Entertainment

Show’s Return

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I have been vegging out today (Saturday, this post will go up late). I was zombied out since I was stuck working late last night and this morning, so I decided to sit around and clean out my backlog of TV watching. By doing that I realized that a show I really like (MI-5, or Spooks in the UK) was starting new episodes tonight. I should have realized when A&E played all of last season all day Saturday. Cable networks tend to do that. Since new seasons don’t come out for so long they play all of the last seasons shows in a run up to the new one. Well I was excited (or as excited as I can get over a TV show) that I would get more BBC spy goodness. I also just pre-ordered season 2 on DVD. Should be out Tuesday.

This week also marked the return of new shows on TV. Since I don’t watch TV (i just tivo stuff and watch later) I figured this out because my new tivo actually started to get full with stuff. This fueled my TV watching binge today.

Tivo To Go, Well Almost

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So Tivo launched their Tivo To Go service Monday. Great. I downloaded the software Tuesday and installed it on my PC. Oh, wait a minute. I thought Tivo said this service was active. Well turns out the software is available, but since you need a software update on your Tivo device it may take several weeks for my (or anyone else’s) Tivo to get updated. That last piece of information I had to get from the Tivo support site.

I wait ready to try this service out. In the mean time I am getting happier with Beyond TV. It just creates MPEG-2 files so I can copy them to my laptop and watch the shows anywhere right now. Maybe by the time my Tivo can do that I might decide I don’t need to pay $12.99 a month and just use Beyond TV.

Turns out I am not the only one ticked off by how Tivo is doing this upgrade. News.com had this article. I understand why Tivo is staggering the upgrade, but if I want to get it, and know my risks why shouldn’t I be able to get the upgrade now?

Home Entertainment System

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I have been pondering updating my Home Entertainment System for some time now. What that means is getting a new TV. I have a regular Sharp 27″ CRT TV. I have been thinking about taking some money and getting a Plasma or some type of HD TV. Part of me (and Jayson coaxing me) is saying go get a big TV. The realistic side of me is saying that I don’t want to spend the amount needed to get the system I want at todays prices. I also don’t really utilize Digital TV yet so a HD TV may be a waste for me. So for now I am in wait and see mode.

What I have done is got my Tivo Series 2 up and working. I also tinkered with my new desktop computer and am now very happy with my Hauppauge WinTV USB2 Capture Device, and Snapstream’s Beyond TV. I have my ATI remote wonder working so I can sit on my couch and use my TV just like I would use Tivo. At this point I could seriously think about replacing the Tivo with this new solution, but I wont just yet. I also like the ability to capture shows on two different TV’s. The only down side is that I have to change the video resolution on my computer whenever I want to watch TV with Beyond TV. I run my monitor at 1280×1024. The TV can only properly display 1024×768. Not that big a deal, but it is a pain.

What is also good is that my TV Capture system on my computer can save a ton more stuff than my Tivo and I can burn stuff to DVD if I want to archive it. I cannot offload MPEG-2 files of my Tivoed shows now that I have an un-hacked Series 2.

Holiday Week Recap

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I could say that I took the week off, and that is why I haven’t posted in a few days. That would not be true, but I could say that. I worked all of last week. I even ran to the office on both friday and Saturday. I had off both days but I had some quick stuff to do so I ran down there for about an hour each day.

Christmas eve I did some rewiring of my TV and computer. I bought RCA cables to hook up my computer video card to my TV and stereo. I can now use Beyond TV on my TV like a Tivo. It actually works really well. More news on that as it develops. I ended up down at Outback with Jayson and Gretchen for dinner. It was empty because it was Christmas eve, but the place was open till 10:30PM. I made it down in record time. The cab powers that be have been kind to me for finding cabs in the freezing cold. Gretchen knows I cannot pass up Outback. Dam her! That was the third time in recent memory that I have dropped what I was doing and went down to Outback because of a phone call. She is not helping my diet. Since I don’t have I diet, I shouldn’t care:) I did have a bloomin onion for the first time in months. It was a good day!

I went to my parents friends house for a Christmas party. it was ok. My family is friends with a bunch of crazy people. I should learn not to trust my mom when it comes to time or how far someplace is. The trip to the party was LONG. traffic was bad. Coming home it was not as bad, but my sister got into a small fender bender. As she was pulling over to the curb to let me out to the subway we hit another car. Some dumb-ass was stopped at the curb, so my sister went to pull in front of them to park and let me out. The dumb-ass begins to move and hits us in the side of the truck. I could see no damage to my sisters cherokee, but the other car had a nice dent and paint off of the bumper by the front headlight. After some “nice” words between the group of us, we exchanged insurance and off we went. Not sure who will be blamed by the insurance company. I think we will, even thought this ass-whole was not moving when we were moving into his lane. At least morgan slept through the whole thing.

