Entertainment

It’s Friday…

rmiles7721November 10, 20066Blogging, Entertainment

…and I actually have a couple of days off thank god…and not a fucking thing to post :>

I have to take the smallest one for an ear re-check in a few minutes, so she gets to spend my day off with me, which is a treat for both of us. She is currently watching Dora as I listen to the Pixies (Wave of Mutilation).

Perhaps I am the one who needs to go back to the doctor. I have been on antibiotics for about eight days now and can’t seem to shake this crap. My ears feel as if I just got off a plane and nasty stuff flows from all of my orifices. I DO feel better than I did this time last week, but really would like this to go away.

Looks like a few folks are getting together at the Vinings Inn for supper tomorrow night. Since I am off until Sunday morning I am going to have to head in to Atlanta (traffic and all) and have a bit of fun. Unfortunately I have to be up early Sunday, so won’t have too many libations while there. Yabu is coming, so I will bring my get-out-of-jail free card just in case.

Youtube Culturally Significant?

rmiles7721October 25, 20061Entertainment, Technology

I was checking out comments on a video over at youtube and one dude (I am assuming) called it “Culturally Significant” and declared that this is the “Youtube Decade”. Fucking moron. I attempted to say as much, but I kept getting this page about verifying my email address, even AFTER I verified it. Fuck them, it gives me something to blog about anyway. The advent of the World Wide Web was culturally significant. The creation of Arpanet, then the Internet is significant. The invention of the light bulb, the TV, and the PC were all significant. A web site that allows people to share videos? I think not.

I think that youtube plays a very small but important part in the current incarnation of the World Wide Web, but that is it. It just shows how the Internet is evolving to become a part of our daily lives. Youtube, MySpace, easier and faster shopping, wikipedia, and shitloads of blogs. I can access them from my PC, my TV, my iPaq, even my damn cell phone if I want to. Some of the content, such as youtube, is important to a few people, and help advance the technology that is driving the net, but overall it is just a bunch of dumb fucks looking for something to do rather than watch TV (yes, I am one of those dumb fuckers) or read the newspaper.


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Cheerleaders Gone Wild!

rmiles7721October 25, 2006Entertainment

When I saw the link over at youtube I just HAD to click it. Yeah, I don’t watch America’s Funniest Home Videos, but if it happens to be on I am one of those who laughs their ass off at other peoples misfortunes.


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What’s an HTPC? (Another annoying geek post)

rmiles7721October 10, 2006Entertainment, Technology

I think Shoe said it best, “uh, what’s an Htpc?”

That pretty much sums it up for the great majority of computer users. I answered her, at least a bit. It is like Tivo on steroids. Live TV, recorded TV, DVD library, music, pictures, gaming. All on a computer hooked to my television. I also run my home automation software on the same box, and some of it is tied in to my HTPC setup.

My current HTPC is running on a home brew PC. Athlon 64 3200+, Abit UL8, don’t remember how much memory it has. Although I love tweaking my PCs and the software that they contain, I have learned to leave this one alone, and just let it do it’s job. I use Windows XP as my operating system. I have tried Linux, but the HA software designed for it sucks compared to what I use, and the hardware is just not designed for it. Too much damn tweaking. The HTPC software programs that I tested under Linux just don’t do everything that I want it. No extra programs running, no anti-virus, no firewall (other than my external routers). I don’t need them since I don’t read email on this machine, or browse the web.

I have four TV tuners in the machine, a Hauppauge PVR250 (roslyn), a Hauppauge PVR150MCE, a Hauppauge WinTV PVR 2 USB external tuner, and a generic bullshit tuner I bought at a computer show a few years back. The PVR250 is hooked into my Motorola cable box via component video, and I have a serial cable run to the box as well, for channel changes. The bullshit card has a feed from my Sony VCR, and regular cable, as do the other two tuners.

Video is run from my Nvidia Geforce 6600 LE via DVI/component to my TV. Just a generic Sharp flatscreen. Nothing special, but but my eyesight isn’t particularly sharp lately anyhow.

