Continued on formosa228.blogspot.ca

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CBC Museum

We were taking a picture with Glenn Gould when a CBC employee invited us into the studio to take a look at the live Pan Am coverage.  It brought back a lot of great childhood memories when we went to the museum.  We also saw Canada beat USA in Men's Basketball on their big screen!  Thanks CBC!

Jon Kimura Parker - Fantasy

This CD arrived today.  It has my favorite solo piano work on it - Schumann's Opus 17 Fantasie.  I shall add this recording to to put along side Curzon, Anda, Pollini, Perahia and Tryon as versions to set aside as my favorites. It is beautifully recorded.  There is not a hint of percussiveness at all! Jon Kimura Parker won the 1984 Leeds Competition - the only Canadian to have ever done so.  As a high school student, I remember seeing a clip on CBC news of the end of the Beethoven 4th piano concerto which he played in his winning effort.  Parker is on the Faculty of Rice University.  Lin Cho-liang happens to be on the faculty there too.  Must be a great music school to go to!  Now, Colin Zelt, who helped me out in grad school is also at Rice University.

HP Pavilion 500 Reformatting

When I tried to reinstall Windows 8 on an HP Pavilion 500 Desktop with the restore DVDs I created with the Cyberlink software that came with the PC, it would give me a read error on DVD 4.  I managed to restore the computer to Windows 8 from the restore partition, but it would not update to Windows 8.1.

I tried again tonight, but the problems started.  The UEFI BIOS wouldn't let me change the boot order even after I disabled secure login (I couldn't access the legacy boot items like DVD-ROM, Primary HD etc).  I also got an error message when I tried to restore the computer to factory new condition from the restore partition of the hard drive (that worked previously, but not tonight). So, I plugged in a Lenovo slim DVD burner and booted from USB Optical Drive option in the BIOS.  This worked!  The Lenovo could read the 4th DVD and the HP Pavilion was restored to factory original condition.

I really dislike how HP only lets you make one copy of the restore disks.  I made ISO images of the DVDs with ImgBurn to make sure I could burn restore DVDs for this computer in the future in case the original copies got lost or corrupted.

Andy the Android Emulator Let's You Run Android on top of Windows!

I just tried the JCG HD Cloud Camera on my Dell Inspiron Touchscreen notebook running Windows 8.1 with the Andy the Android Emulator software! Pretty cool.  You have to run Andy Android as an administrator though.  Now my kid could play Clash of Clans on his Dell Touchscreen laptop instead of our Samsung tablet (not a very good use of time!).  I had tried Bluestacks first, but Andy Android is WAAAY better!

JCG Hackers H1 Router

I just got one of these JCG Hackers H1 routers today to watch TV on the upstairs flat screen.  It is actually an Android computer with routing capabilities.  You can browse directly from the router without a computer.  You can also mirror the screen of your Apple iOS device onto a TV connected to this router with an HDMI cable.  It's possible to do some of these functions on Android devices, but it isn't as easy as with Apple iOS devices (since Apple has the advantage of being a single manufacturer).

The JCG router is connected to the SaskTel router down in the basement via a CAT5 jack in the room.  The Ooma Telo is then connected to the JCG router.  You can also connect the Ooma Telo to the main router and then the JCG Hackers H1 to the Ooma Telo. You can install apps on the JCG Hacker H1 router that aggregate various media content.  Shown below is a video from NASA which streams a Youtube video about the Hubble Space Telescope.  The JCG router is using Kodi (formerly XBMC) to aggregate the media to the JCG Hacker H1 (Android device).

Stellarium - the view of Saturn from Titan

I was asked about planetarium software and found Stellarium and Celestia.  Both are multiplatform, open source projects. I had found Celestia really easy to use and there are many scripts available to use with it.

Tonight, I finally got around to trying Stellarium.  It is easy to use after you look up a few things on their user guide.  Here's the view from Titan!