in my new area, and select the show from the guide for that particular channel. On tivo.com, I now magically have channels I can’t even receive anymore.

And yes, I typed in my new ZIP code in guided setup. Worse, some recordings are recording on simply the wrong channel. For example, a CBS show instead records Telemundo (it even says it recorded the show from my CBS affiliate on the Telemundo channel). Right time, completely wrong channel.

Anyone have any suggestions, aside from returning the TiVo to factory condition? Having to transfer all my TiVo recordings off the device would be quite a pain at this point.

I went to attend a Media Center Expert Zone chat, at its regularly schedueled time (once monthly, on the third Thursday of the month)… only to find that the Expert Zone web site had removed the Media Center chats from their schedule completely.

I can’t blame them, really. The chats weren’t aimed at true Media Center experts, and wound up being broken up into two parts; basic questions and questions left unanswered. Guess which category my questions always wound up in?

While the right people from Microsoft were in these chats… they refused to answer the pressing questions that Media Center experts have been asking (for months… and months… and months).

It’s really starting to be disappointing that Microsoft is leaving people, who paid thousands of dollars for CableCARD systems, in the dark on basic things like placeshifting. CableLabs finally chimed in months ago, and Microsoft still has no answer on when, or even if, CableCARD users will be able to break free from draconian and unnecessary DRM.

And don’t get me started on my bevy of TV Pack 2008 (Fiji) questions, which I’ve been personally promised answers to, for months now.

Long story short, a bug has surfaced in WordPress 2.6.2. It allows for the injection of the following code (or stuff similar to it):

<p><span style=“padding: 1px 4px; position: absolute; z-index: 10000; cursor: pointer; left: 395px; top: 745px; color: #000000;”>save</span></p>

The above string does not appear in HTML view. The only options I can come up with to fix it, are to switch to plain text editor, or remove it from the SQL tables.

And yeah, this happened during CTIA, quite embarrassing to have four of those hanging around on PhoneNews.com’s front page… here’s what it looked like:

I don’t normally post on WordPress codex, but I’ll schedule posting it over there if nobody else does in the next couple of days. This appears to affect Firefox 3 mostly… I’m telling my staff to switch to Safari or Chrome until the next update (or we get a patch).

One of the things that I was concerned about with the Volt, was the uncertainty about being able to use Electric Vehicle Charging Stations.

Thanks to mis-appropriated government spending in the state of California… we have tons of these. And, virtually all of them go unused. About the only cars that can use them are non-mainstream. The Volt is designed to be charged at home, but it’s the first car that could have the potential to quickly recharge from these stations as well.

And, it appears that the Volt will be able to. The press release confirms that it supports 240v charging, the same grade of the charging stations. It’s not clear if Chevy will throw in the necessary adapter (the charging stations use a weird, paddle-style charging connector).

Best news of all? The Volt can charge at home in eight hours. At one of these stations, it will be able to fully charge in three hours.

I could see a backlash though. Those that invested/wasted money on so-called zipcars will be quite angered when all the stations are taken up with Volts… loaded with gasoline in their tanks as a range extender. One thing’s for sure… I won’t let someone call my Volt a standard hybrid. I plan on parking at these whenever reasonable to do so.

If you’ve been using Google Gears for Mac, you might have noticed sometimes that the Gears setup for a particular web site… sometimes vanishes. You have to re-enable Gears for each web site which you had approved it for.

Why is this? Well, Google is deploying the Gears setup inside of /Users/yourname/Library/Cache (or, ~/Library/Cache as we commonly denote the path as).

Well, this isn’t really a good place for Google to store Gears data. I can see why they did it… after all, all Gears does is cache files, and the logical place for cached files is… the Cache folder! Wouldn’t it be great if other Mac developers thought with such clarity.

However, with Gears, you don’t want that data wiped out easily. When it is wiped out, you have to go back and re-approve each site to use Gears. Typically, savvy users may clear a cache after a major Mac OS X update (say, 10.5.5 which was released yesterday). Clearing a cache isn’t necessary… I don’t want people to think that they have to. But, if you’re extremely tech savvy… some of the tinkering around that you do, can cause the cache to become a problem. Hence, normal users are fine, but enthusiasts may want to clear their caches.

Worse, tech savvy people are the most likely to install Gears. Hence, the people most likely to use Gears… are the most likely to clear caches as well.

My suggestion would be to move Gears data to ~/Application Support/Google/Gears as that would avoid the problem. Alternatively, a future version of Gears probably should save true cache data inside of ~/Library/Cache while keeping the approval data in the new folder I just suggested. That way, the next time you run your browser (after clearing a cache), Gears would just re-download/update the cached files automatically.