I run sound from the MB’s onboard connectors to a Sony audio receiver, and out to about 10 mini speakers around the living room.

If you do a search around the web, you will find that mine is a pretty generic, low-price setup. I’ve seen some sweet setups that would run $10k+ that just make me weep when I think about them. I like mine though. For the most part, it does what I want. This is the second machine I have built for this purpose over the last five years. Not bad considering it gets constant 24 hour usage, and they were both built with parts from previous PCs.

My software setup is a bit more complicated. I have been interested in HTPCs for about ten years or so. I got my first TV tuner in 1995 or so, but was never able to really get a nice setup that worked, or that I could hook to my TV and my family could use. That’s one of the key factors. If my kids can use it, it works.

I started getting interested in X10 and home automation about six years ago. I picked up a basic kit, and hated the free software that came with it. After looking around for awhile, I found Homeseer and loved it. I still use it. I would like to move away from X10 into some higher end stuff, but that shit is expensive, and with my current extra spending money of $2/week 🙂 it will just be awhile. I have about 13 X10 controlled light switches, several lamp modules, and several appliance modules. I have 10 or 12 RF motion sensors that communicate with Homeseer and tell it when anyone is in proximity, as well as whether it is light or dark. I have about 10 temperature sensors around the house inside/out and a humidity sensor. Homeseer also controls my audio/video appliances via IR as well. All of it is accessed via remote control, switches, voice, as well as through a web browser in other parts of the house. I also use a couple of programs that interface with Homeseer as well as iTunes and WMP, so I can feasibly turn on the tunes from the shitter.

Anyway, about the HTPC software. I run several pieces of software. On the back end, as I said before, I sometimes use itunes and WMP through my HA software. I also access my music through a front-end, BeyondMedia. It’s OK, but not the greatest program I have used. I used to use one called Meedio, but it is now defunct, and there is no more meaningful development going on. BM is not at the top of Snapstream’s development list, but I am sure that they will get back on the bandwagon, or integrate it into their PVR product. It works for what it is supposed to though. Videos, DVD library (using a plugin), games (also using a plugin), photos, as well as access to some online stuff, although I don’t use anything other than the weather. I also access itunes on the TV screen for a few shows that I have downloaded, although the legibility sucks since it was made to be looked at on a PC screen.

The part that gets used the most is the PVR software, BeyondTV. BTV kicks ass. This post actually started out as a review of the software that someone asked me to do, but I will do that later, perhaps on my day off when I have a few extra minutes. Although there will probably always be stuff that it doesn’t do to my satisfaction, it is by far the best PVR software out there. It is easy to use, both for me and my family, right out of the box. Watch live TV, pause, rewind, record four shows at once to watch later (which is what I mostly use it for), as well as tune to FM radio. I can do this with the IR control from my HA software to my receiver, but using BTV is MUCH easier.

My favorite part, and what makes it so easy for the rest of the family, is the remote control. I have a couple of remotes that I can use. I use two different IR receivers, and both can transmit as well, but I much prefer the RF Firefly over the rest. It is easy to use, easy to set up to work with multiple programs, and fits right in my hand, so it’s not too bulky. It ties all the rest of it together. I only wish that it were a combination of RF and Infrared so that I could program it it to control my components as well.

I have tried several other programs out there, including MCE, MythTV, Sage, Meedio, Yahoo Go, and a few others, and none of them are as good as what I am currently using.


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Yet another review of YGTV

rmiles7721October 6, 20065Entertainment, Technology

Back in April I talked a little bit about Yahoo! Go for TV here and here. None of this will have any interest for you unless you are into HTPCs so you can just ignore this post, or read it anyway until you realize what a waste of your time this was.

Here is the body of my initial review from April. Not much has changed:

Yahoo! Go for TV was released in the last 24 hours, so I went ahead and downloaded it to check it out. It is definitely Meedio in disguise, with a bunch of missing stuff.

