Logan snapped a knee ligament, the vet says, and requires surgery. As I posted in the morning, this blows our planned California road trip away. Viv will go alone via air instead while I manage a hobbled dog.

I built a 12 or 13 foot dog ramp out of to-hand scrap today – so far he hasn’t used it, which is to be expected. After I had the basic design and wood manifest I felt that I needed to check it via more reliable generators of measured dimensions than my head and my pen so I redrew the plan in SketchUp. My wood manifest was fine, as it turns out.

Every time I use a CAD-family tool, I’m taken aback at the obtuse design. For example, one may enter exact dimensions on a newly-created object but I was unable to discover a way to copy an extant object and then enter new dimensions, so for example instead of creating an 18x6x2 cross brace and editing a copy to be 17x6x2 I had to create a new object with the desired dimensions. Some of the UI decisions presumably stem from long years of CAD feature heritage, but another feature I could not locate was align-to-center, a basic building block of 2D illustration and page layout over the exact same period of time that CAD has existed.

I’m not sure what it means, other than I was as frustrated by the experience as I am when using accounting software, which includes features that inhibit wholesale copying of entries, the consistent UI location of specific information elements such as dates, and other sandpaper for the mind.

Logan snapped a knee ligament and needs surgery, blowing our trip to California away.

Today, as I was carded for beer to my surprise, a drunk man with a strong resemblance to Vladimir Putin shared my amusement at the event. He had a faint accent which I could not place, but his resemblance misled me to assume Russian.

Murph’s offers an $8.00 downloadable USS Macon.

In late June, the signin on my old Apple TV 2 for MLB stopped working. This was not entirely unexpected because I run it jailbroken to allow the use of non-Apple software on the device, and the jailbreak software service (Firecore’s ATV Flash (black)) I use requires that the Apple-provided operating system not be updated beyond an old version, 5.3. Therefore as application providers change aspects of their services, including Apple, bits and pieces of the software on the device will fail as well.

I previously had set up XBMC on the device with an add-on installed called MLBMC that allows XBMC to access MLB.TV streams, but similar issues are affecting both XBMC and MLBMC – XBMC is now called Kodi and has a different suite of supported devices, and the volunteer developer for the MLBMC add-on has left the XBMC development community for reasons unknown.

I sighed and grouchily set about researching my options, eventually concluding that the best way to re-establish login to the MLB app was by un-jailbreaking the device and letting Apple update it. The plan was then to use AirPlay re-streamers to get local content on to the Apple TV, which is Apple’s preferred way of letting consumers use non-Apple content on the ATV family of products. It’s exactly what the Amazon Instant Video app does, and the developers of Firecore even have an app that does exactly that, Infuse. It’s been some time since Apple’s ATV version of iOS has been jailbroken, and it seems likely that there won’t be future jailbreaks, so these restreamers are the best we can do with the devices.

After playing with that setup, I found that none of the re-streamers I had in hand did a good job transcoding 1080p local content to the ATV2’s max rez of 720p and decided to give jailbreaking another go, this time with the idea of a fresh install of Kodi and some hacking around in the underbrush of MLBMC in the hopes that a new maintainer or version had appeared. In the end, this approach succeeded, though with some caveats. MLBMC was no longer, and may still not be, an officially-approved add-on for Kodi and consequently has been removed from the default ‘repository’ that is the most easily accessed source of software add-ons for Kodi. Therefore I had to hand-install it in the ATV2 implementation of Kodi.

I took the time to document this in a couple of posts at Firecore’s generally-moribund forums and wanted to take the time to grab that and publish it here too.

First, I responded to a fellow-user looking to get MLB working again.

Chris, I see this too. I have gone ahead and rerun all the steps (restore to factory, re-jailbreak) and can add a couple of observations. First, after a full factory restore to Apple’s current iOS, MLB.tv did work, as far as logging in was concerned. I did not try it with a geospoofed IP, but my understanding is that with a geospoofing DNS proxy service you can get around blackouts in the app on a non-JB ATV.

My prior setup had an old version of XBMC installed with divingmule’s abandoned MLBMC XBMC add-on and the add-on was able to connect and stream MLB content even with the MLB.tv app no longer functioning. However, the livestreams were stuttering and failing badly enough that I decided to tear it all down and start over.

