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Since I’m between jobs, I’ve geeked out a little bit.

Got a Thingamakit for my birthday. After completing assembly, In the spirit of the gift I got from Greg (thanks Greg!), I had all my other gadgets introduce themselves to it yesterday.

Then today I modified my iPhone ProClip mount so that I can simply drop the iPhone in the slot and have it both charge and feed audio into my car stereo. Before it was two separate connections.

Materials:

• ProClip iPhone 3G mount with swivel (here’s the mount for the original iPhone)
• Proclip mount specific to your car
• iPhone 3G dock (here’s the dock for original iPhones)
• Coping saw, file, screwdriver, drill and bits, vise, hacksaw, hammer
• A 2″ x” 6″ strip of steel from the strongtie section of your home improvement store

This was a simple project. Check out the captions for some basic details on how I did it.

Comcast HDTV customer? You’re not getting anything close to what you’re paying for.

(Click here for a printable version.)

While many customers have a variety of issues with Comcast, I think their most egregious failure to deliver customer value mostly boils down to downright rotten picture quality.

What does “High Definition” really mean? At the barest minimum it means “better than standard definition,” also known as SDTV. It would also be reasonable to insist that it look better than enhanced definition, also known as EDTV. What you get from Comcast does not look consistently better than either SDTV or EDTV, as I demonstrate below.

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I always think of this scene from Tron when I change jobs.

My birthday is coming!

Don’t miss the surprise ending.

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I love G-Force. It’s a computer program that performs real-time music visualization.

My home theater setup includes a SqueezeBox with two outputs. The digital output goes into my receiver, and the analog output goes to a laptop about 25 feet away (the distance is so I won’t notice the fan noise). G-Force runs on the laptop, and the real-time visuals are sent in 720p high definition via a DVI/HDMI cable back to my big new TV.

The effect of all this is that I can sit on my couch, turn the music up, and enjoy awesome looking eye candy that is synchronized to my music.

G-Force has a really robust scripting system that veejays can use in nightclubs and stuff. I used the scripting system to create this introduction to G-Force and its abilities.

Here are my G-Force Scripts if you want to see them at something better than YouTube quality.