Posted by Scott Laird
Fri, 08 Jul 2005 23:50:28 GMT
Darn it, I think I’ve fallen in love with another unreleased phone.
This week, it’s the Nokia N91. It was announced a couple months ago, and isn’t supposed to ship until late in 2005. It’s going to be marketed as a “music phone,” but I think the specs more or less speak for themselves:
- 4 GB hard drive
- 802.11g
- Bluetooth
- 2 MP still camera, 352x288 video capture
- Series 60 3.0 software
- Video player (MPEG4, Real, H.263)
- GSM/EDGE/WCDMA (3G) support
- FM radio receiver
- mini-USB jack (can act like USB mass storage device)
- phone keypad and music controls, but no keyboard
- battery life: 12 hours music playback, 3-4 hours talk time, 7-ish days standby time
You can get more details from Nokia’s own flashcrapular site.
It’s not a small phone by any stretch. It’s very slightly smaller then a Treo 650–4mm narrower, 1mm thinner, 16g lighter.
The thing that I find so fascinating about the N91 is that it can replace practically every device that I’ve been cramming into my pockets:
- phone
- iPod–the N91’s not as nice as the iPod photo, but for light use, it’ll probably be good enough.
- pocket camera–much better then my T616 (which is worthless as a camera). 1600x1200 is big enough for web photos and the occasional whiteboard photo at work. If the shots are anything like the N90 sample shots then I’ll be happy.
- organizer (it’ll sync with the Mac once Apple tweaks their list of supported Series 60 devices). It’s not quite as capable as the Clie that I’m still dragging around, but it’ll probably be good enough.
- USB flash drive (you’ll need a mini-USB to USB zip cable, but they’re small)
- video player (er, well, if you don’t mind watching on a 2” screen)
- photo album – if the iPod photo can do it, why can’t the N91? Their screens are basically the same resolution.
The other thing that fascinates me about the N91 is its SIP support. The specs list support for JSR-180, which is SIP for J2ME apps. There are rumors online that the demo N-series phones have native SIP support in the phone UI. That’d let me use the N91 as a cordless phone when I’m at home or at work, which is just one more thing to like about it.
Of course, there have to be downsides–the camera doesn’t look as good as the one that comes with the N90 (but the N90 doesn’t have 802.11 or the hard drive). It doesn’t have the N90’s video-conferencing camera, either (that’d be cool with SIP). It’s kind of big. It doesn’t have a keyboard (although external bluetooth ones will work). It won’t ship until the very end of 2005. The specs don’t list 850 MHz support, although they’re clearly marketing this to the US, so presumably there will be a US model with 850/1900 MHz support. Finally, the price: at least $700 US before subsidies, possibly closer to $900. So, frankly, it’s probably too expensive for me to buy, but I’m going to be really tempted. Since Palm is rumored to be saving the next Treo for Spring of 2006, the N91 may not even have any competition for “Cool Phone of the Year” in my mind.
Posted in Phones, Toys | Tags n91, nokia, nokian91, phone, series60, sip, voip | 26 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Tue, 05 Jul 2005 20:02:00 GMT
We’ve owned an Xbox for several years, and recently bought a Playstation 2, partly to play Katamari Damacy, and partly because there really aren’t many Xbox games that are good for kids under 12 or so.
Both devices have been out for years, so there’s really no point in reviewing them, but I have a couple quick impressions that I’d like to pass on. First, the newest incarnation of the PS2 is tiny. It’s about the size of a mid-sized trade paperback. It’s about as thick as my laptop, but it has under half of the footprint. Volume-wise, I think the console is smaller then two controllers, the power brick, and the video cable. Compared to the PS2, the Xbox is huge–it takes up at least 10 times the volume of the PS2. On the other hand, the Xbox’s DVD drive is front-loading, while the new PS2’s drive is top-loading, which means that you can’t stack anything on top of it. In many ways, the PS2 is actually too small–our 2-year-old stepped on one of the controller wires and sent the PS2 flying out of our entertainment center. The Xbox just won’t do that.
All in all, I think I like the Xbox’s hardware (especially the controllers) better, but the PS2 is a nice addition to the household. I’m looking forward to playing some of the more interesting games that haven’t made it to the Xbox, once I finish with Katamari.