Once I was on Apple’s official release I tried using several AirPlay-based restreamers to send my local content to the ATV and found that lo-rez content (480SD and up to 720p) played well, but HD 1080p content did not. I therefore determined to try an install of Kodi.

I just finished re-jailbreaking with seas0npass. I can confirm that seas0npass successfully rolls the base system on the ATV2 to 5.3 and that reinstalling Firecore and in 5.3 MLB.tv is no longer functional. I do not yet know if I can re-add MLBMC to Kodi even though it is no longer maintained.

Then, a couple of days later, with everything running smoothly, I dropped by with an update.

I was able to reinstall MLBMC in Kodi, and it seems to work OK. It’s somewhat convoluted to do. divingmule has stopped maintaining the add-on and another volunteer, Youioup, has been working on it. Since the add-on is not in the official repository any longer, you must install it another way.

The MLBMC thread at kodi.tv:

http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=104391&page=67

Youioup’s github for the add-on:

https://github.com/Yuioup/kodi-mlbmc

When you download the release (the ‘download’ button on the right of the Github page), you’ll need to locate a zip file inside the zip file you download called ‘plugin.video.mlbmc.2.0.75.zip’. the numeric string may differ; it’s the release number. That’s the install-ready zip that Kodi needs to see to install the add-on.

I followed these instructions to upload the zip file to Kodi / XMBC’s ‘Home’ directory on the Seas0npass/Firecore JB 5.3 ATV2:

http://www.appletvhacks.net/2012/04/06/how-to-install-xbmc-add-ons-and-p…

The article was posted in 2012 and uses screenshots taken with a much older version of XBMC. The basic procedure: Copy the zip file to Kodi’s Home Folder as described using SFTP. Navigate to “Settings > Add-Ons > Install from zip file”. When the file source dialog displays open the ‘Home Folder’. I am not sure if it’s labeled ‘Home Folder’ or ‘Home’. Once you’ve selected it, you should see the filename of the zip file you uploaded earlier along with some other info and folders. Select it and Kodi will install the add-on.

You’ll need to configure it with your MLB.tv account info. My install went without a hitch and I have not had problems with playback or logging in or anything. Your experience may vary; posting to the MLBMC thread at kodi.tv for help and with questions is your best bet if you run into problems.

A note to consider: I found that I had to restore and jailbreak the ATV a couple of times. The first time the restore-to-current went fine but then performing the JB failed as the device became stuck in DFU mode. I was able to restore it again and the second time everything went smoothly. However, other users here have sometimes reported that getting stuck in DFU mode can make the device unrestorable. I also had to pay for the Firecore software again, which was aggravating, but does provide access to what must be considered the final release of the software, including an implementation of Infuse which provides excellent downconversion of 1080p content to the ATV2’s 720p.

Finally, in January, the development lead for the Apple TV 2 implementation of Kodi announced that the current release is the final release for the platform:

http://kodi.tv/farewell-to-future-appletv2-development/

As absurd as it seems to relegate these less-than-ten-year-old devices to history, that is the reality we are facing. Given that MLB.tv is the subject of active and well-executed technical development and that MLBMC is both not an official MLB licensee nor officially supported under Kodi, one must anticipate the eventual loss of MLB.tv playback functionality on these jailbroken devices at any time.

Hope this helps.

An addendum: on July 19th, a user noted that MLB has started working for them again without their having changed the setup. I look forward to trying that.

The intolerable heat drove us from the hearth tonight in search of sustenance. Our stated destination was a fantastic and extraordinarily inexpensive Ethiopian restaurant nearby called Lucy, after the famed fossils of Olduvai Gorge.

I pause here to celebrate my just-concluded assassination of a mosquito.

When we arrived we were saddened to see the place shuttered. We walked around the corner and had an unremarkable meal of tacos and a burrito before strolling home. We stopped by the nearby market and picked up a couple of paletas to eat while headed home.

We crossed the nearby deadly arterial and watched three small kids play in a dusty chainlink lot next to a shack labeled “Blessed Event Counseling Center,” which pissed me off. A few houses later Viv found a “for sale” flyer box in front of an awful-looking full-lot crime against architecture.

I wasn’t really paying attention, because the house was so ugly, when Viv told me I had to see what they wanted for the place. Obediently, I came over to look at the hand-reduced asking price.