I am fairly biased toward my review, as I paid for Meedio, and then paid for the “pro” version later, with the hopes that the TV portion would

eventually be improved to where I could replace BTV with it. No such luck. BeyondTV always kicked Meedio’s ass as far as PVR capabilities, and supported hardware. Yahoo! Go is free, so that is a bonus, but as a paying user of Meedio, it ticks me off. Not that I regret it. I got what I paid for, a fully functional front-end that my family could use with a single remote. It is great for watching movies, viewing pictures, and listening to music.

Anyway, on to Yahoo! Go.

It was a fairly small download compared to some others I have checked out at 9MB. Quick and easy install, then runs the setup wizard. You enter your yahoo username if you have one. I don’t know what happens if you don’t, so can’t say much there, as I do. It prompts you the locations of your pictures, music, and videos. Since I don’t have any TV tuners in my test system (my desktop), there was nothing for me to set up there.

Once the install was finished, I eagerly started the app. It comes up with a nice clean theme, purple in color. Nice, my favorite. There are seven menu options. I will go through each in turn.

First there is movies. Once you have selected a menu option, the right hand side brings up several more. Under movies, there are Top Box Office, Today’s Features, My Theaters, Local Theaters, and DVD Player. Top Box Office is a detailed listing of what is currently out in the theaters with synopsis, trailers, and cast listings. This is kind of a nice feature. Today’s features looks to be a listing of upcoming theater releases, with the same kind of stuff as Top Box Office. My theaters probably gives you a list of your favorite theaters IF you have set them up on your yahoo account. Since I use Fandango anyway, this was pretty much useless to me. Local theaters predictably gives a listing of…Local Theaters!!. Damn. It also gives you a list of movies that are currently playing there, and you can get to the same Detailed listing that is in Top Box Office. DVD player takes you into what I guess is the stock Meedio internal DVD player. Since I use an external program for this (Theatertek), this option was pretty useless. All in all, the entire movies menu section was pretty useless to me. No way to set up my DVD software, no way to add in my own movies (I have about 250 ripped to my hard drive, or recorded from BeyondTV).

The next option is Music. OK, here are the guts to my HTPC system. If it weren’t for music (I have about 9000 mp3s) I would just run BeyondTV and be done with it. In the music menu, we have several options. First is LAUNCHkast. This is an extremely well done module. I have used shoutcast with Meedio, and set up internet radio through it, but this kicks ass. Next is Music Videos. Just the crap that is online at Yahoo though. No way to set it up for local music videos that I may have downloaded from itunes, or from bands websites. If I want to see crappy music videos, I can tune to MTV or VH1. Next is “On your PC”. This gives an explorer-like view of your music directory. I have all of my music arranged in ArtistAlbum directories, so it makes it easy to traverse. Once you select “On your PC”, it brings up the artist listing, and there is a menu option to “play all”. It does not work. You actually have to drill down into the Album directory so that the actual music files show up on the screen in order to select tracks, at which point you are thrown into the Now Playing screen (also a default Meedio behavior). The music player is OK, but there are no options to play protected itunes music, I was not able to find any way to add multiple albums or artists to my playlist, and I hate the way that you have to traverse it. If I want to fool around with explorer, I will open explorer and increase the fucking font size. The next two options are CD player (pretty obvious what this does) and Now Playing. No options in now playing to launch any kind of eye candy, or to look at lyrics.

Next is Photos. There are four options in this menu. First is My Yahoo! Photos. Fine if you have your stuff uploaded to Yahoo Photos. I don’t. I use flickr, or my own web site. Next is Shared Yahoo Photos. It prompts you to enter the Yahoo ID of a friend, then you get to see the photos. Next is pretty cool. Flickr. The last things I want to look at is 500,000 flickr photos. No way to search for a particular flickr account, or even set up my own (which oh, by the way, yahoo DOES own, and my yahoo account is LINKED to). Good idea, shitty result. Last option is “On my PC”. Decent photo viewer to show off your My Pictures stuff to company. From past experience, just make sure that you only keep your final edited pics here. Keep the crap somewhere else, otherwise you end up showing off your upside-down sideways, shitty pictures of body parts that you don’t want your mom to see. Oh, wait, that was a different day.

