A number of commenters on the original video pointed out that the Channels App‘s TV Everywhere feature does support local networks but it has to be enabled first. I tried it out on my installation and it does indeed work! The only network missing from my local lineup is Fox but everything else appears to be working.
Many viewers suggested that I look elsewhere for TV service, so I also did an analysis on my cable bill to see if I’d save any money going to an over the top service like YouTube TV, Sling, etc.
At the end of the video I also did a search on AntennaWeb to see if any of my local broadcasters are using the new ATSC 3.0 format. It looks like they just started around here so that will be the subject of a followup video this week! Stay tuned!
My latest video is a “haul” of some of the Ham radio gear I picked up to begin building out my base station. For equipment I went with the Yaesu FP-991a which a solid all-round radio that covers HF, VHF, and UHF frequencies in a single unit. It has separate antenna connections for the HF and UHF/VHF sides.
I went with an HF (high frequency) antenna that blogger Tom Costello built for some of the same things I’d like to do with mine – exploring the 10 meter band with a technician license. Technicians here in the USA get a small sliver of that band to experiment on but need a General and/or Extra license to go further into the lower frequency bands.
So far the set up is working quite well – I’ve made some very long range digital FT8 contacts into Europe and South America and even talked to somebody briefly in Georgia from my home in Connecticut!
There will be much more to come on this topic as I get antennas installed and begin exploring the portions of the radio spectrum this new equipment will give me access to!
If you want one of those things, you can get it at a reasonable price. And that’s what the Victus 15 is all about.
The review loaner we received has a 12th generation Intel i5 processor along with a GTX1650 GPU from Nvidia. It performs at the top end of the 1650’s performance curve per our benchmarks and comparison with other laptops – including some that cost a heck of a lot more. They also managed to get a 144hz 1080p IPS display on it too.
So what about the compromises? So given performance is the key factor here all the other stuff is where you’ll find compromises. Battery life is pretty bad on it even for light work (maybe about 6 hours). The display isn’t very bright, the webcam is lousy, the fan is super noisy, it’s mostly made out of plastic, it has no biometrics and it’s pretty heavy.
But if you’re just looking for performance and nothing else this will get you there for well under $1000.
As many of you know I use Vmix to produce my videos here on the channel. It’s by far the most efficient and highly optimized piece of Windows software ever made. It’s absolutely incredible.
My appreciation of it went further this week during one of my Prime Day live streams. I figured I would do an evening overview of the three TV boxes on sale this week (Fire TV, Roku and Apple TV) and I wanted to get all three running together in 4k simultaneously along with my three 4k studio cameras. You can see the stream here.
My current production machine is a home-built i9-9900KF based Intel machine with 32GB of RAM and a recently added RTX 2080ti GPU. For video capture I have a Blackmagic Decklink Quad HDMI card which can capture four 4k sources simultaneously. I brought the cameras and the Apple TV in through the Decklink card.
But Lon, you had 6 sources! Yes and thanks to the modern miracle of NDI I was able to bring in those additional two sources using a Newtek Spark box and a Kilo U40 (affiliate link). These boxes take HDMI video in and output a lossless video signal that can get ingested into Vmix with minimal latency. Those two sources generated about 500 megabits of bandwidth but Vmix easily kept up.
The most amazing thing about this set up is that my system still had plenty or room left for more. I also connected a 4k display to the back of my GPU and was able independently switch what appeared on that screen. Check out this short I made once everything was set up.
I just ordered a bunch of stuff to begin my amateur radio station. I still only have a technician license which limits a lot of what I can do on lower frequencies but there’s still plenty to explore.
For the base unit I went with the Yaesu FT-991A. I like it because it integrates HF, VHF and UHF bands all in one unit and its powerful enough for the things I want to do. There’s room to grow here as it also works on the frequencies I’m not currently licensed to operate on. For power it can do 50 watts on UHF & VHF with another 50 on the HF bands. Because my HF interests are mostly in the “weak signal” domain that’s more than enough power. And the 50 watts on the UHF/VHF side should be more than fine to do some of the local packet stuff I’m interested in exploring.
