Sweet techno-victory

This weekend, I didn't buy a TiVo. Ha!

My guy and I recently had a DVD-player breakdown. This led us to the idea that we should start recording TV on our current hard drive. We don't have TiVo or rent a DVR from Comcast, because we feel about subscription fees the way most people feel about visits to the dentist (besides, back when I taped things onto videotapes, I owned the darn thing I was recording onto. I controlled it. It was mine. Why should I settle for less now that we've gone all digital?).

The obvious solution seemed to be to hack our desktop computer - after all, it's got the storage space, right? The cool part is that I just finished getting it working, it adds to my geek cred, and it was easy. It was also cheap, at least when you compare it to other electronic gadgetry out there. So here's my setup:

• Existing desktop computer: 200Gb hard drive, some kind of Pentium chip, etc.
  
• New Hauppauge 350 TV tuner + PVR card - $133
  
• Splitter to send our incoming cable +internet signal into two separate jacks (the TV tuner + cable internet modem) - $15
  
• GBPVR software - free (tho I'll send the guy a donation once I've run it a little longer)
• Monthly subscription fees - none! Works just beautifully without 'em.
  

The only things I can't do with this setup:

• Watch my recordings on the TV in the living room. If/when I care, I can hook things up using Hauppauge's MediaMVP.
  
• Watch one show while recording another. If/when I care, I can install a second tuner card.
  

Sticky points:

• Rearranging the wild jungle of cables under the desk. It's still wild, but no longer actually prevents me from reaching the printer.
  
• Figuring out which tuner card to buy. Hauppauge seems to be industry standard, but they've got a 150, a 250, a 350, and a 500. I opted for the 350 because it had a bunch of enthusiastic user quotes re: picture quality, and because it has TV-out jacks. If we ever put the real TV in the same room as the computer, I can use those TV-out jacks to hook my computer directly up to the TV.
  
• Figuring out which software to use. Hauppauge's own software is a pain. My options were SageTV (costs $100), BeyondTV (costs something, and the UI got poorer reviews than SageTV's), MythTV (works on Linux, not Windows), and GBPVR. I was sceptical of GBPVR at first since it's free & has no manual, but it got so many user raves that I decided to try it. It turns out to be some of the easiest-to-install-&-use software I've ever run across, and the support Wiki & the user forums had all the info I needed.
  
• Installing Microsoft's dotNet 2.0 framework. Windows told me I already had it, so I didn't realize at first I needed to install it. Grrr. Evil Windows!
  
• Configuring the Mpeg decoder settings on the GBPVR software. This actually wasn't hard, I just forgot I needed to do it.

And there you have it. It's up, it's running, and I'm recording Grey's Anatomy on Thursday.

9/11

I wasn't there. I was in LA. I didn't lose a family member or close friend. I can't write anything intelligent about this. But still. . . .

On the west coast we should be woken early by shrill phone calls. We should wander out into the street, aimlessly, and talk to people we don't know and would normally never speak to. We should remember. We should tie up the phone lines with east coast calls and spend hours watching the news. We should laugh nervously when a little crop-duster plane flies low over a field, doing what it always does, and turn to the person next to us to see if, just for a second, they too imagined it much larger, flaming down from the sky.

Why isn't this a national day of mourning?

The Ironic Doppelganger

A couple of weeks back, my guy & I drove out to Half Moon Bay to go to the beach. On our way through town, we spotted a new bookstore, so we wandered in. While browsing for anything new by Michael Faber (I can't decide if The Crimson Petal & the White is a great book, a decadent guilty pleasure, or just a fun ride), I ran across this book.

Note the author's name.

Note that the author lives in the Bay Area, has hair about the color mine gets when I spend a lot of time in the sun, seems to be about my height, and appears to weigh about what I do.

Note that I didn't write this book.

What the . . . ??!!?

When I first picked it up, my stomach turned over. I think my fingers shook a little bit. I looked over my shoulder to see who - or what - was watching me. All those sci-fi & fantasy books I read as a kid, not to mention the time one of my friends asked why I'd been in San Francisco one weekend and not waved back at her but I hadn't actually been there, came bubbling up from the unused, not-looked-at-too-often recesses of my mind.

I have to admit this feels damn weird.

I'm also pondering a new question: when I send my current story out to magazines in October, what name do I send it under?

It's going to be pretty funny if I wind up taking my guy's last name after all - and do it to maintain my own separate identity, rather than to establish new credentials as part of a couple. Just when I was getting comfy with the dictates of feminism. . . .

One small step . . .

