Wednesday, October 20, 2004

What did I do?

Well it appears that at least my mother is confused as to what I described in my last post. The long and short of it is that my computer will now automatically record television shows for me to watch later. It creates large movie files that I can copy them to my laptop and watch during the crazy late night sessions, or watch whenever I want to at home.

10:12 AM Posted by Big Dave | 2 Thoughts

Monday, October 18, 2004

Super Insanity Incarnate

Tis the season... for all nighters and insane dead lines. Work is on it's big push for the end of the year. I have a whole lot going on for the next several weeks. Life has just gone a little nuts in general for the last few weeks. When I finally get home I'm usually too tired to do much. So I really haven't updated in a while.

Dezi and I wrapped up our dance lessons last week. They were originally a Christmas present to her that we've just kept at for the last several months... but when they became more of a financial burden they really lost their luster. At least in my eyes. I'm sure Dezi would like to continue, but I she didn't want to take the lessons any more if I wasn't enjoying myself too. I'm really glad we took the lessons and I'll miss going. I especially enjoyed our instructor James. After a slow start, I really grew to like him.

I think I may have posted here before that one of the projects I really wanted to work on was to get a Linux PVR system up and running. I had spent a lot of time and money on the project. Probably for the last 9 months or so. Fiddling with it here and there as I had time. Well... about a month ago I got an extra performance bonus so I decided to splurge it on myself. I bought some hardware that was recommended by some of the websites I found. I decided to purchase the Hauppauge WinTV 350 and a cheap DVD R. When I got the software in, I saw that Happauge recommended some software called SageTV. I wasn't quite ready to rebuild my Linux machine, but I wanted to play with my new toy so I installed the card in a Windows 2000 box and downloaded the 30 day trial of Sage TV. I was very impressed with the software and very pleased with how clear and easily the WinTV worked to record and play shows.

I finally got around to trying to install MythTV on my Linux box. I got past installing the updates, downloading the files, and into trying to install/configure the drivers for the capture card when I decided it wasn't worth all that time and effort when I already had something that worked perfectly well. I swapped the cards, bought the software, and am quite content with the results. Next thing I want to do is move the PVR to something like this and have a complete home theatre system for the living room. But since I'm back to trying to being frugal, it may be a little while.

11:43 AM Posted by Big Dave | 0 Thoughts