Rants Tagged with “Gadgets”
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Google Earth is available for download again! Get it before they stop allowing downloads. It allows you to browse the earth, including elevations, some city skyline blocks, historical weather etc.
With Apple moving to Intel chips, is a price war with Dell, HP and Toshiba far away? I'd love to get OS X in virtual machine to play around a bit. This might even make Mono more compelling. This might change everything...or nothing...
I am coming kind of late to the dance on this one. I needed to get some equipment for a new MCE box I am building, so I headed to Fry's this afternoon. While it was exactly what I expected; a store 4x the size of any of their competitors. I was glad to see a very helpful group of employees (not the case with CompUSA!).
Sometimes its the smallest things that impress me though. The size of their receipt is perfect. When I leave BestBuy/CompUSA/Circuit City, I am amazed at the sheer size of the receipts. I think we could reduce the cost of paper in this country by 2c/ream if we just got those three stores to make reasonable sized receipts. I just don't get it.
I am not surprised that Tivo has come to Pop-up ads. Tivo has always reminded me of the AOL of set-top boxes. After wasting my bandwidth by pushing full 3-5 minutes ads onto my old box, I knew that the $12.95/month ransom they were getting was just wheting their whistle. Too bad Tivo, you pioneered a good thing. Too bad you had to get greedy.
It took a bunch of time to find this info so I thought I'd share it. I have a Motorola MPx220 (a GREAT phone), but I wanted to be able to use it as a modem if I absolutely need it. It uses GPRS and I have an unlimited data plan, so what ever. If you've been trying to figure this out, check this out!
Here is video of Gate's MCE demo at CES. Not only a MCE crash, but also an XBox crash later on in the day. Very embarassing. But it isn't without a precedent:
Windows 98 BSOD
After a relatively happy honeymoon, my marriage to the new Tivo is on the rocks. I've been spoiled. ReplayTV just does what I expect, with less of the intrusive advertising of Tivo. Here are my sticking points:
- You can only buffer live TV for 30 minutes. There was an old hack where you telnet'd into the box to change this, but it doesn't work any more. ReplayTV will buffer up to available diskspace. This means that on Tivo, if you pause live TV and hit hits the 30 minute limit, it starts to play the beginning of the buffer. If I am out of the room, I miss the show I had paused. Quite unnerving.
- Skip forward button moves to the end of the program by default. I can use a hack to make it go 30 seconds (to make passing ads easier), but it loses the hack everytime it is rebooted. Thirty seconds is the default on ReplayTV.
- No way (that I can tell) to have it record a show on a particular channel, at a particular time. I can tell it to record from 11-11:30 on comedy central, but it records whatever is there, not just "The Daily Show" like I want it to. If I setup a Season Pass for the Daily show, I get the same show records 3-4 times a day (since they re-air it). ARG! This is simple (and the default behavior) on ReplayTV.
- No way to tell it to record a show on low priority (e.g. if it doesn't conflict with a guaranteed show). When you tell it to record another show that conflicts, it will allow you to record instead, but if multiple shows conflict, I can't decide which are guaranteed, and which are not. ReplayTV has the notion of Guaranteed and non-Guaranteed shows which simplifies all of this.
- Taking my bandwidth to download ads for movies, cars, etc. On ReplayTV, I will get an occasional image ad on the Pause screen, but Tivo goes way beyond that. They download movie previews, complete car ads and more. I thought I was paying them ($15/month) for the service. Stop using my broadband connection to make you more money.
So this leaves me with two options, go back to my ReplayTV (luckily I still have it), or see what a Windows Media Center Edition box with the XBox MCE Extender will do for me. For now I am probably just going to get the ReplayTV going again, and look at the MCE for the future.
So it's Christmas day and I received a RoboSapien from my brother. It takes me back to my first 'Programmable' toy back in the eighties. Much more limited than the RoboSapien, the Big Trak was a tank that you could specify it to move forward, back, turn left and right, and fire a fake laser:
In constrast, the RoboSapien has a much larger bank of operations, but still a pretty limited amount of task space. What I do like about the RoboSapien is the sound and touch sensors. This allows you to determine what to do during collision with objects or even let you create a robot watch dog. I can't wait to finally get home to Atlanta to see how the cats like it ;)
I've owned ReplayTV's for years now. For those of you out there without a PVR, get one *now*! Magenic (the company I work for) recently gave it's employees a Tivo for a holiday gift. I got the one with the DVD recorder in it and including some media features. So far I am very impressed.
What I like about Tivo so far:
- Tivo interface is slicker than the ReplayTV interface with more options.
- The recording options are quite good and a Season pass seems to work well.
- With an network USB device, I can listen to MP3s and look at pictures that are located on my home server. Eliminates the other device I had doing that.
- TV Listings are customizable, filter-able and has two types of formatting which I really like.
- 480p Output....'nuff said.
- Thumbs up and thumbs down is really interesting.
- Watching DVD's and burning DVD's...not specific to Tivo, but it makes a nice device.
Pet peeves about the Tivo:
- I could do without the incessant animations when switching from screen to screen.
- I wish that recording show at the same time every week was a little bit more straightforward than it is.
- I wish I could queue up songs instead of having to play a directory of songs, though I haven't tried to see if playlists are supported.
- I wish that I could have the picture slideshow continuously looping.
- I wish that I could show pictures while listening to MP3's.
- Network adapter should be included.
- Setting up the USB network adapter should work much much better than it does.
- Don't send me adds for movies in theatre. I installed it in my 'home theatre' for a reason...if I can't watch it now, don't bother me.
- 30 second skip should be the default, not a hack that I have to do everytime the device resets itself.
Overall I am very happy with the unit. Better than my old ReplayTV? I actually prefer ReplayTV for the PVR features, but as a whole (with DVD, MP3, pictures etc.) it's a great all in one unit. The PVR features are almost as good as ReplayTV. Note, I only own one TV so all the features about sharing shows around the house don't concern me, so I don't have an opinion.
This is an impressive machine:
- 17“ Screen
- A NumPad (yea!)
- 256 Megs of Video memory
- 1 Gig RAM standard
- 3.6 Desktop processor
But at 12+ lbs, not sure they can still call it a notebook....it might be the War and Peace of Lugable computers.