Posted in Toys | Tags games, playstation, ps2, xbox
Posted by Scott Laird
Tue, 05 Jul 2005 19:33:30 GMT
We broke down and bought Katamari Damacy this weekend. Unfortunately, we had to buy a Playstation 2 to go along with it, but it seems to be worth the cost.
Katamari is a weird little game. Your job is to roll your ball-like katamari (Japanese for clod or lump) around the game environment, picking up things as you go. When you roll over something that’s substantially smaller then the katamari, then it’ll stick and make the the katamari a bit larger. Keep this up long enough and you’ll go from picking up pushpins to picking up pets, people, trees, assorted zoo animals, houses, cars, oil tankers, and islands. It’s hilariously addictive, but simple enough that anyone can figure it out in under a minute.
Very cool. It’s also only $20 which isn’t too bad. Unless you need to buy a PS2 to play it on–then it adds up a bit.
Posted in Toys | Tags games, katamari, katamaridamacy, playstation | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 27 Apr 2005 19:26:37 GMT
One of the hot questions about the Xbox 360 (or whatever Microsoft ends up calling the new Xbox) is will it be able to play games from the original Xbox. The new system is rumored to be really different from the old system (multiple PowerPC CPUs instead of one Intel CPU, ATI graphics instead of nVidia, no standard hard drive), and Microsoft has been unwilling to commit to any sort of compatibility between the two systems. Everyone believes that MS would like people to be able to play Xbox 1 games on the Xbox 360, but it’s not clear that they’ll be able to get the emulation software to work well enough.
A number of sources have mentioned a recent Xbox Live poll, suggesting that it’s the first clear evidence that the Xbox 360 will include Xbox compatibility. Here’s the text that everyone’s talking about:
Xbox Live is an online gaming service that works across both the current Xbox system and the future Xbox 2. You will be able to play online and compete against others across both consoles. If you are playing an Xbox game on Live you will be able to compete against people playing that same game on Xbox 2.
I read this a bit differently–to me, it says that if you have a game that’s available natively for both the Xbox 1 and Xbox 2/360, then you’ll be able to compete online against users on either platform. This is similar to games that are available for both the PC and the Mac–some games allow mixed-platform network games, some don’t. Since we know that at least two Xbox 1 titles will be available natively on the Xbox 360 (Project Gotham Racing 2 and Halo 2), this is a perfectly reasonable statement for Microsoft to make.
I’m still hoping that they’ll be able to make the compatibility layer work well enough to ship, but I’m not holding my breath. I suspect that it works well enough with most games, but there are a handful that Just Don’t Work, and they’ll probably get less bad press over the lack of backwards compatibility then they would if they released a flaky emulation layer.
One interesting approach that they could take with this–if there are only a small number of broken games, they could pre-load the Xbox 360’s (optional, but required for Xbox 1 compatibility) hard drive with patches (or even complete replacements) for the games that don’t work. Or, they could make the emulator refuse to load the broken games, and then allow emulator updates via Xbox Live. This way, they could push the blame for broken games off to the games’ publishers–“I’m sorry that only Microsoft games work with the Xbox 360, go complain to your game’s vendor.”
Posted in Toys | Tags compatibility, xbox, xbox360 | 19 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Thu, 06 Jan 2005 19:49:46 GMT
As mentioned earlier, I spent part of the long weekend cleaning up home theater stuff. Part of this involved migrating files onto my home file server, which is an old Athlon 700 with an 8-channel 3ware RAID card and 4 160 GB drives in a 450 GB RAID 5 array.
So what happens as soon as I finish copying stuff onto the array? A drive starts failing on the RAID array, and I discover that it was already running in degraded mode. Now I’m in danger of losing all 200 GB on the array. Most likely, it won’t come to that, but it’s still fantastically irritating. Of the 4 160 GB drives that I bought last year, 2 of them have now failed.
To make sure that this doesn’t happen again, I just ordered 2 more 160 GB drives from NewEgg (only $76 each), along with a 3-in-2 style drive cooler. Assuming that it all arrives tomorrow, I should be able to rebuild the array, including a spare drive this time, and hopefully I won’t have to worry about it failing again.
