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HD OTA experiments

An online conversation with a few friends last week got me thinking harder about something that’s been on my mind lately: is it possible to get rid of my Rogers cable subscription, and get TV signals the old-fashioned way: with an antenna? This is now referred to as “OTA” (over the air) for those in the know, and there’s a whole range of digital HD channels that you can pick up in addition to the old familiar analog ones.

We already had pared back to the most basic analog cable plan, with no desire for several hundred channels of additional crap that we wouldn’t watch at additional cost, and when we got the Wii a few weeks ago, our TV watching dropped to less than an hour per day on average. We rent movies a couple times a month, read a lot of books, and, of course, there’s the internet: a vast library of fascinating material in a variety of formats. Although the US networks and Hulu block viewing of full TV episodes from Canada, some of our networks do show full episodes online of a few programs, such as Mad Men on CTV.

So, for the cost of one month of our basic cable, we picked up a Philips indoor DTV/HDTV antenna to see how OTA would work for us. We live near Richmond and Spadina, in a west-facing apartment on a low floor: that means that we face away from the CN Tower, source of most OTA signals in the Toronto area (although within 1km of it) and have a lot of taller buildings in the way.

We plugged in the antenna to the DTV port on our TV, scanned for channels, and wham! There was CBC in beautiful HD, completely without distortion. A few hours of playing around, and we found 6 additional channels, including CTV and Global, which syndicate many of the popular US shows during evening prime time. Here’s the rundown of what we can receive:

Station DTV channel Zap2It channel
CBC (CBLT) 5 5
CTV (CFTO) 9 9
Omni 2 (CJMT) 44 69
City TV 57 57
Omni 1 (CFMT) 64 47
Global (CIII) 65 6
Sun TV (CKXT) 66 45

The Zap2It channel is the corresponding channel if you use Zap2It for TV listings, and select Toronto - Local Broadcast as the source: I set my preferences on that site so that I see a grid of only these stations, in this order, as my TV guide.

Unfortunately, we haven’t found a single position that brings in all channels: CBC, Global and CTV seem to be best when bounced off the top of a taller building to the southwest of us, while SunTV is best reflected from the building directly across the road. CityTV and the two OMNI stations are picked up when the antenna is pointed directly towards the tower, that is, through our building. We’re still experimenting, and need a longer cable so that we can try some other locations within our apartment. If we lived in a higher or south-facing unit, I’m sure that the results would be radically different, and we might even pick up some Buffalo stations across the lake if we were high enough, but this is good enough for our TV-watching habits.

2008 07 11 culture
home
technology Comments (1)

What did Earth Hour do for us?

I’ve heard a lot of criticism of Earth Hour over the past few days, mainly that it was a token public effort by people who aren’t really committed to any permanent change. Whether that’s true or not can’t be determined from last night’s behaviour alone, although I have read that some local businesses were using this as a test for how they can reduce their energy consumption on a regular basis while still maintaining safety standards.

In looking at last night’s behaviour specifically, consider the expected power demand curve for today (Sunday) in Ontario: pretty low at 8am when I grabbed these from the Ontario Wholesale Electricity Demand and Price Information site, expected to climb before noon as people start to make lunch and do laundry, then increase to a peak around 8pm when the sun has just set, the dishwasher is on after dinner, and people settle down to the TV or computer for a couple of hours. The green curve is actual demand, the darker step graph is the projected demand, and these guys are usually pretty accurate.

Projected Ontario power consumption

Now here’s what happened yesterday, which included Earth Hour at 8pm (20 on the horizontal axis):

Ontario power consumption during Earth Hour

I wished that I had captured the projected demand curve earlier in the day for comparison, but I suspect that the expected curve would have been much like today’s graph shown at the top. We see a higher demand midday than today, due to more businesses open on Saturday than Sunday, but then an interesting phenomenon: long before Earth Hour starts at 8pm, power consumption drops off, and stays well below the midday peak for the remainder of the evening, even after Earth Hour completed at 9pm.

So what’s the story here? This is only my hypothesis, but I think that businesses and individuals started lowering their power consumption much earlier in the day (around 3pm, when the usual evening demand would normally start to build) and maintained the lower power levels longer than the designated hour (until 10:30, when the usual evening demand would normally start to drop off) because of the awareness that Earth Hour raised; in other words, Earth Hour actually had an impact seven to eight times longer than planned.

During the actual hour of 8-9pm, a lot of us were sitting around in the dark or out on the street gawking at the lack of lights in some of the buildings, but what were we doing all afternoon until 8pm, and after 9pm, that also made a difference? Obviously, we were all going about our normal Saturday lives, but somehow using much less energy than usual. That gives me hope that this isn’t just a placebo, and we can reduce energy consumption if we take yesterday’s lessons to heart.

2008 03 30 Comments (0)

Chillin’ with Olivia

Last Sunday brought an enormous, city-closing snowstorm to Toronto, and our condo holiday party — good attendance because no one wanted to leave the building. Given that many of us are NDP supporters, we also had a visit from Olivia Chow, our MP, who bundled up in her boots and parka to walk the 1.5km over in the snow. Jack, apparently, was at the airport trying to get a flight to Halifax.