Somebody told me that in photography you can’t have enough lenses and in amateur radio you can never have enough antennas! In my case I’m limited to the UHF/VHF bands and a small sliver of the 10 meter HF band. So that helps a bit to narrow things down.
For UHF/VHF I went with what DX Engineering suggested – a Diamond X50A. It’s a simple vertical fiberglass antenna. For HF I found a great blog post from Tom Costello who’s doing exactly what I want to do on HF with a technician license. He built a simple dipole using a pair of MFJ-1610T antennas to make 10 meter contacts. So I bought exactly what he is using.
Because I am not all that handy I will be hiring somebody to mount the antennas and run cable into the house. In the meantime I bought a portable antenna tripod that I’ll set up when I’m exploring the spectrum. I am eventually going to get the UHF/VHF antenna up on the roof but will keep the HF closer to the ground as I’ll be needing a different antenna after I get my General license for the lower bands.
My plan is to try and reach out to a few viewers using the weak signal FT8, JS8talk, and whatever other protocols might work over 10 meters. If you think you are in range let me know and I’ll add you to the list! I’d love to do a few livestreams experimenting with it.
I don’t care if Elon Musk owns Twitter or not. But he’s correct on the Bot issue. It permeates the platform and has bifurcated the user base into those with a blue check and those without. Twitter decides who gets a voice on their platform and who does not.
As such Twitter denies independent content creators an equal voice to those the platform has arbitrarily decided gets the mark. They move the goal posts constantly and deny people opportunities to grow their audience.
Blue checks get all sorts of benefits the rest of us don’t: monetization opportunities, longer video uploads, the ability to communicate with other blue check marks, etc.
This is in stark contrast to YouTube. Despite all of their faults, YouTube designed their entire ecosystem around discovery and independent creator opportunity. Arguably Instagram and TikTok do this too but they don’t compensate their creators fairly.
Musk said from the get-go that all users would get verified on Twitter. This would immediately level the playing field as it would make the blue check mark unnecessary.
YouTube already does a similar verification process if you want to monetize. YouTube’s most influential creators are verified real people who earn 55% of the revenue YouTube brings in. And their platform is designed as a market-based pipeline to move aspiring creators to that level vs. an arbitrary system of picking winners and losers.
If Twitter didn’t have a bot problem why split the user base into verified and unknowns?
My latest review video is of the Acer Chromebook 514. This is a surprisingly good Chromebook for its price (especially today as it’s a Prime Day deal). See my full review on Amazon.
The device is powered by a Mediatek Kompanio 828 ARM processor. In the past these chips performed at or slightly below some of the lower cost Intel based Chromebooks. But this new chip performs much better – especially for graphically intensive tasks like gaming.
Other value-adds here include a full 1080p touch display, backlit keyboard, 8GB of RAM and exceptional battery life when doing basic tasks.
In the video you’ll see this thing running demanding Android game emulators like Reicast and Dolphin exceptionally well. Other Android games work great too although some don’t make the translation very well to laptop form from a touch based app.
Chromebooks are also great for running Linux apps and this one is no exception. The ARM version of Libreoffice runs great here and feels every bit as snappy as it does on Intel devices (even the more expensive ones).
What’s missing? Storage.. At the moment only 64GB of EMMC is available which will limit how many Android and Linux applications can be installed. Unfortunately there’s no SD card slot either.
But overall this is a great deal especially at its Prime Day pricing.
Virtual Set technology is moving in some exciting new directions. It all began with the Mandalorian and their use of the ILM “Volume” to merge virtual sets with physical ones. What makes these virtual sets so unique is that the images are not added later in post-production but are there in realtime with the actors during the shoot. It adds new levels of realism as the light from the volume reflects off of costumes and other props naturally. The set also aligns with the camera’s point of view allowing for camera movements and depth making the background look almost three dimensional.
But Star Wars is not the only production making use of this. According to this Twitter post, Star Trek Strange New Worlds has a volume of its own to do similar effects. This might be why the production looks so much more expansive than the other recent Star Trek shows on Paramount+.
— William F. White International Inc. (@WFW_Intl) July 10, 2022
What I’m most excited about is this technology making its way to small creators. Many of us with gaming PCs have the processing power already – it’s just a matter of packaging this display technology into something smaller and affordable for us basement dwelling YouTubers.