I've always been irritated that birth control pills are prescription-only. I don't need a prescription for the over-the-counter cold medicine that makes my heart race double-time & causes mood swings; why the heck do I need a prescription for an optional drug whose main possible side effects are pimples and reduced monthly cramps?

I'm hardly a conspiracy-theory junkie, but this is exactly the kind of thing that makes me want to start picketing street corners, ranting about the evils of a paternalistic, pseudo-Victorian society trying to control women's sexuality.

So I am naturally overjoyed that Plan B has just been approved to be sold over the counter. My only question: how long is it going to take for the rest of us? Come on, we don't want to incentivize people to plan poorly . . . do we?

Adventures in networking

Last week our DVD player started making sad little staticky noises instead of actually playing any sound. Hmph. So much for watching News Radio while lazily eating pizza.

Possible solutions: we could clean our DVD player . . . buy a new DVD player . . . or we could network the whole house! Use our 200 GB hard drive to record TV! Download movies! Set up our internet connection to run thru the walls on our electrical wiring! Copy our old VHS tapes to a portable hard drive!

Naturally we chose option three.

We haven't set it up yet, but here's what I've learned so far about doing it (as well as prices, for my own amusement in case they come down before I get around to doing this):

• Total cost to get the TV network set up should be $300-$400. Wow, less than I thought!
• No need for Windows Media Center edition - in spite of Microsoft's nasty website that tells me I need to buy a whole new computer!
• We'll need a TV tuner & recorder to install into the computer - $134
• We'll also need a Media extender to get the signal from the computer into the TV - $90
• Two powerline ethernet adapters to get the network signal from the room with the computer into the room with the TV. Sounds like the older ones are too slower, but the latest from NetGear might work: see Powerline Networking that Doesn't Suck, and Mossberg's column
  
• Possibly Sagetv, which supposedly has a better UI to navigate recorded stuff & find new things to record - $100 (including the site license re: the TV networked in the other room)
• This page has great details on how to set up recording from various sources. Another good reference guide is here.
  

I also have a bunch of questions:

• Can we watch DivX movies and/or streaming movies with this setup (eg CinemaNow - and is there a better site than this one)?
  
• The TV tuner supports 125 channels. BBC America is on channel 162. Will this work?

And of course, the final question: if we clean the DVD player, will that solve the initial problem?

You've been where?

Peru smells of dust and diesel and the leftovers of crops burning in the fields and incense and cedar and good things cooking. I gorge myself on fresh squeezed pineapple juice and say "no" and "no" and "no" to all of the dozens of small children trying to sell me postcards and shine my hiking boots. On the train out of Cusco I marvel at the fact that I can now afford a seat with a view (so unlike that previous anguished trip six years ago, but still containing brief flashes of vivid memory: last time I sat on this side of the train, last time I ate breakfast at this bakery).

I chat with cabdrivers and the women who keep the hotel desks running. I say, "so much new construction!" and they tell me yes, the Lima airport has been privatized and is now run by a German, see the new hotel? Be careful after dark, don't call attention to yourself or buy from street vendors. Enjoy the torn-up, graceful beauty of the slivered, shadowy, squatter-filled mansions in the center of the city and be sure to visit the mall on the edge of the sea - it's amazing. If you like you can take a bus up to the peak and see the city - 10 million and growing - spread out below you.

They ask: Have you been to Cusco? Did you like it? Will you come back? Have you seen the fortress at Ollantaytambo?

I take a photo of three doorways: one Inca, one Spanish, one modern. The doorways are lined up on a street that was first laid out over six hundred years ago by people I can barely imagine, but whose profiles I encounter daily behind a shop counter, above a business suit, mortaring a wall with modern mud. Behind the Inca doorway a dog barks, and I hear the smack of a soccer ball against the wall.

I walk for hours every day.

I am here for a week but it feels longer, and when I return to work I can no longer remember the combination for the cable that secures my laptop computer to my desk.

Boxes of . . .

Sitting peacefully in my garage are no less than four boxes of books I don't intend to keep. I've got books that looked good but weren't, books by famous authors that bored me, and books that just weren't, well, me. I won't read any of them again, so the question is "what now?" My available shelf space is in high demand, thanks to a guy who loves books and reading as much as I do, and collecting a little more. For the past couple of months I've been thinking about selling these books on Amazon, but I haven't actually gotten around to it - and it seems like a lot of work. Maybe this is a better option? Seems less painful, and I know just enough about online shopping fraud to be leery of getting into the money-related actual merchant game. Now . . . will I get around to it?