Posted on by mwhybark

Working on the streams

This appears to be the subscription site for the Pacific League. According to this post at Yakyubaka.com, the approximate cost for an all pass in 2010 was $80 for the season.

While the TOS noted the service was restricted to residents of Japan, commenters noted that the streams were not region-restricted.

No info on online DVR-like functionality.

I would really like an app similar to the MLB.tv and MiLB.tv apps, moreso than watching the content on a computer. I mean, I have a Mac Mini connected to our TV so it’s not that big a deal to play content to the tube via the computer, but generally last year I watched more games on my phone via justin.tv, both NBP and MLB, than I did via my actual paid subscription to MLB.tv.

So my actual use case for baseball programming is live Mariners ball and time-delayed Japanese ball to my handheld devices and my computer, but not to my TV, unless by paying for it on my TV I can get it on my devices, without going as far as getting a cable or satellite service provider.

I am obviously aware that this specific use case with regard to MLB is exactly what the blackout rules are designed to prevent, that is, MLB is treating the cable provider as the primary customer rather than the viewer. I kinda suspect the in-Japan restriction in the NPB TOS, which did not have teeth at rollout in 2010, is a reflection of NPB respecting MLB’s desire to maintain a pro ball media monopoly in the US.

Which, whatever, I would pay MLB for the NPB content, just as I did for the minor league content last year. I turned out to never really watch the minor league stuff though. Well, who knows. I would assume that the media team at MLB have a number of other overseas leagues to consider for app-based deployment and although the Japanese games would probably be the easiest to get content for they might not have the largest potential audience.

Posted on by mwhybark

Noted

A couple years old, but here is a rundown on computer-oriented Japanese TV remote access options.

Update from October 2011 regarding iOS viability. Looks like a subset of Japanese broadcasters publish rtsp:// streams.

The site is emphatically not about baseball though, so I am somewhat dubious if the various yakyu providers expose their programming in such a manner. It would be really cool if they did, though. One thing I noticed last year was that sometimes there were multiple competing broadcasts of the same game, and the relay originator would switch between them occasionally, like if an ad came on.

One of these channels appeared to specialize in non-commented broadcasts, so that the game would play without any narration or commentary, just with the sound of the park and the game itself. I really liked that.

It seems like someone this year mentioned that that may be an option on HD sports broadcasts in general, a setting that the viewer can select.

Posted on by mwhybark

Comments

Bill, Lindsey, adamdelved: just now had the presence of mind to check the comments queue. Sorry for the tardy followup. Lovely to hear from you. With luck, MT will let you post comments directly now.

Posted on by mwhybark

Headaches

The past few days have been devoted to trying to figure out why my accounting system is not accurately reflecting a wide variety of costs and expenditures for the year.

Happily, today I was able to lay hands on some numbers that clearly indicate my head figures are correct but the numbers I have been diligently tending for nine months in Quickbooks are completely fucked up. As you might imagine, I find this maddening as hell.

It appears that yes, I have been entering the transactions correctly into the program, but that the program has been, apparently arbitrarily, excluding a VERY LARGE subset of data from certain cost categories. And by arbitrary, what I mean is a giant swath of actual, money-out-the-door expenditures appear to have been treated as income!

I spend something like fifteen hours a week on bookkeeping, because I am trying my damnedest to be a fucking adult. Yet it seems clear that had I simply waited until year end and gathered the data as I have in the past I would have had an accurate accounting system with no cost to me beyond my (surely less than fifteen hours a week) labor. I am mighty pissed. Here, I’ll just light this pile of several thousand dollars on fire and call it a business expense. That’s not too different from my time and cash investment in this bookkeeping stuff this year. Aargh.

Posted on by mwhybark

Feels good

Ah, to take the time to blog like this again is such a pleasure. It’s nice to hear my own thoughts in my head once again.

Posted on by mwhybark

Oh of course

While I was able to use this tip to enable a means to view source in Safari on iPad, one cannot copy a selection from the code. Naturally. Nor can one copy a JavaScript link. So I will have to remember to fish around for a quickpost link when I get my butt into the desk chair.

Posted on by mwhybark

Connections

A day well spent crawling on the floor amid cables, wrestling with KVMs and trying to grok all the myriad favors of DVI. A used DVI KVM picked up cheap works great but not with the equally cheaply acquired Apple DisplayPort to Dual-Link DVI. The adapter is supposed to show some sort of firmware info in a system info panel but I couldn’t get it to speak. More poking and prodding, inevitably, to come.

I started the day foolishly attempting a series of cpanel-based hosting changes involving .htaccess redirects, some of which took and some of which did not. When the redirects started failing it drove me inevitably, and equally foolishly, toward code changes against the rickety engines that hold this MT-based blog steady, lashed to the mast amid the storm of abandonment and platform evolution.

Lucky for me, I think, the changes took and I ventured on to, it seems, resurrect commenting here. I’m still a tad sketchy on whether or not the comment system is operating as intended.

This is all driven by my pro-tem retreat from Twitter and Facebook. I mean, fuck Facebook, that might be actually over for me, but eventually I’ll turn my profile on again. But seriously, I was tooling out, posting ranty exclamations basically inviting people to stay away; obviously I’m not fit for polite company so I’ll keep it here from now on.

But as soon as I suspended my shit on FB I started pulling the same bullshit on Twitter, which is forgivable but also much more stupid. After thinking about it for a bit I realized it was a combination of things, among them the lack of a sense of personal investiture I feel toward Twitter and FB.

So for now, I’m here, I’m not nuts, and you can keep your social media. Eventually I will figure out how I want to use them again, but for the foreseeable future my thought is that they are best used to invite other consumers of said services to leave the safe and inviting confines of the farmville and return to a digital economy based on gathering nuts and berries. Sure, the infant mortality is high, but so is the fertility rate!

Posted on by mwhybark

Talk talk talk

It appears I have re-enabled comments with the ‘new’ commenting system. When the signin dialog appears I only noted a TypePad signin option, but selecting that provides an opportunity to use your gmail ID or your FB ID. The confirmation loop back stalled for me but appeared to have been passed along correctly to my blog backend, as evidenced by my successful comment.