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.

I think I have a problem. Its name is threadless.com and apparenly I can’t stop buying tshirts from them every couple of months. I have to admit there are a couple of shirts that I probably wouldn’t have bought if there wasn’t $10 sale enthusiasm clouding my judgement but in general I’m very satisfied with the interesting designs I’ve picked up.

You are what you eat

Gingerbread Nightmares

Flowers in the Attic

A Room with a View

Yo-Fu

Dark Side of the Garden

Southbound Pachyderm

Moby was a consumer

Pandamonium

Motovino

Consumable

Game-set-match

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...

..for my poor S400. The lens got stuck halfway out after my ocean beach backpacking trip I took last summer so I finally took it apart to see if I could fix it. Blowing it out with compressed air had failed, so I thought “what do I have to lose?”. I was amazed at how much sand had managed to sneak its way in given the lack of any noticeable entry point. I put it back together after blowing it out again and now it wont start up anymore - doh! Lesson learned - sand and cameras don’t mix very well…

Oh, tweaked the website design again… what do ya think? I didn’t like how things were looking under windows so I tweaked some of the CSS and designed a title image really quick in photoshop.