The Shakes have Subsided...

This week has been insanely busy. Fortunately, it has allowed me not to miss cable (almost completely!). We have discovered that we severely miss cable at night after we go to bed. Fortunately, season 4 of The Office has helped us get through that rough patch. I also discovered that I miss waking up on Saturday and watching TV in bed for a couple of hours. This morning I just had to get up and mow the lawn.

I am also spending more time (and money) on my aquarium hobby. I am starting to develop it quite well.

I've decided that we're going ride through May without a TV solution (other than keeping up on our shows through streaming them on my laptop). Starting in June, I'm going to build a streaming video PC that will hook up to our television. I've decided I'm going to install Ubuntu on this machine and officially run Boxee.

Please stay tuned... I will continue to update our situation regularly and will definitely post my dive into Boxee...

New Ads

I am continually reminded of how I despise cable every time I look at my blog on the internet. Those ads at the bottom are for nothing but companies that tend to stiff their customers.

I have no idea how many people are reading this, but I hope I start to get a little interaction and people posting their thoughts and comments about what I write. Hopefully, we can water down the weighted ads to something I'd be a little more proud of on this blog.

The Shakes are Constant

We were officially disconnected from cable today. I canceled our service last week but they didn't come to the house until today to disconnect us. No TV the entire night! It made it easier that I got home from work late, we had practice at the church, and then I came home and played around with Linux some more.

However, there's that relentless truth that even if I wanted to watch TV, I wouldn't be able to.

I'm looking into Netflix to help us make the transition. They seem to have some pretty affordable packages (I remember the last time I looked into it being relatively expensive). For around $20 you can get 3 movies at a time, no rental limits. I think we will need something to help wean us off.

A little hair of the dog ought to do the trick...

Spec'ing Hardware

On my lunch break I decided to price some hardware for a decent Home Theater PC (HTPC). I was surprised at what I could build for the money. I could get a decent microATX computer for around $356 after shipping. This included an Intel Dual-Core CPU (clocked at 2.5 Ghz), motherboard, case, power supply, 640 GB hard drive (with 32 MB buffer), 4 GB of RAM, and a 256 MB video card that outputs to s-video (and composite). This computer wouldn't beat any speed records by any means, but it would be a relatively cheap jump into making my dream a reality. I would most likely eventually want a better video card, better CPU, wireless mouse/keyboard, and a Blu-Ray DVD player which would almost double the cost of the computer. But I can start out slow and work my way up to bigger and better.

Experimenting with Hardware

So over the weekend I acquired a computer that has dismal specs (at best). It is a 333 Mhz PII (w/ MMX Technology!!) and 384 MB of RAM (can anyone say SDRAM?).

I used a boot CD to load Puppy Linux on it over the weekend. I was amazed at how simple it was. I downloaded the ISO from the internet and burned it to a CD. Just boot from the CD and voila. It installed and started running very quickly. Puppy Linux ran pretty good but every time I attempted to stream video with Firefox the system crashed. I was really surprised how well the OS ran despite the old hardware. If I needed a simple box to check email and look up stuff on the internet, you could do it very easily with Puppy Linux despite the hardware.

This evening I tried a different distribution of Linux called Damn Small Linux (DSL for short). Again, I'm very surprised how responsive the OS despite the hardware specs. I am having difficult loading flash on the computer. Linux appears to have a little different way of installing software. A novice computer user would have a little difficulty switching from Windows to Linux. I'm starting to get the hang of it, but it's still somewhat foreign to me.

I do realize that even if I do get streaming video to work with this hardware, the results will be abysmal at best. For now, I am simply trying to test the theory before sinking a bunch of money into this project.