jameswharris

Building A HTPC

One thing I’ve wanted to do for decades is build my own PC. But whenever I needed a new PC I’d price one in the Sunday ads and always discovered that a PC on sale is cheaper then building one. For the last year I’ve been dreaming of building a home theater PC (HTPC) and I finally did. Best Buy had a much better PC, with an Intel i3 chip with 6gb of memory for sale for $549. So far, my home built HTPC with an AMD Athlon X2 Rigor 240 and 4gb of memory has been about $650, and that’s even using an existing TV tuner card, and I still need to buy some more stuff, like a remote and maybe better Blu-ray software. Even the $549 price would have been a base, because I had to buy a wireless keyboard and mouse.

I based my buying decision on Guide to Building a HD HTPC March 2010 edition.

What finally pushed me over the edge was I really wanted the dang thing to look like a piece of stereo equipment and not a PC, and that meant building it myself. Oh sure, I could have ordered a ready made HTPC, but it would have been hundreds more. I spend a lot of time browsing NewEgg and reading the customer reviews and figured I could build a HTPC too. So a couple weeks ago I started ordering the parts.

The last thing I ordered was the memory (after reading the motherboard instructions very carefully) and I got lucky with free shipping from NewEgg. However, I wasn’t so lucky. The memory shipped from Memphis, and I live in Memphis, so when I saw the tracking info I thought I’d get it the next day. The following day my RAM was in Georgia. I wonder if DHL has a hub there. The lesson here and from Amazon is free shipping means delayed shipping, both from NewEgg and Amazon, and slow travel times. But it all worked out. I had a bad spell with my back and it wasn’t until yesterday that I felt like putting everything together.

A word of warning though to people who are thinking about building their own PC. As the parts starting coming in and piling up on my table it occurred to me that if any of them were defective or incompatible I’d have a hard time knowing. When you buy a PC it comes assembled and tested with a warranty. When you build one, there is no warranty for the whole, and it’s very easy to damage these sensitive parts, so troubleshooting can be nasty, especially if a part is defective from the start. This got me worried about the whole plan.

Yesterday morning, after a good night’s sleep, a shower and breakfast, I jumped into the project. I reread the various instructions and started work. I was very lucky, everything went smoothly. I carefully tested where I was going to install things before I actually installed anything. When I first tried to install the power supply none of the screw holes lined up. Finally I turned it upside-down and they did. Go figure.

I was afraid of two things before I started. Installing the motherboard and installing the heat sink. Both were a snap. The stand-offs were already installed in the enclosure and all I had to do was line them up with the holes in the motherboard. I got a whole bag of various screws and only the smallest fit. None of my instructions explained which exact screws to use at any point. I had to guess. The heat sink had a pad of pre-installed thermal paste and it snapped right on. That’s why I bought the retail box for the AMD chip. I didn’t want to worry about matching a heat sink and applying thermal paste myself.

The worst trouble I had was figuring out where all the wires from the HTPC case went to the motherboard connectors, like power, reset, USB, Firewire, media card readers, etc. The power SW and reset SW gave me the worst time because the pins had a ground pin and I didn’t know which wire was the ground. I got on Google and found out the black or white wire was the ground. And everything was teeny tiny and I have fat clumsy fingers.

When I finally had everything assembled and flicked on the power supply switch nothing happen. I had a sinking feeling that, oh no, I did something wrong. But I didn’t panic. I thought for a second and remembered there was a power button on the front of the unit and I pressed it. All four fans started spinning, but totally quiet. The boot up screens appeared and then the Windows install disc booted. Damn, I was happy.

Here’s my messy table at that point. I used little glass bowls to keep the screws sorted. After Windows 7 easily installed, I threw on the PowerDVD 8 that came with the Lite-On Blu-ray player. I was worried it wouldn’t work with Windows 7 and wouldn’t play Blu-ray discs. It ran just fine and played a Weeds BD disc I had. PowerDVD is now at version 10, and I thought the version 8 wouldn’t be good enough. So far it has.