Posted in Computer System Administration, Toys, Personal | Tags 3ware, broken, drive, failure, ide, raid | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Mon, 03 Jan 2005 17:42:10 GMT
After all of the effort that I’ve went through over the years to try to sell the things to friends and family, it feels odd to be unplugging my TiVo. Now that we’ve turned off our satellite TV service, though, there’s no new content flowing onto the TiVo, which makes it a lot less interesting. All we’re left with is 75 GB of old stuff that we’d like to get around to watching sooner or later.
Fortunately, TiVo hacking has continued to move on since I first added a bigger hard drive to my first TiVo over 4 years ago. Using the tools discussed on the dealdatabase.com TiVo hacking forums, I’m currently extracting all 75 GB worth of programming from an old TiVo and putting it onto a 120 GB drive that I had sitting around. Then, once that’s done, I’ll use mencoder to re-encode them into something a bit more modern then MPEG-2, probably XviD. This will make it trivial to play things back using MythTV, which is really the point of the whole exercise. While MythTV has its problems, it’s pretty good at playing back pre-encoded video, so I won’t miss that aspect of the TiVo experience.
Once that’s done, I’ll probably put the old TiVo up on ebay. I’ll be sad to see it go, but time and technology move on.
I guess I find it kind of ironic that I’m doing this on the same day that TiVo finally officially announces their TiVoToGo service. So, if my Series 2 TiVo was still working, then I could use it to stream DRM-ified video to a small number of Windows systems. If I had any Windows systems. So, instead of doing it to official way, I guess I’m just cutting out the middleman and doing it myself. As usual.
Posted in Toys, MythTV | Tags entertainment, mythtv, tivo, tv | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Thu, 30 Dec 2004 02:44:05 GMT
As mentioned earlier, we bought an InFocus X1a projector last month. Here are the basic specs on the X1a:
- DLP with 2x color wheel
- 800x600 resolution
- 37 dB
- 6.8 lbs
- 1100 ANSI lumens
- 2000:1 contrast ratio
- 3 inputs: composite video, SVGA video, VGA. VGA supports HDTV component input via adapter cable
- Supports computer resolutions up to 1024x768 and HDTV up to 1080i, downscaling as needed
There are two common flavors of projectors; DLP projectors and LCD projectors. In general, LCD projectors are a bit cheaper and have a bit better color, while DLP projectors have darker blacks and last longer. The X1a is a DLP projector, but I’ve been very impressed with the colors that it produces. The one downside to it is that it only uses a 2x color wheel–DLP projectors work by bouncing light from a lamp off of a “DLP” array, which consists of thousands of micromirrors that can be moved to create a picture. The DLP array doesn’t contain any color information; instead the projector uses a spinning color wheel to display red, green, and blue information in sequence. High-end DLP projectors use up to 6x wheels, which display each color repeatedly for each frame of video. Cheaper projectors, like the X1a, use 2x wheels. Some people’s eyes can see color fringing from slower wheels; I can sometimes catch it out of the corner of my eyes, but I don’t find it annoying.
The X1a is a cheaper version of the popular InFocus X1; it trades slightly longer lamp life for the X1’s Faroudja deinterlacing chip. Since we’re planning on feeding it progressive-scan video directly from a PC, the fancy deinterlacer doesn’t do us a whole lot of good. Since the X1a ended up being about $65 cheaper, it seems like a better deal.
Right now, the projector is hanging from the ceiling in our bedroom, projecting its image onto the wall at the foot of the bed. We haven’t done anything to the wall–it’s just a normal textured white wall. The projector is about 10’ from the wall, and it projects a 7’ image. For comparison, the biggest rear-projection TV that I could find is Sony’s 70” XBR Grand WEGA. I’m sure the Sony has much better image quality, but it costs $7,000, while my $740 projector produces an image that’s over a foot wider.
When used in a dark room, the X1a produces wonderful images. I’m very impressed with its color reproduction and brightness. It looks stunning. As the room gets brighter, the image quality starts to fade. Our bedroom doesn’t have particularly dark shades, but the projector is still usable in full December sunlight. It’s hard to pick details out of dark scenes, though. I’m not sure how well it’ll work in summer–we’ll probably need to pick up some black-out shades.
