When I got to the Denver airport on Wednesday, I needed to break a twenty to have some ones to tip the shuttle driver, so I bought a book at W.H. Smith’s (no relation). Having seen some good reviews, I purchased The Golden Compass, a fantasy novel by Philip Pullman. I’m only halfway [...]

The original concept for the new version of the closed-caption decoder was that everything would be interrupt-driven, and that there would be four interrupt sources:

vertical sync from sync separator — would initialized timer 1 to count down horizontal lines
timer 1 — would count horizontal lines and interrupt at the start of line 21. handler [...]

I’m vacationing in Denver at the moment. Rich Ottosen and I are upgrading our closed-caption decoder to use a Microchip PIC16F627 rather than the PIC16C622 we previously used. The new chip has several advantages:

flash memory — the PIC16C622 was OTP.
in-circuit-debug support — requires a special bond-out adapter, though — $35 from Digikey.
hardware UART [...]

On Tuesday I started a new project, WREC. WREC Reforms Electrolytic Capacitors. We’re going to use it for the PDP-1 Restoration Project at the Computer History Museum.
I’m trying to finish coding WREC and debug it in time for the 7-JAN-2003 meeting of the PDP-1 Restoration Team.

I needed a program to demultiplex MPEG-2 Program Streams that I’ve recorded with a Hauppauge WinTV PVR 350 MPEG-2 hardware encoder card and the free MythTV PVR software, so that I could remultiplex the stream for DVD burning using mplex (part of the mjpeg tools package.
I found several MPEG demultiplexers out there, but they all [...]