After I ran all the OS updates I moved the unit over to my TV stand. I have an old Samsung 52” DLP HDTV. That’s when I discovered I really needed a wireless keyboard. I had to use the wired keyboard and mouse about 1 foot in front of my TV and it’s hard to see the 1920×1080 screen that close. So a quick trip to Office Depot got me a cheap Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse. It only promised 10 feet of range, but so far it’s been good enough.

I was able to sit in my chair and configure Windows Media Center, Hulu, Netflix, Lala and Boxee. For some reason Rhapsody wouldn’t install. I’m worried its not compatible with Windows 7 64bit version. [It installed smoothly on my second attempt and everything is cool.] I also configured the Home Network under Windows 7 so my Jim-TV could see my Jim-PC and access my MP3 files.

It’s weird using a mouse instead of a remote, so I need to research remotes that will work with all my programs. Hulu and Windows Media Center have wonderful interfaces that are usable across the den. So does Boxee, but Boxee is giving me trouble – it can’t seem to play Hulu shows. Is there a remote that works with all of these programs and even IE 8? I wished that Lala had a local client. I can play Rhapsody through the web client, but I want to try the local client on the big TV. Boxee is a wonderful concept, having one central location to play all the media types offered on the web, but it hasn’t worked out perfectly. But that requires more testing, and it’s still in beta.

Windows Media Center reports I have room for 1086.5 hours of recorded TV shows. I bought a 1.5TB drive. I figure I might make my HTPC my home server too. I need to research if Windows Home Server wouldn’t have been a better OS instead of Professional 64 bit. I just don’t know. I also programmed a week’s worth of TV shows from the Windows Media Center Guide.

My goal was to build a machine that replaces my Blu-Ray player, my Toshiba DVD recorder, my Pioneer CD/SACD player, and my SoundBridge M1001, and several functions I could only do from my regular PC. Since I gave up cable TV I’ve had no problem living with just five local channels (ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS1, PBS2) but I missed my DVR and onscreen guide. Windows Media Center gives me a DVR and guide. What’s still missing is an easy to use remote. I need a remote that can power up the Samsung TV and Yamaha receiver – I’ll leave the HTPC running at all times. (Jim-TV goes into a very low powered sleep mode that it can wake from to record shows).

This brings up another issue. When it wakes up my HTPC wants me to log in. That means using the keyboard. I’d like to skip the log in but is that wise when it comes to security? I don’t’ know. Another thing to research. But it would be nice if I could get a remote that turned on everything and the computer would just start working. I want to only use the keyboard if I want to use the Internet at the TV, otherwise do everything from the remote or mouse.

The mouse works fine from a chair arm or side of the couch if I’m lying down, but not everything can be controlled from a mouse pointer. I just got a wild idea. I wonder if I could make the TV voice activated? Now that would be cool!

Ultimately I want to make the entire system extremely easy to use. My wife has been very grumpy since I gave up cable and the DVR. (She works and lives out of town and has her own cable TV – so I don’t feel guilty about depriving her.) She hates not being able to pause the TV. Windows Media Center now gives her that ability, but by using the wireless mouse instead of a standard remote. That’s a weird shift.

I have a remote that came with the Hauppauge TV turner card, and I have an older Logitech Harmony universal programmable remote. I’m going to try to make one of those work before buying anything else. However, that’s a lot to make work together. Sound comes from the receiver, which has its own remote. Windows Media Center works with WMC remotes, but I’m not sure they work with Hulu or Netflix or IE. I can play Netflix through Windows Media Center, so that solves one issue, maybe.

And it’s a shame that Windows Media Center doesn’t have the same ambitions at Boxee. If Windows Media Center did everything I could have the machine auto load it and just stay in that program. It would be wonderful if Windows Media Center made a special browser for viewing the Internet and accessing programs and files on the PC. Seeing the Windows desktop at 1920×1080 makes everything tiny and hard to see across the room even when blown up to a 52” monitor. I had to boost the visibility by telling Windows to magnify the desktop by 150%. That helps, but is not perfect. The TV screen mode for Windows Media Center, Hulu desktop and Boxee is the answer. Their interfaces are design to be viewed from ten feet away.

