January 29th, 2007 at 04:36pm
Finally. It seems HBO has picked up George R.R. Martin's fantasy series, A Song of Fire and Ice, and plan to turn it into an ongoing series, one season per book. This is the first thing coming to TV in a long time that has gotten me even close to excited.
You've probably heard Nathan or I rave about these books and if you haven't started reading them then hop on it (if you want to borrow a copy just ask). I'm sure the HBO adaptation will be very well done but nothing can beat the books.
Variety broke the story here and George R.R. Martin has a post on his website here.
October 7th, 2006 at 10:43am
Well not exactly like Tivo, but close enough. I had gotten tired of trying to tape shows or download them after they had showed and I wanted a better way to do things. Being the practical person I am (it also helps that I'm cheap) I decided to turn my computer into a High Definition Personal Video Recorder (HDPVR). I had been watching shows on my computer for a while and thought why not make the process easier and get better quality at the same time. Tivo would be nice but I'd rather not have to pay a monthly fee to get full functionality and I'm looking towards the future and an HD tv.
I decided on pulling down over the air (OTA) high definition because I don't want to pay for TV and 90% of the shows I care to watch are broadcast for free. Next I bought a HD tuner card, VBOX DTA-150 ATSC HDTV receiver, and ran coax from our rooftop antenna to my room. The funny thing is you don't need a special antenna to get HD signals but they'd probably try to sell you an "HDTV" antenna at one of the big box stores. I hooked up the 20-30 year old antenna on our roof and it works great.
Next I had to decide what software to run to manage and schedule all of my recordings and playback them back. I started off with GBPVR, open source, and it worked ok but I just wasn't very satisfied and had to fuss with it. I looked at the commercial offerings, I didn't want Microsoft Media Center so I tried the trial of BeyondTV. Wow, what a difference and the nicest thing about it is that it works great with minimal configuration. Trial was only for 21 days and it was reasonably priced, but they were throwing in a decent Firefly RF remote for free for a limited time so I bit and ordered it.
In this process I also found out that an hour of uncompressed HD video can take up about 6-8 GB on the hard drive so I had to order a new 250 GB Western Digital SATA drive to expand my 160 GB storage capacity to about 400 GB.
So I pretty much have all the functionality of Tivo for a fraction of the price, considering the new HD Tivo they just released is well over $600, plus the monthly $13.
December 17th, 2005 at 02:59pm
"Earth Orbiter 1 to CAPCOM Krimsk, I can see Rambo and the Fonz doing a high-five" - Space Cadet PaulI've always enjoyed British comedy and TV and the latest show I've been catching off the Internet is "Space Cadets". It is a reality TV show where a group of people are going to be tourists, at least that's what they think. When the went through and interviewed the people for selection, they used psychology tests to see who would be the most gullable and it turned out they are not so bright young people. The quote above is from them practicing radio transmission from the card the lecturer is holding. It takes a special kind of person to think they are going to be blasted into space and this how they would be prepared for it, I haven't seen anything on reality TV since Joe Millionaire. Survivor? Apprentice? Big Brother? Trading Spouses? Supernanny? Bah, fabricating such an elaborate facade is way more difficult and seeing them actually pull it off is very enjoyable even if it is at the expense of the dimwitted participants. They are eventually told there will be gravity in the "spaceship" because "gravity generators" in the floor that have only been developed in the past month, but they will never be leaving the ground. 3 episodes down so it should get a little more comical as the time for "blast off" approaches.
I'm a 24 year old self-proclaimed geek. I have a B.S. in Computer Science and I work with web technologies and databases on a daily basis. My geekiness extends into computers, photography, sound, video games, music, movies, politics and books.
