It has been a few months since I last posted about the changes I was making to our home multimedia experience. I went over the Roku last time and will give everyone an update on my thoughts after a few months of usage.  I will also be going over the rest of the gadgets I’ve put in place.  Nothing too fancy mind you, I am working on a “limited” budget.  First things first though, I am still not completely done with the project as some issues have not been easily fixable with minimal cost.

     We have two televisions in the house.  One in the Master Bedroom and one in the Living Room.  The children get no TV in their room.  Yea, we are weird in some ways I guess.  The TV in the Living Room is a 32″ Sony Wega,  flat screen but no HD, it’s comparatively old.  There was no room in the budget originally for any new TV but I managed to find a really good deal on a 22″ Vizio 1080p TV that we now have in our bedroom.  I really like the Vizio screens and they certainly have a high “bang for yer buck” ratio.  With the old TV in the Living Room I needed a Digital Converter box which I got for $8 after the Gov chip in.  I bought two just in case and it turns out I don’t really need either of them now, as I will explain later.  Now that I have two “digital” TV’s and three computers (already had the computers) in place, I need to get some content to them.

     The Vizio TV has the Roku connected to it so Netflix is available there.  I also wanted to get Netflix to the Living Room TV.  I thought about getting another Roku but opted for an Xbox 360 instead since we are gamers and I wanted to limit the number of boxes connected to each TV.  With an Xbox Live Gold subscription, which costs about $45 per year, we can get Netflix onto the living room TV.  Since the Xbox is a DVD player I only needed to buy a disk player for the Vizio TV.  The Vizio is a HDTV and I wanted to make the most of that and not just get another DVD so I bought an Insignia Blu-Ray player.  It is probably bottom of the line but was reviewed well and works very well for our purposes.

     Now that we have Netflix and DVD capability everywhere in the house I wanted to get local programming from public TV and the major networks into the mix without paying a monthly fee.  I contracted with a local company to install an antenna on my roof and to run fresh coax to both tv’s.  I ran one of the coax cables to an HDHomeRun box that I had bought from Amazon.com for $160.  If you don’t know what a HDHomeRun is you should check out the link, very cool IMHO.  The HDHR became the tv tuner for all of the computers on my network.  I just set up the drivers and Media Center (Windows) to recognize the HDHR and now I can get live OTA broadcast tv for my local stations on my computers as well as pause, record etc.  All very coll if I do say so myself.

     Since I am trying to keep these posts from being insanely long I will end part 3 here.  Next is a bit more of a “review” of the gear now in place and an overview of the entire process.

Dear Mr Content Provider,

If you are going to stuff content with ads do not charge for access.  If you are going to charge for access do not stuff content full of ads.  If you are going to charge for access and include “sponsored” content do not charge for crap we can otherwise get for free on the web (I’m lookin’ at you Xbox Live)!

That is all.

PLC

    Wow, time really does fly.  I have spent the past few months (among other things) catching up on some console games, watching movies and getting in on a few shows that I haven’t seen before and some old ones that are worth a second look.  It never ceases to amaze me how quickly things change and yet remain very much the same.  I have spent hours on games that are far and away superior to stuff that was available even just a few years ago and yet they remain a huge “time suck” that can easily get out of hand.  I spent time watching new and old shows and movies that are not only compelling but also completely unoriginal.

    Video games have been like a haven to me for the better part of thirty years since the Atari 2600.  This Summer, for me, has seen mainly a change from my usual PC gaming to consoles which was partlybrought on by our recent digital conversion and the fact that I have just gotten terribly burned out on PC games, MMORPG’s really.  I’m looking at you WoW.  I have a Wii and an Xbox 360 and most of my time has been spent on the 360.  I have played Oblivion (for the second time and actually finished before I got bored with it this time), Fallout3 – which is an awesome game but I got bored and switched to Oblivion, Fable II – again an awesome game but I’m fat in real life and I’ll be damned if I want to play a game that makes my character fat if it eats anything other than celery.  I have wanted to get some of the addons or other games available on XBL but I refuse to pay those ridiculous prices (a rant /post in the making on that one).