The X1a’s native resolution is 800x600; when projecting a 84” diagonal image, that gives us roughly 12 pixels per inch. As you’d expect, each pixel is clearly visible from close up, centered in a black “screen door” pattern. At normal viewing distances, I don’t find the screen door objectionable at all, and you get dampen it a bit by defocusing the projector slightly if it really bothers you.
Like most modern projectors, the X1a has a “keystone” adjustment, so you can project rectangular images even when the projector isn’t perfectly perpendicular to the screen. Architectural photographers face the same type of problem when taking pictures of buildings–if the camera isn’t perfectly level, the buildings don’t appear square in the image. Photographers know there are two ways to fix this sort of distortion–you can either get a lens that you can shift to control the distortion, or you can fix it in Photoshop afterwords. Generally, using the right lens produces a better image, but Photoshop is cheaper and faster. The X1 takes the “Photoshop” route, and rescales the image in software to correct for keystoning. This is very noticeable when you’re feeding it an 800x600 image from a computer–some scan lines go fuzzy, when they should all be perfectly sharp. To fix this, you need to either align the projector correctly and then disable the keystone correction or live with a crooked image. I assume that high-end projectors have shiftable lenses, but the X1a clearly doesn’t reach into that price range.
All in all, I’m really happy with the projector. My only real complaint is that it doesn’t ship with a remote control, so I’m forced to use the power switch on the side of it to turn it off and on. Since it’s hanging from our ceiling, that’s a pain. I suppose I could pay them the $60 they want for a remote (with presentation keys and laser pointer), but I’m currently too cheap for that; I’ll shop for a universal remote that can drive their projectors instead.
Posted in Toys | Tags dlp, entertainment, infocus, projector, reviews, tv, x1, x1a | 51 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Fri, 17 Dec 2004 18:58:48 GMT
I need a new message on my home answering machine, but I really don’t think this is what I’m looking for:
If you sign up three people to donate to and join the Free Software Foundation, geek
hero/Free Software inventor Richard Stallman or FSF copyfight lawyer superstar Eben Moglen
will record an answering machine message for you to use (Boing Boing)
This is deeply wrong. Deeply wrong.
Posted in Toys | Tags broken, fsf, rms | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 01 Dec 2004 05:04:25 GMT
I made a bit more MythTV progress today. DVD playing now works perfectly. I had had three problems:
- Audio was really quiet. After upgrading mplayer, I decided that this was really an issue with my receiver–it was decoding analog Dolby Surround correctly, but it wasn’t really configured for my speakers. A little bit of fiddling and it’s acceptable, if still a bit quiet. The reference source that I was using for comparisons is really loud–the meter on the receiver is peaking out all the time, while Finding Nemo (my DVD test today) is really just about where it should be.
- Mplayer was dropping frames while playing DVDs, but DVD rips played just fine. DMA wasn’t enabled on my DVD drive. Once I fixed that, it became perfect.
- I couldn’t eject DVDs without opening up a shell and
umounting /dev/cdrom. I’m not sure what was up here, but something in KnoppMyth was automounting /dev/cdrom every few seconds. I commented out the entry in /etc/fstab, and everything seems okay–I can still play DVDs, but the eject button on the drive works now.
At this point, MythTV is an acceptable DVD player for me. It still isn’t perfect–it takes too many button pushes on the remote to start playing, and the remote buttons aren’t mapped quite right. In other words, it’s still kind of complex, but it works fine once you get through the complexity.
On the other hand, the image is stunning on the projector. I think the jump from NTSC DVD player to VGA DVD player is almost as big as the jump from VHS to NTSC DVD, at least in my setup.
Posted in Toys, MythTV | Tags dvd, entertainment, linux, mythtv | 2 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Mon, 29 Nov 2004 23:14:58 GMT
As I mentioned briefly before, I’ve been setting up a MythTV system at home. MythTV is a Linux-based open-source PVR system. Used properly, you’ll end up with something TiVo-like. Used improperly, you’ll end up with a massive headache and a sore throat from screaming at your computer.