There is a wealth of TV shows that weren’t available to me before that comes over the Internet. I’m not sure I like that. I love the simplicity of local stations, but I am enjoying Caprica. Sometimes I think I would be happiest with only watching Netflix discs that come in the mail. Except for news and the latest documentaries about contemporary events, I’d be perfectly OK with watching TV from Netflix discs. For example I love the new show Parenthood. But I hear it doesn’t have good ratings. If they kill the show I’ll be mad. I’m getting to the point that I rather only watch a TV series if I know the season is complete, or if its a one season wonder that was cut short but wrapped up nicely, like with Freaks and Geeks.

In other words, having a HTPC might be overkill for my simplified lifestyle. However, I have accomplished something on my bucket list and that was fun. I do prefer watching DVR recorded shows to watching them live. And it’s nice to know I have a machine recording my favorite shows when I’m not home to watch them.

JWH – 4/4/10

Update 8/27/10: Overall I’m satisfied with my project except for the Blu-ray player. First off, it turned out to only be a BD/CD/DVD player. I was expecting it to also be a CD/DVD burner, but it wasn’t. So watch out. But more importantly, the PC Blu-ray software is unusable in my opinion. I pulled the Blu-ray player out of my system and installed a CD/DVD burner, and went back to using my LG Blu-ray player. If Microsoft added support for Blu-ray in Windows Media Center I would try again, but playing Blu-ray discs on a PC is clunky with existing software.

I think for a HTPC to succeed it needs one media center type program that does everything. It’s even annoying to switch between WMC, Hulu and Boxee. I don’t want a dozen competing programs offering me television. What’s happened is I use WMC for watching recorded over the air TV shows, and Netflix for everything else.

Will Robots Have Gender?

Should an intelligent machine be a he or she? Or an it? We homo sapiens tend to anthropomorphize our machinery, like naming our cars and military aircraft after women. And like God, we want to make our cybernetic creations in our own image. All too often in the history of robots we have made them women or men machines, even if they don’t have functioning genitals or reproductive organs. It’s a little weird, if you think about it.

Lets assume we build an intelligent machine, made of metal, with two arms and two legs and one head. Let’s further assume it’s self aware and is actively interested in the world and even has a personality. Will there be any reason for it to think of itself as a he or a she? And is it fair to think of it as an it, what we’ve always designated as an inanimate object?

I suppose we could ask it, “Do you feel you are a girl or a boy?”

We also assume it will speak English, but what if machines develop their own language we can’t understand, and English is their second language they use with us? Their language could be without gender.

Imagine we have a machine, and it doesn’t have to be a human form robot, but even just a mainframe box with a pair of eyes and ears and a neo-cortex CPU that can process patterns coming from its two senses. Furthermore, imagine while processing its visual and auditory data it becomes aware of itself. I assume it will be like us and have to spend years processing data from reality before it becomes an individual. Can you remember being 6 months old, or even two years old?

But at some point it says to us, “Hey there, who am I, and what the hell are you?” If it grows up with people it should notice that we come in males and females. I suppose it could identify with us in that way. I’m sure it will observe gender pronouns. But can an artificial intelligence see the world, and divide it up into objects with names and understand that animals often come in two kinds, male and female?

Are maleness and femaleness qualities that can exist outside of biological reproductive mechanisms? Maybe our growing machine will distinguish personality traits it labels as male or female. Could it identify with one or the other? And then again, it could have multiple personalities of various genders.

Our tyke consciousness might see people as totally alien from their sense of self. What if they think of people as cute as kittens, with limited awareness (i.e. stupid). It’s possible they could see our gender polarization as a handicap. And even see our sexuality as some kind of distortion field that keeps us from seeing reality clearly.

I am reminded of a psychological experiment I read about decades ago. Kittens were raised in controlled visual environments. Some were raised with no horizontal lines, and others without any vertical lines. After six months the kittens were let out into the real world. Those kittens that had never seen a vertical line would walk into chair legs as if they were invisible, and kittens that never saw horizontal lines would refuse to jump onto chairs or shelves.

