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So we have a video camera trained on Connor’s crib that feeds to every TV in the house on channel 3, an X10 camera to be exact that is black and white and supposed to be low light. However, it’s low light level performance leaves something to be desired (translation: sucks).
Now its maybe not so well known, but most camera’s can see IR on some level. Some better than others, but usually at least a bit. For example if you take a TV remote and hold it up to a digital camera and push a button, you sould see a pulsing flash….or if you feel so inclined try pointing it at your Wii sensor bar next time it’s on. What you are seeing is Infrared being transmitted.
So I thought I’d buy an Infrared Illuminator, but they are super freakin’ expensive. Well not to expensive, but still $50 bucks for one with only 20 LED’s. I knew I could do better than that. So I looked around and found a kit online I could make sold by a gentleman named Dale Wheat. I bought it from BG Micro, but he’s got a pretty good site. Anyways moving on, so I got the kit in the mail and sat down to start putting it together. It’s been a while since I’ve done some serious soldering, so I really enjoyed dusting off my skills and seeing if I could burn myself again About 45 minutes later I was all done and crossing my fingers that it would work on the first shot. There were 36 Leds, so I was a little concerned about any polarities I might have mixed up, but I had taken my time.

So I hooked up 12v DC @ 150mA and hoped for the best. I used my Pentax camera to make sure they were working (remember, Infrared is invisible to the human eye) and at first saw nothing. Upon closer inspection I saw a faint purple like glow, it then occured to me that the Pentax might have an IR filter on it that was super strict so I tried my cell phone camera with much greater success. Pleased with myself I took the assembly upstairs to Connor’s room, place in in front of the camera, plugged it in, and then walked to the tv to bask in my success.
I saw jack squat
I tried different power supplies, eventually hooking it up to my “tank” (which is a 12v 30amp power supply). Still nothing….then something I had read before popped into my mind..IR filters. I did some more research and came across the website I remembered reading in the past. It was about how to change webcams into IR cameras….of course I was only interested in removing the filter, but the concept was the same. So I decided it was time to tear an x10 camera apart for the greater good.
The x10 camera was easy enough to take apart, you don’t even need a screwdriver….just unscrew the lens by hand (which is also how you focus it) until it pops out in your hand.

The infrared filter is a little square inside this assembly, but the hard part is getting to it. There is no way short of using a dremel to carve around the assembly. As you can see in the pic below, you need to just chop it off about 2 millimeters below the start and be careful.

See the little square inside there? Kinda has a reddish hue to it? That’s the infrared filter….you know the thing that removes infrared (which we want) from the camera. Simply at this point take it out and try your best to get the whole thing back together. I didn’t have any luck with superglue, the plastic doesn’t seem to bond. So I ended up melting it back together and re-assembling it. After that I had to file it a bit and trim it up with a razor blade to make it screw back into the housing far enough to get a good focus. Once that was all done I waited for dark…
When it was finally dark out I plugged in the IR illuminator and BAM! Super freakin’ what the hell bright. Lit the whole area up like a spot light, but it’s completely invisible to the human eye. Makes you wonder why they don’t just make these so people can remove them, especially in something that’s supposed to be a “low light” camera.

Why is it when you make an dentist appointment it seems to far ahead, but you never seem to remember it until the night before? Well, at least in my case my wife remembers it…
So many things going on that I want to talk about, it’s just finding time to do it has been scarce. Hopefully after the fence guys comes today, and I get another hole put in my head by the dentist I’ll find time to make another post.

Ya know, I’ve always liked rottweilers personally. Then again I like a dog you can tackle and play with Everybody thinks they are so vicious but look at this:

For months now, the Internet has been clogged up with these varients of the Storm virus, spewing out their fake ecard emails, and more recently their “membership details”. Both of these are very easy to spot because they always use IP addresses in the email. For example:

Welcome,
We are glad you joined Joke-A-Day.
User Number:
Temorary Login: user8675
Temp Password ID: qj392
This Login Info will expire in 24 hours. Please Change it.
Use this link to change your Login info: http://209.89.3.xxx/
Welcome,
New Member Services
Joke-A-Day

Now most likely that IP address above is just some other poor schmuck that got zombied when he visted another version of it. Doesn’t really matter because in the end, we just want to make sure we don’t go there…and neither does anyone else we have to fix their computers for. So, here’s a handy little filter that somebody showed me, that totally scraps any email that comes in with an IP address html link (which really, there shouldn’t be any legitimate email like that). Plus, merely visiting the site is dangerous enough…there’s usually a few exploits hiding on it that try to whack you right away, even if you are just looking and click nothing.
So…how to make a filter that kills these instantly. First up Outlook 2003:
1. First launch Outlook, then go to your toolbar and select Tools > Rules and Alerts.