As for commuting on the subway on a cold holiday, I was surprised by how quick most of the trains came on Christmas. Maybe I got lucky, but 3 out of the 4 trains I had to catch came quick.

Today I hung out at home. I had work to do on my laptop (see another post on that) and I had to update my checkbook in quicken. What fun. I just got back from seeing meet the fockers with Jayson and Gretchen. I went down to their neck of the woods and we saw it. That movie was stupid but funny.

Lets hope this week will be a calm and q—t. I won’t say the “Q” word. But I am probably wrong about it being “Q”. Why you ask? Because I am thinking it will be.

Sunday Movies

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Today I met up with Jayson and Gretchen and we hung out. We went to Soho so Gretchen could hit a shop. I hit the Apple store, and got a skin for my iPod. Blue colored if you are wondering. We then ate dinner at the California Pizza Kitchen while we were killing time before the movies. We went to see Ocean’s 12. It was good, but I think the first one was better. It was good entertainment though. It was cool in NY today so I had on the Pea Coat and the nice warm neoprene police gloves.

Before the movies I had some time to work on my TV / computer setup. I got my All In Wonder card to properly pump video to my TV. In order for it to look right I have to turn down the resolution to 800×600. When I do I can watch recorded shows from my computer onto the TV. With the ATI Remote Wonder I can also change the channels and fast forward, etc without going to my computer.

Hung Out, Watched Elf Saturday

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Saturday I slept in. I wasn’t out too late on Friday, but I was tired from the week of work. I cleaned up my place and Rich came over to hang out. We haven’t hung out in a few months. Both of us have been busy, and he has been trying to conserve cash. We rented Elf on DVD. Neither of us had seen it, and everyone at work said it was great. I thought it was funny, but not outrageously so.

We walked down to Sassy Sliders for a quick dinner. It was a cool long walk, but we were on a budget. That place is like a wannabe White Castle, but the food is really good for fast food.

The plus side of having company over was that it forced me to clean up the crap in my apartment. It now looks halfway decent. I had a good day. I need to hang with Rich and Amanda more. I miss them:(

DVD’s I Might Be A Bit Embarresed To Admit I Own

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Generally I am not embarrassed by my taste in DVD’s, or TV & Movies in general. Others tend to think so sometimes. I will admit that I am a fan of Science Fiction. I am addicted, but I have very picky tastes. Not just any crap will do. Wasn’t a fan of the Lord of The Rings. Just wanted to get that out there. So, my collection of DVD’s does include several SciFi movies, and an ever growing collection of TV shows on DVD.

My latest arrivals are the 7th and final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I will admit that I like that show. I started watching it just as the 7th season aired on TV. My friend Rich is a big fan. I made fun of him for years for watching Buffy. One day he was like, come on. You like Scifi, you like hot women, and you like well written comedy. Why don’t you give the show a try. So he lent me the first season on DVD. Dam Rich. I actually liked the show. So I ended up Tivoing season 2-6 and watched it. By the time I finished season 6 in rerun’s, season 7 was on TV. I now own all the seasons on DVD. There were a few episodes that I never actually got to Tivo, so it was good to get these last remaining hours of TV to watch. When I tell people I like this show I eather get asked “are you retarded?” or, “cool I love that show”. Why is Scifi so polarizing.

Other good DVD’s I have are Angel. That was another great series, by the makers of Buffy. Joss Whedon actually has great ideas. That guy also came up with Firefly. I have that also on DVD, but it didn’t last very long. I am also collecting as many Simpson’s DVD’s that they will put on DVD. Of course at the rate Fox is going by the time they are done putting all the Simpson’s seasons on DVD I will be in retirement and DVD’s will be outdated.

To set the record straight I am NOT a Star Trek fan. One of my vendors likes to make fun of me because several of us from work made the mistake to see a recent Star Trek movie. Out of all the series out there, the only one I can tolerate to sit down and watch now is Deep Space 9. That one at least had some killing, and real fighting. The other shows were people going around acting like no person I want humans to evolve into. Come on, who gets shot at and is like “lets talk this out”? Blow someone’s ass off. (Deep breath) Ok, my ranting is over.

Below are some links to other posts where I have talked about great TV shows on DVD, that most people will miss out on, but are fantastic.

