Review: Terk TV38 Antenna

Reviews

Last year, as we were planning our move, I knew we would need to buy a new TV antenna. According to AntennaWeb (a very useful site), we are in the violet (or “fat chance”) zone for several TV stations. Add to that the fact that we have a tin-covered building pretty much in the direct path to several of the transmitter. Metal buildings often cause “multipathing”, where a signal bounces off buildings and arrives multiple times at the antenna. This causes ghosting on analog signals and can cause problems getting a signal lock on digital ones. We also have a fairly long run from the antenna to the receiver (a MythTV box) and are wanting to receive digital signals. Not only that, but the TV transmitters are in different areas about 40 degrees apart, and most high-gain antennas are also highly directional. So it’s a difficult situation.

So in our situation, an outdoor antenna is a must. At our old place, we had used the best outdoor antenna Radio Shack sold. Despite having more friendly reception conditions, it didn’t work well.

After a good deal of research, I bought a Terk TV38 outdoor antenna from Amazon. It comes with:

  • The antenna, at a large 12.5 feet long, 9.25 feet wide, 2.6 feet high (though packaged in a much smaller carton)
  • A 5-foot mast
  • Chimney mount
  • Wall mount
  • Transformer (for direct connection to coax cabling)
  • Various mounting hardware

It comes with the hardware you need to mount it in an attic or attach it to an exterior wall or chimney in most situations. However, we wanted to attach it to the roof directly, so we purchased a tripod mount from RadioShack for that purpose. I had also purchased some quad-shield RG6 coax from Cat5ECableGuy.Com.

I assembled the antenna on the ground. That took some time, but wasn’t difficult. But this was in winter, a fairly wet winter, and I knew that weather wouldn’t cooperate well enough for us to get the antenna up on our roof safely some Saturday for a few weeks. So I thought I’d just leave the antenna on the ground for a little while, hook it up, and see if we get anything. I put it on the ground, aimed it about in the middle of the TV transmitters, and went to set up the MythTV.

I was shocked to discover that, even with the antenna on the ground, I got a perfect digital picture on all channels but one. Once we got the antenna mounted on the roof, reception has been perfect. I’ve had no need for actuators (to rotate the antenna) or amplifiers. Just the antenna itself, even with the long coax run, has performed quite well.

For anyone that needs an outdoor antenna, I highly recommend the Terk TV38.

Young People NOT Delinquent?

Society

Here’s an interesting and probably controversial article. It starts with:

When I hear people my age (35+) rip the younger generation I usually keep my mouth shut. But I have something I need to say, so this is my public response to the people who think there is something wrong with young people today.

Let me tell you what I think about young people:

The kids coming of age right now are the greatest generation, and we don’t give them the respect and freedom we were given and it is shameful.

And it goes on from there.

Also I should point out that George Bush is a baby boomer.

Hey Dell, Can You Hear Me Now?

Technology

A couple of years ago, I had an apparent lapse of judgement and bought a 21″ Dell LCD because it seemed to be a good monitor and a good price. Even after my earlier experiences with Dell.

Last winter, it developed an odd dim area in the shape of an L. It was under warranty.

I made the mistake of contacting Dell support. It probably took 2-3 hours of calling before they agreed to replace it. I’m pretty sure I said each of these things to them at least 5 times:

  • No, it does not have an Express Service Tag. It has only a serial number tag, and no, it is not the same format as the Express Service Tag.
  • No, my computer doesn’t have an Express Service Tag either. It is not a Dell computer.
  • Yes, it is possible to use a Dell monitor with another kind of computer.
  • Yes, I did buy the monitor from Dell. Would you like the order number?
  • No, hooking it up to another computer doesn’t change it. Do you remember I told you that the area looks green even when the monitor is OFF?
  • I was just talking to someone else, who was going to transfer me to some other department, but (hung up on me, sent me to a busy signal, sent me to a menu that accepts no input) instead.

Eventually I spoke to somebody that understood the concept of a serial number and agreed to send me a replacement monitor. I made the mistake of giving them a shipping address for that.

Ever since then, they have sent me stupid catalogs.

NO, DELL, I DO NOT WANT TO BUY A FLAMINGO PINK INSPIRON NOTEBOOK

that is what I think each week when I get such a catalog.