This week’s Weekly Wrapup experiment is a morning posting of the video to have it coincide with this email. We’ll see how it does vs. the usual evening posting.
The big event this week is the two day Amazon Prime Day event which starts tomorrow! It’ll be similar to prior years where there are scheduled deals along with sales running throughout.
I usually own a lot of the stuff that goes on sale so I’ll be doing a bunch of livestreams throughout tomorrow. Be sure to follow me on Amazon!
Also this week we’ll have a review of the Acer Chromebook 514 with a Mediatek ARM processor, an Acer gaming laptop (the Helios 300), a followup on my CableCARD video, and a look at a wireless microphone system from Hollyland. The Acer review is already live on Amazon and I’ll have unboxings of the other two later today up there too.
As I posted the other day I preordered the new M2 Macbook and that might be showing up by the end of the week. We’ll definitely live stream it when it arrives.
One other thing that I’m going to be doing are some fun livestream gadget sales and giveaways on WhatNot. These will consist of items that I received for free here on the channel that will be sold for just the cost of shipping, along with other stuff I am trying to get rid of. I’ll have more information on WhatNot and how to sign up coming in a future email.
More than likely we’ll go back to an evening Wrapup schedule after this week as I have a few reviews to get up ASAP ahead of Prime Day. I may target Sunday night for next week’s video.
My latest video is about the impending death of CableCARD.
CableCARDs look like the old PCMCIA/cardbus cards our late 90s/early 2000s laptops used but instead plug into cable equipment to access subscription television services. The cards are provided by cable companies to customers.
For a long time getting cable TV to work on a television was as simple as plugging in a coaxial cable – in the past only the premium channels like HBO were scrambled.
But a lot changed when cable went digital in the early 2000s. Cable companies found a new revenue path renting expensive digital boxes to consumers and most TVs lacked the tuning hardware to get service without one. The FCC allowed this provided cable companies gave consumers the option to use their own equipment to access services. CableCARD was the mechanism for that.
Sadly though consumers tend to drift towards the tyranny of the default and few CableCARD boxes were ever manufactured. The two remaining ones are the HDHomerun Prime and some Tivo boxes.
I have been using the HDHomerun Prime since 2013. It saved me a ton of money (thousands over the last decade) as I was able to use my own Android TV boxes and DVR vs. paying Comcast a monthly fee for the privilege. In fact my original video about the HDHomerun box was one of the main catalysts for my channel’s growth. Silicondust, the makers of the product, later became a sponsor. The open architecture of the HDHomerun equipment allows it to work with other apps too like Plex, Emby, Channels and many others. Channels and Plex are also sponsors on my YouTube channel.
Their reason for doing so is to make room for better Internet upload speeds to keep up with fiber optic providers that are putting competitive pressure on the cable giants.
Although it’s digital today, cable TV works pretty much the same way it did at its inception as a “community antenna service.” Think of your cable wire as an antenna that can pick up a range of frequencies. In this case those transmissions are not coming over the air but are rather transmitted over the wire. There’s a finite limit as to how many frequencies can be supported on the wire, which means to add services something has to be taken away.
Internet service needs to share the wire with TV stations that are broadcasting 24/7 each on their own frequencies whether somebody is watching or not. And the process of supporting uploads from many “stations” vs. a single downstream transmitter is very complicated and requires a lot of room on the cable to separate the transmissions.
But upstream speeds need to be increased dramatically for cable companies to remain competitive vs. fiber optic providers. Like any highway expansion there might be some homes in the way that have to be cleared to make room for the road. This is exactly what’s happening with CableCARD – the frequencies it uses on coax cables are in the region that would be allocated for this expanded Internet service. The industry calls it “high split.”
Why are cable companies still using coax? Because they’ve managed to squeeze every bit of value they can out of the wire and are still finding ways to do more. Although much of the local cable backbone is fiber optic these days, most homes are still connected over coax. The cost for replacing the connections for hundreds of millions of subscribers would be astronomical. It’s much cheaper to use the cable differently vs. installing a new one.