    I have given up watching network television recently.  The over abundance of shows and commercials that pander to the lowest common denominator in society makes my head hurt.  I have been watching stuff on Netflix and Youtube and Hulu along with other sites that offer video feeds of one type or another.  I have also been using Boxee which is a great app but I was very sad to see that it has been infected with pornography if the most recent builds (for a group looking for main stream acceptance, a bad decision IMHO).  Anyway, Dirty Jobs, Deadliest Catch and Mythbusters are still some of my favorite shows along with a new appreciation for the American version of The Office.  I tend to dislike blatant rip offs and shows being redone over again but this time the US version is every bit as good as the UK’s.  The reason?  Chemistry.  The show is populated with writers and cast that work well together.  There is nothing original about the story but the interaction of the characters is compelling.  Penn & Teller: Bullshit! is another show that, although not terribly original, is very compelling none the less (as long as gratuitous nudity doesn’t bother you).  I have been enjoying my Netflix subscription a great deal.  I don’t tend to get many DVD’s but I watch the streaming content on a daily basis.

    I will be finishing my series on my digital conversion soon.  I regret that it has drug on so long after the fact.  I certainly intend to be more consistent in writing in the future, not because I feel some sense of obligation to the three people that read this but because it is interesting to me and if someone else gets something out of it, all the better.

Yes, I have been gone for awhile.  I blame Fallout 3 and Oblivion and Fable 2, hmm, maybe I should just blame the whole thing on the xbox 360 we purchased recently.  Couldn’t be my fault, I’m just an innocent victim here.  :p

I do have a few things in the works though.  Thoughts on Win 7, my new 360, fallout 3, fable 2, the next installment of our digital conversion as well as Android 1.5 (if I ever get it… *shakes fist at T-Mobile*).  So, yea, lots of stuff going on in house and as always my own take on the tech industry and anything else I feel like poking fun at.

Some of this will be here and some will be over at Tech Breaker and I can be followed on twitter as well.

Now that I have more bandwidth to play with, we are enjoying netflix even more.  The selection of “watch instantly” shows is not wondrous by any means but it is consistently getting better.  We have the second lowest plan which gives us one DVD out at a time and unlimited streaming from the netflix website and it costs only $9 per month.  As an aside we do not pay the surcharge for bluray disks from netflix (which would be an extra 2 dollars a month) and I am not sure that I am willing to pay that extra when netflix admits that it is an arbitrary charge because bluray has a higher perceived value.  Yes, that means it doesn’t cost them anything extra it means they think people will pay it because they want to watch bluray movies more than they want to watch DVD’s.

The issue with netflix is this, you either watch DVD (or bluray) disks on your television  or you can stream movies to your computer.  I want to make all the content available to us watchable on both our televisions and computers.  There are a few ways to get streamed netflix content onto a television but I went with a Roku.  The roku lets you stream netflix and also can let you buy or rent television shows or movies from the Amazon Video on Demand website.  The clincher for me is that Roku is adding 10 more “channels” to their little box by the end of the year.  There have been no real announcements as of yet (except the accidental one by blip.tv) however the conjecture is that stuff like hulu.com and tv.com are 2 of the 10.

The Roku is a really nice device.  It has an HDMI port (among others) to connect to your TV and can connect to your home network by 802.11g wireless or by Ethernet.  Note that this is not compatible with 802.11n, for those that are looking to squeeze every drop of speed out of their video enabled home network.  I have a Belkin router and when I put it in “N” only mode I couldn’t connect to Roku to it.  This was a bit of a learning experience for me since I have not played with 802.11n much at all.  On the wireless “G” network the Roku worked very well.  We have experienced one video interruption during playback in the week that I have had this setup.  The netflix stream through Roku seems to be pretty solid.  The setup of the Roku overall was really simple.  During the connection to your netflix account it generates a code that you need to authorize on the netflix website.  There is a similar process for Amazon content.  The Roku box itself is very small, about 6 inches square and 2 inches high so I put it right behind my television.  The remote is pretty small and has a very simple layout which is also true for the Roku’s UI.  All in all easy to setup and easy to use.  The one downer for folks who are really big on true HD content is that the Roku tops out at 720p.  So if you just have to have full HD everywhere, the Roku is not for you.  If you don’t mind 720p and really are into the functionality and currently expanding content, this device is definitely for you.  Personally, I love it.