I have gone to their website to try to get off of these mailings. They have different privacy forms for their different units (home, small business, etc.), and I sent in a removal form for all of them. That didn’t help. I called their customer service department, and after getting the run around yet again, they said they’d take me off right away. That didn’t help either. This was all months ago. They are blatantly violating their stated privacy policy.

Today I got another magazine. Featuring Flamingo Pink inspirons yet again. And a page that says “Raze your standards.” Need I say more?

I will therefore be following the advice of Junkbusters.com and will file a Prohibitory Order against Dell at my earliest convenience. That’s the first time I’ve been motivated to do that.

And if they don’t honor that, they’ll be hearing from the postal inspectors.

Dell has now become my most despised company ever. Yes, even more than Sprint.

Spineless Democrats

Uncategorized

The Democrats ran in 2008 on the platform of ending the Iraq war, and won largely on that platform. Now they are failing to deliver upon it.

It is true that they have a thin majority in the Senate and a not much wider one in the House. It is also true that it takes 60 votes to pass legislation in the Senate, which they don’t have.

But here’s the thing. It takes 60 votes to pass legislation. That means that they can easily defeat any massive Republican war spending bill.

I think they are worried about the Republicans painting them as being against the troops. So what? If the Republicans vote against a Democratic funding bill that provides adequate funds for an orderly withdrawal, aren’t they doing the same? “No” votes on both are votes to prevent the funding from passing.

They easily have the votes to defeat massive Republican spending bills. So why not advance a spending bill like they campaigned for, and watch all the Republicans vote against it? If no funding at all passes, they achieve their objective, just not as cleanly, and the Republicans would be the ones voting against funding. Make the Republicans take some heat for a change, and give them no choice but to compromise.

Technology

Technology

Two days ago, I was out by the road digging a hole for our mailbox.

Along comes a guy on a tractor. The tractor was built in maybe the 1960s. It had no cab, and was loud, as tractors are. Attached to the back was a mower. It had long since lost any part of paint that was on it, and appeared to be made of rust.

The farmer driving this tractor was wearing a bluetooth earpiece for his cellphone.

(I don’t think there would be any way to use a phone while driving that tractor due to the noise, but hey.)

Now, the rest of the story…

This being rural Kansas, the farmer saw me and stopped to chat, turning off the tractor first, of course. He introduced himself as “that crazy guy from south of town”, and of course had a pretty good idea of who I was. After all, he’s lived around here for decades and knew my grandpa.

I told him why I was digging the hole for the mailbox. There’s going to be a second house down our mile, so now the post office will actually deliver to a mailbox at our driveway, rather than one almost a mile away. I thought he looked confused, so I pointed down the road and said that’s our mailbox on the corner.

“Oh, I know. I probably shouldn’t say this, but I knew when you moved in because I checked your mailbox one day and it didn’t have 40-year-old ads piling up anymore.”

We chatted a few more minutes, about the neighbor’s goats, how annoying it is that he can’t get DSL, why he wishes he could still use DOS instead of Windows. Then he went off towards home.

He had stopped his tractor in the middle of the road. But it wasn’t a problem. Nobody drove by that whole time anyway.

Desktop Linux: Gnome

Desktop Linux

I had been intending to write an entire series of posts about our corporate switch to Linux on the Desktop. To date, I wrote only one introducing the project and our reasons for switching from Windows. That was back in April.

Today I’d like to start talking about it all some more.

We have standardized on Gnome for our desktops. Given the Windows background of our user base, it was pretty much a given that we would have to use either Gnome or KDE. Something like fvwm or a non-integrated environment just wouldn’t be a good option.

We evaluated both Gnome and KDE. The very “clean” appearance of Gnome was a nice thing for us. KDE seemed to be to “chatty”, talked about entering in audiocd:/ when it shouldn’t have needed to, and generally violated the KISS and principle of least surprise too often. That said, I continue to run KDE for my personal desktop because Gnome just doesn’t have the flexibility that KDE does. It is too bad that Gnome has gone on this remove functionality kick, and KDE hasn’t gotten the KISS religion yet.

Anyway, Gnome worked well for the most part. We have set some defaults in gconf for things like panel icons. We also set a few mandatory defaults. I fixed a couple of bugs in the vfs system related to nfs4 support, which manifested themselves as icons for files newly saved to the desktop never showing up.