Next is the TV option. Since I don’t have a TV tuner in my box, this shouldn’t even show up in the fucking menu. Since it does, I checked it out. Each screen under this menu just tells you that TV is not currently configured. No shit. If I wanted to see this, I would have configured it.

Next is Videos (as opposed to movies?). Why not just keep this under the movies menu, or combine the two of them. First option is Featured videos. Short trailers and clips of TV shows. Watch the damn commercial instead. Next is Top Web Searches (The Most Sought after Videos). Need I say that this is crap. Actually it’s not all that bad. User uploaded videos to yahoo. Next is Search. Search for videos on Yahoo. OK, pretty self-explanatory. Last is On My PC. During setup, you are given the option to specify the default video directory. Since I have over a TB in about eight different drives and directories across my network, this just pissed me off. It played the wmvs fine, but since half of my stuff is ripped DVDs that have been compressed, it wouldn’t do anything at all with these. Damn, that sucked.

Next option is settings. No way to change ANY of the settings in Yahoo! Go TV.

Bottom of the list is Exit, which I did, right after going through everything.

Pretty much what I expected from a beta version. It’s nicely put together, with most of the work leaning heavily toward the online experience, which I expected considering that it is yahoo. It shows a lot of promise. Enough that I will keep it on here, and upgrade to the next beta. Since I have a running version of Meedio on here too, I was able to hack it somewhat, and try out the yahoo modules in it. No go with that. There is also no weather module, which sucks. The stuff that is good really rocks, but for the most part, I found it pretty much useless. On one hand, it is free, which is nice, AND it may prompt Snapstream to fix the problems that it has with the crappy Beyond Media so that it doesn’t lose any customers. Yahoo has enough pull, and money, to make this a pretty decent software if it wants to.

If you are not into HA and HTPCs and have actually made it this far and still don’t know what the fuck I am talking about, don’t worry about it. Mainly I am just blowing off steam, and getting a post in 🙂

They released a new beta version recently. I just downloaded it and installed it on my personal machine, since the HTPC in my bedroom is non-functional, and I won’t put any more crappy beta software on the living room PC. I an also running Windows Vista RC1 on this machine, so I figured it might make for an interesting combination.

Right off the bat I noticed a few things.

1. Still no way to change any kind of meaningful settings or change the menus without modifying files.

2. I couldn’t get into anything that uses my Yahoo account until I brought up my web browser and manually logged OUT first. This is a pain in the ass and a deal breaker. It means that I can’t use my account on two separate PCs.

3. I have my movies and ripped DVDs spread over the network in three or four different directories. I can only set it to access one directory and since I went ahead and picked the default settings, it uses “My Videos” as the directory. That’s fine for movies and videos I created, but doesn’t help me access the other 197 movies that I currently have online.

4. Still stuck with the default DVD player and not able to use your own. This doesn’t seem like it should be a deal breaker, but anyone into media centers and HTPCs usually uses either Zoom Player, or Theatertek and loves them. I personally use Theatertek and am not going to start using something else.

5. I also use BTV for my PVR. I consider it the best PVR software out there, it kicks everything Else’s ass, but there is no way to configure external players. You also cannot access the TV guide unless you configure the TV tuners first.

6. The music library is still folder based rather than library based. This actually is not a huge issue, if Yahoo could find a way to support iTunes protected music, or perhaps interface with itunes, I would be happy with it. I hear that TVedia supports itunes protected music. I don’t know about movies and videos, but I may try it out next.

Overall, without having read any of the release documentation yet but just setting it up and using it, I would have to say that this is more of a bugfix release. No changes or additions yet. I am going to download TVedia and see how it does next and will review it here as well.


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Hi, I’m Chucky. Wanna play?

rmiles7721September 23, 20061Entertainment

This is just too damn weird. I already have three pain in the ass kids, why would I want more? Makes me think of all the movies where the dolls kill someone, usually the first chick that shows her tits.