I am in the middle of converting over to DTV and getting rid of our very expensive legacy services and putting low cost IP based services in place. My first step was to get rid of my Verizon DSL service and get Comcast Cable Internet service. Comcast is $10/month more expensive but it offers 5 times the speed (3 meg vs 15 meg) and I really needed a beefier connection to handle the video I am now streaming. Next was my land line phone service (also from Verizon) and that was replaced by T-Mobile @Home and since I already have T-Mob for my cell phones the home phone service only cost $10/month.

By legacy services I mean land line phones, cable/satellite tv providers and anything that is now available for free or very low cost on line. Just to be clear I am in no way advocating piracy and with the on line presence of the major networks and sites like hulu, netflix, crackle, blip.tv (the list goes on) the out right piracy of media content should really be a thing of the past. Understand that I also believe that fair use is another issue altogether and is much larger than this short series of posts.

Next will be a bit about the gadgets and services and network setup that will help me to replace (for my wife mostly) as painlessly as possible, the functionality of our satellite service and the dvr that was part of it.

Wall Street finally likes the stimulus.  Big gains yesterday after hearing about the Gov’t buying some of those “toxic assets”.  Do we love toxic so much we’re buying it twice?  I guess so.  I still struggle with why the DJIA is even marginally relevant and why so many sources live and die by what it’s performance “means” for economic indication.  Oh, well.  Even though the stock market was up and China has some 2 trillion in cash reserves, China is now calling for a different world monetary standard than the US dollar.  I can’t really blame them.  China works really had to make money (even though it berates capitalist values at every turn) and not spend it on infrastructure or services for its own people, they should be concerned.  In case you missed it, that was a bit a sarcasm since we don’t really know how to manage our finances but China has no business bitching since they take so few (if any) steps to contribute to our global social and economic structure.

Apple apparently has some goodies hiding in the wings but I don’t really care since all of their stuff is too expensive for me to buy anyway.  Yes, I know Apple pricing is skewed since they really don’t have any low end equipment (except the mac-mini but how many people even know what that is) so Apple appears to be higher priced than other manufacturers since other manufacturers always try and compare their low end stuff to Apple’s low end, which is actually mid range.  Sometimes I hate marketing.

Facebook has a new look and a high percentage of the users don’t like it.  Although Facebook is relevant in the social media space…  Who cares about the UI?!?  90% of the UI’s in existence look like shit and that’s web based applications, phones, software, you name it.  With all the creative people in the world do you think programmers would get some of them involved in UI design?  No!  I’m so tired of listening to people bitch about getting things to look like they did in Minority Report (good movie by the way).

Anyway…  I could piss and moan for pages about this stuff but I won’t.  All the above and more is why I’ve been delving into some movies that I haven’t seen in years.  The Terminator movies for one.  Partly because there is a fourth coming out and because I want to start over and watch the Sarah Connor Chronicles from the beginning.  Great action stuff but sad also because it is indicative of a social condition of people pulling together in times of great strife and adversity.  If we could only do that on a day to day basis…

Independence Day is also something I’ve watched again recently.  I really like Will Smith and have seen a bunch of stuff recently, iRobot, Hancock, Men in Black etc.  I just saw Iron Man recently.  I find I’m liking Robert Downy Jr more and more as time goes on.  I loved the Iron Man comic books as a kid and I liked the movie but it’s getting annoying all the little changes Hollywood makes in my comic book heroes for no apparent reason.  Spiderman did not shoot webs out of his wrists.  They came out of a device that he invented.  If Hollywood was looking for realism they should have had the webs coming out of Peter Parker’s ass.  I’m just sayin’.