I should start with a bit of background. I have two TiVos, and I love them, mostly. I loved them a lot more before the hardware on one box started flaking out, and before they started sucking up to the TV networks. What I really want is a way to record the TV shows that I watch and then share them between our two TVs, so I can watch the same show on either TV, and then delete it when I’ve finished watching it. With newer TiVos, you can copy shows between TiVos, but it’s just a copy–if I record it upstairs, then I can copy it downstairs and watch it, but I’ll need to delete it in both places once I’m done with it. I’d also like to be able to listen to music and watch DVDs on the same hardware; the ability to rip DVDs would be nice. I’d like the ability to expand my storage is critical–I have roughly 1 TB of disk space in my house, and I’d like to be able to use as much of that as possible for storing video. Finally, and really most importantly, I’d like to have the ability to fix things when they break–I haven’t had any luck with that with TiVo–one system crashes daily, and there’s nothing that I can do to fix it, short of spending hours sitting on hold with their tech-support system.
What I really want is the TV equivalent of iTunes–I want to be able to take the big mound of DVDs that I have sitting around, RIP them, and move them to the basement, next to the big mound of CDs that I used to listen to. I want to be able to pick and choose from upcoming TV events and add them to the library, just like DVDs. I want to be able to watch the movies on any TV in my house without remembering where it’s stored or worrying about the kids scratching the fragile little things. I’d really like it to Just Work, just like iTunes and the iPod, or like TiVo usually does. And I’d like it to work for *me*, not for network companies, record producers, or movie studios.
The closest that I can come to this today is MythTV. It supports recording TV, playing and ripping DVDs, playing MP3s, and displaying digital images. It networks nicely. It’s open-source and expandable.
It’s also a complete bitch to install. Once it’s installed, using it isn’t exactly a walk in the park, either.
I’m certainly not afraid of Linux in any of its incarnations, but I’d had a number of people tell me what a pain MythTV is to install, so I decided to try KnoppMyth, a Linux distribution customized for MythTV. It’s based on Debian, my favorite Linux distribution, and it comes with MythTV pre-installed and configured. I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to use KnoppMyth to take MythTV for a quick spin. I even had a spare small-form-factor system with a Celeron 2.4, a Bt878-based TV capture card, and a DVD drive sitting around.
Here’s a short list of what went wrong:
- The KnoppMyth installer locked up in the middle of the install when I told it to do an automatic install.
- When I tried again with a manual install, it didn’t default to installing onto any particular hard drive partition. I had to monkey with it briefly to tell it to install onto the boot partition that I’d just created. If I skipped through with just the defaults, I got an error later on when it tried to format a drive named ‘’.
- Once it had finished installing, even though it had formatted two partitions for
/myth and /cache, it failed to mount them. This resulted in errors that I had to fix by manually editing /etc/fstab.
- The MythTV setup procedure consists of an xterm that asks a handful of questions. Without a mouse, it’s non-obvious how to select the xterm so you can type into it (Alt-Tab, space, if I recall correctly), and then it’s not obvious what to do–I had to re-run the installer repeatedly to get my channel listings correct, for example, because nothing said that I needed to go to http://labs.zap2it.com/, register, and get a username and password.
- Once MythTV was running, I was still unable to access the DVD drive at all–putting in a disk and hitting ‘Play DVD’ would cause the menu to flicker slightly, but it didn’t play the DVD or return an error. A bit of digging showed that the
/dev/scd* devices weren’t owned by the cdrom group, so MythTV couldn’t access them. Once that was fixed, DVDs played correctly (plus or minus CSS problems, but we’ll ignore that little issue–it’s political, not technical).
- DVD ripping complained about the transcoding daemon not running, and never seemed to actually do anything.
- Dropping video files into
/myth/video didn’t seem to make videos visible to MythTV.
- Live TV video worked, but recording TV produced files that were way too dim to view. Live TV audio didn’t work, even though it should have been available directly from the Bt878 decoder chip, but loading the
btaudio driver doesn’t seem to produce any effect that I can see.
Most of these are just stupid integration issues; there’s no reason for them to exist in any even slightly polished product. KnoppMyth is at version 4r5; you’d think the CD ownership settings would have been fixed by now, right?
At this point, it had taken me about a half day to get MythTV to work, and all I could do was watch broadcast TV via rabbit ears and play DVDs. I could have accomplished the same thing by plugging the rabbit ears into a TV and buying an $18 DVD player (that was the cheapest “black friday” ad that I saw this year).