We had a chat about the draconian copyright bill that was supposed to be introduced in Ottawa last week, but wasn’t; she’s completely on board with why the bill is a bad thing. It likely helped that I helped her out with a little Blackberry problem that she was having just then. :) The best part, however, was her Rona Ambrose imitation.

2007 12 20 politics Comments (0)

Where are all the TorCamp men?

Last night, we had the first Toronto Girl Geek dinner, which drew about 40 people with only one brave male soul amongst us. The rules of attending a Girl Geek dinner are simple: if you are male, you must bring a female with you or be brought by a female. You don’t have to be invited. You don’t have to be a girl. You don’t even have to be a geek.

One of the questions that came up was how to get more women integrated into the Toronto tech community, and I suggested that the *Camp events were a great place to start: they’re more casual, it’s easy to gain some experience and confidence with public speaking by heading up a session, and the male attendees are not the usual chest-beating alpha males that you find at some technology events. How disappointing, as I looked around the room, to realize that not a single TorCamp man was in attendance to show his support for women in the Toronto tech community.

The next dinner is planned for September 19th, hope to see more of you then.

2007 06 28 technology
women Comments (2)

Tales from the swarm

I don’t usually break the confidence of the swarm, but I just checked the history logs for the conversation that went on in our TorCamp group chat on Skype last night to find a few of them discussing the latest target of their website design scrutiny:

Swarmie #1:

ack! i just had a look at streets.to :O

i like the way it looks like the cab runs over the pedestrians on the sidewalk on this page http://www.streets.to/assets/recent/elephantcastle.php

what a horrific website

hah! http://www.streets.to/websitedesign.php

Swarmie #2:

re: streets.to websitedesign.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

[quoting the actual site:]

<table border=”0″ width=”782″ bgcolor=”#FFFFFF” id=”table36″ height=”285″>
<tr>
<td bgcolor=”#FFFFFF” width=”776″ align=”left”>

We offer website design services utilizing Macromedia Flash and superior programming.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Swarmie #3:

oooh man, stop it, you’re hurting my W3C sensibilities!!

These guys completely crack me up. :)

2007 06 22 Comments (2)

How much does your data cost?

If you’re like me, and have a data plan for your Blackberry with one of Canada’s mobile carriers, you feel massively ripped off every month when you get your bill, especially if you roamed outside Canada or went over your monthly data limit.

Tom Purves has plotted out just how bad this situation is in Canada, where 500MB/month of mobile data will cost you a whopping $1,600 from Rogers (my carrier), compared with as little as $58 in the US, or even $74 in Rwanda. He suggests that you talk to your MP to see what they’re doing about this huge barrier to technology competitiveness in Canada. While you’re at it, Digg Tom’s post so that it gets even more exposure.

2007 04 09 business
canada Comments (1)

The Economist checks out Toronto

A recent article in the Economist online edition (haven’t checked the print edition yet) about skid-proofing your SUV has a photo of the famous truck sticking out of the CityTV building at Queen and John:

Hopefully, they don’t think that we all drive like that in Canada. :)

2007 04 09 Comments (0)

Hangin’ with my swarmies

Mark has started a This Week in the Chat Swarm series.

2007 04 07 technology Comments (0)

My favourite t-shirt of the week

iPoo'd

Available in baby sizes, if that’s not already obvious, at Outer Layer on Queen West.

2007 04 06 fashion Comments (0)

Five things that make me part of Toronto’s tech community

As a lead-up to Toronto Tech Week, I was tagged by Dave Forde for five things that make me part of Toronto’s tech community, so here goes:

  1. I’ve started three technology companies in Toronto: a product company, Imara, during the late 80’s to build a desktop imaging and workflow product; a services company, MetaConcepts, during all of the 90’s to build custom software for business process management and e-commerce solutions; and my current one-person consulting gig. All in all, I’ve been a part of the Toronto technology industry since 1985, except for a 2-year American hiatus.
  2. I participate in the TorCamp swarm, a Skype chat group that’s been going on continuously since mid-January with topics focussed on technology but ranging all over the map. Lately, I’ve handed out advice about WordPress, Flickr and Windows Live Writer.
  3. I blog about local technology events and companies on this blog, and on my main business blog when applicable, to help promote the people, events and companies.
  4. I’m an active participant in local EnterpriseCamp events, and attend DemoCamp and other local camps to help spread all that techie goodness around.
  5. I’m an indefatigable technology evangelist with my non-technical friends, pushing them to get their own domains, start blogging, discover RSS feeds, upload pictures to Flickr and tag their favourites in del.icio.us.

In turn, I’m tagging five others: Kieran Huggins, Rohan Jayasekera, Mark Kuznicki, Martin Cleaver and Sacha Chua.

2007 04 05 technology
torontotechweek Comments (0)