Cool things to do with a Humax HDR-FOX T2

Posted on February 19, 2012 by blogmywiki

Just a quick brain-dump of things I’ve discovered about the Humax HDR-FOX T2 Freeview HD box in my first few hours of ownership…

  • I set it to 1080p video output via the supplied HDMI cable on our Sony Bravia Freeview HD TV. The picture quality is stunning, even on non-HD Freeview channels.
  • I connected the box to the my broadband modem / router by ethernet to enable the BBC iPlayer – this also got the Humax box on my home network.
  • It has a built-in FTP server – you can turn this on under the internet settings menu. Transferring files ON to the Humax is much easier by FTP than mucking around with USB sticks (though USB sticks are needed to get recordings off the box). If you look under the internet settings you’ll also find the box’s IP address. Probably ought to make this static, as it will likely change every time it’s turned on, but anyway I scribbled the address down.
  • On a computer on my home network I used an FTP client (FileZilla) to connect to the box, using the Humax box’s IP address, the username humaxftp and the password 0000.

    • browsing Humax by FTP

  • You can then see the Humax’s ‘My Video’, ‘My Photo’ and ‘My Music’ folders on your computer’s FTP client.
  • I transferred three different types of BBC Redux file from the computer to the Humax box using FTP. (If you don’t know what BBC Redux is, skip this bit.)
  • The Redux .TS MPEG 2 original data stream plays but you can’t fast forward or rewind.
  • The much smaller Redux .TS MPEG 4 file played but also wouldn’t allow skipping within the file.
  • Amazingly, the small Redux high bit-rate h.264 MP4 version, described as ‘suitable for iPad, tablet computers, TVs’ file played, looked pretty good AND allowed navigation – fast forwarding and rewinding. This is more than I could have dreamed of!
  • These files also play off a USB stick stuck in the back of the Humax.
  • Apparently the Humax box encrypts recordings it makes itself, so you can’t get those off by FTP. You can copy SD (non-HD) recordings to a USB stick and take the files elsewhere, but not HD recordings. One way round this that doesn’t involve mucking around with the Humax’s firmware is to use something called Foxy. This doesn’t break the encryption itself, rather it modifies an HD recording so you can copy it back onto the Humax and the Humax box will then decrypt it when you copy it off again.

    • screengrab off Humax HD file playing on Mac

  • Foxy is a Windows .NET application. This is a bit of arse as my main computer is an iMac. But it looks like you can run Foxy on a Mac… you need to download and install the Mono runtime for OSX. Once you’ve installed it, you need to use the OS X command line to find Foxy.exe and run it using the command mono Foxy.exe - I can’t vouch this works for sure but the Foxy window appears on my iMac desktop and seems to work as you’d expect. Following the instructions I got the Humax to allow copying of an HD recording to a USB stick, though it was very slow and an error saying there wasn’t enough disk space flashed up at the end. When I copied the .TS file to my iMac’s hard drive, the video played flawlessly in VLC and looked gorgeous, but there was a problem with the sound – rather distorted. Will try again with a shorter programme – 40 mins of PanAm in HD is 1.64 GB (ouch!).

    • vlcsnap-2012-02-19-16h49m08s179

  • I’ve not looked into DLNA servers yet – as I have a Mac it seems to be a toss-up between Twonky and MediaLink – neither of which is free. I’m going to look at Twonky first.

Day 2 update.
browsing Humax on a netbook in XBMC xbmc
The Humax actually has its own DLNA server – you turn it on in the same place you turn on the FTP server. Using this I managed to watch an SD (non-HD) recording made on the Humax back on my netbook using the free XBMC media player on the laptop. This doesn’t copy the file, it streams it off the Humax onto the laptop over my wifi network. Pretty cool – means I can watch recordings back upstairs, though it doesn’t work with HD programmes.