I probably would have dropped the project if an InFocus X1a projector hadn’t fallen into my hands. The InFocus is a 800x600 DLP projector that works with composite, svideo, HDTV, or VGA sources, but it’s happiest with VGA. So I had a project–mate the MythTV box to the projector. A few quick tests with MythTV’s DVD player shows that it looks way better then the same DVD via NTSC from my old RCA DVD player. Finding Nemo was gorgeous.
So, here’s all that I’ve had to do to get this to work right:
- Go to Fry’s on Black Friday to find a 25-foot stereo 1/8” plug to RCA cable.
- Pick up the cheapest USB remote control gizmo they had there.
- Recompile LIRC to support the StreamZap remote that Fry’s had sent me. This required re-creating KnoppMyth’s patched kernel so that the StreamZap patches would build.
- Figure out how to debug LIRC problems. Hint: use
irw, because strace on lircd is pointless.
- Set up key mappings for MythTV and mplayer for the new remote. Half of the keys aren’t mapped to anything right now, because I can’t find the right feature to map onto.
- Set up NFS so I can store videos and music on my home file server.
- Copy 15 GB of music out of iTunes and into MythTV.
- Point MythTV to my home picture library.
- Upgrade like half of the software on the box to get MythPhone and Torrentocracy to compile. I ended up hand-patching Torrentocracy, and it still crashes MythTV whenever I try to use it.
- Figure out how to import videos. It turns out to be trivial–just copy the file into
/myth/video, then go to the “Utilities/Setup” menu, then “Video Manager,” and then edit the metadata so the video has a reasonable name. Once you’ve done that, it’ll show up in the menu under “Media Library”/”Watch Videos”. Yes, this *is* a new meaning of the word “trivial” that you haven’t seen before.
Things that still don’t work:
- Playing DVDs or DVD rips with AC3 audio produces really quiet audio.
- Ripping DVDs doesn’t always work right. Of my two test disks, one just fails silently in the middle of the process, while the other seems to work, but has video from the “making of” feature combined with audio from the main feature.
- Recording TV is still broken, I think.
- TV audio is still broken.
- Playing DVDs results in frame drops, which produces jerky video. Playing the same DVD ripped to the hard drive works fine, which leads me to suspect DVD read speed issues.
- I can’t skip chapters in DVDs, but I can fast forward and rewind several minutes at a time.
- DVD menus don’t work.
- Image gallery slideshows are weird–they overlay the image on top of the menu’s background, when a black background would make a lot more sense. The image gallery in general doesn’t look quite right, but that might just be a theme issue.
So, what does work?
- I can play DVDs with audio, if I turn the stereo up really loud.
- I can watch live TV, if I can lip-read.
- I can listen to MP3s.
- I can watch
.avi files that have come from various sources.
- I can browse JPEGs.
- I can do all this using a remote control instead of a keyboard.
Not a whole lot in other words. But I’m making progress–I’ve had a couple suggestions that might fix the DVD audio problem, and I suspect that the DVD ripping problem isn’t much harder. Once that’s done, at the very least I’ll be able to import a handful of the kids’ shows and have something useful.
I have a huge usability rant to make here, but I’m going to put it off a few days–I actually have some hope for MythTV, ever though it’s proving to be a massive time sink. It’ll take a few days to get all of my ducks in order, though–I need to finish a couple minor projects and do a few little tests. Fundamentally, I want to believe that MythTV can be fixed, but it’s so far from usable today that I’m amazed that it has the number of users that it does.
Posted in Toys, MythTV | Tags entertainment, home, mythtv | 19 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Thu, 11 Nov 2004 02:01:08 GMT
I ended up driving to Costco yesterday and picking up a copy of Halo 2, since my Amazon order is so screwed up. I haven’t had a ton of time to play with it, but I like what I’ve seen so far. The graphics are much more detailed, the vehicles feel better, and the multiplayer settings are way more advanced. I’ve made it through a couple levels in the single-player campaign, and played a couple multiplayer rounds with family members, and the whole game just feels more polished then the original Halo. Nice work, guys.
I’m planning on spending most of Saturday playing; hopefully I’ll still have the same opinion then.
Posted in Toys | Tags halo2, reviews | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Tue, 09 Nov 2004 18:38:08 GMT
As widely covered in the news, Halo 2 was released today. I pre-ordered a copy through Amazon over a month ago, so I should be expecting my copy today, right?