So it’s likely in the coming months we’ll be seeing announcements about CableCARD support coming to an end. SiliconDust says they can re-route the frequencies CableCARDs use but I doubt there’s enough CableCARD customers out there to warrant going through the amount of work to make that happen. And at some point cable TV will pivot away from always on broadcasts consuming considerable bandwidth to a streaming on-demand model delivered over IP.
And there are some alternatives now. Cable streaming apps run on most mobile and TV devices. I’ll likely switch to the Channels App which supports TVEverywhere – this works almost exactly like my CableCARD although it streams my subscribed content from Comcast over the Internet. And for those of you lucky enough to receive over the air television (I cannot where I live) tuner devices like the over the air HDHomerun boxes are a great solution.
So times are changing. And it’s funny that the thing driving this change is what we’ve all wished for the most: a more competitive local ISP market. Sadly our CableCARDs will be a casualty of that.
Rarely do my predictions come true but this time I might be on the right track! On May 2nd I suggested Twitter was overstating its value because of its bot problem – an issue that Elon Musk says is a material breach of his purchase agreement with the social media company.
Musk did them a favor by releasing this in a Friday night post-market news dump. This is going to gut their stock price on Monday as it raises serious doubts about the actual number of real, non-bot active users are on the platform. This was an issue I also covered in the May 2 video, where Twitter was forced to disclose that they overcounted actual users by about 1 million due to a software issue.
They really have no way to measure bots on the platform. Why? Because Wall Street demanded user growth. There’s no way engineers would implement any impediment to that growth – it’s engrained in the code and the culture there.
Ultimately user growth is a poor measurement. Twitter’s value I think comes from the weighty influence of the “small” number of actual users it does have. As @davewiner pointed out a few months ago Twitter really is a big newsroom/cocktail party.
My new prediction is this deal is still going to close – but perhaps closer to $25-30 billion which is probably what the company is really worth.
The M1 Macbook Air largely ushered in the ARM Mac transition and pushed the PC industry in a new direction. In my review of it I was blown away by its performance and power efficiency.
It was so good I retired the 2016 Macbook Pro I was using for my daily driver (including channel video edits) and handed it over to Producer Jake as he was still using my decade old prior Macbook Pro Retina for his work.
The Air worked great for 4k and 1080p video edits along with everything else I was doing for my day-to-day work. Even after I bought the 14″ Macbook Pro I still used the Air quite a bit as I left the Pro mostly docked in my studio office. And then my wife took the Air when her 2016 Macbook Pro 13 died.
So today I ordered the new M2 Air (affiliate link) to fill that secondary role. I much prefer to travel with a less expensive laptop so this will also fill that role. I ordered the “midnight” color which reminds me of the original Intel Macbook I owned back in 2007. I can’t wait to see what it looks like in person.
We’ll have a livestream and review coming up on it as soon as it arrives!
Valve designed not only the hardware but also much of the operating system. SteamOS 3.0, which powers the device, feels very polished and optimized for the task. Additionally it does a superb job of running Windows games on the Linux based OS without complexity.
In the review we look at the Steam Deck’s gaming performance but also explore some other areas including getting Epic and GOG games to run on SteamOS, evaluating its SD Card performance, trying out desktop mode, and booting up Windows 10 from an external SSD.
I have a feeling we’re going to see a lot more out of Valve when it comes to SteamOS. Don’t forget they are working with the ChromeOS team at Google to get Steam running on Intel and AMD based Chromebooks. According to the ChromeOS Wiki Valve’s Windows compatibility layer Proton will also be employed to get Windows games running on Chromebooks.
One of the things I talked about recently in my Gigabit Pro update video is that even though you have the bandwidth you likely will never make full use of it on any single task.
Sure it’s possible to run a speed test to fully saturate the connection as I have done many times, but when doing real world tasks things work differently. So even though I have a full six gigabits available, I’m usually only getting about half a gigabit to each location I’m sending data to.
The image above was taken from my Unifi app as I was uploading an 8.7 GB video to YouTube and Floatplane simultaneously. Each can only take about 500-600 megabits per second.