2. After that a new window will pop up, click on “New Rule”

3. Another new window will pop up, titled Rules Wizard. Click the radio button that says “Start from a blank rule” and then click next

4. Now on this new screen, make sure you check the box that says “with specific words in the body”. Once you do that it will appear down below in the “step 2″ text area….and the words “specific words” will be underlined and look like a hyperlink. Click them to make the next window appear.

5. At this new window, what we are doing is adding the text the filter will key off of, so simply what we will do is add the following entries, one by one:

http://1

http://2

http://3

…..etc until we get to 9

6. Once that’s done and you click the Ok button, you should see the screen below. Now we have to tell outlook what to do with the emails that match the text string we set above (http://1, etc). For this example I selected “move a copy to the specified folder” and then told it to use the Junk E-mail folder down below in the Step 2 text box (just like we specified the http:// stuff earlier). But a better solution would probably be to select “permanently delete it”. I’ll leave it up to you, but I’d go with that one for most normal people.

That’s pretty much it, just click on finish and you should be all set. Now Outlook 2003 will automatically put any email with an IP based link into the bit bucket.
How to setup for Outlook Express 6:
1. Launch your Outlook Express and go to the tool bar, then click on Tools > Message Rules > Mail. This should launch a new window after you click it:

2. This new window (called New Mail Rule) will pop up and you will want to select the “Where the message body contains specific words” in the first text box, and then in the second I recommend you check the box that says “Delete it”. Now down in the third text box you should see the words “contains specific words” highlighted like a hyperlink. Click on them to get to the next box:

3. A window called “Type Specific Words” will pop up, and just like before we’ll type in “http://1″ then hit enter (without the quotation marks of course) and then continue on until we’ve done up to http://9. When that’s done hit the Ok button

4. Now back to the “New Mail Rule” you should see the following screen capture on your own computer. Text Box “3. Rule Description” should show all the http://’s you put in, and that it will Delete it immediatly. Just click the Ok button

5. Last screen…just confirms everything you’d done already, all you have to do is hit Ok again and your all done.

That’s it, your now hopefully 100% protected. In reality there’s really no reason any email should ever have IP link, so this is really a good rule to have by default.

For the first time I decided I needed a ring tone for my new phone, the reason simply because every ring tone that came with it currently was absolute shit. I’m not even eggagerating, they really were that bad. Didn’t even have a simple ring one….just a whole lot of stupid ones…hell my kid’s toys make better music than this thing could.
So wading into the festering pile that is the cellphone ringtone market, I began my search. Desperatly for anything that wouldn’t embaress the living hell out of me when blared from my phone in public. Certainly having Gwen Stephani proclam that “” has a certain appeal, but I don’t think it would go over well in meetings.
My main point is pretty much, all these ringtones are bad…but it get’s better. If you do manage to find something that doesn’t make you spew projectile vomit from your mouth, then the real fun begins….pricing. $2.99 for a single ringtone? Are you out of your ever lovin’ mind??? That’s just 100% pure insanity…what kind of a racket are they running our there with this junk?
All I had to do was drop the sample rate, and make sure the file size was under 500kb, then upload the MP3′s to my site here and I was able to download them just fine. Sure I had to pay for data transfer, but you can take your “MTV says you must like this band so they can make more money for the record companies” ringtones and keep them. 100% pure profit for the companies pushing this dreck…makes me sick.
Plus…they didn’t offer many Strongbad ringtones…nothing like having “the system is down” play when your phone rings

I had been trying to download the Bioshock Demo off Xbox live for a few days with no luck. Either it would time out or just crap out 1/2 though. Even resuming and clearing the partial download from the hard drive didn’t help at all.
Somebody suggested removing the Xbox 360 from DMZ if I had it there, and sure enough since I removed it it resumed the download at 45% and finished up just as I was leaving for work (….figures). No idea why DMZ would have caused this behavior, unless Microsoft’s servers were hammering the 360 and causing it to drop bits or something.
Of course since I don’t have a gold membership, and don’t play online it’s not a big deal. Whatever works I guess….maybe now that stupid Superman Returns demo will work. But again…it doesn’t make sense since I’ve been able to download other demos (crackdown, blue dragon….) just fine and DMZ was on all that time as well.

omg!

