Seriously! Imagine a 10 hour work day where you had the video camera running the whole time thinking “Oh, that’ll be a great idea: means I’ll have a recording to work with”. And then, sit down in the editing room and gasp and wonder what on earth you were thinking!
So, here it is! Edited down to a 1 hour mega super day special!
On this incredible, productive day, I bought a cute little fridge to keep cream and drinks cold for the studio crew, and also welcomed a viewer–Paulo–into Studio D. He is a combination electrician, contractor and all-round good guy who volunteered to help with a lot of the stuff I’m just not capable of doing… or at least until I’m shown how. He proved to be a great teacher and fun guy to work with … and it’s a good thing too, because it was a LONG day!
Enjoy the special! Make sure you set aside some extra time this week and let’s get these lights up!
Studio D is an exciting adventure for me and Category5 Technology TV.
One of the coolest things about this project is how much I’m learning. From all the valuable information provided by Andy Christie during our inspection, and the subsequent ripping out of the drywall, to the leak repair and caulking, as well as lighting knowledge provided by Robert. And then to boot, Paulo comes along offering his time as well, and all of a sudden I’m learning how to do electrical work! I’m learning so much, and these skills transcend the Studio D project and will no doubt make me a better home owner as well. Plus, I feel it’s good to learn new things… and be able to then use those skills to help other people when they have need.
It’s been a joy sharing my experiences with you so far as we work toward the completion of studio D. If you haven’t followed along yet, check out the video playlist at the top of this page. It’s raw, largely uncut, and full of great information. But it’s also a lot of fun!
Thank you for your support through this project thus far. If you’d like to contribute, please head over to cat5.tv/studio to find out what ways you can support us.
When Bekah and I went shopping to buy our first house, we had a dream: to move Category5 Technology TV into its own space.
That dream took longer than we’d anticipated to come to fruition, but it finally has! Studio D is real! I saw it with my own eye bulbs, and even have the key in my pocket right now!
I met with the landlord at 9:30am today to hand off our insurance papers and receive the key. A wonderful handful of people showed up to help clean the place top to bottom, and we finished cleaning in only 3 hours!
There is some water damage from a leak which we thought was a previous leak, but thanks to a good hard rainfall today, we got to see the water coming in. So at least we know right away what we’re up against. We need to rip out a fair bit of drywall and assess the damage, and repair and paint the whole place. It’s going to be a huge job, but so worth it. Thank you to the volunteers who endeavour to make it possible!
I said to Bekah, the strange thing about Studio D is, the more real it becomes, the more surreal it becomes. I can’t believe it’s finally happening!
The owner of a local wireless ISP came by to assess provision of Internet services, and he noted from the roof that indeed their tower is line of sight, and we should have no trouble receiving a good strong Internet signal.
Step one is complete… the place is ours, and clean. Now to do the repairs and paint. At that time we’ll be ready to start moving our gear.
Category5 Technology TV and Beltone Canada are giving away a pair of Beltone First hearing aids (left & right ear), and including a fitting at an authorized Beltone Centre in Canada–a prize valued at $7,000.
Beltone First is a sophisticated, Bluetooth connected hearing aid that uses an iPhone / iPad app to control your hearing aids, and even take calls directly on your hearing aids.
I found this funny. We had a new neighbour move in next door. Our front yard is shared, but small. With our previous neighbour, it was never a big deal… if I was mowing the grass, I’d mow the whole yard. If they were mowing the grass, they’d mow the whole yard.
But our new neighbour is petty.
It was a bright, hot, scorching day on Saturday. The kind of day where you know not to do anything outside beyond drink a mojito or chomp down on a freezie pop. That was the day the neighbour got out their lawn mower.
They mowed their half of the yard, with a perfectly straight mow line down the middle of our tiny lot. My wife and I rolled our eyes and thought, that’s so petty. Just one week earlier I handed him one of my beers which he downed while watching me mow both sides of the lawn. But here we are, 7 days later, and he wouldn’t have it: this is my lawn, that’s his lawn… split down the middle.
So, things cooled off the next day, and I went out and mowed “my side” of the yard.
It rained the next day, and my side of the lawn looks lovely and green. Remember how hot it was the day he mowed the lawn though? The “neighbour’s side” of the yard is entirely sun scorched! It’s brown and yellow and dead.
Part of me is glad my neighbour is petty. My side of the lawn looks great.
