Fo’ Shizzle

We’ve been talking about ditching Cable TV for a while.  We pay over $700/year for a few hundred channels that we don’t watch.  There’s never anything on, the DVR that comes from the CableCo is crap, and we don’t feel like buying a new TiVO to handle HD content.

The MythTV setup we have is OK, but it’s SD-only, and without the tuner we’re missing out on a bunch of the channels anyhow.

So, what now?  I’ve spent some time looking at VUDU, AppleTV, and other options.  VUDU seems kinda neat, but we already have an xbox 360 and the HD movie rentals on it look just fine.  What I’m interested in is AppleTV’s ability to get real TV programming, legitimately.  Torrents are fun and all, but A. I don’t feel like being on the wrong end of an IP infringement suit, and B. torrents have a low WAF value.

Having decided to hitch my wagon to the Cupertino star, I came pretty close to pulling the trigger on a 160GB AppleTV, when it occurred to me that I might not have done enough research.  After poking around some more, I’ve decided that the best option is a Mac Mini…  It’s a few hundred bucks more, but totally worth it.  There’s no downside…  The Mini comes with FrontRow, same as the AppleTV.  But it also comes with a DVD player, a full OS with web browser and all that good stuff, and it can play formats other than .mp4.  Now it’s a no-brainer.

Let’s look at the math:

Cable TV: $720/year

1.83 GHz/1GB/80GB Mac Mini + mighty mouse + keyboard: $728

HDMI <-> DVI Cable: $20

headphone <-> RCA adapter: already have one in my bins somewhere

For hardware, the first year would be a wash.  But, we need to factor in content costs…

Figure that on average, we watch 1-2 hours of TV every day.  Usually, though, that’s just crap that we can both agree on, or else Law & Order before bed.  Looking through the store, there are a bunch of shows (Weeds, other Showtime/HBO stuff) that are a bargain to get, and we’d both find interesting.

In the end, I’m not sure that we’d save all that much in month-to-month costs.  However, we wouldn’t be paying good money to subsidize the 99% of crap that goes alongside the 1% of interesting stuff we want to watch.  Plus, cable companies suck.

Just a plug for the Tomato replacement firmware for Linksys WRT-based routers.  What a beautiful bunch of work.  I haven’t really looked at options since the openwrt WhiteRussian 0.9 days, and Tomato blew me away.  I’ve just heard about x-wrt too, but I really can’t find anything lacking in Tomato.

I was chatting with Makia the other night, who told me that he was flying his helicopter around his hotel room.  Well, of course I was curious, so when he told me the make/model, I looked it up on amazon.  Their price is $26.50 (free shipping for Prime), and I’m not sure I’ve ever managed a faster impulse buy.

Fortunately, when it arrived two days later, the Air Hogs Mini Havoc that I ordered lived up to its reputation.  As D commented (while I was buzzing the pets in the TV room), “It’s worth $26 just to watch the cats go bonkers.”

Downsides:

• 20-30 minutes charge time for ~6 minutes of flight time
• have to play with the nose weighting to get stable forward flight
• no cyclical control (just yaw and throttle/collective)

Upsides:

• $26.50!!!!
• 9.5g == virtually no inertia, so crashes result in minimal damage
• chasing a 90lb dog with a dragonfly-sized helicopter

I bought a Mio Digiwalker c320 the other day. I’ll write a post about that later. For now, I thought the Intartubes might like to know that when you see messages like these:

Mar   5 13:14:57 ganymede kernel: [298160.921155] usb 1-7: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 9
Mar  5 13:14:57 ganymede kernel: [298161.053809] sd 5:0:0:0: scsi: Device offlined - not ready after error recovery
Mar  5 13:14:57 ganymede kernel: [298161.053826] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Result: hostbyte=DID_ABORT driverbyte=DRIVER_OK,SUGGEST_OK
Mar  5 13:14:57 ganymede kernel: [298161.053830] end_request: I/O error, dev sdc, sector 7880
Mar  5 13:14:57 ganymede kernel: [298161.055176] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Result: hostbyte=DID_NO_CONNECT driverbyte=DRIVER_OK,SUGGEST_OK
Mar  5 13:14:57 ganymede kernel: [298161.055180] end_request: I/O error, dev sdc, sector 8120
Mar  5 13:14:57 ganymede kernel: [298161.055196] lost page write due to I/O error on sdc5
Mar  5 13:14:57 ganymede kernel: [298161.055207] lost page write due to I/O error on sdc5
Mar  5 13:15:27 ganymede kernel: [298183.709232] usb 1-7: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 9

… the problem might be lurking in the block device settings for your USB drive.

In my case, I looked in /sys/block/sdc/queue, and observed the following:

root@ganymede:/sys/block/sdc/queue# cat max_hw_sectors_kb
120
root@ganymede:/sys/block/sdc/queue# cat max_sectors_kb
120
root@ganymede:/sys/block/sdc/queue# cat read_ahead_kb
128

Hmm… Carpet doesn’t match the drapes. On a hunch, I did this:

root@ganymede:/sys/block/sdc/queue# echo 64 > max_sectors_kb

… Which also had the effect of reducing read_ahead_kb to 64.

Now my transfers work fine.

I am relieved, because I was about to take the unit back to Rat Shack, thinking that this one was defective somehow.

If Rock Band sucked otherwise (which it doesn’t), the Metallica Pack would make up for everything else.

I don’t think I’ve had a bigger grin on my face as when I hit a bass groove on “…And Justice For All” and held it for 254 notes. Not quite 5-star, but not bad for my first try. It’s almost as if I’ve heard the song a bazillion times, or something.

Also: The opening to “Blackened” still gives me chills. I am so glad they got the master tracks and not Mr. Tries Very Hard.