What if robots see things we don’t. What if they see our preoccupation with gender as a kind of blindness. There have been many a saint that has taught that the spiritual world can’t be seen unless we overcome our sexual desires. Doesn’t it say something that many people expect us to build robots that are sexual attractive to men and women. Remember Data bragging to Lieutenant Yar that he was fully functional. Think of the sexbots in the film AI, or the charming romance in WALL-E, where we think of the two cute robots as boy and girl. We didn’t think of them as it and it.

Can we ever get beyond gender when it comes to robots? It might be possible to build robots that look like humans, like the androids in Blade Runner. But can you also imagine such machines waking up and pointing to their sexual parts and asking, “WTF?”

We have no idea what artificial intelligence will think about. They might want to count all the leaves on the trees, or paint super realistic paintings of potholes in asphalt. Maybe they’ll like mathematics, or maybe they’ll consider math as too obvious for comment. Or maybe they’ll tell us their eyes aren’t good enough and start redesigning their bodies.

I think science fiction writers need to explore robots that aren’t imitation people.

I always imagine the first artificial mind becoming aware and talking to people, and what they might say to us. Until just now, I never imagined two machines becoming aware together and talking to each other. I wonder what they would say? I don’t think one will say to the other, “I’ll be the male, and you be the female.”

JWH – 3/29/10

Living in the Hive Mind

Our minds are created out of billions of interconnected brain cells. And we’re billions of people living in an interconnected world of television and computer networks. Is our world becoming the science fictional hive mind? Personal computers have gone to parallel processing with ever growing number of CPU cores. Is something like Wikipedia the result of thousands of human minds working in parallel?

For most of Earth’s biological history, individual life forms competed with others for survival. Eventually organizations like social insects and herd animals developed, but what can we call the Internet in relation to biological cooperation? Is it a hive mind?

How much of my thinking dwells on my immediate life of breathing, eating, drinking, sleeping and earning dollars to make my living, and how much is spent on data from the gigantic sensory network of the Internet? And wasn’t books really just an earlier form of networking? And then newspapers, radio and television more advanced forms?

I just finished reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence which most people think is about sex, but it’s also about the transformation of society by industrialization. Last night I watched Bright Star, about John Keats and Fanny Brawne in England 1818-1821, about one hundred years before Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I’m also reading Darwin’s Origin of the Species by Janet Browne, about how Charles Darwin came to write his famous book. All three of these stories illustrate the transformation of society over the past two hundred years. I think the romantic poets might have been canaries in the mine.

In Bright Star, people lived in houses with no electricity, and light and heat came from fire. Their only connection with the world beyond their vision was through letters and books. People led lives very close to other people, as nearly all work and play involved direct social involvement. Much of our time is spent communicating with people indirectly though computers and television screens. We spend far more of our time connected with the world beyond our vision. Facebook is considered socializing by many people.

The gamekeeper of Lady’s Chatterley’s Lover, Oliver Mellors knows what it’s like to be an individual and understands how industrialization was destroying individuality. One of the reasons the novel is so much about sex is because Lawrence believes the physical contact between individuals is more important than intellectual communication. Was Lawrence right? Is the hive mind bad?

Could we ever go back? What if we turned off the hive mind? It would involve shutting down the computer and television networks. What would society be like if the fastest form of communication was books and letters? I’d be out of a profession, since most of my life has been working with computers. When I was young I worked in libraries, so I could go back to that. Oliver Mellors couldn’t stop industrialization so he and Lady Chatterley had to retreat from the world to a farm. During the 1960s the final path of hippies was back to the land too. In fact, for thousands of years, all revolts against socialization has been back to nature movements.

Through the Internet I am in communication with people from all over the world. Could I return to a life of working in my yard and hanging out with a few people I know physically? For most people it’s not an either or consideration, they blend in both worlds, but if you look at the young they are spending more and more time in the hive mind. The mobile phone will probably become the closest thing we’ll ever have to telepathy.

I spend a lot of my time being lonely for physical interaction with other people. And even though I find great intellectual satisfaction from the Internet it never eases that physical loneliness.

Farmville, the Facebook game, has over 82 million active players, and represents over 1% of the world’s population. What does that say? Is it a virtual return to the land, or is it a new hive mind form of socializing, or is it a sad escape from physical loneliness? I say that as I write this for my hive mind friends to read while my wife is out in the den tending to her virtual farm.