Category5 TV is shooting its latest music video, and we want you to be in it!
All you have to do is shoot video of you dancing through the entire song, “Happy” from Pharrell Williams. NO, you do not have to be a good dancer for this! That’s part of the fun!
Then, upload your video (we prefer HD if possible) to your favorite cloud storage service (PogoPlug, DropBox, etc) and email a link to [email protected] – we will contact you at that point with more details.
Here’s the music and style you’ll want to follow:
Looking forward to your submission!
Submission deadline is Tuesday April 29, 2014 Extended to Tuesday May 6, 2014.
The Roku is a great way to catch all your favorite web-based programming, including Category5 Technology TV, Netflix, and so much more!
Buy your device from here to support Category5 Technology TV:
Model
Description
Buy Now
Roku Streaming Stick
The Roku Streaming Stick brings you a solution that is entirely hidden away, plugged directly into your TV’s HDMI port. It will only work with HDTV’s for this reason, and is well suited for situations where the TV is mounted on a wall, where you don’t want to see any wires. The Roku Streaming Stick supports the same great channel lineup as the other models. This model is only recommended if you need that discreetness. The other units are more powerful.
The Roku 1 is the entry level unit, giving you full access to all the channels available in the Roku Channel Store. It will work with old-style televisions (composite—not component) as well as your HDTV over HDMI. It has the standard Roku remote which does not include a headphone jack.
The Roku 2 is very similar to the Roku 1, but it has dual-band WiFi (better/faster WiFi) and a high-quality headphone jack built into the wireless remote. You can listen to your shows or music with the privacy—and quality—of a set of headphones. Works with the included earbuds, or your favorite set of headphones with a 1/8″ plug (standard). The Roku 2 will also work on old TVs as well as HDTVs, as it offers both HDMI and composite outputs.
The Roku 3 is the fastest, most feature rich version of the Roku. It will only work on HDTVs (720p or 1080p). Like the Roku 2, this model has dual-band WiFi, a headphone jack in the remote, but also adds gaming functionality, an ethernet port (hard wire your Internet connection rather than using WiFi). There is also a USB port and MicroSD port, allowing you to load your own videos or pictures onto flash media and load them on your TV. This Roku is the all-round HD entertainment device: television shows, movies, games, and even home movies. Because it is so much faster than the other models, the Roku 3 also has a more robust featureset for channels such as Netflix. While Netflix will work on all the devices, the Roku 3 is the only one which supports the “new Netflix”, with more advanced features such as viewer profiles. My Roku 2 for example, loads the default profile for Netflix and works great, but has no option to switch to the kids’ profile. The Roku 3 has that capability. Roku 3 will not work on old TVs as it only features an HDMI output.
As you know, I’ve worked hard to bring you the new transcoders the past while.
This meant introducing a whole new distribution model, with all new servers and a redeveloped distribution infrastructure for Category5 TV (yes, we outgrew our previous solutions).
We have a number of main distribution nodes, but there are three primary content delivery networks. We’ll call them CDN 1, CDN 2, and CDN 3.
During the initial stages of the transition, we placed our RSS feeds, Miro Internet TV and other “downloaders” such as the direct download links on CDN 1. It is our slowest, least reliable CDN, but it is also the cheapest for us to operate.
CDN 2 was not in use yet, and CDN 3 is our fastest, most reliable and most expensive system. CDN 3 was implemented as our on-demand distribution node. This means if you watched the show via our web site or a player embed, you were watching it through CDN 3.
Miro Internet TV in particular was experiencing some speed issues pulling form CDN 1, and the past two weeks one of our syndicate partners was also having trouble pulling the HD file down from the CDN 1 direct download links as provided by our weekly email.
So, I have now replicated everything onto CDN 2, which is much faster and more reliable than CDN 1, but not nearly as expensive as CDN 3 to operate.
I have moved all RSS feeds, Miro Internet TV feeds and direct download links onto CDN 2 and now CDN 1 becomes simply a redundant option for us to use should either of the other CDN’s become unavailable.
All this to say, you should now notice that your downloads are faster, and that you don’t experience timeouts when downloading the larger HD files from our services.
Thanks for your patience as we worked out the kinks.
Having made his first international appearance during Episode 204 of Category5 TV Tuesday August 16, 2011, our studio mascot Space Fish, Major Tom passed on this day, Friday October 4, 2013. He spent 2 years, 1 month, 19 days with us in-studio.