Two Of The Best TV Show’s, Ever, And You Probably Didn’t Know It

What’s on TV?

Tivo & PVR Trouble

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Sunday and Monday I spent time working on my Tivo. I have (had) a 40 hour original Phillips Tivo that I had hacked to a 160 hours. Well as I said earlier it died. My online searching said that the problem I was having could be the hard drive or the unit itself. I went out and downloaded InstantCake from PTVUpgrade. I originally had PTVUpgrade do the hacking for my Tivo so I figured I would check them out. IntantCake allowed me to prepare a new hard drive for the Tivo in hopes that the original drive was dead.

After spending most of monday trying to get 3 old computers to get drives working in the exact way InstantCake wanted I was finally able to get instantcake to build a drive. I don’t really blame instantcake for my woes there. They had strict requirements that I just had trouble getting to work with some old PIII 700’s. Once the drive was built I plugged it in to the old Tivo. No dice. The same problem happened again. It looked like my old Tivo finally died. We had a little more than 3 years together. I am upset that our relationship is over early, but I will get by.

I went to Best Buy near my apartment and picked up a new Tivo Series 2 80 hour DVR. I got it home and Jayson brought over a USB nic card that he had (I bribed him with Pizzeria Uno). The Tivo for some reason keep rebooting itself. The online community didn’t say very much about this problem other than it is very bad and I should bring back the unit. So after only 3 hours with it, my Series 2 Tivo went back and I got another shinny new one. This time the setup was a snap and I have been happy (or kind of happy, I did have to blow $299 before rebate on tech I already had but it broke)

At the same time on Monday I decided that the ATI All In Wonder video capture system was not doing it for me. I did some research on a product that looked like a good Digital Video Recorder (DVR) for the PC. Beyond TV from Snapstream got my interest. the problem was the demo sucked on my ATI card since the ATI card did software MPEG-2 encoding. If I knew that I would never have bought the card. The software itself looked awesome. So I took the plunge and bought a bundle of Beyond TV 3.5 and a Hauppauge USB2 video capture device. I got it yesterday and it rocks so far. I am now just programing it up, but it looks like most of the Tivo functionality on my PC. and I have full access to the MPEG-2 files it creates. The bundle even came with its own remote that actually works. It is nice.

These new hardware investments are now funded by the sale of all that old gear I got rid of over the past 2 months. Easy come, easy go I guess. I am at least using this gear. I am addicted to video capture recently, what can I say.

Halo 2 Day Redux

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Saturday was another all Halo 2 day. I met up at Johns and played Halo 2 for most of the day and evening. We had 6 people so it was a good game. John, Jayson, Dave, myself and 2 of John’s friends from work came over. In general I still sucked, but surprisingly I was not in last place for a good portion of the games. We played capture the flag and just shoot them up rounds.

I always have fun playing, but my eyes start to hurt after a while. John wanted to play poker at night. I was not into it. I was tired and I am not a fan of playing poker which requires concentration after playing a video game for 7 hours that requires concentration. We ended up going for Italian food around the corner from his place and then he drove Jay and I to the F train. I was thankful for that because by the time we got to the train it was already late and I didn’t want to wait for the 7 and then the 6. I just took a cab from the F train stop by jayson home. I admit I was lazy…

Tivo May Be Dead

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I have plenty to write about today, but the only thing on my mind right this second is that my Tivo may be dead. I came home and it was crashed. So I rebooted it. it is after all linux, so I was like a reboot will make it all better. Well 30 minutes later, it is still sitting at the please wait while I startup screen. that is not good. This thing always comes back in like 5 minutes. I don’t know what to do. It is like a good friend is sick. Is life worth living if Tivo doesn’t work? Yeah, probably. But it will suck that much more:(

I just turned it off, and I will let it sit idle for a while before I try to bring it back up. Honestly I think it is toast. I have an original 40 hour unit that I have hacked to 160 hours with a network card. No way I can get “support” on it. The unit was also purchased in September of 2001. So it has got some years on it. The thing is I have thought about upgrading and realized I had no reason to. This 3 year old device still does everything I want it to. Now only if it worked…

More news as it develops…

UPDATE: Well a 2 hours have passed and the Tivo is still not coming back online. According to the message boards I have read, the drive is bad, or the unit is totally fried. Not sure what I am going to do. I can try a different hard drive that I can prepare with a $20 piece of software from the people I originally upgraded my unit from, PTVUpgrade. Or I can upgrade to a new Tivo, or a different device. Either way I am out of commission for a few days. For now I am getting my shows on my ATI capture card. it is not perfect, but I have tv…