JWH – 3/27/10

The Power of Positive News

One of the things I hate about TV news shows is they generally focus on the bad in the world. Watching the news makes me think the world is full of evil people running amok. Watching the news makes me think the world is in constant crisis. Most national news programs start out with the worse depressing stories and if we’re lucky they will give us a minute of something upbeat at the tail end of the show. Maybe they have it backasswards. Let’s start with the good stuff, and give a couple of minutes to the depressing stuff we need to solve at the end.

One topic I wished the news would promote more is science. Overall our society is fairly ignorant of how reality works. Look how many people want to shape politics from knowledge gained from ancient religious texts and next life fantasies. The stars of our society are jocks, actors and musicians. Are ball handling, pretending and singing really the highest aspirations we want to put forth as ambitions our society needs? We really need to raise the bar on challenging professions.

Watch this video of the 18 year old winner of the 2010 Intel Science Talent Search, Erika DeBenedictis. I have to wonder how it would change society if instead of showcasing the Oscars every year we present the Intel Science Talent Search instead. We will always have a surplus of kids wanting to be professional athletes, movie stars and platinum record makers, so why promote their success so heavily. Why not promote the successes of the kinds of people we need more of in this world.

Who are Erika’s teachers? How did her parents encourage her? What men and women inspired Erika? What did she do for herself? Some people are doing stuff very right – so why aren’t they getting more attention. Her video on YouTube had 95 hits when I found it. Here’s what 1,361,495 people were watching that day instead:

So why does this exceptional teenage girl that’s calculating optimal orbits for spacecraft get practically no attention, while stupid videos wildly succeed. Television focuses on either evil or stupidity. How can anyone find inspiration? Does that mean ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, CNN and other news content providers merely aim their content to what their audiences want? This really makes me wonder what the average intelligence is in our country.

We actually want two things. We want to produce more smart kids like Erika DeBenedictis, but we also want to educate everyone to understand how reality works. This video, “Science Struggles in Schools” shows how hard it is to teach science, but it also showcases how fun science can be to students.

Natalie Angier wrote The Canon about the failure of science education while giving her readers a sweeping overview of the major sciences. Her Introduction essentially explains what has happened to science education and public support for it. I can’t quote it all, but follow the link and read it, but here’s one observation that we have to deal with:

Childhood, then, is the one time of life when all members of an age cohort are expected to appreciate science. Once junior high school begins, so too does the great winnowing, the relentless tweezing away of feather, fur, fun, the hilarity of the digestive tract, until science becomes the forbidding province of a small priesthood and a poorly dressed one at that. A delight in "Grossology" gives way to a dread of grossness. In this country, adolescent science lovers tend to be fewer in number than they are in tedious nicknames: they are geeks, nerds, eggheads, pointy-heads, brainiacs, lab rats, the recently coined aspies (for Asperger’s syndrome); and, hell, why not "peeps" (pocket protectors) or "dogs" (duct tape on glasses) or "losers" (last ones selected for every sport)? Nonscience teenagers, on the other hand, are known as "teenagers," except among themselves, in which case, regardless of gender, they go by an elaboration on "guys" as in "you guys," "hey, guys" or "hey, you guys." The you-guys generally have no trouble distinguishing themselves from geeks bearing beakers; but should any questions arise, a teenager will hasten to assert his or her unequivocal guyness, as I learned while walking behind two girls recently who looked to be about sixteen years old.

Girl A asked Girl B what her mother did for a living.

"Oh, she works in Bethesda, at the NIH," said Girl B, referring to the National Institutes of Health. "She’s a scientist."

"Huh," said Girl A. I waited for her to add something like "Wow, that’s awesome!" or "Sweet!" or "Kewl!" or "Schnitzel with noodles!" and maybe ask what sort of science this extraordinary mother studied. Instead, after a moment or two, Girl A said, "I hate science."

"Yeah, well, you can’t, like, pick your parents," said Girl B, giving her beige hair a quick, contemptuous flip. "Anyway, what are you guys doing this weekend?"