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Music

rmiles7721September 22, 20063Entertainment

Dax posted a bit earlier about progressive rock over at his site, with a small offering as well. As much as I am into the hard stuff, and classic rock, I absolutely love progressive rock from the ’60s and ’70s. I grew up listening to ELP, King Crimson, and Hawkwind to name a few. I commented over there that I was listening to In the Court of the Crimson King: 30th Anniversary Edition. Even though King Crimson remained a great band I loved the stuff that Greg Lake did with them. He did two albums (three if you count the two-disc Epitaph released in 1997) with them before ELP, In the Court of the Crimson King, and In the Wake of Poseidon. The first was most definitely the best. What pisses me off is that none of them can be found at the itunes store.

It’s pretty hard to find some stuff on the internet (like videos from the late ’60’s, but I managed to come up with this short flick called “The Janitor” put together by a dude that uses 21st Century Schizoid Man as the soundtrack.

Very cool.


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Avast!, what be on now?

rmiles7721September 19, 2006Entertainment

What be on me playlist that pleasure me ears now?

Black Elk Speaks – Hawkwind
Human Cannonball – Butthole Surfers
Bell Bottom Blues – Eric Clapton
No Way Back – Foo Fighters
Of Wolf and Man Metallica – Metallica
How Many More Times – Led Zeppelin
Life Sucks – Marky Ramone & the Intruders
Panic in Detroit – David Bowie
Double Dare – Bauhaus
Hell Bent for Leather – Judas Priest
Suffragette City – David Bowie
Poor Twisted Me (Acoustic Radio Performance) – Metallica
Bullet Train – Judas Priest
Sunday Morning – The Velvet Underground
Promised Land – Queensrÿche
Strange Ways – Kiss
Turn On The Night – Kiss
Into the Labyrinth – David Bowie
Friends – Joe Satriani
Supernaut – Black Sabbath
Lust for Freedom – Grim Reaper


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What’s on now?

rmiles7721September 18, 2006Entertainment

Hunter of the Heart – Dio
The Storm – Savatage
Sin After Sin – Twisted Sister
Wasted Words – The Allman Brothers
Emotional Rescue – The Rolling Stones
Once (Brendan O’Brien Remix) – Pearl Jam
Driving at Night – Joe Satriani
Mia – Aerosmith
Venting (It’s a Different World Today) – Joey Ramone
Wheels of Confusion/The Straightener – Black Sabbath
Mistreated (Catch the Rainbow) – Dio
Neon Forest – Iggy Pop
Let Us Prey – Judas Priest
Sheena Is a Punk Rocker – The Ramones
Sooner or Later – Breaking Benjamin
Taking the Music Back – Anthrax
Mockingbird – Eminem
English Civil War – The Clash
I’m Horrible – Dee Dee Ramone
Children of the Grave – Black Sabbath
Strip My Mind – Red Hot Chili Peppers


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So what are you listening to this morning, Rich?

rmiles7721September 18, 2006Entertainment

…I’m glad you asked that. I am pretty much just trying to keep busy so that I don’t take my happy ass to the store to buy smokes. Here’s what’s in the party shuffle right now.

Hole in the Sky – Black Sabbath
Haunted – Evanescence
The Honey Roll – AC/DC
Deuces Are Wild – Aerosmith
A Woman Is a Sometime Thing – Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong
Killing the Thing That You Love – Styx
Crystal Planet – Joe Satriani
Trapped Under Ice – Metallica
Fadin’ Away – Robert Cray
Karn Evil 9 – Emerson, Lake & Palmer
Breadfan – Metallica
Is This Love – Whitesnake
Let There Be Rock – AC/DC
Inside Us All – Creed
Woke Up with a Monster – Cheap Trick
Strawberry Fields Forever – The Beatles
The Willing Well IV: The Final Cut – Coheed & Cambria
Southern Man – Neil Young
What It Takes – Aerosmith
Look at Little Sister – Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble
E5150 – Black Sabbath


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