Major Tom will always be remembered fondly for his colorful appearance. He also had a distinct talent for stinking up the studio despite our futile efforts to keep his habitat clean.
Major Tom’s final appearance on the live broadcast took place during Episode 283, Tuesday February 19, 2013.
I have used Google Hosted Libraries for as long as I can remember, and it’s what we use on Category5.TV to accelerate the javascript end of our site. For all the javascript and CSS (plus images and so-on) we use that aren’t available through Google’s hosted solution, I use Amazon S3 and distribute it through Cloudflare to make it load quickly for our viewers.
CDNJS boasts that it is in fact much faster than Google Hosted Libraries.
Neah… that can’t be true! Google’s the “big dog”… Cloudflare is still relatively new.
RELATED VIDEO
So I took a look. The first thing that shocked me was the absolute magnitude of how many javascript tools are available through CDNJS. Gone is the need to (for example) load jQuery from Google Hosted Libraries but then have to download and deploy a copy of Fancybox 2 locally or on your own CDN. CDNJS seems to have it all. Or at least a great selection, plus the ability to add a library yourself via GitHub.
Sorry, what? Yeah, baby.
So I thought, let’s run the world’s simplest test: how fast does wget receive the jQuery library on Linux? It may not be a realistic benchmark in all cases, but it gives us a bit of a look at how quickly each service delivers the js.
Here are those simple (but amazing) results from my location in Ontario, Canada:
Google Hosted Libaries
robbie@robbie-debian:/tmp$ wget http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.1/jquery.min.js
–2013-03-22 13:50:47– http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.1/jquery.min.js
Resolving ajax.googleapis.com… 74.125.133.95, 2607:f8b0:4001:c02::5f
Connecting to ajax.googleapis.com|74.125.133.95|:80… connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 200 OK
Length: unspecified [text/javascript]
Saving to: `jquery.min.js.1′ [ <=> ] 92,629 –.-K/s in 0.1s
Note the filesize (92,629) is exactly the same; we’re dealing with the same version of jQuery here–identical files. Also note that I’ve used a non-secure (http) connection for each. The difference in speed is incredible.
Now, for a basic site, the fraction-of-a-second difference may not matter to you. But for a big site like mine, this kind of difference could mean a full second off the load time–possibly more! That’s unheard of for a simple copy-and-paste change in code.
Time to update Category5.TV. What about your site? Please comment below.
Update: Garbee made a great point in our IRC room: You’re only seeing results from my location. Fair enough. We want to make sure this isn’t justme that is experiencing such a massive difference. Therefore, please run this exact test yourself, and post your results below in a comment. I’m in Ontario, Canada. Where are you? Thanks!
First Day Results Extracted from Reader Comments:
Me: Ontario Canada – Google @ 798 KB/s, CDNJS @ 2.21 MB/s, CDNJS is 2.77x the speed of Google. Brea California – Google @ 2.27 MB/s, CDNJS @ 14.5 MB/s, CDNJS is 6.39x the speed of Google.
Garbee: Virginia USA – Google @ 429 KB/s, CDNJS @ 496 KB/s, CDNJS is 1.16x the speed of Google. New Jersey USA – Google @ 104 KB/s, CDNJS @ 2.60 MB/s, CDNJS is 25x the speed of Google.
Chris Neves: Montana USA – Google @ 123 KB/s, CDNJS @ 300 KB/s, CDNJS is 2.44x the speed of Google.
Alan Pope: Farnborough UK – Google @ 1.26 MB/s, CDNJS @ 1.16 MB/s, Google is 1.08x the speed of CDNJS. London England – Google @ 6.79 MB/s, CDNJS @ 4.72 MB/s, Google is 1.44x the speed of CDNJS.
steve5: Leeds UK – Google @ 153 KB/s, CDNJS @ 178 KB/s, CDNJS is 1.16x the speed of Google.
Bryce: Seattle Washington – Google @ 1.83 MB/s, CDNJS @ 659 KB/s, Google is 2.78x the speed of CDNJS.
Calvin: Massachusetts USA
Test 1: Unsecure Connection – Google @ 810 KB/s, CDNJS @ 876 KB/s, CDNJS is 1.08x the speed of Google. Test 2: Secure Connection – Google @ 721 KB/s, CDNJS @ 1.08 MB/s, CDNJS is 1.5x the speed of Google.