Say this today in the store, apparently they’ve co branded w/ Halo 3 (yes please) and are marketing something called Game Fuel.
They had my consumer heart at Halo, but apparently it’s not just a mere marketing ploy alone. There’s a new taste, cherry citrus….and there’s more caffeine.
48mg vs 36mg for normal Mountain Dew. That’s a 25% increase in caffeine…and it doesn’t taste to bad. Kinda like livewire with some grenadine mixed in. Slightly cough syrupy-ish though.

Well we’ve made it this far at least. Just kidding, the time really has flown by, especially with the little rug rat being born so soon after the wedding (apparently massive amounts of stress can act as a catalyst, go figure). Although I’ve never had a wedding anniversary before, I think it’s probably pretty easy to guess it’s going to be a little different w/ Connor around. Of course, I could imagine a lot worse things than spending time with the people you care most about. Plus I’m just thankful I married somebody who was willing to contantly remind me when our anniversary is so I don’t have to get a tatto or something
Earlier in the week Jen encouraged me to play with Photoshop Elements 2.0. I have to say I’m pretty impressed.. .I’ve been using a copy of photoshop 6.0 for all my photo editing needs for years now, but I figured they’ve probably put a lot more advanced features into these “lite” versions for the generic home user. Boy was that true, stuff that takes me like 5 minutes to do is now just a drag and drop away. I think they’re up to version 5.0 now for elements, and I’ll have to keep my eye out for a deal on that. Years ago Photoshop was as daunting a tool as Quark, but now they’re really brining it to the masses. Scary!
There was some other stuff I was gonna post about while I had the time, but I can’t remember….maybe it’ll come to me later.

Haven’t been posting a lot lately, way to busy with a lot of things, but I had to share this.
Back when Jen’s mom came to visit she bought us a Pure Digital Flip Camera (PSV-351), and pretty much like everyone else who’s tried one of these we really liked it a lot.
Flash forward a few weeks, and for some unknown reason the time on it got totally off. Instead of 7/2007 it thought it was suddenly 10/2011. I didn’t think it was that much of a big deal at first, figured we could either:
1. Set it on the camcorder
2. plug it in and run a utility to set it
3. plut it in, and it would automatically sync with the computer’s time.
The answer is D: none of the above. You can’t set the time on the unit at all. Which begs the question; Who the fark thought that was a good idea? How stupid do you have to be to overlook something that basic and simple. In fact the only way to actually get the time set is to do the following:
From the Flip Video site:

The date and time on the camcorder are set to U.S. Central Time during manufacturing. You can reset the camcorders date and time by taking your camcorder to an authorized Pure Digital Retailer to get a DVD. When the camcorder is processed, its clock is reset to your local date and time. There is no other way for you to reset the date and time on your own.

Hey guys, here’s an idea…maybe I don’t want to pay for a freaking DVD just to get the time set. I mean call me a renegade but I’d think that it might have occurred to somebody over there pulling in a paycheck that this was a very very stupid idea. Hell, this isn’t even about time zones, I could deal with the camera using EST, while it needs PST….but my camera seems to think it’s magically 4 years and 3 months in the future. How in the hell did that happen? That’s what is killing me, somehow the date changed cause the first few video’s were fine, so how in heck did it go south like that suddenly?
As for their tech support group, they were nice enough, telling me they would fix it for me. The only caveat is that they wanted me to ship it out to them to CA.
Ship it….
Ship it to CA just to get the time set on it correctly?
What part of your brain has to be missing to make that seem like a logical course of action? Here’s an idea guys, write a farking program and make it available on your site. Or if that’s to hard, offer up a free DVD coupon so that I could take it and have it go through the full cycle of the machine which will probably sync the time….but asking me to ship it? Stop wasting my air you moron.
Update 9/3/07: I responded to their RMA request with asking them to just send me a coupon for a free DVD. They actually did, and today we tried it out. Sure the time is still 5 hours off, but at least the date/month is correct now. So short answer is if your date/time is off, having a dvd made will get you mostly fixed.