So, I went to all of the trouble to order it a month in advance, and they can’t even be bothered to ship it until after the release date? I noticed that the shipping date was listed as the 15th yesterday, but Amazon’s site was so freakishly slow yesterday that I wasn’t able to log in and deal with it. Now, today, they’re gearing up to ship it, but it’s still not expected to arrive until the middle of next week.
This is really irritating–I need to have a copy in my hands before this weekend, because some friends have been planning a “Halo 2” party for almost 6 months.
Posted in Toys | Tags amazon, broken, halo2, shipping | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 03 Nov 2004 21:41:25 GMT
I keep telling myself that sooner or later, I’ll install MythTV at home to replace one of my ailing TiVos, but I’ve never really got around to it. I like the idea of an open, networked PVR that I can easily fix when it breaks.
During today’s semi-monthly visit to the MythTV web site, I noticed a new feature: MythPhone. It’s a SIP-based videophone for MythTV. It’s new, and probably doesn’t work right, but it’d be a nice addition to my home Asterisk setup.
Posted in Asterisk, Toys | Tags mythphone, mythtv, voip | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Mon, 04 Oct 2004 18:24:17 GMT
I’m suffering from Halo 2 lust. It’s due out in just over a month; I pre-ordered my copy from Amazon this morning. Wired had an article today about the development process. The problem that Bungie faced was that they’re targeting the same hardware platform for Halo 2 that they used for Halo. They don’t have a lot of spare CPU power to use on fancier graphics. So they spent their three years building a better story, more levels, and better gameplay. Hopefully it all works out; games and movies have been trending towards better special effects at the expense of gameplay and plot for years; hopefully this is one of the exceptions to the rule.
I just don’t know if I can wait to find out.
Posted in Toys | Tags halo2 | 1 comment
Posted by Scott Laird
Sat, 28 Aug 2004 00:15:31 GMT
As mentioned before, I have two TiVos at home, a Series 1 upstairs and a Series 2 downstairs. I love the things. At this point, I refuse to watch TV without them. They’re genuinely changed the way I interact with my TV, and that’s mostly a good thing.
I just wish they’d stop dying on me.
It started a few months ago, when the Series 2 TiVo started locking up once or twice per day. I ended up replacing the hard drive in it, and as part of the upgrade process, I discovered that the old drive had a number of bad sectors right in the middle of the swap partition. It worked perfectly after the drive swap was complete, so I assumed that the worst was over and I was in for another year or two of trouble-free TiVo use.
Unfortunately, in early July it started crashing again, and by the end of the month, it wouldn’t stay up for more then an hour without freezing. We ended up unplugging it entirely and leaving the TV off for the first half of August. Eventually, though, the lack of TV got to us, and I ordered a new drive from newegg to replace the 120 GB drive in the TiVo, assuming that the drive had failed again.
Unfortunately, swapping drives didn’t help this time. I didn’t see any media errors while copying data, and the TiVo is still locking up at least once per day. At this point, I’m getting fed up with the whole thing. At some point this weekend I’m going to rip the box back open and make sure that the IDE cable isn’t broken, but after that I’m out of things to try. I’m going to have to call TiVo and see if there’s anything that they can do for me.
Since new TiVos are selling for as little as $100 this week, and this one is almost two years old, I wouldn’t normally be that irritated. Unfortunately, we paid for lifetime service on the dying box, and that’s currently going for $300. So, the dying TiVo would cost $400 to replace, not just $100. And that’s more then enough money to get me to spend an hour or two sitting on hold, waiting to yell at their support people. That’s because the “lifetime service” is good for the lifetime of the box, not the life of the owner. When the box dies, your $300 evaporates.
I tried calling TiVo’s support line. They try really hard to shunt you off to their web site, or into their automated support recordings. Of course none of the options provided have anything at all do with “my TiVo crashes several times every day.” By playing the “other” “other” “other” game, I eventually got through to a real person, but all he could do was give me a case number and punt me into the 35+ minute tech support queue. And I don’t have time for that now.
I swear, I’m inches from selling both TiVos and building myself a bunch of cheap MythTV boxes.
Posted in Computer Hardware, Toys | Tags broken, tivo | 4 comments