$600,000.

Free of volition, I yelped “WHAT!”

From behind a nearby bush, an amused voice said, “That’s for interested negotiators only.”

Viv and I burst into laughter and had a brief conversation with the fellow reclining in his lovely, gardened and detailed front yard in which we both expressed hope that the absurd asking price would pan out.

We turned home and on entering the nearest precincts were struck dumb by the mighty colors spilling across the sky for the next hour. As we entered the house we let our neighbor Tony know that now was probably a good time to gaze slackjawed at the sky.

The walk from our house to the nearest commercial center is not that long, and on a good day it holds a mix of good and bad, with the good predominating. But the bad is so bad, and so clearly the effect of structural forces within our economy and society that it defies reason to expect that an individual citizen can resist and remedy them. Therefore, we, and our neighbors, prefer to drive.

Today while walking the dog I happened through a majestic three-way furball, a large wing of violet-green swallows and their allies the dragonflies against what must have been a considerable swarm of dastardly and delicious gnats.

I would guess there were thirty or so birds. The combatants were using rising air up from a large work pit bordering the gravel road I take to get to the dog’s accustomed playfield. The net effect was to place the zenith of the swallows’ upward trajectories just above my eye level about six feet out beyond the edge of the embankment I stood on, looking down into the action. It was as fantastic a session of aerobatics as one can ever hope to witness. Occasionally a patrol of two or three birds would wing out and around me until they saw my placid and uninterested large dog, where up they’d wheel back into the thick of it.

I did not notice any dropped frames. There was some sort of processor-intensive time-compression effect whereby the moment both lasted forever and was gone in an instant.

(from a post I wrote for a friend on Facebook, regarding whether or not to buy a direct-display drawing tablet for her daughter as a school-gear investment.)

There are some potential tradeoffs to be aware of. First, what’s the hoped-for longterm goal here? Independent work as an illustrator, production art in a technology company, working as a cartoonist?

For independent work, non-Wacom products will be fine. In a studio setting, Wacom products will be the devices used.

Another point to consider is that non-direct display tablets are soooo cheap that probably you should just buy a small Bamboo anyway (what are they, $50?) and insist that it get used productively for a little while in order to be sure the $500-$1000 direct-display device being sought won’t just gather dust.

Additionally a point to consider is that non-direct display tablets can be extremely convenient for some uses. On a direct-display tablet, even though having the display under your hand is satisfying and less cognitively challenging (it’s weird to move your hand without staring carefully at it at first), using a direct display tablet actually GUARANTEES that you see less of the image while you work on it, since your hand is in the way. Additonally, no matter how carefully you calibrate, your stylus point is actually always slightly offset from the point on the display where the pixels are being shown in response to the stylus input.

Since an iPad costs as little as $200, it’s still a realistic option -AND- if it’s not getting use as a drawing tablet it WILL get used as an internet access device.

Wacom (and others) make bluetooth-enabled pressure sensitive stylii for the iPad that in combination with an app such as ProCreate provide easily 95% of the drawing functionality of a full-fledged tablet setup. I’ll post some 100% iPad work in thread here in a moment.

Microsoft’s also-ran tablet product, Surface, also has Wacom support built-in and iirc some models come with a pro stylus. I think there may be some limitations with regard to software selection but that applies to the iPad as well. The primary applications on either OS that are used with tablets are Photoshop and Manga Studio, with other more graphic-designy applications like Illustrator also working well on the tablet but not by any means requiring it or really offering an advantage.

The basic feature that Wacom’s products offer that is better (presumably) than competitors’ and definitely better than any iPad and stylus combo is levels of pressure sensitivity and the ability of the drawing surface to recognize and render the effects of stylus angle of contact. That plus speed equals shape of line, giving line dynamics and brushstroke tails and so forth. I can’t provide evaluative information about the non-Wacom products with regard to that.

To summarize:

non-direct-display tablets are more or less as useful as direct-display tablets and they cost less by an order of magnitude

iPad (and presumably Surface) can cost less than half as much as a comparable-size dedicated direct-display tablet and definitely do offer near-parity of potential quality of work. iPad does not offer parity of certain features or software, Surface definitely does.

non-Wacom direct draw tablets offer some level of feature parity with Wacom at roughly half the cost

Wacom tablets, direct or not, are the industry standard and no matter what product you settle on if it is not a Wacom the consumer will eventually want to at least try a Wacom

I should note that I have a Wacom Cintiq, a slightly older model than that currently available, the smaller size 12-inch or so model. It’s fine and I am glad I have it. I still use the iPad much more often.