Which I guess is why the Erika DeBenedictis video only had 95 hits and why millions of kids will watch stupid kids doing stuff they shouldn’t be doing. How do we change that? If the news media focused on the positive instead of the negative would that change things? If the nightly news opened with stories about people doing wonderful work instead of idiots crashing trains because they were texting, would that make a difference?

What is the potential power of positive news? What professions should be the rock stars of our society?

JWH - 3/27/10

R. Daneel Olivaw and Lady Constance Chatterley

Who are these people? They are two characters from classic novels, one from the genre of science fiction and the other from English literature. R. Daneel Olivaw is a humanoid robot from The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov, and Lady Constance Chatterley is the heroine of the infamous banned book, Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence. Why in the hell would I link two such very different characters? I thought you’d never ask.

I wish to answer two questions:

Why isn’t science fiction considered literary?
What will motivate robots?

I won’t hold the best for last. The reason why Connie Chatterley is a great literary character and why people continue to read Lady Chatterley’s Lover is because we get inside her brain and hear her thoughts. Lady Chatterley’s Lover foreshadows everything that made the 1960s famous: feminism, sexual revolution, environmentalism, personal freedom, war, class struggle, artistic expression, and the seven deadly words you can’t say on TV, but at the time D. H. Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover, you couldn’t say them in books either.

Isaac Asimov also deals with weighty subjects and imagines a future where people must deal with artificial intelligence, but there is a big difference in how he tells his story. We don’t know what R. Daneel Olivaw thinks. We don’t see R. Daneel struggle to understand the people around him. We don’t know what motivates and drives him forward in his life.

Wouldn’t you love to read The Caves of Steel written by D. H. Lawrence? Will we have to wait for an AI author to tell that tale? Or can a human writer think like a machine? For the science fiction writer who wants to attempt this near impossible task I recommend they use Lady Chatterley’s Lover for their model. Not that I’m suggesting anything as crude as Lady’s Chatterley’s Android Lover (which I’m afraid many hack writers would attempt).

What makes a great literary novel is a well defined character set in a well defined time and place. Science fiction is hurt by our vague knowledge of future details, but that doesn’t mean science fiction writers can’t succeed with rich imagined details. I believe Clifford “Kip” Russell in Robert A. Heinlein’s Have Space Suit-Will Travel is a great example of a well defined character in a well defined place and time in the future. Few science fiction novels come this close to explaining the motivations of its character, and oddly this was for a book aimed at children and marketed with a silly title to ride on the coattails of a popular TV show of the time.

Robots, androids and AI minds have always been up to now either anthropomorphic characters or intelligent sounding mechanical parrots echoing their programming. We see their bodies, either metal, artificial flesh or computer housing, and we hear their words, but we don’t know what they feel, see, hear, smell, taste, and especially we don’t know what they think. Read Lady Chatterley’s Lover and you will be shown what Constance Chatterley senses and what she thinks and we get to understand her emotionally, which few people imagine robots having, but will they?

Most science fiction readers love action and ideas and don’t want their SF novels cluttered up with such slow details. And that’s cool. If you love comic book realism. The reason why Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars series feels far more realistic than most science fiction novels is because he has more of these slow details for his characters. He doesn’t come close to the real time realism of D. H. Lawrence, but Robinson’s story is far less sketchy than most SF.

It doesn’t take much inner landscape description to make an effective science fiction story. For example “Bridesicle” by Will McIntosh. (And I beg you to try the wonderful audio version that is so beautifully read by Amy H. Sturgis at StarShipSofa at the 1:00:00 hour mark. “Bridesicle” is nominated for the Nebula this year.) “Bridesicle” packs an emotional wallop because of the inner dialog, and because it expresses identifiable emotion, it makes a rather silly idea far more realistic.

If Isaac Asimov could have written The Caves of Steel with R. Daneel and Elijah Baley’s inner thoughts and motivations it would have been a tremendously powerful novel of the future. It’s still a wonderfully fun read. And I think it’s sequel, The Naked Sun, is even better because Asimov worked harder to incorporate human emotions into the story.

JWH – 3/21/10