Posted in BBC, internet, MacOS X, media, TV | Tagged , , | 30 Comments

Winter holiday reading

Posted on January 4, 2012 by blogmywiki

winter holiday reading

A quick wintery ‘recently read’ roundup…

Just My Type by Simon Garfield.
My favourite of the bunch – an inspired Christmas present from @gwithiansunset. Apparently this was serialised on Radio 4, which is a bit odd for a book about the visual art of typography, and brings me to my only niggle with this lovely, fascinating, well-researched book: he often talks about fonts without showing you what they look like. I know I can look them up on the internet, but curled up in Cornwall with no internet access worth speaking of, it would have been nice to have them in print. But then I’m a font nerd. As a kid I used to fall asleep with the Letraset catalogue. It was my favourite book. So I’d like to have seen a full alphabet for every font mentioned – and perhaps a chapter on Herb Lubalin. But I’m being picky. A great book.

How to Leave Twitter by Grace Dent.
This was a Kindle 99p Christmas offer – in fact, as I type, this is still 99p on the Kindle. And I’m afraid I wouldn’t pay much more than that for it. It’s surprisingly sour, very short, but the chapter on Twitter stereotypes is very funny and horribly accurate. I can see myself in at least one of them. Her section on people who use tools to see who has unfollowed them is spot-on and exactly what I have always thought: isn’t there enough misery in the world already without going out of your way to find out who’s gone off you? And it made me think of my own reasons for unfollowing people:

  • Because you tweet too much.
  • Because you never tweet.
  • Because you said one thing, one thing out of a million tweets, that hurt me and I unfollowed you in a strop. I’ll be back.
  • Because, even though you follow me, you never reply to me when you solicit help or advice from Twitter at large, and frankly I now feel a bit like I’m stalking you, so I’ll just slink away.
  • Because you’re too happy and I’m in pit of despair just now. I know this is bad of me. I’ll be back.
  • Because you are having a massive argument with someone else I follow and it’s getting me down.
  • Because you are having way to much fun with someone else I follow and it’s getting me down.
  • Because someone thinks you’re flirting with me. You’re not, I know you’re not. If I know anything by now, I know when I am, and when I am not, being flirted with, but sometimes it’s simpler just to unfollow.
  • Because sometimes Twitter randomly unfollows people – I think this is deliberate and wonderfully good coding. It means you can blame any of the above on Twitter.

When God Was A Rabbit by Sarah Winman.
I wanted to like this book, I really did. It has a lovely cover, I found a signed copy in the bookshop in St Ives that was calling out ‘buy me’ as several people recommended it. And I did love the first half. The second half, not so much. It’s well-written, the childhood scenes especially, but too many things annoyed me – the historical events which, although they are dealt with sensitively, still felt crow-barred in to me, the utter absence of romantic love for the main protagonist, a couple of possibly accidental anachronisms: I don’t think you got gherkins in Wimpy burgers in the 1970s – I’m pretty sure they came in with McDonalds. And I’m pretty sure dads in the 1970s didn’t say ‘yay!’. In fact I’m not even sure anyone said ‘yay!’ in the 70s. And then the deliberate anachronism: the 50p piece with the date in the future that Jenny produces from her arm. I waited 324 pages for an explanation. It could have been mad, as crazy as a talking rabbit, I just wanted to know what it meant. And it was never referred to again. Maybe I’m just too thick to work it out.

Posted in Christmas, fiction, literature, recently read | Tagged , | 4 Comments

…which was nice.

Posted on November 28, 2011 by blogmywiki

In the dark days of winter it’s sometimes easy to lose sight of one’s achievements. This is just a personal list of things to remind myself that I’m not utterly useless or unlucky.

