A Kick Butt Personal Video Recorder (PVR)

Well I have been using my own home grown PVR for a number of years now to record TV shows.  You see, I just don’t have time to sit down and watch TV and I have no patience for the frequent repetition of commercials during my favorite shows.  Really, what are they thinking when they have the same commercial play 15 times during an episode of LOST?  I wasn’t considering buying your crap anyways, and now that you pissed me off by showing me your lame commercial over and over a hundred times, the chances of anyone I know buying your product are very slim if I have my way.

Anyways, enough of my rant.  I have found the PERFECT solution that blows away anything that I have seen out there yet.  It is so simple and relatively inexpensive, it will blow you away.

First, you can buy a computer case from Antec that matches your stereo equipment, and doesn’t even look like a computer case. 

Next, make sure you get a decent motherboard.  It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, but it should be fairly new so you can support the new fangled video cards on the market.

One thing that I learned a couple days ago was that if you get a combination TV Tuner Card / Video card then things can get a bit funky when you are trying to watch a recorded show while recording another show.  In all fairness, there might have been something weird with one of my previous incarnations of this system, but now that I have a TV Tuner card and a separate video card everything is working AMAZINGLY well.

One of the most important things to look for in the video card is an HDMI connector with both video and audio output (see the little black slot in the middle of the video card I linked above).  This gives you an incredibly sharp and clean signal to your big screen TV.

Now, the most important part of the system!!!  Don’t even think about going with Microsoft’s media centre operating system.  Just install Windows XP and purchase Snapstream Media’s Beyond TV software.  This product is by far the most amazing TV recording software on the market.  Gone are the days where you try and figure out what channel to record on and for how long.  Then what happens if your favorite show is pushed out because of a baseball game or some news broadcast.  With Beyond TV you can search for a program you want to record by keywords or by title.  Then when you find what you want to record, you can tell it to record:

• Just one episode
• Just NEW episodes
• All episodes

Even better, you can tell it to record your show on a specific channel, or to record the show from ANY channel.  If your show is pushed off for a sports program, don’t worry, Beyond TV will catch it when it comes on.  It also has the ability to record on a specific channel at a specific time if your into doing it the old fashioned way.

Sounds awesome doesn’t it… well wait… hold onto your hat because it gets better.  You can record shows in many different formats and even auto compress them for download to your iPod.  In addition to that you can burn a DVD directly from Beyond TV if you have a DVD burner in your PC.  That’s not all… one of my favorite features is a sister product called Beyond TV Link which allows you to connect and control Beyond TV from any computer on your home network.  You can even watch recorded shows or Live TV from any computer in your house that has Beyond TV Link installed.  Pretty freakin cool eh?

Well I hope that provides you enough information and inspiration to go out there and set up your own PVR.  I can tell you that once you have tried it, you will never go back to just sitting down in front of the boob tube again.  Now your TV watching has meaning and purpose.  Oh… and did I not mention that Beyond TV has a feature called Smart Skip that automatically finds the commercials so you don’t have to watch them anymore?  Ah yes, this is true paradise!

Technorati Tags: HD TV,Hauppage,Sapphire Radeon HD 4550,Beyond TV,Tuner,Computer,DIY

Very very very very Impressive Technology

As a web developer myself, I find it a little awkward to be recommending Square Space to people because it pretty much puts me out of work for basic website development projects.  Luckily if the client needs a web-based application they still have to come to people like me to design from the ground up. 

Customizable

Square Space is an amazing technology that provides a very intuitive and incredibly flexible user interface for building web sites.  It has templates that are almost infinitely customizable, and easy too, with no coding at all.  It makes full use of CSS so if you want to get your hands dirty, you can really change things around.  If you don’t know CSS that is no problem because there are easy-to-use interfaces to allow you to pick colors and size columns, and change various aspects of the look, layout and feel of the site.

Modularity

If you want a forum, or a photo gallery, or a blog, you just create a new page and specify the type from the exhaustive list of options.  A few clicks of your mouse and you have a fully functional web form that you can use to request information from your site visitors.  A file storage component lets you easily upload and maintain a file structure that you can share through an authenticated user interface. Detailed analytics allow you to monitor site traffic and other details about your visitors.

Scalability

The grid-based architecture behind the scenes ensures that your site can handle ANY traffic load from 1 visitor to millions of visitors a day.  All with no headaches for you.

In my humble opinion, this solution is the only solution for people who want to put up a very professional, feature-rich web presence without investing a lot of time or money.  It is powerful, flexible, and very affordable.  Damn, I wish I was getting paid for this, but in reality I am just so impressed I had to tell everyone.

Technorati Tags: web,hosting,development,css,style sheets,websites,blogging,forums,gallery

Only Intelligent Life in the Universe? Ya, right…

First off, let me say these images are not mine, I got them in an email from a good friend.  If the images are yours, or you know who created them, please let me know so I can give them credit.

These, as you know, are the planets of our solar system, in perspective of relative size…

Beyond our sun it’s a big universe…

 

Antares is the 15th brightest star in the sky.  It is more than 1000 light years away.

 

This is a Hubble Telescope ultra deep field infrared view of countless “entire” galaxies that are billions of light-years away.

This is a close-up of one of the darkest regions of the photo above.

Still think that we are the only intelligent life in the universe?

As you can see we are pretty tiny specs in the big picture, so there is not much point in sweating the small stuff.  Be happy and remember, the universe has it all figured out already.

Technorati Tags: Earth,Venus,Mars,Mercury,Pluto,Jupiter,Saturn,Uranus,Neptune,Sun,Sirius,Pollux,Arcturus,Betelgeuse,Antares,Rigel,Alderbaran,Universe,Intelligent Life

Microsoft Online Services

I was at a Microsoft seminar today titled “EnergizeIT” at Hotel Arts.  What a nice Hotel that is, I need to do a photo shoot there one day. 

Anyways, the seminar was actually pretty good.  I like the concept of Microsoft Online Services, which launched today apparently.  This allows small businesses to have access to Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite for $20/user per month.  That gives you Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting and coming soon, Office Communications Online.

I guess this is Microsoft’s answer to Google Apps that has already been in the market for some time.  I use both GMail and MS Exchange/Outlook for email and I like them both, but I use Exchange for business and I like how my iPhone integrates with it so nicely.

Another technology that will be coming down the pipe from Microsoft is Microsoft Azure.  This is a pretty mind-blowing concept for a software developer like  me.  It is Cloud Computing in the most elegant sense of the words and will really change how businesses host web applications and manage scalability.  Worth some research if you have the time.

Mac & Rob : The RAW Files

A photographer friend of mine (Rob Caleffi), and coincidentally the guy that got me into shooting artistic nudes, and his friend (Mac Swift) have been working over the past two years on a very creative project called "The RAW Files".

For starters, both Rob and Mac are amazing photographers. Photographers in general are visual artists, and the good ones have a burning inside their souls that forces them to express themselves. It is not good enough to be a great wedding or portrait photographer, the freedom of expression is too confined that way. Sure you can be creative and original, but you can only go so far because you are still working for the client. True artistic expression has no boundaries, and it can lead to some amazing creativity.

Rob and Mac have found a way to express their creativity by taking one model each and shooting their model over a period of one year at all sorts of different locations. The best part of this project is that the photographers and the models all blog about their experiences. It is a fascinating project and you will find yourself captivated by the words and the images that are presented. I encourage you to have an open mind and visit The RAW Files.