Heard about the Disney-ABC deal with Netflix? Seen all the TV shows in iTunes? ( I know DRM hell , get to that later ) . What an abundance of show over the Internets!! I know I could just fire up the torrent client and get everything illegal but trying to stay legit although freeing your iTunes of DRM with requiem might be considered illegal but I'm not going to pirate my purchases, I just want them viewable via MythTV, Boxee or XBMC frontends. Looks like ala-carte has started from my point of view... I'm just going to purchase what I can't watch via Netflix and there is Amazon and now recent newcomer Vudu for rentals and purchases too. I figured that even if I purchased HD versions of the Disney and Nickelodeon shows for my son via iTunes that it would cost half of what we were paying for cable each month.
Do I miss cable? Nope, but try and rationalize with a 9 year old that you are not paying $60 a month for three boxes( HD, HD DVR and standard ) just so he can watch Disney and Nickelodeon shows. He has been riding me since I cut the cord until tonight when I loaded up the Netflix queue with three of his favorite Disney shows. I've been betting that having a traditional TV is going bye-bye one day and I think that day has come. In combination with Netflix and Boxee, I've also been running a MythTV server with two HD OTA antennas fed into a www.silicondust.com HD HomeRun for quite a few months which takes care of my 4 year old with MPT and PBS just fine. My wife and I just record whatever interests us on the the major networks, it is very rare that we watch live tv these days. Also, I've been ripping our purchased DVD's with Handbrake on both OSX(mini) and Linux(Ubuntu) and feeding them into MythVideo so the kids can watch programs on either of the two main computers in the house. Maybe one day I'll post a diagram of my home setup?
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Sandboxie saves me a rebuild
Are you the tech support for your family like I am... you look for apps( secunia PSI, noscript, flashblock, etc...) to save time and energy with click-happy relatives or risky surfing. Do yourself and favor and buy them a lifetime license for www.sandboxie.com. I was not 100% sure that my Dad used Sandboxie exclusively since I did say that he can only bookmark things out of the sandbox to be persistent ( he's not ready for syncing nor does he want a google/yahoo type account).
The other day Dad calls me up and says there is a pop-up screen on his computer saying this anti-virus software has detected that the computer is infected and he should purchase the product.... ah gotta love the ransomware. Dad also stated that he could not close the window nor could he get anywhere on the net after some time. I asked if he had logged into his back and he said yes so I made him change all the passwords that he had been to recently just to be safe.... Now I'm thinking, oh crap!! now I have to rebuild his XP machine from scratch. As I'm driving up the road one my way home from work the "light" finally comes on, I call and ask if he ever surfs without sandboxie and he says only on trusted sites and to bookmark, sweet! he is following y instructions unlike most users. I walked him through clearing the entire sandbox contents and told him to surf around a few days to know sites to make sure the fake AV popups were gone and did not really infect the OS.... almost a week now and all is AOK. Thanks to sandboxie!!
The other day Dad calls me up and says there is a pop-up screen on his computer saying this anti-virus software has detected that the computer is infected and he should purchase the product.... ah gotta love the ransomware. Dad also stated that he could not close the window nor could he get anywhere on the net after some time. I asked if he had logged into his back and he said yes so I made him change all the passwords that he had been to recently just to be safe.... Now I'm thinking, oh crap!! now I have to rebuild his XP machine from scratch. As I'm driving up the road one my way home from work the "light" finally comes on, I call and ask if he ever surfs without sandboxie and he says only on trusted sites and to bookmark, sweet! he is following y instructions unlike most users. I walked him through clearing the entire sandbox contents and told him to surf around a few days to know sites to make sure the fake AV popups were gone and did not really infect the OS.... almost a week now and all is AOK. Thanks to sandboxie!!
Monday, December 6, 2010
Bye for now gentoo, trying Ubuntu for a bit
So... after 7 years of running gentoo on the main home server which does a variety of things, I decided to switch over to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS this past weekend. Over the past 7 months I've been running Ubuntu 9.10 on a Zotac MAG HD-ND01 which is a very decent MythTV/Boxee/XBMC frontend machine with thoughts of buying more frontend nettop devices to stream from the media server (I cut the cable on cable TV last month). I started thinking that I don't want to maintain three+ machines running Ubuntu and then have to match software versions ( MythTV especially ) on the gentoo server. It took me quite a few months of pondering back an forth about switching from gentoo and finally bit the bullet. I've experienced the breakage of Fedora for desktops at work in the past but have had machines at work running Ubuntu 10.04; the results were great and the end users did not seem to mind at all either.
I was almost tempted to try out Avahi media server but that is based on Fedora and somewhere down the road I might look into Avahi, sounds like a VM project. I'm going to miss the ultimate control of gentoo but with two kids and lots of things on the honey-do list I'm thinking that Ubuntu will provide the same wealth of packages. This will also free up extra time watching/fixing emerge issues plus now I'm playing with KDE again and that is quite a lot of time to compile. Kudos to both gentoo and Ubuntu devs/forums/supporters, my transition is 100% complete. I must say the upgrade to MythTV 0.23 from 0.22+fixes in combination with the distro switch was very easy and was running a do-release-upgrade on the Zotac machine during the switchover. There was only a minor lirc.conf hiccup on the Zotac upgrade and now both machines are humming along on 10.04.
Cheers.
I was almost tempted to try out Avahi media server but that is based on Fedora and somewhere down the road I might look into Avahi, sounds like a VM project. I'm going to miss the ultimate control of gentoo but with two kids and lots of things on the honey-do list I'm thinking that Ubuntu will provide the same wealth of packages. This will also free up extra time watching/fixing emerge issues plus now I'm playing with KDE again and that is quite a lot of time to compile. Kudos to both gentoo and Ubuntu devs/forums/supporters, my transition is 100% complete. I must say the upgrade to MythTV 0.23 from 0.22+fixes in combination with the distro switch was very easy and was running a do-release-upgrade on the Zotac machine during the switchover. There was only a minor lirc.conf hiccup on the Zotac upgrade and now both machines are humming along on 10.04.
Cheers.
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