There’s a great segment on this week’s TWiT podcast where the gang is talking about Bob the TSA Blogger screening the MacBook Air. The video is hilarious by itself, but when you add the commentary of Leo, Dvorak, Wil Harris, and Jason Calacanis … well, let’s just say I haven’t laughed that hard during a TWiT episode (while driving home from work no less) in a long time.
The segment starts at 1:06:15 and goes through 1:16:16. Check it out.
Welcome to my personal blog!
In *nix-land, ‘chmod 644‘ means “world readable.” I have no delusions of grandeur that the “world” is reading this, but it’s an accurate description of a blog’s potential audience thanks to the web.
For now though, first post! Let’s go!
I got my hands on the TiVo-verified Western Digital My DVR Expander. It’s an external 500gb drive that connects to my THD’s eSATA port. Setting it up was as easy as turning off the TiVo, connecting the drive with the supplied eSATA cable, and then powering up the TiVo again. The box recognized the external storage and now I have 94 HD hours (or 888 SD hours) of recording capability.
The drive itself is relatively quiet and has a soft orange circular LED on the front. This box is in my office, so extraneous noise/light isn’t an issue, but this unit should even be fine in a bedroom environment.
If you have questions, check out the eSATA FAQ on the TiVo Community Forum.
I’m back up to four TiVos. 🙂 I couldn’t resist the new TiVo HD to go in my office with my Sony LCD TV. It’s time to retire my trusty old TX20. The THD is sometimes referred to as the “S3 Lite.” It doesn’t have the OLED display, isn’t THX certified, only has a 160gb hard drive, and doesn’t come with the premium Glo remote (I got one anyway, thanks to TiVo Rewards), but it supports a single M-Card for dual-tuning capabilities, the CableCARD slots have been moved to the front, and it does all the other HD-goodness its bigger brother does. Now that MRV (multi-room viewing) and TTG (TiVoToGo) have been enabled for the HD boxes in the 9.1 software release, it’s all good!
I inherited an old Dell OptiPlex GX270 desktop PC from work and decided it was finally time to retire my old Linux laptop running Mandrake 10.0 and make the switch to Ubuntu. I built the box using Feisty Fawn (7.04) but a few days later Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) was released so I did an in-place upgrade.
It’s going to take me a while to get used to using ‘sudo’ all the time since Ubuntu doesn’t let you (or, rather, strongly discourages you) from logging in as root. But other than that, a Linux distro is a Linux distro. I do have to say, though, that so far I love apt-get! So much easier than using RPMFinder and then getting stuck in package dependency hell (Mandrake 10 might have had some sort of built-in package management, but I never used it and did things manually … that’s how we learn, right?).
My new server is running pretty much all the same things the old Mandrake laptop did: Galleon and pyTiVo for serving photos, music, and video to my TiVos, the Apache web server, NUT for UPS monitoring, Nagios for network monitoring, Gallery for my photos, and Folding@Home just for fun.
I tried to find one locally, but after constantly finding empty shelves, I broke down and bought a Nintendo Wii on eBay (for a slight premium, of course).
I’ve only tried the included Wii Sports disc, but the use of the Wii Remote and Nunchuk controller is very intuitive. Swinging the controller like a bat to hit one out of the park is pretty cool.
Our old Polaroid portable DVD player wouldn’t work off of just battery anymore since a tiny plastic latch had broken off. After researching the cost for a new battery, I decided to just sell the whole thing on eBay and get a brand new player.
At Best Buy, I found the Philips DCP850/37 portable DVD player and was really impressed with it after just a few minutes of playing with the demo model.
The unit sports an 8.5″ tilting/rotating LCD screen, an SD card slot, dual headphone jacks, a remote control, and an iPod dock. It supports all of the various DVD formats and will even play DivX files.
Having all of those different options for playing media on the go was a big plus. Before going on a trip, I’ll download a bunch of recordings from my TiVos, convert them into DivX format, and burn them onto a DVD. That way we have to carry fewer discs. Or I can put them into my iPod Video and then dock that on the player and show them on the larger screen. If I happen to have a few videos on an SD card (which I usually carry in my Treo for more portable video playback via TCPMP) I can pop that in as well. It’s a really well-designed video playback device.
I recently bricked my Linksys WRT54GS router while playing around with the DD-WRT firmware (it wasn’t DD-WRT’s fault … the v6 router I had was one of the “crippled” ones with less NVRAM running VxWorks so it was a risky undertaking to begin with). I really like the DD-WRT firmware, so I went shopping for a new router with that (and the fact that I’m done playing the hardware version release game with Cisco/Linksys) in mind.
I selected the Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 Wireless-G MIMO Performance Broadband Router and Access Point (listed as the router with the “best range” on the DD-WRT wiki). It was quite easy to set up, using the supplied CD, but as soon as I confirmed it was working I re-flashed it with DD-WRT. So far, so good.
Another one of my new Christmas toys is the Garmin StreetPilot c340 GPS. Times have really changed since the days (i.e., 1999) when I would connect my Delorme Tripmate to the serial port on my laptop and drive around using Street Atlas. The c340 is the shape of a small tube television set and has a color touchscreen. It comes pre-loaded with maps of the entire United States and has an SD card slot for loading other maps (like Europe). It does text-to-speech recognition (a feature that separates it from the slightly cheaper c330) so it will actually read out the street names when speaking directions (instead of just “turn right in 500 feet”). You can download different voices as well. The c340 is very easy to use and view in the car and comes with a very sturdy windshield suction cup mount.
While it’s not flat and PDA-sized, and doesn’t have some of the fancier “kitchen sink” features of the higher priced units (like widescreen format, MP3 playback, photo viewing, Bluetooth, customizable icons, etc.) it’s the perfect device for me. I was looking for an in-car navigation system, not a portable navigation/entertainment/PDA system (check out Garmin’s Nuvi line if you’re looking for something like that).
Time to do more driving!
My trusty three-year old Canon Powershot A70 had been sent back to Canon for CCD repair twice (under recall) and was still working relatively well, but my wife surprised me this Christmas with the new Canon Powershot SD600 Digital Elph. The 6-megapixel SD600 is officially the smallest digital camera I have owned (even smaller than my Treo 650) and has all the great features I’m used to from the A70, plus a few new ones.
I’ve only been playing with it a few days, but so far I like it a lot. The smaller size took some getting used to (the A70 was very easy to use one-handed due to the hand grip (battery compartment) on the right side), and I still end up holding it to my face in the slightly wrong position to look through the view-finder, but being able to slip it in a pocket is worth the trouble. I usually don’t bother with digital zooms, but the 12x digital zoom (3x optical) seems to work very well and my pictures looked very clear.