All in all, the news is not new.  It reiterates the same old crap over and over, so pick and choose your sources carefully (think new media) and use the rest of that time doing something you like.  That is all.

This was to be a test of whether or not I could include one of the internet traffic report meters in a post.  I think it worked okay but my ISP (verizon) was apparently having some issues yesterday and it was very difficult for me to see my blog.  I took the meter out of this post just in case it was causing a redraw issue which I doubt at this point.  I think I’ll be switching to Comcast very soon.  The cost of broadband is about the same in my area for a 3meg Verizon DSL connection and for a 12 meg Comcast connection.  buh-bye Verizon.

I was excited when I first saw a mention of the green comet and that I might actually be able to see it.  I have been looking casually for it ever since.  Not in an obvious way because I didn’t want the comet to think I was desperate.  I would lazily peek up at the sky to see if it was there, just in case it saw me looking and I could pretend I was looking at Libra.  Well, no such luck at any point this month but I thought “I still have the 24th”.  The 24th is here and the time to see the comet has come and gone for me and nothing.  True, I probably would have needed at least binoculars to see it and I didn’t check to see if the comet and saturn (the comet is supposed to be near saturn right now, to us anyway…)  were even visible above the horizon at my latitude, but I still had hope.  I am after all the worlds laziest astronomy buff.  The month is not a total loss however.  I did get to see Venus and a meteor (shooting star) which is a really cool thing to see.  Maybe I am being a bit romantic about it though.  The meteor was probably just an alien spaceship entering out atmosphere (yawn).

I wish I could come up with a catchy title like TWiT (This Week in Tech)  but Leo Laporte already has most of the acronyms in use on his Netcast Network.  Oh, well guess I’ll have to stick with The Wandering Lunatic.

Lots of stuff going on this week.  First off is a move by the Cell Phone Industry (except Apple) to adopt a universal phone charger based on micro-usb.  If you own a Blackberry or Razr, among others you are already familiar with this kind of connector.   It’s a green initiative coming out of the Mobile World Congress this week.  No more bazillions of chargers floating around the house and not remembering which one is which.  We will have “One charger to power them all…”.  Okay LoTR references aside this is a beautiful thing and I am a bit surprised that an industry is getting together to do something that makes sense.

Michelin comes out with the e-wheel and not that I think this is the end-all-be-all for future drive train replacement but it is a step in the right direction.  The old gear boxes and drive shafts served a purpose but may no longer have relevance in the coming world of electric cars.  I hate to use old Apple marketing slogans but isn’t it time to “Think Different”?  Operating on the status-quo needs to come to a screeching halt.  The automobile industry is one great example.  They (all US car makers collectively) have done very little to innovate and make serious use of new technology or deliver product that makes sense for the changing world and all of the people that live in it.  Oh wait, they did start to use robots to make cars…  30 years ago!  Now the US taxpayer has to spend billions to dig these companies out of the holes they have created.

I can’t find the link for it now nut apparently Verizon is thinking about offering a $5/month inbound only (except 911 and support) service.  How this differs from the “metered” line that they have had for years, I am not sure.  A “metered” (charged for every call) line cost about $8 a month although I’m not sure that Verizon liked people knowing about it.  One day soon consumers will figure out that they don’t need to pay for internet and phone and TV.  All we need is Internet and all the rest is readily available.  I just hope that consumers figure this out before the phone/cable/satellite companies do, so that they don’t have a chance to weasel their way into the equation when they are no longer needed or financially feasible for consumers.

I also have a note here to check out Elisa, the free media player.  I have played with Boxee and I really like it even more than Xbox Media Center (XBMC) even though Boxee is based on XBMC.  Unfortunately Boxee is in an invite only alpha stage right now.