We wanted to present a customized menu to people based on what their job function is. That is, we are using a single system image, so all apps will be installed on all machines. But we didn’t want people to have to see a ton of software that they don’t use. That was easily enough accomplished for custom apps by creating desktop files with mode 0640 and setting the group to the set of people that should see the program on their menu. We removed a few stock programs (such as the terminal) from the menu as well, using dpkg-statoverride. That was also quite easily done. However, I will say that the entire Gnome XDG menu thing is woefully under-documented.

We use Firefox for the standard web browser. It is integrated well enough with Gnome and we have no problems there, aside from sites that are IE-only. We solve that with a Windows terminal server, which I’ll discuss later.

Our network printing was already based on Cups. The individual machines are set up as Cups clients only, which works fine. We did find, however, that gnome-cups-manager automatically installs a tray monitor for cups. This monitor puts little printer icons on the tray when printers are in use. Unfortunately, it figures out which printers are in use by polling the server, and it is turned on by default out of the box, with no good way to disable it short of dpkg-statoverriding it to 0000. You can imagine that hundreds of users times dozens of printers times numerous polls per minute created quite the load on the server. This was a really braindead design and the people that wrote it should have known better. It is also quite useless to have icons coming on for all the printers on the network, which on some networks could be thousands, and not even on the same continent as the user.

Printing is generally a bit iffy in Gnome. They seem to be transitioning between about 3 different printing toolkits, all of which have different print dialog boxes with different supported features and different ways of selecting printers. One chief annoyance is that the print box in evince (the document/PDF viewer) does not let people access printer-specific features such as hole punching and stapling. So we installed gtklp and xpdf for people. The people that print heavy PDFs are huge fans of gtklp these days; it’s a nicer solution than we had in Windows. Nobody really likes evince. We also have had some trouble with evince generating PostScript output that some printers can’t grok. It sounds like all this should be much better in newer versions of Gnome, which if true, would be welcome news.

The Gnome screenshot tool makes it easy to save off a screenshot to a file, or to drag it into an email, but it is difficult to print it (you have to save it first). That was a common complaint around here, so I wrote a little wrapper around xwd and gtklp for printing screenshots. People really like that because gtklp gives them lots of options about orientation and size of the image if they want it, or a simple “Print” button to click if they don’t care. We set a gconf default to bind this to Ctrl-PrintScr and it works well. KDE’s screenshot tool is much more capable, and if we were using KDE, we wouldn’t have had any problem with screenshots.

The bottom line on Gnome is that we, and are users, are happy with it after we’ve made these customizations. But we have had to do more customization that we should have. I still think that Gnome has been better for our users than KDE, but I do wonder how long we’ll be able to survive with our “no KDE libraries” policy, as people want ksnapshot, kolour, etc.

Time: Failing Our Geniuses

Uncategorized

An interesting article on Time today: Failing Our Geniuses about how the most talented students are being sidelined by current education policy. Some choice bits:

Since well before the Bush Administration began using the impossibly sunny term “no child left behind,” those who write education policy in the U.S. have worried most about kids at the bottom, stragglers of impoverished means or IQs. But surprisingly, gifted students drop out at the same rates as nongifted kids–about 5% of both populations leave school early. Later in life, according to the scholarly Handbook of Gifted Education, up to one-fifth of dropouts test in the gifted range.

It can’t make sense to spend 10 times as much to try to bring low-achieving students to mere proficiency as we do to nurture those with the greatest potential.

We take for granted that those with IQs at least three standard deviations below the mean (those who score 55 or lower on IQ tests) require “special” education. But students with IQs that are at least three standard deviations above the mean (145 or higher) often have just as much trouble interacting with average kids and learning at an average pace. Shouldn’t we do something special for them as well?

In a no-child-left-behind conception of public education, lifting everyone up to a minimum level is more important than allowing students to excel to their limit. It has become more important for schools to identify deficiencies than to cultivate gifts. Odd though it seems for a law written and enacted during a Republican Administration, the social impulse behind No Child Left Behind is radically egalitarian. It has forced schools to deeply subsidize the education of the least gifted, and gifted programs have suffered. The year after the President signed the law in 2002, Illinois cut $16 million from gifted education; Michigan cut funding from $5 million to $500,000. Federal spending declined from $11.3 million in 2002 to $7.6 million this year.