Within days of my last post I was back to MythTV, partly because it works better and partly since I can watch recordings over my network on my Mac.
Time to come clean: I succumbed and re-activated my WOW account. <big sigh> . A lot of things have changed since I quit and I actually having fun again. Its sad, but given how I get sucked into these games I actually set up parental controls on myself to control when I can play : )
In case you wondering…
The chief export of Chuck Norris is pain.
Crop circles are Vin’s way of telling the world that sometimes corn needs to lie the fuck down

Back in the hight of my WOW addiction I did a budget upgrade on my PC – upgraded to amd64 3000, new socket 939 motherboard, nvidia 6600GT. I’ve kept this box with XP on it sitting around just in case I need windows for something which turns out to be just about never.
I’d temporarily retired my old VIA MythTV box (its bad when the power supply makes a god-awful noise right?) so I’ve been relying on BitTorrent lately for my TV viewing needs. Why not repurpose my perfectly good windows box and see what the state-of-the-art in open source windows PVR software is like?
Media Portal is an open source .NET based PVR solution hosted over on sourceforge. It has all the standard features and then some- timeshifted TV viewing, DVD/Video/Music playback, image gallery, even tetris.
I have to say, the interface looks nice in my opinion. I also noticed that video looked better under windows using my WinTV PVR-250 than under Linux. Setting up XMLTV was a little problematic since after I followed all the instructions I ended up with listings that were 8 hours off, but its not too hard to fix that in the set up. I wasn’t too happy with the scheduling interface – browsing the guide data alphabetically is *really* slow and its missing some of the recording / storage options I’m used to in MythTV.
I have to say after using it for a couple of days I think I prefer MythTV’s mature usability over MediaPortal’s slick work-in-progress interface but I find it usable enough that I will continue to use it as my PVR for a while. Give it a bit more time and I’m sure some of what I think are rough edges will be ironed out.

Hey, a friend of mine from work played with the new 360 all weekend long and put together his own review. Verdict? Hot – literally. Better get that string ready...

I’ve been living without a landline for a couple of years now and just using my cell phone however I’m a bit of a cheap bastard and only have about 250 minutes a month. Most months thats more than enough since I don’t really talk on the phone that much however when some sort of parental tech support issue comes up I can burn through the minutes pretty quick.
Lately with my Mom I’ve been using iChat’s audio capabilities and its worked great. Both my Mom and I have the older titanium PowerBooks with the built in mic and the auto quality is excellent, not to mention that my hands are free to click around and look stuff up while I help her out.
Unfortunately my Mom is the only other macophile in the family so when my Dad called looking for some Linux help last night we ended up turing to Skype to save on the minutes. The sound quality wasn’t nearly as good as the iChat conversations I had had but that could have been due to the cheap headset my Dad had.
Wanna use iChat/Skype to get ahold of me? I’ll update my about page with my account info…

I’ve been playing with last.fm a bit over the weekend. Its a neat idea, you create an account and download a program that tracks both what you listen to in iTunes and what you play on your iPod, then uploads the track information to a central website so you can share your musical tastes with others. Once you have uploaded enough tracks they try and identify a number of people who are your musical “neighbors” and theoretically have similar musical tastes as you so you can browse what they are listening to and maybe find some new music.
I was somewhat inspired by this after seeing Adriaan Tijsseling‘s script that you can use to update your blog, but for now I think I’m going to just leave it as a link…

Alex’s last.fm page