I have just started the seventh and last season of Deep Space Nine as my time-and-motion entertainment while running on the treadmill. My runs fell off a bit the past couple weeks after a mild case of tendinosis, but I hope to be back up to thirty miles next week.

That said, I am glad to have taken the time to watch the show, which I basically eschewed while it was on, largely due to the inclusion of religious themes but also because the increasing use of multi-episode serialization made it hard to follow if you only caught a few episodes here and there.

I genuinely came to enjoy it by maybe a quarter into the sixth season, and there are a couple of truly outstanding episodes. But by the end of the sixth season, I found myself scoffing at plot events and yelling “bullshit!” at the screen at least once an episode, at character actions, at large-scale set-piece effects wankery, and at incredibly self-indulgent new elements introduced to the show.

The seventh season’s initial episodes have done nothing to assuage my growing skepticism about the show. Instead of the well-developed A-B plot mechanism introduced and perfected in American television by TNG, we appear to be in for the first stumbling gestures toward the current GoT-style merry-go-round of separate narrative threads, up to four per episode, parceled out in tiny snippets of plot simulacrum. These short clips of dialog and posturing are occasionally leadened by entire three minute Las Vegas standards performed by an actual member of the Rat Pack whose addition to the show exceeds my desire to appreciate his work in this context.

The contrast between the smug self satisfaction that underlies the introduction of this character and the delusional lack of dramatic acuity that led the production team to kill off the single most effective female lead in any Star Trek property does not fill me with a desire to justify the team’s further creative endeavors over the final season. I fully expect them to be bloated, indulgent, and nonsensical, and that’s a darn shame. I suppose I’ll have to review the production gossip to make sense of it. You would think that if the producers of the show would have preferred to make a show about Las Vegas, they should have made a show about Las Vegas and let us fucking nerds have our FTL and particle weapons and cashless utopias in peace. But no, they have to introduce religion and gambling and shit.

I have to wonder if I’m gonna stick to my plan of giving Voyager another shake. When that show aired I nearly immediately HATED it because the writing was so cynical and stupid and lazy and disrespectful of itself. I mean, those are for sure legitimate themes in nerd culture. But Voyager always felt like it was being written by people who couldn’t WAIT to get off the show and go write something they cared about. Right now, in my seventh season of DS9, it feels to me like the show is being written primarily to please the people that run the show and who like Las Vegas better than the stars. I suppose that’s a creative orientation, just not one I’m interested in.

Finally got the video card up for a workout under Win7 via Bootcamp on the Mac Pro. Still some major issues, like apparently there’s a long-standing no-audio-out bug associated with correctly installed Win7 under Bootcamp, for example. I was able to work around that by using an external USB audio module I had to hand, but come on.

I still don’t think my objective of a true single-box dual boot device is gonna work out here. With the stock card installed, the new card won’t work at all in Windows. With the stock card removed, there’s no boot screen, so you can’t option-key at startup to select the boot volume. With both cards seated, Mac OS 10.9 won’t boot at all, so even if I commit to a dual-boot machine, I have lost my standardized local OS setup, and will likely cave and go to 10.10 on all the machines, inevitably compromising performance and breaking software.

Anyway, so next week will be more banging on the actual Windows machine to try to bring the card up. The conventional opinion seems to be that the card and machine combo needs a 750w power supply. I’m gonna have to do the math myself, because the card actually seems to be designed and marketed with a lower power draw than the card it will replace on the Dell. If it’s not power, the next most favored choice is the BIOS, which is both only editable in limited ways on the Dell and quite possibly the source of the issue. I don’t have a definitive answer from either Dell or the card manufacturer about the compatibility of the devices, so I need to initiate that again.

I have been posting here and there about this and have a long narrative document written which I used to clarify the issues I was addressing. I should add more explicit technical detail to the doc and round up all the links to post here so I can refer back to it, including, one hopes a calendar and hour-budget timeline. That way, the next time I want to buy hardware, I can remind myself TO NOT DO IT.