Tech Jawa > 2009 > June

It’s taken time, patience, headaches, sweat, and blood… well… Maybe not blood, but it made me angry for sure.

Facebook Connect is an amazing system. Most internet uses at least have heard of Facebook, if not have their own account. More and more sites are supporting their new Facebook Connect system, which will entice even more users to sign up for Facebook, and in turn they already have accounts on multiple other sites, such as Digg, Stickam, and LifeHacker, and now that includes Tech Jawa.

I’m sure alot of users don’t see the point, but as quick as this system is growing, its great to get ahead of the game and be prepared for anybody who visits this blog with Facebook, instantly has commenter access, with avatar and links back to their Facebook accounts.

An amazing thing about this system is it also has the ability to post to your news feed as shown below.

That’s right, Tech Jawa comments straight to your Facebook news feed. This helps you update your Facebook, and in turn gets more users involved in your discussion.

So to begin using this system, all you have to do is use the FBConnect button, convinently located in the sidebar, and in the comments section. You’ll be asked to grant access to your Facebook account and once you do so you’re automatically logged into this site with posting access. As long as you remain logged into Facebook, you also remain logged into Tech Jawa.

Be sure to look for the friendly Facebook Connect button on other sites, as more and more are starting to utilize the system. It allows for a “one account and password to rule them all” concept, and works wonderfully, especially for sites which you might not to spend time creating an account and logging in for a trivial matter, like commenting.

Today is the big day! The day we finally switch from analog broadcasts to digital broadcast for our TV needs.

The difference is displayed.

A funny thing happened today, while at work… I was asked to fix the TV. Mind you I work in the IT department, not the “general electronics” department. I figured I’d give it a look.

Our company has had one of those digital conversion boxes for 8 or 9 months now, and everybody thought it was working already all along. In reality they never had scanned for a single digital channel. They had the box hooked to channel 3. Kind of like how you used to use the old RF adapters to get your Nintendo to come in on Channel 3… Well, they changed the TV itself to channel 4, 7, 16, and the rest… completely bypassing the digital box all along. I went in, fired up the digital converter box, scanned for digital channels, and started using the correct remote to change the channels, and there we go. Digital TV, in all of its artifacting glory.

I’m sure the old people are going to be pissed at this artifacting. They’d rather have “snow” and EMI/RFI (Eletromagnetic Inteference/Radio Frequency Interference) than some artifacting on the screen. In fact some people here are in an uproar over the fact that there is pixels on the screen now.
Lets see… you have choices here.
1. A constantly unclear picture, with snow, and interference in the audio.
2. A clear and crisp picture with crisp audio that has pixelation artifacting occasionally.

The artifacting is just more noticeable because it isn’t happening constantly.

I JUST picked this up today… Is this seriously how it’s SUPPOSED to act?