IR_Blog

How to Watch Chinese TV Online Using XBMC

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XBMC is a fantastic media player that can handle most video and music formats. It also includes many add-ons to watch TV online. Being open source, XBMC is free and is compatible with Windows, Mac and other platforms. If you don’t have Dish Network or a dedicated set-top box for watching Chinese programming, using XBMC with CNTV can be a handy solution. CNTV (China Network Television) is provided by China’s official broadcasting company CCTV, and I’m sure there are other add-ons for different languages.

Quality-wise CNTV on XBMC is very good, although it highly depends on the speed of your Internet service. I’m using Time Warner standard 10MB down with Turbo Boost and can watch most stations without any problem. Obviously it still can’t compete with Dish’s Great Wall Package in terms of PQ and ease-of-use, but for occasional viewing, XBMC is hard to beat.

Below is a step-by-step tutorial for setting up XBMC with CNTV:

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My Journey to U.S. Citizenship – Step 4: Interview

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Today I was pleasantly surprised when I saw a citizenship interview notice in my mailbox (8/17/2012). I was surprised because my USCIS online status never changed. In fact it is still showing Initial Review right now. Normally it would’ve changed to “your N400, APPLICATION FOR NATURALIZATION was placed in line for interview scheduling. When scheduling is complete,  … Read more

Set Up a New PC Part IV: Install Peripherals

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The final steps setting up a new laptop include connecting peripherals, such as a mouse, keyboard, printer and external monitor. My Logitech MK700 combo worked immediately after the unifying receiver was plugged in, and didn’t even require a pairing process. However, the mouse felt a bit sluggish. Installing Logitch software solved the problem. The rest, however, took a bit of effort and are explained below.

12. Print through router

My laptop only has three USB ports. Without using a USB hub, two of them were already occupied by the Logitech receiver and a laptop cooler. I wanted to reserve the third one for flash thumb drives, so my only option is to add the printer to my Asus RT-N16 router which has two USB ports available. This way other computers on my home network has access to the printer as well.

The process isn’t straightforward and goes like this:

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Set Up a New PC Part III: Install Software

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With the SSD in place, it is time to start installing software and drivers, beginning with Windows 7.

8. Install Windows

Insert the laptop battery, connect the power cord and power on the computer. Since the BIOS was already set to boot from the CD/DVD drive in Step , Windows installation should start automatically. If you forgot to load the installation disk, you can do so now and restart the laptop.
The entire process of installing Windows 7 took me about half an hour (maybe less since I was doing something else at the same time). Near the end I was prompted to activate Windows and I chose the phone option. The automatic voice system guided me through the process: I provided the OEM Windows product key and in return received an activation code. The only problem was that the system couldn’t understand me saying “I’m finished,” and insisted transferring me to a live operator to restart the process. At that point my computer was already showing successful activation so I simply hung up.

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Set Up a New PC Part II: Install Hardware

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Upgrading a laptop’s hardware isn’t as easy as for a desktop, simply because there isn’t much room to work around. But replacing the memory modules, hard disk or optical drive is fairly straightforward. Memory has been quite cheap for a while and is the most cost effective way to boost your PC’s performance. Solid state drives (SSD) offer numerous benefits compared to traditional disk-based drives, but at a significantly higher cost. However, over the past six months SSD prices have steadily drifted lower and are now at a very affordable level. Some of the highly rated 128GB SSD’s, such as Samsung 830 and Crucial M4, are often on sale for under $100. The one I got is a 240GB SanDisk Extreme, which also has great reviews on Amazon and other places. The optical drive, usually a DVD burner, may be upgraded to a Bluray burner or even replaced with a second hard drive. However, I’m not planning to replace the internal optical drive anytime soon and if a need arises later on, I’ll just use an external one.

5. Prepare SSD

SSD has been a hot topic in the tech world so there are plenty of guides on the internet on how to prepare and maintain solid state drives. Here is one, another one, and yet another one. They are very useful but can be over complicated for my case: I simply don’t need data migration, disk cloning or  things like that. After reading through many informational articles and forum discussions, I only did a few things to my SSD:

  • Update firmware. This is considered a necessary step even though it carries some risks (anytime you flash firmware something could go wrong, although unlikely). This is particularly important if your SSD has some known issues that have been reportedly fixed by new FW – all this information can be found online by searching for the specific model of your drive. To upgrade firmware, I downloaded and installed the SanDisk SSD toolkit. By putting my SSD in an external enclosure and connecting it to my old PC, I was able to examine the SSD using the toolkit. It turned out there was indeed a new version of firmware released just a few days after my specific SSD was built. So I went ahead and saved the new FW into a USB flash drive – the toolkit would then make it a bootable drive. Still on my old PC, I changed the BIOS boot priority to USB. Upon restart, the software found the SanDisk SSD and completed FW update in just a few minutes. For more information on this particular SSD, here is a very detailed benchmark report.

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Set Up a New PC Part I: Get Started

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There are basically two ways to migrate an old PC to a new one: Clone the entire hard drive and copy it to the new PC, or set up the new PC manually and then move old data over. Since my old desktop has too much junk and a 32-bit Vista, I won’t bother cloning its hard disk and will just start fresh with the new laptop.

1. Burn recovery disks

The first thing I did after firing up the laptop was to generate recovery disks. Most PC manufacturers don’t ship the disks anymore, and instead will happily sell them to you. But it is easy to burn the DVD’s on your own. These disks will restore your computer to its factory state after a hard drive crash or corrupted operating system.

Lenovo’s pre-installed ThinkVantage software has an option to create system recovery disks. The program will instruct you to load blank media and guide you through the process. The first disk is a bootable repair disk, and can be either a CD or DVD. The second and third must be DVD’s to restore your system to factory condition. After installing new operating system and other programs, you can choose to create another set of disks that contain an image of your entire hard drive. This way you don’t have to re-install everything again if you later have to replace the hard drive.

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Set Up a New PC

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I recently bought a laptop to replace my aging desktop computer and the migration process has been quite fun. It wasn’t difficult by any means, but was so tedious that I had Google running all the time to look for solutions. I’m going to post some of the work I did, to either help you … Read more

July 4th Fireworks – San Diego, 2012

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I live in a small community in San Diego and every year our town puts on a spectacular July 4th fireworks show. By spectacular, I didn’t mean it was comparable to New York or DC, but last night it was enough to cheer up the 25+ guests gathered in our backyard for an up-close, unobstructed view of the entire show. For a minute I was convinced the kids were making louder noises than the fireworks, but I decided to give them a break 🙂

I also took some photos; actually this was my first time trying to capture fireworks. The camera I used is a Canon Xsi, with an EF 24-105mm, f/4 L IS USM zoom lens. Manual focus to infinity, no flash, ISO100, f8 or f10, and on a tripod. I didn’t have a manual or remote release so I didn’t try the bulb mode, but I did take a few long exposure shots (4-6sec) and the results were better than I expected:

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My Journey to U.S. Citizenship – Step 3: Fingerprinting

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The next step after accepting an application is to run a background check. These security checks typically include a fingerprint check, FBI name check and other fraud detection measures, and it all starts with a biometrics appointment. On June 5, 2012 my online status indicated that USCIS has sent out the Biometrics Notification. On the 7th, I … Read more