Remember the Internet is not one network. So it’s possible that within Comcast’s infrastructure I can utilize the full bandwidth. But once we cross outside the network it depends on how different networks interoperate and what kinds of bandwidth they allow across those crossing points. In some cases there are multiple networks to traverse!
Strange New Worlds just completed its first season. I like it.
I’m a few episodes behind but it’s great Trek. Oddly I don’t think the traditional trek formula being used here would have worked if they launched this as the first new series in 20 years. We needed Discovery & Picard first to know we really wanted this.
And if you like the “problem/planet of the week” formula you’ll love The Orville. Season 3 is now on Hulu and I hope it gets renewed in the future.
Apple Insider reports that storage device maker Drobo is filing for bankruptcy.
Drobo’s were once a popular direct (and later network) attached storage device. They simplified the process of adding storage to an array which allowed for expansion without having to offload all of your data first. You can see an early review video of it here from Luria Petrucci who used to be known as Cali Lewis.
I owned one of their early Firewire based devices that took four drives about a decade ago. I liked it quite a bit but its fan and drives were quite noisy sitting on the desk. Because it was a direct attached device it had to be plugged into my computer for it to work.
They later came up with an expensive network add-on (and later integrated networking into the product), but they were leapfrogged by competitors like Synology who built better and less expensive NAS devices with far more features.
I ended up moving to a Synology network drive that was just as fast over gigabit ethernet and could be located in my equipment closet where I wouldn’t hear it. Synology also has a fairly simple array expansion process that doesn’t require a full rebuild and there’s a much more robust app library.
Drobo could have been a contender.. They blamed the pandemic for their woes but they just could not keep up with competitors. It’s a shame because the product really solved a lot of problems that plagued storage arrays at the time of its release.
Today we’re taking a look at another Mini PC, the Beelink Mini S. This is an entry level Mini PC running with an Intel Jasper Lake processor. It’s not bad if you’re doing basic tasks like word processing, spreadsheets and email.
Where it falls short is in its memory configuration. Although it can be expanded to 16 gigabytes beyond its included 8GB, the Mini S only has a single channel of memory. This limits the performance of its processor for more intensive tasks.
In my testing I found that it had a hard time keeping up with 4k 60fps YouTube videos – something that other Jasper Lake processors with dual channel memory can handle with relative ease. It will also limit its performance for other tasks like casual gaming and game emulation.
That said if you’re looking to build out a bunch of thin clients for an enterprise the price here is pretty reasonable especially as it comes with Windows 11 Pro pre-installed. Ubuntu also boots up perfectly on these too.
The system supports two storage devices (one MSATA and a 2.5″ SATA drive) so there’s plenty of storage expandability.
The systems come with a VESA mount and have a very quiet system fan.
I am continuing my experiments with the Weekly Wrapup transition. The goal of this show has always been to interact directly with subscribers as so much of my content is focused on attracting search traffic. I also feel it’s important to verbally acknowledge those who support the channel. You can watch it here.
What I’m experimenting with is recapping the prior week and previewing the week ahead. Along with that preview solicitating feedback on what viewers want to see in the videos I plan to produce is part of the mission.
Last week I did the preview portion as a YouTube short. So far the new Wrapup and the short are running about neck-and-neck as far as views are concerned but there’s far less interaction on the Short. Also of note is that the much shorter wrapup is doing about as well as my average views on a longer one! But so far it’s not where I want it to be.
Next week I’m going to try and make it even shorter and focus more on the week ahead. If I don’t see improvement I’ll scrap it altogether and we’ll come up with some other way of acknowledging new supporters.
Although it’s a day off for most the show must go on for me. So today I’ll be shooting a new version of the Wrapup that accomplishes the goal of reaching out to subscribers and sticks to being channel-oriented vs. a topic. Let me know what you think about that tonight! It’ll be posted around 6:45 p.m. eastern USA time.
I still plan to do my in-depth topic analysis videos but will do so as standalone videos. and only when there’s something to talk about.
Also be sure to check out my latest video on Amazon Luna that I posted Sunday morning. It was one of the more popular ones I did this week.
Stay tuned for tonight’s video to get a preview of what’s coming up this week!
