Me too.

i find the right and left thumb switches on the kinesis are very useful; the thumbs are basically wasted with the typical keyboard layout and this makes them much more useful. When I go back to a standard lame keyboard i really miss the backspace with my left thumb.

For the original poster, you ought to be able to figure out something to do with the keymapping that will work given your right thumb is out of commission.

As the previous poster said the keyboard is remappable (on older models it was an extra cost option but i think now it's standard). This is cool; for example, vi users might do as i do and map the left thumb "delete" key to esc.

Their tech support is excellent.

These keyboards are expensive but worth it.

there's an explicit non-warranty of data on drives, because the consumer wants to put their priceless data on a cheap drive; the market has spoken, though, and cheap drives sell and expensive ones don't.

The car analogy is flawed - there's an explicit reliability warranty on all new cars, and an implicit expectation of safety (often made explicit by the mfr's advertising).

I find it amazing that these are written by the same person.

due to the problem, server operators delay support for IPv6 to avoid losing customers. it certainly "blocks ipv6 adoption."

It may be less prevalent, but we have observed similar behavior on windows when the client thinks it has IPv6 connectivity but does not for whatever reason. in our environment, I believe it was due to moving from wired to wireless network (our braindead wireless system only supports ipv4). My testing about a year ago showed that firefox on mac or windows waited 3 seconds PER HTTP HIT before falling back to IPv4; it was too dumb to cache the fact that v6 wasn't working, and repeated the 3sec wait over and over. Safari on mac acted similarly but 5 seconds per hit. I don't remember about IE but I think it was similar. Camino had no such problem; it didn't support IPv6 at all :(

Interesting - I hadn't actually looked at it beyond a quick glance. They will accept a standard certificate request, but as Lazy Jones describes above they'll just generate it all for you.

It's a tough call for me whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.

Obviously, as you say, when they generate the key for you, you're giving them your ssl session. OTOH, maybe if it gets more people using ssl in more cases, it's worth it.

Startcom offers free ssl certs and they are in all the browser roots now (although only recently added by microsoft).

that said, encryption of web traffic adds two significant bits of overhead:

• encryption takes CPU time. on busy web sites this really adds up.
• by default, most browsers won't cache anything that is ssl-encrypted. This really adds up too. Browsers warn you if some elements on an encrypted page aren't encrypted, so you can't mix elements easily.

very-recent versions of pytivo will extract the longest mpeg2 program from the dvd automatically, if you point it at an unencrypted VIDEO_TS folder.

supposedly, anyway. I haven't tried it.

as i mentioned above i normally watch ESPN or ABC for college football.

the other day i happened to watch an NFL game on CBS. I was surprised how much pixelation they had (it was not unwatchable but it got blocky for a few seconds every few minutes). I'm not sure if it was recompression by comcast or just crappy from cbs to start with, but it was definitely not as good as i'm used to on the other networks.

in bars & other public places, i've frequently seen HDTVs showing standard def content. Usually without the aspect ratio correct. That looks like ass, for sure.

by comparison, ESPN HD on comcast looks awesome.

I've seen demos of uncompressed HD vs broadcast quality. You're absolutely right about the quality difference, and when i get access to uncompressed HD source material I will want to display it.

In the meantime, on the planet earth, most of us don't have access to that material and blu-ray and broadcast HD are the best available. Let me tell you, it looks a bunch better than my old SD set (which was a pretty good toshiba).

my 5.1 downmix problems were due to either ffmpeg/pytivo or the tivo, and odds are good it was ffmpeg, and that it was my fault in misconfiguring it.

pytivo will default to something like 8mbit/sec bitrate for an hdtivo. ffmpeg won't actually use that much for dvd-sourced content, it won't need it, but it's not limited in any significant way by default.

I had only a stereo sound system, was getting stereo analog out of the tivo.

i don't know what the root cause of the problem was, whether ffmpeg was improperly downmixing it, or the tivo was. i'd bet on ffmpeg; i probably configured pytivo to do the downmix to save space on the tivo or something stupid like that.

I never really spent any time troubleshooting it so it's really hard to say what the problem was. If you configure it to just pass through 5.1 sound to your tivo (this is probably the default), odds are good it will just work.

The bitrates it transcodes to are configurable, and the default for s3 tivos is 8mbit I think. If it has a native mpeg2 stream it won't transcode at all, it will just pass it down to the tivo.

ftr dvd is 720x480 with rectangular pixels. The widescreen square-pixel display res of 480p is 854x480 or something close to that.

100Mbit is plenty fast enough to transfer hi-def streams; it's not the limiting factor. In practice the total a/v bitrate i'm transcoding to is usually less than 10Mbit.

but as i mentioned above, *something* isn't fast enough and the tivo doesn't keep up. You can have the tivo save it and watch it later though.

++ as far as tivo's actual DVR functionality.

if pytivo thinks you have an HD Tivo, it won't change the resolution at all (it does transcode to mpeg2). The series3 will scale the video itself (and it has a pretty good scaler chip in my experience).

If it thinks you have a series2, it will change the res, presumably to 640x480 but i haven't checked. Perhaps you misconfigured it so it thought you had a series2.

pytivo tries to detect if your file uses a supported codec (includes ac3), and just copy the audio stream if so; otherwise it transcodes, but the default transcoding target is in fact AC3.

I *have* had problems with 5.1 sound not being properly mixed down to stereo (yeah, yuck, but it's what i had until recently). The center channel was always sent to one speaker or the other. not sure if it's pytivo (ffmpeg really, it does the transcoding) or the tivo that causes this. I haven't really tried to debug it.

it is under active development and the devs seem to pay attention to support requests on the forums, so i'd suggest you give it another shot.

you need to make sure you have a good ffmpeg build. this can be non-trivial; the one that comes with your linux distro may not be good/new enough. the pytivo forums have links to win32 binaries that work for most people. If you're on a mac or bsd, try the ffmpeg-devel port rather than the ffmpeg port.

pytivo recently gained the ability to stream from DVD images. I haven't tested this but i suspect it works fine.

I like pytivo a lot, the only issue i have with it is speed. I have this cpu (1.9GHz dual-core athlon) and it's not fast enough to transcode hi-def in realtime.

you xfer the program and it dribbles through and you can watch it later.

More importantly, i've tried pre-transcoding and just transferring the mpeg-2 stream (pytivo will not transcode this at all), and the tivo (presumably) can't keep up, it still is a bit slower than realtime. That's annoying; i can pre-transcode or buy a faster cpu, but if the streaming just isn't fast enough then i'm kinda stuck. I am using 100Mbit wired ethernet, it's not some crappy wireless that's the issue. I haven't really investigated this.