DVR experience

So we finally had to ditch Vonage. We had some problems getting a number local to Steubenville, Ohio. Oh well. We decided to go with Comcast Triple play since we were already committed to the 50 a month for broadband and were missing some cable upgrades. They give you a free month trial on a DVR and we started playing with it. It's fairly nice. I think it may prompt me to set up a nice little setup to handle it on Linux. Then again, maybe I'll just pay to rent one as a card to do the encoding nicely will probably be $100+ alone. So we'll see how it goes. Right now the computer is doing nothing which is making me want to get a LCD projector or a decent TV. I think the 6-8 hundred on a LCD projector is probably our best bet. To get that working I'll have to finish setting up our family room. If I finish the wiring for it and it's adjoining bedroom then it'll just be a matter of doing something to mount it, perhaps on a shelf. That and some custom furniture to hold the speakers and we should be good. I'll have to post pics if I do what I'm thinking. Laura mentioned the surround sound when I talked about moving the setup, does she miss it? We watch less and less movies or anything anymore, so maybe it's not really worth it. But then again, I watched the final table of pot limit WSOP poker this morning, so maybe it is. I guess this month will be a good test of it. One nice thing about the DVR is that it can play a show live and record a second show at the same time, or even record 2 at once. That is a big plus. If I just upgraded the current machine and went for a third it may be reasonable to make a MythTV box. I still can't play Quake 4 on my current machine, but with WoW taking up my time, I doubt I'll want to anytime soon (YES, I did buy Quake 4 at 50 just to say thanks to Id Software). So maybe the DVR will be the way to stay until it's REALLY time to upgrade.

RSS Feeds

I know I just posted 10 minutes ago, but I wanted to start a separate post on it. I settled on NewGator for now and it is working out well. I think the only thing I didn't like was depending on what I do it seems sometimes I can't re-mark a feed as unread if I left it in or something. I'm not sure how I did it, but it was a bit upsetting.

Something I really am getting into that NewsGator and Google both support is sharing clippings. I swapped clippings with one guy at work and I'm working on getting another guy to get in on it. I'm digging it so much I'm thinking I should spam some other friends to share feeds and try to get them into it. It's really fun when I see something I'd like to share to hit the clippings button and know Dave from work will read it. Also kool is looking at what Dave puts into his clippings folder. It's just pretty cool.

The only thing I wish would happen is that other sites would support RSS. I mean it's a great tool to push what content you have. If everyone used it I would certainly be subscribed to more stuff. As it is, I'm reading allot more of the sites that do.

What's wrong with media and other updates.

Well, In case you didn't hear, Southpark has covered the World of Warcraft world. Laura and I would ordinarily not go anywhere near Southpark, but for this one I think we would sit and watch it. Now note, I will NOT pay 30 bucks to see, maybe 2-5 bucks to download it and watch would be fine. And while I don't even know when it came on or get the correct channels, I think a number of the millions of players would pay some to see it. As it is, the only way I know to watch it is some pirated copy in France which I won't touch. So there it is, at 2-5 bucks times a couple million the creators of South Park would be doing allright off of one show plus they would possibly win some followers. Instead they get nothing because media is behind the times.

Plus there should not only be the ability to buy a single episode for that much, but what about an entire season online with a single episode released every week. There could even be a community forum set online and a feedback forums so creators could really dig into how people react to their content. But it won't happen unless some new form of media does it to fight with the big dogs. Hey there's an idea.....

Other than that, Samsung let me down. Their old printer system used to interact with CUPS fairly seemlessly, now they seem to have some other setup they use. I ended up installing the Slix drivers the last time I went to set it up as the old CD drivers I had don't seem to be compatible with the newest version of CUPS in Gentoo and the newer drivers I didn't like. So this week sometime I'll have to package an ebuild of it which I couldn't find anywhere.

More updates

So I found newsgator.com while reading an article which seems to be a good enough RSS reader. Of course, the day after I decided I like NewsSator Google redid their reader which I like allot now. Oh well. I may go with Google's because I can export and import an OPML with all my feeds, and the idea of not being able to do that in NewsGator just annoys me. It's too much like something microsoft would do. But both are adequate for me now, and at the moment I don't want to move my feeds one more time. When I get my reading list stable in a week or two, I'll have to link to that opml too, so anyone can see my typical reading list. I should also throw some news in too as I don't get any current events in the world any other way.

Other than that, nothing much else going on. Just doing house updates and playing warcraft.

Oh, that reminds me, the latest version of Wine finally works on Gentoo for me with a fully upgraded gcc 4.1.1 system. It's pretty good, hangs when it loads data it seems. Must be some differences in the threading in MS Win DX and the Wine implementation. I've never had it lock in an instance that I can remember so it's good enough although the sound lags a bit. Landing from a FP is usually the worst I have to deal with, and waiting a min there is acceptable. I think it could also be Alsa related, but I haven't proven that. Changing a SoundSystem config option in WTF/Config.wtf from 1 to 0 didn't help which I thought it might if it was a sound issue. Great job to the guys at winehq. There's a good chance I'll never run Vista which is more than okay with me.

Maybe some day, I'll get around to doing something to help OSS and report on that. It could be soon.

Robert