The Digital Conversion @Home Part One

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.

It’s All New (To You…)

A new year is upon us and so is CES and Macworld.  The real news (for Macworld anyway) out of Macworld was that Steve Jobs wasn’t there this time and Apple won’t be there next time, or anytime after that.  This was apparently the death nell for Macworld Boston some years ago and some say that no Apple plus no Adobe equals no Macworld.  CES is just getting underway.  If you want to see some of the goodies from CES check out Engadget.  Windows 7 public beta will be coming out tomorrow however the MS execs are still being cagey about whether or not W7 will be released in 2009 at all.  From what I have heard it is already more stable than Vista was at release and is basically ready so I’m not sure why it wouldn’t be released as early as Q3 this year but then again I’m just some yoyo with a blog.

One of my projects is getting rid of our TV provider (Dish Network) and making use of the various audio and video capabilities of the Wii and xBox and the computers we own.  And now Dish Network comes out with a really cool device. The new high end DVR has some really nice capabilities including being able to access your programming from a computer or even a laptop while travelling.  I am waiting for more companies to start generating products that allow people to break away from the service based model of telephone and television and allow consumers to have more choices in these areas all by just having an internet connection.  Maybe that should be another post altogether.

Internet Services worth a crap 2

OK, so Twitter is one of those things that you either love or hate and is talked about adnausium on many websites and podcasts.  I completely didn’t get the use of twitter partly because no one that I personaly know, uses it.  Most of my friends are not very tech/net savvy and to be completely honest I am really bad at maintaining interpersonal relationships.  Factor in that I tend to dislike canned news from the major networks and that Twitter is not very user friendly without getting some 3rd party help.  Enter Mr Tweet.

Mr Tweet is a free service that scans your followers and followed.  It then makes a list of recommended people for you to follow that may be of interest.  It generally only takes a few hours for this process could take a week or so, in the case of Leo Laporte who is following 600 people and is followed by 60,000+ people.  Now that I have been able to easily find other people on Twitter that have similar interests and who actually share those interests via tweets (a message on Twitter is called a tweet), Twitter has become much more useful to me.

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Tech picks for the day

Microsoft is not retiring Windows XP until 2010.  Why?  Well, if you listen to Microsoft and some industry analysts, it’s because of the demand for very low cost PCs that don’t have the hardware needed to run Vista.  Could it possibly be that Vista is so bloated that it won’t run on anything but a mid to high end machine?  Is MS a bit scared because of the success of Linux on low end machines and the recent successes of Apple in getting a bigger piece of the computer market pie?  Could it be that Vista SUCKS and manufacturers want an in-road to keep using XP?  The world may never know….  LOL