  • S39 – a new ‘flagship’ studio for World Service News & Current Affairs that I helped design, test and install. I wrote the instruction book for it, and I did my last ever World Service transmission as a Studio Manager in it. I love it. I feel towards it like the Doctor does to the TARDIS. I understand that the mixing desk will live on, in Scotland which makes me happy. I had been worried that it would be scrapped.
    New S39 1st TX
  • I wrote a book. Yes, it’s very short but I actually started and finished a book and some people seem to like it.
  • I designed a working font.
    Punchie font demo
  • I built a web site from scratch for someone using PHP and SQL that allowed them to upload their own audio showreel and edit the site on a web page. I have no idea how I did it, but I did.
  • Sometimes I take a photo I’m really happy with.
  • I invented a super-delicious recipe for pumpkin soup.
  • I got to spend a day in the Private Eye office on press day earlier this year, and I met Ian Hislop, Richard Ingrams and Tony Rushton. They were all lovely. Childhood dream come true.
  • I got to drive a small truck coast-to-coast across America in 2000, from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, part of the way on Historic Route 66. I got paid to do this.
  • I made an elegant dual-boot WindowsXP and Mac OS X netbook for under £300 – a lot of trial and error was involved in this, but it’s a wonderfully useful thing.
Posted in Grace in Small Things | Leave a comment

November spawned a monster

Posted on November 26, 2011 by blogmywiki

Or, My NaNoWriMo Hell

The creative processIt was a mad, spur-of-the-moment decision. I hadn’t thought it through. A couple of friends were doing NaNoWriMo – and I thought, what the hell, why not? 50,000 words in a month, 1666 words a day. Sure, I work full-time. Yes, I have three small children. But, really, How Hard Could It Be?

I already had two books on the go – one is about what happens to Patience Wilson, one of the characters in my previous book Constance Breakwater, when she grows up. The other is a mad idea, best described as The History Boys meets An Education via Doctor Who. NaNoWriMo demands a fresh work, though; you can’t import stuff you’ve already written, so I decided to have a crack at an immediate sequel to Constance Breakwater. I was going to knock something off, get it out on the Kindle by Christmas. Easy.

It started well. For the first three days I was either on days off or on late shifts at work and managed to find a couple of hours’ peace and quiet where I could write. I was hitting my targets. My word count graphs looked good. I smiled down with pity on my friends who weren’t quite on schedule to finish their books by the end of November.

Then I unexpectedly had a job interview to prepare for. All writing stopped. I very much wanted, and needed this job. I could not justify spending time writing when I really ought to be revising. Then I had a leaving do to go to: my own. The job interview and saying goodbye to the people and building I’d known for almost 21 years took 5 days out of my writing month. When I looked at the stats, they were grim. I had such a deficit to make up, I’d have to put in a 9,000 word day. NINE THOUSAND of the little fuckers in one, doubtless already packed, day. That simply wasn’t ever going to happen.

I started to hate the book I was trying to write. It was a stupid idea, going nowhere. I closed my NaNoWriMo account, thinking I could set my own, more realistic goals. 50,000 words in 2 months, perhaps. Or 6. Or a year.

Then one sleepless night I decided to abandon writing completely. I have a friend who’s had two novels published, but could not, no matter how many times he tried, get a third book published. Eventually he gave up trying. My own urge to write was, at the time, still so strong that I told him he was mad, but he said the relief when he decided he was no longer a writer was immense. And now I knew, a little bit, how he felt.

My first, short book came relatively easily. It had felt just like typing, admittedly after an awful lot of thinking and plotting in my head. And a lot of walking around Walton-on-the-Naze on my own. But it’s not like that any more. I do want to finish my two other books, but now writing is like banging your head against a brick wall. It’s lovely when you stop.

And I didn’t get the job.

Posted in children, family life, fiction, literature | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Circus Peanut Butter

Posted on November 6, 2011 by blogmywiki

Locker tapesI’ve been clearing out my locker at work and found many iced gems on reel-to-reel audio tape. Perhaps oddest of all was a reel of American advert jingles from the 60s and 70s that I have no memory of – they must have belonged to my brother. I need to do more research on these, but a quick Google suggests some of them may have been written by Steve Karmen. I’d love to share them but as I clearly don’t own the copyright, I don’t see how I can.

I’m going to risk this one, though. It’s the oddest of the bunch by miles, and it’s for a long-dead brand of peanut butter. The lyrics and the music are just insane. I wonder why the brand died out…

Posted in food, media, music, nostalgia, radio | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments