right on bro!

I’ve been watching this video over and over….I really like it.

Links:
M83 official website

Nice Things

I paid for a Movable Type license a few years ago, but I switched to WordPress.   I’ve been running WP on another project for almost a year now, and I like it better, so here we are.  I’m using a theme from the ThemeViewer library now, but I’ll work on customizing my own.

Things that just made sense to switch:

• Akismet spam filter - I was getting hundreds of comment spams on MT and Akismet does a good job of just getting rid of most everything.
• Adding non-blog pages with the same theme is super easy.
• It seems like WordPress launches more features and fixes more quickly.
• Automatic Google sitemaps generation with the Google Sitemaps plugin.

The reason this came about today was that my server has been getting craptacularly slow, and I decided this morning to do something about it.  I rewrote some code on DealTuner (thanks Serge for your help) and just decided to swap over blog software while I was at it.

Enjoy!  You’ll be able to read my trash more quickly and with more stability now.

General

[14:19] Friend: my macbook ac adapter recently quickly develoepd the infamous melting/poor connection problem, as documented all over the web
[14:19] Friend: it seemed dangerous
[14:19] Friend: yeah
[14:20] Friend: so i took the ac adapter to apple store today
[14:20] Friend: genius bar guy was like
[14:20] Friend: “need to test this before we can give you a replacement”
[14:20] Friend: he plugs it in, fiddles with it, and then screams
[14:20] Friend: he got electrocuted
[14:20] Friend: haha
[14:20] Me: oh no f’in way
[14:20] Friend: yeah
[14:20] Me: electrocuted???
[14:21] Friend: the flimsy rubber shielding was melted
[14:21] Me: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
[14:21] Friend: and his finger got fried
[14:21] Friend: after he recovered,
[14:21] Friend: he said “in my professional opinion, this is broken”
[14:21] Me: LOL
[14:21] Friend: yeah
[14:21] Me: hey
[14:21] Me: can i copy this IM, replace the names, and post it as a blog entry?
[14:21] Friend: sure

General

By the time you read this, I should be in the air on my way home to visit my folks in New York for a few days. I shut off my Blackberry and I am going to have withdrawl symptoms, but I am going to try my best not to do anything related to work at all.

At the end of the day, what is going to count for you? Your career? Friends, family, lovers or spouses? Where you live and what car you drive? What stuff you have? I think about this a lot.

General

So apparently the new thing that kids are doing these days is called “Fire in the Hole.”

1. Go to a fast food drive-through and order a soda.
2. When the soda is given to you, take the lid off, shout “fire in the hole!” and throw the soda back through the drive-through window
3. Drive off as fast as you can.
4. Videotape the whole thing and post it on YouTube.

This is really dumb, on a variety of levels. Guess who just made themselves easily identifiable as candidates for jail?

General

Over the past few years I’ve built several renditions of a Home Theater PC (HTPC) on various software platforms, including GB-PVR (I contributed to the design of the Web interface at one point), BeyondTV, and MythTV. Since about a year ago, I’ve been running Windows Media Center Edition 2005, which I bought out of sheer frustration with re-installing MythTV and my wireless hardware on Fedora Core 4 (and FC5, and FC4 64-bit, and Ubuntu….ouch).

Although it’s been running nonstop, I never really paid much attention to the HTPC beyond a Digital Video Recorder (DVR) that served as a backup to the Comcast DVR we had in the place I used to live in. In my new pad, the HTPC is now front/center, and MCE 2005 is rad. It’s buggy here and there and a pain to set up, but it is probably the best indicator of what the digital entertainment home could be (all your media in one place, video on-demand and delivered via the Internet).

Here are are some observations and advice for people who are interested in doing an MCE setup. Today’s part is a brag-fest about stuff you can do. The next part deals with the reality of hardware and software - this can be a tricky thing to get right, and I’ll provide some advice and pitfalls, at least in the context of how I have things working.

Content

Try over-the-air HDTV first before getting cable TV. High-definition programming on public channels (CBS, Fox, NBC, ABC, CW, PBS) is available in metropolitan areas with just an antenna, with some caveats (see the next post). Also, here in Los Angeles, there is a really cool over-the-air station called The Tube that plays music videos nonstop. It’s like MTV was when they first started.

So why do this? If you don’t watch a lot of TV (like me), it doesn’t make sense to spend $50-75 a month for 300 cable/satellite channels when you only watch 6 shows on 5 channels. If one of your shows is on a cable network, download the series from iTunes or Xbox Live, or wait until the end of the season and spend $50 on the DVD box set, or get it from Netflix. You’ll still end up saving money on an annual basis.

Get TVTonic. I just installed TVTonic yesterday and I am astounded by its potential. This is a free application that integrates with MCE that plays video “channels” (including any videocast delivered by RSS). I have it set to automatically download CNN’s daily news recap, G4’s X-Play and Attack of the Show video podcasts, GameTrailers’s HD game footage, Rocketboom, and some others. Be advised though that it will download all of the archives of any program you subscribe to at first (I am sure my ISP is going to love me even more), but you can also restrict downloads to certain hours and also limit the download speed so it doesn’t jack up your regular connection usage.

On-demand music videos with MTV Overdrive or any of the other MTV-created applications in the “Online Spotlight” section. They do lots of of news/entertainment programming, but the coolest thing here is the on-demand music video section - a big database full of on-demand videos, and you can save your favorites into a playlist for later viewing. This is also free as well and currently there are no interstitial advertisements (they are monetizing by selling related CDs while the video is playing).

Configure your pictures as the screensaver. You should probably have a screensaver installed to protect your PC, so why not serve up your digital pictures?

Install MCEweather. This is also a free application that gives you the weather report (surprise!).

iTunes album art does not play well with MCE. In particular, when you use iTunes to get album artwork on your songs, MCE (and Vista as well) has a bug where it displays a black box instead of the album. The only workaround for this is to lose the album artwork on the iTunes side (right click on the song in iTunes and click “Clear Downloaded Artwork.”) It is annoying as hell and I wish Microsoft would fix this.

Use last.fm to track your music play. Last.fm is a plugin that “scrobbles” what songs you are playing and reports them back out to the Web, so you can show the world how much of a Britney Spears fan you really are. If you install the last.fm player, which integrates into Windows Media Player, it also scrobbles when you are playing it in the MCE interface and shows it like this.

That’s it for this part. One thing I wish existed: A MCE application with a “10-foot” user interface that let you find local businesses, event listings, and movie times. There are some Google links for one app that seems to do this, but it looks like development was discontinued.

Next post, I’ll post some advice on hardware if you aren’t buying a pre-built MCE machine and want to DIY.

General, Home Theater PCs, DVRs, and Media