Posted by Doug Thu, 05 Apr 2007 13:37:00 GMT
A while back I posted I was Officially Cable TV Free. We’re getting our TV content pretty much only from bittorrent. I personally think it’s going pretty well. My wife has one complaint: the time it takes me to get new shows loaded into iTunes so she can watch them through FrontRow. The solution involves some nitty-gritty details of ffmpeg and some fun use of Hpricot to automatically parse TV.com.
Read more...Posted by Doug Fri, 02 Feb 2007 15:31:00 GMT
I’m becoming a fan of Yojimbo for note taking. I have a stack of 3×5 cards on my desk that I often write stuff on for quick notes. I’ve also used stickies on my computer’s desktop. Both of those are good solutions to keeping up with tid-bits, but are also lacking in different ways.
The Quick Input Window is supposed to be a way to add items to Yojimbo without really interrupting your work. Unfortunately, it appears that the Quick Input Window requires the use of a mouse. Of course, this makes it less quick and more disruptive. My little discovery of the day is that the Quick Input Window does not require the mouse!
You can tab between the fields as you would expect. The catch is that some of the window’s inputs don’t highlight like you’d expect. So F8 brings up the Quick Input Window with focus on the Name field. Tab moves focus to the selector for adding tags to the new item. Space then reveals the tags input. Another tab to the rest of the items fields with a final tab to the Create button. The trick is that neither the tags selector nor the create button show that focus is on that input.
Armed with this knowledge, I’m going to try and make better use of Yojimbo!
Posted by Doug Thu, 25 Jan 2007 20:11:00 GMT
Today I’m officially (and finally) cable TV free! We’ve finally tired of paying the high monthly fees to get content. Sure, there are lower subscription plans, but none of them include a DVR or are High Def. So, we just pulled the plug. We’re simply going to rely on our Blockbuster on-line account plus our local library plus some iTunes plus some “backnet”.
I setup my old Apple G4 Powerbook (not the powerbook I’m selling on eBay) in the living room with the mini-DVI to s-video connector. Using the 1.3.1 version of Enabler (not the 1.3.5 version) I was able to install Apple’s Front Row to use as a front end for selecting and displaying shows.
I have a bunch of video and TV shows that I’ve “aquired” that are in .avi format. Using iSquint I’m able to convert those easily into the format that iTunes prefers. Also using Parsley is Atomically Delicious I can tag these with the special meta-data iTunes needs to recognize the files as TV Shows and Movies.
All in all I’m real happy with the solution. I’ve also got our family iPhoto album with all of the photos we’ve taken since we got a digital camera setup as a screen saver. So now the idle TV shows snapshots from the past! The kids love it. I think they might actually prefer sitting and watching the slide show of photos to some of the stuff they normally watch on TV when bored.
My name is Doug Alcorn. I'm a 30-something husband, dad, Christian, and hacker living in Cincinnati, OH. When I'm not on my computer or being a dad, I'm usually shooting photos or out in the woods.
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